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Get in the hot seat! Anne & Lau put on their casting director hats as they host live auditions with members of the BOSS community. There is something magical about a live audition…especially when the casting directors switch up the script at the last minute. These auditionees were on their toes, reading cold & nailing it. Anne & Lau share their favorite tips for before the audition & reflect on all that went right (and wrong). Stay tuned to hear who got a callback + will be featured in next week's episode. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Woohoo!. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Vo BOSS podcast and the Business Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, along with my very special guest co-host Lau Lapides. Woohoo. Lau: Hey everyone. Anne: Hey Lau. Lau: Happy Saturday. Anne: Lau, we have a extra special podcast edition today. We are doing live auditions for the very first time, and I am so excited. Lau: I love it. I love it. It's my specialty. I can't wait, Anne, can't wait. Anne: And we are going to be having people come on doing live auditions as well as people in the audience and will be joining us later on for a Q and A. So I am so very excited. Now, live auditions. Remember back when before the pandemic, when we would go into studios and audition for direct -- casting directors? Ugh. Lau: And that required us to actually see other human beings and talk to them and maybe even shake their hand? Anne: I know. And you know what? And you know what? One of the most important things about that is, is that we would not see the script until we walked into that studio. And there was always the possibility when we actually got into the room, they would change the script on us. Lau: Yes. Anne: So guess what, Lau? Lau: What, Anne? Anne: The client has changed the script. Lau: Ooh. Anne: So for our auditioners out there, and everybody in the audience, I'm sorry, but we had to throw the wrench into the, the loop of things. And we now have a different script that we will be sending to you to live audition with. So I know that Carol is out there waiting to send that new script out with new specs, and we will continue on with the auditions. And I have to say, I just love, I love the Internet and I love technology because it allows us to really do something really cool like this. Lau: Yeah. It's totally amazing. Completely amazing. And you know, just a moment on that real cold impromptu, last minute script, because I know so many voice actors are like, what do you mean? What do you mean? What do you mean? Meanwhile, you have to calm down and take a breath because so many of us are either on a pay-to-play site, or we're on hold with our agent, or we're working with casting on a project, and it's happening fast. It's coming and going really fast, and you guys are really getting used to turning things around fast. So the idea of a cold script should not put you out at all. It should be kind of like a fun challenge for you and really in your wheelhouse as a pro VO of something that really you need to be able to do. Anne: Yeah. And I can't tell you the countless number of times I've been on a live session where, you know, in the moment they're changing the script. And so you really have to be able to have those muscles to be able to quickly adapt and give the client what they're looking for. So I will say that this was a, a kind of a, a completely different script , but you know, remember we are here for educational purposes, and we hope all of you are going to really enjoy and reap the benefits of this exercise that we're going to be doing. I will go through the specs. Because this is for educational purposes, the specs for this script, uh, are open to all genders and ethnicities. And I will read the specs out loud here. Our FVO is a great actor, there we go, who can effortlessly imbue meaning and nuance into the story. They have lived a rich full life, having seen the world with all its wonders and is able to speak about their experiences with confidence and authority while their delivery has a poetic cadence . And by the way, you guys are all getting this. Um, this is done subtly and with a light touch. They never come across as dramatic, performative or as if they are laying on the gravitas. They are natural and have an air of lightness to the read that balances out their connection to the emotion perfectly. And as always, nothing smooth, nothing polished or announcery at all. . So we've got, that's a big paragraph of specs, Lau. What do you, what's your thought about specifications and when talent, you know, read the specs? Are they, you know, are they trying to match those specs exactly? Or what's important, uh, when it comes time to actually doing this audition? Lau: Great question. And I'll tell you, there's a lot of theories and philosophies about your descriptions, your breakdowns, and how to handle them. One of my favorites as a coach that I use all the time is to ask the talent to not read the specs up front. Now, this -- I'm not talking about today, because today's session is a live session, and so time is of the essence. But if you were at home and you had a day or two days to turn around an audition, it's a really interesting and telling exercise to not read the specs at all and give your takes and give a whole bunch of takes. And then go back and read the specs and see what did I bring from my point of view, from my interpretation and what kind of matches what the vision of the producer is? Am I in that realm? Am I not in that realm? Anne: Excellent points. Yeah. Let's have Michelle come on in. Hey, Michelle. Lau: Hey Michelle. Michelle: Hi. Can you guys hear me okay? Anne: We can, we can. Thank you for being the first one. I'm excited. Michelle: Oh my goodness. Okay. I just I'm excited to be here as well. Anne: Okay. So would you like a second, because you just got it? I mean, Lau and I can just discuss one other thing quickly about once you're in front of the mic and you're doing a live cold read, Lau, what is your best advice? Oh, for talent? Lau: Oh, wow. That's, that's a great question. First of all, have fun. Enjoy it. You're gonna get very few of those, right, Michelle? I mean, it's just like an exciting, energized, kind of dopamine experience. And for those of us who live on high octane junkies, we love that stuff. It's real time interaction, which I love. And so I would say make sure you're breathing. Make sure you're nice and warmed up, and you take breaks when you need to take breaks. Well, you'd be given a break after you read -- and make specific clear, active acting choices, Michelle, like, don't, don't, uh, generalize it. Don't just fly through it for the sake of time. Really make specific choices that you can change. And you should always have a good two to three really unique interpretations that you could do if they said, yeah, that's good, but can you change it out? You can change it out. Michelle: Got it. Thank you. Lau: Awesome. Anne: So when you're ready, feel free to slate and audition please. Michelle: Michelle Dillard. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you very much. Michelle: Thank you. Anne: Okay. Onto our next auditioner. Uh, on my list. I have Ryan, I hope it's Geiser. Lau: Hello. Anne: Hello, Ryan. Ryan: Oh, cool. I'm in. Lau: Hey Ryan. Ryan: Hi. Lau: Welcome. Ryan: Thank you. Uh, so I'm Ryan Geiser, non-union, MCVO. Um, our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. I was, uh, taking notes, just so you know that if I'm not responding right away, I'm taking notes. So thank you very much. Our next contestant , our next auditioner, I have, uh, Rosie, uh, Roberson? Lau: Yes. Anne: All right. Rosie. Rosie: Hello, everyone. Anne: Hello, Rosie. Nice to see you. Rosie: Well, I'm glad I got in . It's a little tricky there. Just let me know when to start. Anne: Okay. Well, we're ready. Rosie: Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with Expedia membership, you, you can save up at 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Awesome. Thank you very much. Okay. Our next, I have Manny Cabo. Manny: Hey ladies, how are you? Anne: Welcome. Manny: Welcome. Anne: Thanks for, thanks for joining us. Manny: Oh, thanks for having me. This was a last minute thing. I was, I just got off Covid for like two weeks, so believe me, this is a breath of fresh air. Anne: Oh, lovely. Well, I'm glad you're feeling better. Manny: Yeah, me too. Anne: All right, well, we are ready when you are. Manny: All right, let's do this. Here we go. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you so much, Manny. Awesome. Next on my list, I have, uh, Josh Wells. Josh. Josh: Hi. How's it going, Anne? Nice to meet you. Hi Lau. Anne: Hi. Nice to meet you too. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Josh: Yeah. Super excited. Anne: We are ready when -- we are ready when you are. Josh: Heck yeah. Cool. All right. Josh Wells, non-union, Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Um, up next, we should have Kelly White. Kelly White. You are next for the live auditions on VO BOSS. Kelly: Hello. Anne: Hi, Kelly. Kelly: Hi there. Nice to meet you Anne. Hi, Lau. Anne: Yes. Wonderful to see you. Kelly: Thank you. Anne: All right, well, we are ready when you are. Kelly: Okay. Kelly White. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Fantastic. All right. Who do I have next? I have Alicia Hiller. Alicia: Hello. . Anne: Hello. Welcome. Alicia: Good -- good to meet you. Hi, Lau. Anne: Yes. Thanks for joining us today. All right, we're ready when you are. Alicia: Alicia Hiller. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Ah, Aria. Fantastic. Real cold read. All right. So we are ready when you are. Aria: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever they are. And with a new Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a new hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places when we know a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. All right, cool. Thank you, guys.wor Anne: Thank you. All right. Um, and now Carole. Carole, we're ready when you are. Carole: All righty. Thank you. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors and even more places knowing we got great deal -- knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you. Carol. Just remember a lot of times we have auditions with instructions, right? It's important to just go through those instructions too. And I know like you know, there's a lot of people who like, you know, and the forms we'll talk about, well, you know, should I get SourceConnect and then, you know, or should I wait until I get my first client? And this would be one of the reasons why , why you wanna make sure you test out all those tech things first. I am proud to be able to to give you this technical -- these technical issues to help you to learn because you know, it's all our mission, right, Lau -- our mission is to educate. Lau: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm like, you know, I'm not a negative Nelly at all. But I'm very much a realist and I say to folks, even if you've used your program, even if you've used your booth a million times, get in there early. Because anything that can go wrong probably will. And you wanna be able to have time to troubleshoot that and not miss out. So it is a good lesson. It is. Anne: Nicole. Nicole: Hi. Anne: Hi. Welcome. Nicole: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. Anne: Yes, absolutely. Well, we are ready when you are. Nicole: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors in even more places, knowing we got a great deal. Expedia, made to travel. There you go. Anne: Thank you so much. Nicole: Thank you. Anne: I remember being in the LA area, and of course, Lau, I mean, maybe if you ever had to run into the city to do a live audition, right, traffic, traffic. And so when the audition time was slotted right, you would I -- you would pray that there was no traffic jam that would be holding you up. And if you did hit a traffic jam and you got there late, sometimes you missed the audition. Sometimes you got there way early and that therefore you had the script. So I kind of like how we're really mimicking this. You would, you know, you'd be able to practice with the script a little bit longer if they had a, if you had a line in front of you. So, you know, I feel that there's all these -- this tech issues are kind of mimicking the traffic that we would hit when we would be, you know, in the car on the way to the studio. And thankfully now, we can, you know? Lau: The, the one, the one element of this that I think is really different and unique to the circumstance, that is sometimes we can't help tech glitches when they happen, and sometimes we can. And so just kind of knowing the difference. Like I'll give you an example. For instance, if someone knows that they have to be on a laptop and have to go through Chrome in order to do the audition, it's really on that person to go on a laptop and go through Chrome. That's something that could be avoided, but all of a sudden my transmission is bad because the hurricane, all of a sudden, you know, my lights go out. You know, that's something I can't help. So I think being able to determine what I sort of have control over and I sort of don't have control over -- and then the other thing too, and this is just me, you and I are exactly alike in this way, Anne, I will leave four hours early to get to an appointment, knowing that if I'm three hours early, I can do my work, I can have coffee, I can shop, I can do whatever. I don't wanna do the last minute thing ever. Like that really stresses me out. And so just for everyone coming in, like leave yourself plenty of time. Anne: Oh, fantastic. Stephanie. Stephanie: Hi. Anne: Welcome. Stephanie: Thank you. Shall I? Anne: Thanks for being here. Yes, we are ready when you are. Stephanie: Okay. Our colors, they have a way of finding us wherever we are. And with an Expedia membership, you can save up to 30% when adding a hotel to a flight. So we can go find our colors even in more places, knowing we got a deal. Expedia, made to travel. Anne: Thank you so much. So Lau, I have my notes ready and you have your notes ready. Let's talk. Lau: I do. And I am wondering whether it's now or maybe later, if we could also go over some of our top kind of rules of the road in this kind of an audition. We talked a little bit about it throughout, but like, what are our top, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 things that we wanna see people be prepared to do or not do that happened today? Like, because here's the thing, from the talent's point of view, they see nothing. Like they know nothing and see nothing. You, I ,and Sean we're doing this whole massive thing -- and Carol -- this whole massive thing to make this session run. Anne: Right, behind the scenes. Lau: I would love to share a little bit of that so that again, we can go back to what is in my power to change and control and prepare for and what is really not. Anne: Fantastic. Lau: Are you okay with that? If we like just throw a few rules of the road in? Anne: Yeah, absolutely. So let's go ahead and start, Lau. Lau: Okay. I'm gonna start. So one of the things that is -- and again, I'm sharing this educationally, I don't want anyone to feel like we're chiding you or, or, or, you know, cussing you out or anything. It's not about that. This is about education. So that when you're on the real deal in the real scene, a lot of this will sort of dissipate, and you'll be able to work streamlined like a pro. So this entire time, and you'll see my head was down a lot when you see the video of this -- why? Not because I was falling asleep, because I was constantly texting, constantly emailing and helping people troubleshoot all along the way. Now I'm not the tech person to help you troubleshoot. I was expediting those emails and texts over to Anne, over to Sean, over to Carol where they needed to go. In the real world, you won't be able to do that. This is not the real world. This is our educational fun forum. But in the real world, there will be no one to text, no one to email, and no one to help you tech troubleshoot. So, simple things to avoid, I really want y'all to avoid is knowing the device you have to be on, knowing the, uh, uh, application or the program you need to be on, testing it through, preferably the day before rather than the day of. And also being in a solid space where you've got some audio integrity. You're not in the middle of a huge room or in a car or in a big living room to get the best quality that you can get. So those are all, in my mind, things you can somewhat control so that you can get to the next step, which is your talent, your work, your audition. Many of you couldn't get to it fully, 'cause I know most of you. You just couldn't get to it fully because you were so concerned about the tech, about all the tech stuff that was going on. Anne: And, and also, I do wanna say that those instructions were sent out a couple of days in advance, even though our, we changed the script on you. The instructions were sent out. And, and look, most people, if it's going to be a technical, you know, if it's going to be something technical like this where you're joining, uh, remotely via, you know, SourceConnect, ipDTL or some other form like Riverside, it is definitely advantageous to, uh, to test that technology out. You know, it's always wonderful to have a group of, you know, of, of colleagues that you can work with at any given time and say, hey, look, can you help me test? I mean, there's a lot of you know, forums and groups out there that say, hey, I need to do a SourceConnect test right now. Can you help me somebody test with me? So make sure that if this is something that you need to, to do, to do it in advance. And especially if, you know, a lot of times we're asked to record as well, and this could just be something maybe we're recording in, you know, through, uh, SourceConnect Now, or we're recording locally or whatever it is, Make sure that you hit that button and test it in advance. And so not having the technology throw your performance, which I'm sure it probably did for some of us a little bit, and I feel like, I feel like I might have heard that in some of your reads. Um, and as well as, you know, everything that you can possibly do to make that session go smooth. And also, you know, trying not to let that show when you get in the room to actually do the audition. Right? It's in and out and no excess. Nothing necessarily in terms of like, not too much small chat because -- Lau: Anne, you took it outta my head. You took it right outta my mouth. That was my next point, was like, there used to be an ad campaign many years ago for a deodorant, never let 'em see you sweat. That's where like, we're an actor. We're an actor, we're an actor. And what do actors do? They have to act. And that doesn't mean in the role all the time, that means as a business person, like you have to make your client feel like everything's okay. Anne: Oh yeah, absolutely. Lau: Don't worry about it. The sky isn't falling, even though it may not be okay. And you may not be able to audition and they may be disappointed. Don't let them feel like you are disappointed, you're upset, you're worried, you're scared, because that, that mirrors onto them. And then that, that becomes a, like a, you know, a, a slippery slope as they say. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Lau: You know? Anne: Absolutely. Lau: But then being said, Anne, I do wanna congratulate everyone for the ones that -- actually most people were able to get in and show up and do -- almost all. And I just wanna give you a huge round of applause in kudos for doing that, despite your issues and your tech glitches and your confusion and your craziness. Look, you did it. You showed up. You went through it. That's the pro that we wanna build onto. Anne: Yeah. And I, and I wanna say thank you, really. I mean, this is, this was the first time that we've done this. And I think that it's, I like to believe that it's educationally valuable to, you know, the community. And I thank you for being a part of that, uh, from the bottom of my heart, really. Um, I'm really proud of all of you. Number one, it's a Saturday. So thank you for coming out and doing that and then dealing with tech frustrations. And so let's talk a little bit, Lau, about selections. Do you, do you -- Lau: Let's. Do you want to create our shortlists? Anne: I think we should create our shortlists. So first of all, I'm gonna say uh, you know, for, for a lot of the people, I feel that because it was a cold read, there were a lot of reads that sounded a little bit cold read. Um. And so if you had time, right, if you were not the first person, literally, or even if you were the first person, like the, I think my suggestion would be out of the mouth immediately once you get that script. Um, you know what I mean? Get that, get those words out of your mouth because that becomes muscle memory. That's gonna help you make it not sound like a cold read. It's gonna help you get the context of the script quickly. And remember, we are storytellers. We need to tell the story. Even though this was a short script, there was a definite story there. And I needed to feel, above the words coming out correctly, I needed to feel the warmth, the emotion, the point of view. Lau: Mm. I love all that. And as an actor, I mean, I think, you know, we have to choose very specific, very quick actor choices. We don't know if they're gonna work. We don't know how they're gonna land, but we have to be connected to something that's real. We have to know who am I speaking to and what am I connecting to. I like to use props. I mean, I'm a big prop -- like even if I'm, you know, if I'm doing a, a makeup ad, I might have my lipstick ready to go. You may never see it, right, 'cause I'm a voiceover. So you may never see it, but I feel it. I smell it. It's in my hand. There's something, you know, visceral about stuff that is real, that I can hold, I can use, I can feel. I like that. And engaging the body as well. So whether I'm sitting, I'm standing, whatever I'm doing is like, how does this translate within my body? Where's the energy coming from? You know, some of you came in with really warm, rich, textured sound, and that felt right to me. It felt like a way to go. It felt like a path. And as I watched you, I could sort of see where that vibration was coming from. I could sort of see where that was coming from today. So I think not disconnecting your head and your voice from the rest of your body and your spirit is super important. Anne: Now I'm also gonna point out that, you know, part of the specs and, and I think part of what I think innately most people are looking for in this style of, of script is something, you know, uh, not, uh, nothing smooth, polished, or announcery at all. Okay? So that's hard when you're doing a cold read. So the sooner I said, the sooner you can get that script outta your mouth -- and by the way, if you weren't one of the first few that came on board, you know, maybe that's something you were doing in the background right? Until we called you, because we definitely had enough time now through this whole process where people towards the end had a good, ample amount of time to kind of get a feel for that script, you know, and, and really, and do and, and just really feel the copy, understand the copy, know what story you're telling. Natural, and again, I'm looking at some of the specs that we were looking for, you know, natural, not performative, not laying on the gravitas, um, an air of lightness to the reed, which I liked. Um, there was some really nice light reads in there that I liked. Um, what else can I say about, you know -- and I think following the specs is one thing, but then adding something different, right? In addition to making it that non-announcery, telling the story, there, there, I think trying to incorporate something that's a little bit different, a little bit unique, uh, something that you think no other talent is going to give, right? That might surprise us. So I had a couple of, you know, as I was typing madly my notes, a couple of melodies that I heard in there that were really nice, There was like a, a, a lilt on one of the words or maybe a little point of view that was different than I was anticipating, which made me stand up and take notice. And guess what I did, Lau? I actually starred those, uh, those reads. And those are the people that I am, I have on my list to call back. So. Lau: They got Anne's gold star. That means something. Anne: They got my stars. Lau: That means something, right? I love that. That's great. I love that. Oh, there's a point I was just gonna make and I forgot what I was gonna say, but, but I'm hearing you on what you're saying, Anne, because I think that the, that that disappointment, if you will that word disappointment of, I'm ready, I'm prepared, I'm doing this -- wait a second, I'm not doing that. I'm doing something else. Whatever that is, that disappointment, that surprise, that let down that, that confusion, like, it's really important to feel that and be in that space. Certainly as casting as you are, as agent as I am, we're constantly dealing with that. Just when I think it's one thing and I know it, it turns into something else and I don't know it. And typically it's because of priority. So if someone switches a script or someone switches an audition, it's typically, typically because another audition came in that's much more time sensitive. So we have to, I might love say Manny or Kelly or Stephanie, but I also kind of love them for this new one that came in. So I want them to put that on hold just for a second and take this script and do it. So being able to improvise, impromptu, shift fast, interpret fast, I think is really important. Anne: Yeah. And, and before we actually I think reveal, because you and I, I mean, I have my list and you have your list, so we need to agree upon five people that we're gonna be calling back. Uh, I, I really just wanna say that, that it's something, that's something different, right? Uh, the more that you can practice reading your scripts, I mean, I can't say enough how, how important it is to just find different scripts, read, practice all the time, audition -- it, it just helps you to be stronger. And get feedback from, you know, from coaches and, and people that you trust that have been in the industry, that can really help you to, to, you know, uh, perform better and make those bold moves, and workout groups I think are so important. Um, like I have my VO Peeps group and every month, you know, we are working out, and, and, and I know that Lau, you have the same thing. Uh, those are so important to help you get that practice under your belt so that you can -- you need to experience all the different styles, all the different reads in order to make mistakes and grow from them. Lau: Absolutely. Anne: Think it's all about growth, all about growth as an actor. And, and if you're not doing something every day that is voiceover, that is, uh, you know, looking at different scripts, scenarios, practicing, working, uh, I, I think you're, you're missing the boat on growing as an actor. Lau: Right, right. And I think it's also the how we deal with stress. How do we balance, how do we manage time? How do we manage our crazy lives when this stuff comes in? Because you -- you know, I always say be careful what you wish for. You might get it . And when it comes in, it always comes in at the most in inopportune times. It always comes in at the time when you're the busiest, and you're working, and you have events, and you have kids. It always does 100% of the time. So you kind of always have to set your life up that I can go in the space, I can do this quickly, I can make it happen even though I've got a whole bunch of layers going on around me. They don't need to know about it. As we always say, uh, leave your trash at the door. You can come get it on your way out. Don't bring it into the studio. Um, and, and being able to really practice that, really practice that skill along with your actual delivery skill. 'Cause it's a whole other skill, that's an executive functioning skill. That's like, how do I manage 25 things at once and how do I make those 25 things all feel important and all feel like I'm not getting crazy? Like, that's, that's a functioning skill that we have to practice and we have to really work on every day along with the actual acting skills. Anne: Yeah. Right. Lau: That is, we work -- Anne: On, Oh, I'm sorry. I, I was just, I was thinking, I was thinking, uh, while you were talking. Now as we reveal -- Lau, I'm gonna have you read, you know, maybe a list or a couple of people that you, that you kind of have selected and we'll see if we agree. Lau: Yeah. Actually, can I ask you, Anne, just to crosscheck, how many out of our list do we have that actually auditioned? Or maybe I should say how many did not audition? 'Cause it seemed like most auditioned. Anne: Three, uh, three did not. Um. Lau: Okay, great. Yeah. So we had 12 -- Anne: Well, actually, actually two out of the list did not, and then you added, uh, Brit, so. Lau: Okay. So we actually had 12 or 13? Anne: Yep. We actually had 12. Lau: Fantastic turnout. Anne: Out of the original list we had 13. Yeah. Lau: Don't you think that's -- Anne: That's fantastic. Lau: That's a fantastic turnout because we always have, in any audition, a percentage of people who do not audition. There are no shows where they just don't audition for many reasons. So that's actually very high, that level of -- Anne: And they didn't even know their script. Well, they -- Lau: And they didn't know anything and they still showed up. Anne: Yeah. That's good. So. Lau: But see, I think that's a testament. I wanna, I wanna make mention, I think it's a testament to Anne, to myself, and to the nature of this whole group, this whole community of how much we trust each other, we care for each other. And you're just getting to know Anne, many of you, and, and she's part of our community now. And like, like-minded people hold each other up, motivate each other, inspire each other, and through the difficult moments, get each other through it. And that's exactly what happened today. Exactly. And so I just wanna call attention to that from a, a, a social and, and professional friend network, but also a community, sort of inspirational, motivational, holding each other through this. You guys did that, even though you may not have talked to each other. You may not have met with each other. You did that in the space, you did that in the online space. And that's -- Anne: And in the chat. Lau: -- so important to do. Absolutely. The chat. That was great. Okay. So how many, Anne, you think are we gonna shortlist here? Would you say six? Anne: I've, I've got five marked. Lau: Okay. Anne: I've got five marked. Lau: Okay. Anne: Um, so that I'd like to hear, and I, and I just wanna say one other word. Not only was it how I wanted to hear that script in terms of the specs, because consider I am the client or I'm, I'm with the client or I'm representing the client, how I wanted it to be that non-announcery warm feeling with all the, with all the feels, uh, in that description. It's also water. I feel like the voice also, if it hadthe sound that I was looking for. And so there are some that I feel out of the five, I feel some did one better than you know, the other. Um, but they all had something that made me put them on the short list. Lau: So, Okay. So, uh, uh, first of all, everyone had something that I could potentially work with. I would just wanna say that I'm not just saying that to butter people up. I'm saying everyone has a unique quality that I could really direct and work with, but based on what we were looking for and what our vision is, here's some of my top peeps. Okay? I'm just looking my list. Okay. So Manny is one of my tops. Okay? Anne: Agreed. Lau: And I have Kelly, who's one of my tops. Anne: Okay. Lau: And I have Nicole. Anne: Yes. Lau: And I have Aria, and I have, uh, Josh. I wasn't sure how many we're looking for. So -- Anne: Five. Lau: So that's, that's five. I have more. But we'll stop at that. We, we'll stop at that. Anne: Okay. So I have -- I agreed with you on Nicole, Manny, uh, Josh, and then I also had, uh, marked Alicia and uh, Carole. Lau: Good. Three outta five ain't bad. . Anne: Yeah. So, uh, we definitely have the three. Now let's just discuss. Let's just discuss because I think, uh, for me, Nicole had a nice hush that says some of the, the notes that I wrote about Nicole that I really liked. And, and Nicole was also second, so she didn't have a ton of time to prepare. Um, and she came through even with that. Now -- Lau: And you know what I loved about Nicole is when she delivers, there is something that is transfor -- transports me when she speaks that I'm in a different world. I'm in a different mode, I'm in a different world. There's something a little bit magical about her sound that I caught right away. And about her essence, because we were meeting her and seeing her on camera, there's very calm, sort of meditative, logical head on the ground feel to her. And I, that all kind of went together as this really lovely package of someone who I felt really safe with, I felt really good with. Anne: Awesome. Uh, uh, Manny, like from the first few words, I kind of had him marked already. He started off, he started off with a real warm, nice, friendly, uh, not announcery style. And that's what I really, you know, I immediately wrote, you know, stars there. Lau: Yeah, he's super pro. He has a pro sound. There is a polish there without sounding overly announcery. Um, there's a clarity there, and there's also this kind of like sexiness to it that I didn't expect, uh, because I wasn't looking for that. So there was this, uh, appeal to it that, that I really liked. It was almost essential appeal without asking for that, which I liked. Um. Anne: Uh, fantastic. Lau: And he seemed very sure of himself. 'Cause I had not met Manny at all. Anne: Very confident. Lau: He was brought over by a dear friend. And we literally met today when he came in, and I just, I just loved his presence. I just loved his confidence, and I just loved his kind of chill, laidback, but professional guy persona. He had a persona that was very strong that I heard his sound. Anne: Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. Um, Josh, now I have Josh. Um, there was a word of course I was typing so furiously that I couldn't type the word correctly, but he had a word in there that caught my attention, and it was the timbre and the lilt of the word. So as I was mentioning before, sometimes it's just something a little bit different that captures your attention. Um, and so that's one of the reasons why I marked him. Uh, and then, so there's where our three agree upon, and so now we just have to talk a little bit about our ex, our next two. Lau: And I wanted to make mention about Josh too Because Josh, and I don't know, I don't know if this is age related or, or what, but there's, he's right in the middle. There's an interesting gray zone that he's in between that cool -- Anne: Yes, I agree. Lau: -- surfer dude, laidback guy. And someone who's a little bit more professional and on it, someone who's a little bit more with it, the guy in the know. So he has that standup comedy, funny, fun appeal to him, but he has the serious enough that he can land it and have some ethos there. Anne: Agreed. Agreed. Lau: That's why I love Josh. Okay. Um, okay. The two outside of that, yours was Carol and Alicia. Anne: Carol and Alicia. Yes. Lau: You know, close second, this is what people spend fighting behind closed doors about for like hours or days is like you're kind of fighting over people who are all talented. Anne: And that's it. I think, you know, and, and here's the deal, here's where it comes in. So Lau and I are gonna discuss who those other two are gonna be. And, uh, this is probably what happens in most casting , right, offices or whoever's fighting you for the client. And we'll just go back and forth, uh, on the reasons why, you know, we either want this for the callback, right? And, and even what during the callback we'll be figuring out, well, you know, what is the reasoning for any one particular voice? And sometimes you just don't know what that is, and it's not always based on performance sometimes. Lau: No. It's just sometimes it's just like an instinct, a feeling, an impulse. And, and in my mind I'm thinking some of these people are like, oh, okay, so if this person can't do it, they're booked, or they get sick or whatever, then this person could easily go in. Totally. So it isn't the case where I really love this person and I really don't love this -- It's not always that case. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Lau: There's a lot of like, gray zones of people that kind of fall in the same grouping, but that just don't make it to the booking, you know? Um, so Carol's voice is fantastic. I mean, it's very, to me, very corporate sounding. It has very businessy, corporatey, flight attendant-ish, finding the exit kind of sound. I like it. I love it. It's, I felt it was a little bit too objectified, a little bit too removed for the level of warmth that I was, was looking for this 'cause it is travel. When I think about travel now, and I think about number one, trying to reach the younger people, the younger generation, I think about a slightly, you know, not younger -- younger is a mythical word. It's just like a slightly more, more energized or more youthful kind of thing. Anne: Sure. I get that. I get that. Lau: And then also a, a, a little bit of like boxy or squareness in terms of it. Anne: But now when I, of course, Carole, as you said, more corporate and of course, you know, I'm very attuned to the corporate ear because I do a lot of that myself. Now, I'm also gonna say for Carole and thinking of travel, I was thinking, oh, she would make me feel comfortable on a plane, like if she were the flight attendant and so Expedia. So that was one of the reasons I thought it fit. But I'm going actually, and I'll cede you Aria because I love Aria. Lau: You'll raise me Aria. Anne: I'll raise you Aria because even though I didn't check her, I do love that voice. She's got that youthful, that youthful style if that's the market we're looking for. Um, she, you know, we did give her a different script immediately. Like she literally had no time to even voice it and have it come out of her mouth. So I have to take that with, you know, a little bit, uh, you know, a grain of salt because she really didn't even get it out of her mouth, except that was the first time. So for me, I had written that it was a little fast, but I understand why, because it was the first time coming out of her mouth. Now if I'm going on my gut and saying, you know, could you convince me, Aria, um, yeah, you could because of, because I like the timbre, the tone of her voice, the demographic is there for the script. And, uh, so yeah, that's my, that's my thoughts. Lau: And, and you know, I just wanna point out that, you know, if we don't forget about who are really, who's our target demographic for this, and is like both of these women could absolutely deliver this script. But when we get back to, you know, who the client really wants us to be looking at, it's really that, you know, 18 to 35 demographic. Because let's be honest, that's most of the people that are on like Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia, and going up-up-up -- not to say the 40 and up are not doing it, but for this particular one, one of the goals is to kind of find someone who has a bit more energized or youthful presence. Anne: All right. You've convinced me. Lau: So anyway, so that's one issue there too as well. Okay. Anne: Yep. You've convinced me. Lau: Okay, so Alicia kind of fits that. Anne: Okay. Lau: Alicia kind of fits that. Anne: Oh yes. Lau: Um, and I love her quality. She's got a rocky, dirty sort of like textured young sound. So I do like it. I, I felt like it was a little slow, like it wasn't as energized. Anne: Yes, I agree with you there. Um, and I wasn't, I wasn't thinking slow in terms of the read, but more contemplative and thoughtful. And she was another one who had a really nice different sound on the word -- she interpreted the word color toward the end of the script a little bit differently than most other people too, so we can find our colors. And I feel like that the, the operative word obviously in, in any story that we're telling, right, there's some operative words in there that really need to kind of hit the, the listener. Color is one of those words. And she really had a different, a slightly different pitch on the word color, which is why I I marked her. So. Lau: Right. Now, here's the thing that you and I both skipped over. And you guys listening in, this happens all the time. Um, you guys both, ironically we both skipped over the fact that the client does want diversity for these roles. And I don't know how I could skip that over, but I got excited with the switch out of script, but -- Anne: Well, we did change, we did change it for this purpose to all genders and ethnicities. But you're right. I mean, diversity is something that has to be a consideration and -- Lau: Right, authentically, right, diverse. So whereas like someone like Kelly, who I know very well and is a total pro, and can do this in her sleep fits that bill in so many ways and the voice is so layered and rich and textured -- Anne: Oh, I agree with that. Lau: -- and seasoned -- Anne: I agree with that. Lau: You know, it's, we're gonna have to go back and forth on, you know, the age thing and the youthful-ness thing because she's much more of a mature sound in my mind. Anne: My only, my only comments, I mean I did, I did like Kelly, I, my only comments was that she was a little too fast on the read I thought on that. And so, but you know what I'm -- Lau: But we can direct her. Anne: I could -- okay. Lau: Where she's directable. Anne: I feel that she -- all right then, then. Alright, so then I think we have our five then. Lau: And you know how I know she's directable, for those listening in? Because we know her personally. We have a relationship with her. Anne: Okay. Now -- Lau: Normally I couldn't say that if I don't know her. Anne: That's what I'm gonna say. So, and only, and only in this instant, right, if, if you know a casting director, here's an advantage, right? Um, if a casting director has heard you before or hired you before or has worked with you before, you know, it's, it behooves you to have, you know, a, a, an excellent relationship. Or when you work with them, make it as smooth as possible. Make it easy for the casting director. Make it easy for them to work with you, and they'll remember and have you coming back. So. Lau: And quite oftentimes, the casting, we see this all the time at the agency, we'll come back to the agents and go, love it. Great. Good. Need some retakes. It's too slow, I need it, da da da da. Right? And then we can go back to those people and we know that they can do it. They're capable of it. They're willing to. Anne: Yep. All right, So then we have our list, our callbacks. We're gonna call these five people back. Nicole Fikes, Aria Lapides, Manny Cabo, Josh Wells, and Kelly White. Congratulations. I would like to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys were amazing. I can't wait for the next episode. Lau, love you. Thank you so much, guys, and we'll see you soon. Lau: Great job. Anne: Bye-bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Worried about Ai? Your emotions are your job security, and working with technology will be key to future success in voice over. In this bonus Voice & Ai episode, Anne chats with Ryan Hicks and Adam Fritz of Pozotron - an audiobook proofing service. Listen as they dive deep into the future of audiobook production, and discuss how the connections between human emotion & AI is a voice actor's greatest ally… More at https://voboss.com/voice-and-ai-pozotron-with-ryan-hicks-and-adam-fritz  Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Welcome, everyone, to the VO BOSS podcast, the AI and Voice series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm excited and honored to bring you very special guests Adam Fritz and Ryan Hicks of Pozotron, a powerful AI software that helps audiobook professionals make their audio productions more accurate, efficient, and profitable. Adam is the COO of Pozotron and leads the operations and business development arms of the company. And Ryan has a 10-year history in the audiobook industry, having spent eight of those years as a proofer and editor with Deyan before coming over to Pozotron. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure. Both: Thanks for having us. Anne: So if you don't mind, I'd like to start off with serving the need for having a wonderful piece of software like Pozotron. So I'd like to ask, Ryan, since your background as an editor and proofer at Deyan probably gave you lots of reasons to want to have things that would make your job easier. So tell us a little bit about what you did on a day-to-day basis and what type of tools you use to do your job, and then what your pain points were. Ryan: Oh man. So proofing and editing at Deyan. So we, wow. How do I even turn that into something small? Anne: Well, so there were a lot of were a lot of pain points. I would imagine -- Ryan: I mean the whole thing, the whole thing is a pain point. So we would get professionally recorded material and try to make it more professional quickly, in the door, out the door. So we had a series of steps that we would go through to kind of standardize the process of editing and proofing at the absolute highest level. And we had some fantastically intricate manuals about spacing and noise floors and RMS and mastering techniques and what you had to use for all of these things. And then add that to the fact that we're just listening for everything that possibly could be going wrong. Misreads, noises, thunks in the background, wrong character voices, anything that you would have to give a note back to the narrator, that was my job for eight years was finding all of those notes and giving them back. Anne: Wow, so let's just say then for an average size audiobook, how long would it take back and forth between you and the author before you were able to resolve all of these issues? Ryan: So we were super compartmentalized at Deyan. I never talked to an author. I never talked to a rights holder. There was a production manager and a head of post that would take those projects and give them to us. And we gave those projects back to the head of post. Anne: Got it. So how long would you say, do you have an idea of how long it might take? Is there so many days of revisions back and forth or was it weeks before you would finally get the edited version that you needed? And that was correct? Ryan: So it happened a couple of different ways. If narrators were coming in house to the studios at Deyan, they would record during a six-hour session. And at the end of that session, they would send three hours of audio to the editors. And we basically had that day to try and get it done. Anne: Wow. Ryan: So three sessions from a narrator would be about a whole book. And so during that period, we would be editing, and then someone would be proofing after us. And then hopefully within a week, that would be back to that narrator to do the pickups and then finish it up. So we would have anywhere between a 14 and 21-day turnaround. Anne: Got it. Ryan: And we just kept trying to tighten that down further and further and further and make it as efficient as possible. Anne: And I think that there, this is my own experience. I am not an audiobook narrator, however I narrate corporate and long form narration. And so for me, my editing, I can only get it so efficient. There is an amount of time in terms of listening to it to make sure there's no errors as well as the time it then takes to edit those and then go back into the studio and rerecord and then come back and check it again. And so there's a certain amount of time, and I wish I could get it faster, but I just can't. And so I know it must be completely frustrating in terms of having, you know, hours of book material to be able to prove and edit. And I'm just talking, like, maybe my maximum would be, you know, an hour module at a time, and I would do maybe eight or ten modules, but still the process to me, I never got it to a point where I was as quick as I wanted it or needed it to be. And so fast forward to the future, how did you find Pozotron or how did they find you? Ryan: Jamie, my boss, and correct me if you know this part of the story, Adam, it was Jamie that found Jake, right, at a conference? Adam: I believe so, yes. Anne: And Jamie is Deb's right-hand man. And Jamie came to me and said, "oh my gosh, you have to look at this. You have to see what this company is doing." And when he showed me, I'm like, this is ridiculous. We don't need this. I've been doing this for seven years. I don't need some computer program checking my work. I'm fine at what I do. And we set it through dozens of tests. And this is early in Pozotron when they were still kind of working the kinks out. And I never beat Pozotron. I would check my work as soon as I did my foolproof, and I would run it through the software, and there was always things that I missed. Anne: Wow. Ryan: And so I finally, you know, as much as I shook my fist at it, suddenly I had a backup, right? I had a backup, and as soon as I was done, all we had to do was upload the files. And 20 minutes later, I would get a chance to scan through. And there it is, there's those three things that I missed. Anne: Wow. Ryan: There's those five things that I missed. And so we would add that onto my proofing report, and suddenly pickups that were coming back from the publisher, not just from me, but through all of our proofers were coming back in the single digits. And it was, it was awesome. That transition was great. Anne: That's incredible. So you were kind of a, you're a believer now. Ryan: Yeah. Having that safety net when you're -- Anne: Yeah. Ryan: -- when you're tired -- Anne: Absolutely. Ryan: -- when you've been working for eight hours already having that backup was fantastic. Anne: Awesome. Okay. So Adam, let's talk a little bit about Pozotron and how did the company come about? Adam: Like any good software company, you know, the, the core software is designed to solve a pain point. Anne: Yeah. Adam: So it's actually almost reversed. A lot of software companies see, okay, here's problem X, how do we create a solution to solve that problem? But in this case, it was almost backwards. Jake Poznanski, our CEO and founder, really wanted to get into AI. He'd exited a gaming, a mobile gaming company and was looking at AI and machine learning, and really liked some research going on about forced alignment. That's basically matching text and audio files together, and basically came up with the idea of the technology and then went about trying to apply that technology to a problem to solve. So he almost went around it backwards, um, came across the whole concept of audio -- he was a big listener of audiobooks and just how -- manual isn't the right word, but how time-consuming it was to prove an audiobook. Anne: Yeah. Adam: I mean, when I describe it to people who are not at all involved in the industry, you basically sit down with a PDF and headphones -- Anne: Yeah. Adam: -- and have to listen and read at the same time, which is tremendously difficult. So basically he designed it as not a way to replace a proofer, but designed this really fantastic and unique tool as a way to add that kind of extra set of eyes. So really the whole goal of Pozotron on the proofing side, that is our core technology, is to get the ratio of time spent proofing to the actual time of the audio or as close to one-to-one as possible. Anne: Yeah, right. Adam: So it should take an hour of time to proof and report on the pickups for an hour of audio. Anne: Makes sense. Adam: Without Pozotron, I think that's certainly a much higher, probably a two to one or three to one at least ratio. The goal with Pozotron is still -- Anne: Oh, absolutely. Adam: It's going to take you an hour to listen to an hour of audio, but instead of doing that, and then spending 20 minutes or half an hour putting together a pickup packet by copying things -- Anne: Yeah. Adam: -- out into an Excel spreadsheet -- Anne: Sure. Adam: -- you click two buttons, and that pickup packets ready to go, and you just email that to your narrator, and they start recording right away. So that's really the goal is to get that ratio as close to one-to-one as possible. Anne: Yeah. And I'll tell you, that's very interesting because, for as many years as I've been in the industry doing long form narration editing, I have never been able to get quicker than one to three, and I am a stickler. You know what I'm like, no, I can do it. I can, I can get better than that. And I just can't, and it's, it's frustrating. And it's time-consuming, and it's also, it's very tedious. It's one of the, I would much rather be in the booth doing the creative, doing, you know, what I like to think I do best, you know, the artistry of it all to be in the booth and do that. And many people will outsource their work to an editor, but I always like to have the first check for myself. And it's not that I wouldn't outsource it, but that still, even if I outsourced it to an editor, it would take the editor just as much time as me or probably a little less, if that's all they do. But there was always that time element. And I could never get things back as quick as I really needed them or my client wanted them to be. And also if I had like a quick pickup to do, and I had an editor and I had outsourced it to an editor, they usually put their own filters on it that they don't necessarily tell me, or they might be using a different software. And so therefore, if I needed a really quick pickup, it was one of the things where if I outsource to an editor, it became a little awkward if I couldn't get that editor like right away, you know? And a lot of times the client would be like, well, look, it's just one sentence. Why is it taking you two days to get me that sentence back? And it just might be because I'm trying to tie in the editor's time as well. So that just added to it all. So I can absolutely see the pain point of needing something, or it would be wonderful to have something that could get it down to a one-to-one ratio. So tell me a little bit about how your software does that or how it works, kind of on a step-back scale. Adam: Yeah. So basically the end goal is if you've never seen how Pozotron works, you press play, you upload your manuscript, you upload your audio, our forced alignment algorithm basically pairs the two and gives you essentially what -- to simplify it, it's kind of like a spellcheck for recorded audio. It gives you an output of what we call annotations, which are things Pozotron thinks are a missed word. So a word that you, in the manuscript, you didn't say it during the narration, an added word, which happens a lot. I have two young kids and I read them a lot of stories. And it's amazing how often I just add words for no reason -- Anne: Yeah. Adam: -- mispronounced words, as well as extra long pauses. So really the goal is what it does is it gives you an output saying, hey, you just put an hour of audio in. Here's the 32 things that Pozotron thinks are incorrect. What you need to do then is as you're going through, we recommend that people continue doing their full listen. So listen to every second recorded. Um, but what it does is allows people to decide, hey, Pozotron thinks that I mispronounced the word microphone because I'm looking at the word microphone on my computer right now. And you need to listen to that and say, yes, that's a mispronunciation or no, it's not. If you click pick up, it automatically goes onto your pickup report and eliminates all that manual time of creating those reports. But at its core, we have a forced alignment algorithm based on tens of thousands of hours of audio data that basically take the spoken word, compare that to the text word. And then using a probability matrix, says, we believe that this was correctly pronounced or incorrectly pronounced, as close to a 100% accuracy as you could ever get. Anne: Got it. How does it handle like words like names and how does it, how does it handle accents and different languages too? Adam: So I'll answer the last part first 'cause that's the easiest. Anne: Okay. Adam: Uh, we currently support English, Spanish, Swedish, and then French and German are in beta right now. Anne: Okay, okay. Great. Adam: So we do support them, but they're just not at the level of accuracy of the English or Spanish, primarily just because we don't have that volume of data -- Anne: Okay. Adam: -- to continue training our algorithm on. In terms of names, really, as long as it is a phonetically pronounced name, Pozotron will be able to handle it. In the name of like, what's a good example of -- a word that is spelled one way and pronounced something completely separate. Um, Pozotron will occasionally have trouble with that because what -- the way Pozotron works is, if it is phonetically correct, it will mark it as correct. But if it is, um -- Ryan, do you have a good example of a word, of a word like that? I can't think of one off the top of my head right now. Ryan: I mean, we keep using lagxoor as our sci-fi name. Anne: Lagxoor. Adam: So that would be spelled L-A-G-X-O-O-R, but pronounced L-A-G-Z-O-O-R. Pozotron will mark lag sewer as an incorrect pronunciation of L-A-G-X-O-O-R because phonetically it's incorrect. So that's why Pozotron a lot of the tools we have, our pronunciation analysis tool, our character voice guide is great to help narrators, authors, production managers, anyone involved do their preparation before the project even starts. So our proofing tool's designed to catch pickups after they happen. Our prep tools are designed to stop pickups from before you've even started recording. Anne: Can you train it for a specific name somehow or phonetically spell it so that it can then, I guess, mimic or figure out if that's correct or not? Adam: So there's a couple of things. One, yes, every time we retrain our algorithm, it gets more and more accurate. But what you can do is we have a -- let's say that Lagxoor, for example, say it's a main character, and Pozotron for the 200 times it's mentioned in the book -- Anne: Right. Adam: -- Pozotron thinks, "we think this is incorrect." Anne: Right. Adam: We have a filter out button that basically is like the ignore all in Microsoft word when you're doing spell check. "This is not a mistake. Pozotron, I know you think this is a mistake because it's phonetically wrong." You click filter out, and it will ignore every other mention of that word. Anne: Got it. Interesting now, okay. Here's a question just because I do a lot of work in medical, and a lot of times in medical, like, I don't know the word enough, so that each time it occurs in the instance of my script, that I can pronounce it exactly the same, unless I go, and I mark up my script, and I phonetically spell it each and every time, I might forget like that 10th time to emphasize the middle syllable, rather than the other syllable. Will it catch those? Or is that something that we have to just, you know, we're on the lookout for that? Adam: So again, two answers there. So the first one is we have a tool called scan occurrences, which we should probably rename it, something a little, a little better than that, but scan occurrence is what it allows to do. So let's say for example, "doliosolaphic," um, which I, I mispronounced, I butchered that, but I named that because it came up in a demo I did the other day. You can choose that one word and click scan, and it will play every single mention of that word in the audio, back to back to back to back to back. Anne: Nice! Adam: You can listen to that straight through for consistency. It's great for character names as well. Anne: Oh, that's fantastic! That'd make my life easy, a live. Adam: I have an example of a customer the other day, who was doing a book, and the word shaman, S-H-A-M-A-N, which could be pronounced "Shaw man" or "shay man". Anne: Right. Adam: He pronounced shaman nine times as "Shaw man" and one time -- Anne: Right. Adam: -- for "shay man." So he used that feature to catch that, and then you can select individual ones and either mark those individual examples of that, mark those as a pickup in your audio, or you can just export a DAW file to put a marker -- Anne: Sure. Adam: -- in every mention of that word in your, in your DAW file or your DAW session to help your editor. Anne: Got it. So then at the core of all of this is AI, right? Adam: Yes. Correct. Anne: That is, it's learning. So when we upload our manuscripts and we upload our audio, is that going into help the model become more intelligent, or do you have a model that exists already and you're feeding it other data? Adam: We started by bootstrapping with publicly available data, whether it's Librivox or any of those other things. Anne: Sure. Adam: But when someone uploads audio, it's very spelled out in our terms of service, and we're going to be redoing our website right around Halloween. We'll be launching a new, just explaining exactly what we're using data for. But essentially what we do is we take random snippets of audio, audio and text paired together. And we feed those into our algorithm to train it. And this is not training it to replicate the human voice. This is training it to better recognize the human voice and the exact thing that is spoken based on the text. Anne: Got it. Adam: So it's basically just, it's almost like every bit of audio is like another drop in the swimming pool. None of it is -- you can't identify a single drop of water in a swimming pool. It all gets aggregated. Yeah. That's what we do. We basically make it so it's completely non-identifiable from an individual voice or anything like that perspective or personal identified information. But what it does is it just continues as we feed more and more data in and retrain, it just makes it more and more effective because we have more examples, more different accents, more different dialects to improve the accuracy of our algorithm. Anne: Got it. So now, do you have any plans to ever like create voices at all in your software in order to like maybe help with pickups? Or is that something that you're not really looking at? Adam: So I'm going to start with what exactly what it says in our terms of service, which is we can never do that -- Anne: Okay. Adam: -- without the express written consent of the person who uploaded the audio. Anne: Got it. Adam: So currently it is not in our plans, even from, from a business perspective. Even if we wanted to, there are companies out there that have a four or five-year headstart on us. Anne: Sure. Adam: So it would be kind of a dumb, it would be a dumb business decision. Um, I could see a future where maybe there would be a feature where you could say, say, you said, Anne instead of V, you could have a, you know, basically copy and -- Anne: Paste. Adam: -- copy and paste that word. But from a, from an AI perspective, we have, we'd have to be pretty careful on how we manage that and negotiate that with our customers -- Anne: Sure. Adam: -- because we would never do it in the way that is looking to replace that customer in full. We'd just be using that -- or that narrator in full -- we'd just be using anything that we ever did, which is quite a ways out, based on the current product roadmap. Um, it would be an assist to that narrator and not be to replace that narrator. Anne: Got it. So, in terms of, let's say AI, AI in general, people fear it because I think for the most part, a lot of that fear is based on, they don't necessarily know exactly how it works or -- and they're probably very fearful that it's going to take their job away, which is not a surprise that people in the voiceover industry are afraid that AI is going to take their job away. And so what is your outlook on that? What do you, what do you say to that in terms of your software? And I know that you're not creating voices at this moment, but you are using AI technology. Adam: Yeah. So AI by itself is not Skynet from Terminator. It's not something to be feared. It's kind of like AI does what it is designed to do. So if it is designed to replace a narrator, that's what it'll do. In our case, if it is designed to be an assist to a narrator, that's what it'll do. So AI by itself is not something to fear. Reality is the companies that are creating AI voices are getting better and better. I've listened to a couple of samples lately, and some of them are really good, but the human narrator will always have that lead in terms of the humanness of the voice that -- Anne: Sure. Adam: -- no matter how much -- it's like that Tom Hanks movie, "The Polar Express" a while ago where it almost got to the -- the animation was so accurate, it got weird. It was -- Anne: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Adam: I think it's called the -- Anne: Uncanny valley, right? Adam: Uncanny valley, that's it. Anne: Yeah. Adam: It's the same thing with AI narrators is -- Anne: Sure. Adam: -- I don't think no matter -- it'll never get all the way there, but the advantages the AI narrators have over humans is they're faster, they're more accurate, and they're cheaper. So people -- we basically say, look, Pozotron is a tool. Anne: Oh wait! Say that again, please. That I, you know, how many people are going to love to hear you say that? That humans are cheap -- you know, in reality, I think they are. Adam: Yeah. So I think that's the advantage. The advantage is not that the AI narrators are better than humans, human narrators, because that's not. Anne: Exactly. Adam: But they're faster -- Anne: yeah. Adam: They're faster, they're more accurate, and they're cheaper. They're most of the time more accurate, I should say. Anne: Yeah. Adam: So using a tool like Pozotron, humans will always have that lead -- Anne: Yes. Adam: -- in the humanness of their voice -- Anne: Exactly. Adam: -- but using tools like Pozotron or many other things out there, or even just a better workflow, will help humans catch up to those AI narrators in terms of speed, accuracy and efficiency. So we kind of pitch our tool as it's almost a way for narrators to stay ahead -- Anne: Sure. Adam: -- of the AI voices that aren't going anywhere. So that's really what we're trying to do is, you know, use the same tools to help narrators rather than take over some of this stuff out there. But I will say one thing, I think, no matter how good these AI voices get, there will always be a place for human voices. Anne: Yeah. Adam: I think and a lot of these companies are saying, look, we're just narrating the backlist or, you know, it'll be great for a history textbook. Something that's a thriller or a romance that requires that human emotion -- Anne: Sure. Adam: -- to really make it a piece of art that audiobooks are rather than just something to listen to. One of -- our CEO said the other day, "look, if I wanted to listen to a cheaper, crappier audiobook, I'd say, 'Alexa, read me my book.'" Anne: Interesting. Yeah. And you expect it, and I think when you hit that uncanny valley where it becomes too human, you're right. It kind of, there's a point where you believe, you think it's human, then all of a sudden, maybe you'll hear that note that kind of doesn't sound right. And it'll be like, "ooh, did I just get duped? Is that a person? I thought that was a person." And then I think there's a whole trust factor when that hits. And so I agree that I think when you need that human element, I think we'll always need that. And I think in that respect, that is quicker than AI in terms of, you know, some of the companies that I've been talking to and what I've seen right now, out in AI, while these voices are great or they can sound pretty human, I think they're only human in one instance. So if you ever had to go back and redirect, right? Adam: Yeah. Anne: You know, that emotion that they just emoted, it's the same, no matter if you put it at the front of the script or the, in the middle of the script of the end of the script. And I think if you have a human that you can redirect and have a slightly different nuance of sad, I think that's where humans are quicker and can actually -- I don't know if you can say it can be cheaper because I think these AI voices, they're on computers. They basically are generated by engines. And so somewhere in the ethers, you know, there's a computer out there creating that job or creating that audio for the job, and there's money, you know. Adam: For sure. Anne: There's -- that costs money. And so I feel like the human will always be there. What type of audiobooks -- both, I'd like to get both of your opinions -- what type of audiobooks do you think an AI voice is appropriate for? Or is it not? Adam: Appropriate is a -- appropriate is a different word. Anne: Yeah. Adam: I think instead of using appropriate, I would say acceptable maybe. Anne: Okay. Adam: Anything that's not going to require huge conveyance of emotion or feeling. So that's where I think, you know, educational materials, textbooks, things like that, where you're just absorbing information, I think it is less problematic than if you're reading a book, and there's a scene where a family member dies, and it's really important that that narrator captures that sadness and all those emotions and the subtleness -- subtlety of emotions. Whereas, you know, an AI narrator probably -- or even if the AI narrator can do that, my understanding is currently there's a lot of manual work in the backend essentially saying on this syllable, AI narrator be sad, on this one, pick it up a little bit. Anne: Sure, sure. Adam: So my understanding is currently there is some manual stuff that needs to happen for it to work -- Anne: Yeah. Adam: -- entirely properly. Anne: Yeah. And I think that it starts to take as much time if you need to dial that emotion to a certain way or dial the speed or whatever, you're, you're changing in that AI, I think you're going to spend more time post-processing to get it to sound more human. And then it ends up taking possibly longer than a human, you know, utilizing something like Pozotron to help, right, proof and get their job done faster. Interesting. So what do you think then is the future of AI for, let's start with what would be the future of AI and how it's being used at Pozotron? And then also, how do you feel AI will ultimately be in five years or ten years? Will it take over the voiceover industry? Or what do you, what are your thoughts? Adam: I'd like Ryan to talk to his -- Ryan's got a really, I mean, we all share it, but Ryan's got an interesting vision on kind of the future of audiobook production with human, with human narrators. I'd like you to go into that, Ryan. Ryan: So as far as the future of AI in Pozotron, I don't even think of it in terms of AI, as I'm working through my day, as I'm doing my testing. That doesn't enter into much of my thought process. Having spent thousands of hours looking for misreads and doing reporting, those two things were the absolute worst part of my job. They are the hardest to do consistently. It's the easiest to make mistakes. And the fact that there's a tool, whether it's AI or not, that makes that part easier, that's my push. That's my function. The fact that AI is there helping make that part better for the proofing process, for the scanning of scripts, for all of that, it's that way to make things easier for people, and the, the AI part of it, the mechanics behind it, don't concern me all that much as a technician. And on the creative side, I would love to see AI be that tool that makes the performance go to that next level. You know that you have an AI behind you telling you when you make your mistakes. So you don't have to worry about it. Anne: Yeah. Ryan: As a narrator, okay, you have these seven pages to do and "oh, am I going to make any mistakes? How long is it going to take, you know, my engineer to get that back to me, who do I have to turn it into next? How do I note it?" All of those things are going to be in your head, but if you have a complete set of tools that look for those things, you can be absolutely peaceful and zenned out, knowing that you have this extra set of eyes and ears and knowledge behind you. And so the future to me as a performer, being able to come to their tools, their microphone and their computer, and do an entire production on their own and have it not just a one-to-one ratio with editing or proofing or -- but a one-to-one production of the whole thing, how they want it, how they love it, how it's supposed to sound. So that's what I see in a few years is a set of tools that allows you, Anne, to go up to your station and make an audiobook. Anne: I love that. Ryan: That's what I see. Anne: Yeah. Ryan: That's what I'm excited for. Anne: Yeah, it gives you the time and the peace of mind to go and be an artist -- Ryan: Yep. Anne: -- which is what you are meant to do, and not necessarily worry about how long it's going to take to edit. I love that outlook. That's wonderful. Thank you for that. Absolutely. Adam: From the AI side of that, it's really just taking either algorithms we built or algorithms we are building to basically make all of the work around audiobooks easier. So an example right now is in our next step of this character voice tool that we're using, we're building an algorithm that will score, yeah, every single mention of a character's name based on two attributes. One of them is that character. So let's take, for example, Sherlock Holmes links to a verb denoting speech also modified by an adverb. So it'll take every single mention of that character's name and the book, and give you an output of the top 20 examples of that character speaking, where there is a description about how that character spoke. So when you're putting together your character voice prep -- Anne: Wow. Adam: -- and deciding as a narrator, hey, this is the voice I'm going to use -- Anne: Yeah. Adam: -- you can use our tool scan to through the top 20 mentions saying Sherlock spoke aggressively, Sherlock spoke in a high tone, Sherlock spoke, exclaimed sadly, or something like that. Where you can basically use this tool to easily figure out all the cues from the book and then plan out your character's voice. Anne: Wow, that's great. Adam: And then the other side of it, so really instead of having to do what they're currently doing -- Anne: Yeah. Adam: -- which is reading the book with a highlighter and taking note of everything they're doing, you can parse an entire book and take all those cues in a fraction of that time while still getting the same high quality work. And then the next step of that, that we've already built into our pronunciation guide, is once you've done your work, you've created your pronunciation list. You've created your character voice guide. You can currently export that into a marked up PDF where every word in your pronunciation guide is automatically highlighted in your script with a call-out box saying this is the phonetic pronunciation -- Anne: Wow. Adam: -- or this is your note saying how, how that voice should sound. And then in the future, it's going to be a teleprompter where instead of just seeing a call-out box, you click play, and you listen to yourself speaking in that character's voice. You pause your recording, listen to yourself, and then click record again and start going. So removing all of those -- Anne: Oh, that's wonderful. Adam: -- switching between apps. Anne: Yup. Adam: And, you know, some people have their character list on their iPhone in a note -- Anne: Yup, yup. Adam: -- or something like that, everything is centralized and that takes -- gets us closer to that one-to-one recording time to finished hour of audio time. Anne: Right, so you can get right to the point in your wav file that you need to be. Because when I go back in and have to do pickups, I have to hunt for where was that? You know, where was that part in my, in my single wav file there that I said this particular thing that I have to do the pickup. So that's, that's phenomenal. I, I think what a wonderful tool. How can BOSSes out there get in touch with you, find out more about your software, maybe -- is that a subscription based model? Adam: Um, so first, uh, they can check us out at www.pozotron.com. That's P-O-Z-O-T-R-O-N.com. Um, or email us at hello@pozotron.com. Uh, we have a number of pricing plans from pay as you go, which has absolutely no subscription. You pay $10 per hour of audio you upload, all charged down to the minute, but it's easier to say $10 per hour than 16.667 cents per minute, but all the way up to, you know, we have some, some of the biggest publishers are putting six, 700 hours of audio a month, and you're getting, and you're paying a much reduced per hour rate based on whatever volume you're doing. So we have very flexible plans from literally you put in 10 minutes of audio a month up to thousands of hours of audio a month. Um, we're very flexible and our subscriptions are only ever month to month. So if you have a big, either increase in volume, you can jump up to a bigger plan. If you have a lull over the Christmas season or holiday season, um, you can go down, 'cause we never want people to be paying for something they're not using because we're a believer in, you know, we'd rather lower our revenues from a customer for a month to make a happier customer because that customer is going to stay with us over the longterm. Anne: Fantastic. And I'm going to push for anybody that does long-form narration, really. I can absolutely see this as being a tool that can really help us, so fantastic. You guys, thank you so very much for joining me today. It has been amazing, and BOSSes out there, make sure to check out Pozotron. I think it's going to really help you do your job better, and thanks again for sharing your time with us today. And I am going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL that allows us to connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. Thanks again, Ryan and Adam. It's been a pleasure. Ryan: Thank you. Adam: Thank you very much. This was, this was really fun. Anne: Awesome. Alright, BOSSes. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Adam: Bye! Ryan: Bye! >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Stewart: Insurance companies are using ETFs more than ever before. My name’s Stewart Foley, this is the Insurance AUM Journal podcast and ETF use in insurance company portfolios is the topic of the day. We are joined by two folks who are experts in the field, David Stack, and Bernie Ryan. Welcome gentlemen. Ryan: Thank … Fixed Income ETFs: Passing the test and making more sense Read More »

Product descriptions may seem straightforward, but if done right they can significantly improve conversion rates. Today Jon explains why product descriptions are one of the most effective changes you can change to your website and how to write great product descriptions that will convert. The article Jon mentioned on how to write production descriptions that sell: https://thegood.com/insights/product-descriptions/ TRANSCRIPT: Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better eCommerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. Ryan: Jon, you recently wrote an article that kind of put my head in a spin around product description. Jon: Sometimes that's too easy. Ryan: I know. Spinning my brain's not necessarily the most difficult thing to do if you're in the space, but you wrote an article about product descriptions and how they can significantly improve conversion rates. And that surprises me because I personally ignore those all the time and I focus on other aspects of marketing and driving traffic as per usual. But that for me, is kind of like a side, just put it in there. As long as it's in there and then we can manipulate it going into Google shopping, where it's going to have an impact on your traffic. Just get something in there, period. Obviously I was wrong on this in my opinion. And I'm probably not alone in that. I'm excited today, Jon's going to school us on product descriptions and what you should be doing as an eCommerce business to leverage that to improve conversion rates. Jon, kick us off, explain at a high level, of all the things you could be focusing on on your site, why product descriptions in your mind, are one of the top things you can be doing to improve conversion rates? Jon: Yeah well, I think you basically just said it best in your tee up here where a lot of people just don't pay attention to this. And I think it's really, really forgotten. And that's a challenge in that as you're optimizing websites, it's one of the first places we go because most people forget about it. But look, we've learned over a decade of running AB tests on hundreds of product detail pages that optimizing your product descriptions is just one of the highest return, lowest investment improvements that an eCommerce manager can make. And look, they're key part of your potential customer's decision making process. I think the stat that my team here at The Good always says is that 87% of consumers rate product content extremely or very important to deciding to buy. Ryan: Wow. Jon: 87%. Ryan: Way higher than I would've thought. Jon: Right. Well, that's exactly the problem is most people don't think about this. And so if you're not optimizing product descriptions, you're certainly leaving money on the table. That's why you should focus on this. Ryan: If we're going to improve it, if we just assume that for example, my product descriptions are just terrible because I didn't focus on them, what are the areas I need to be looking at as I'm staring at my product description? And where do I start? I guess would be the best question. Jon: Well, I think there's four main areas that everyone should be focusing on and we can chat about today, but we can break these down. But the first is the real job of a product description. Most people think the real job of the product description is something that it's not. And we'll dive into that a little bit. The second is that it's an effective product description template needs to be used, so we can talk about what goes into those and what items you need to check the box to really make it great. And then how to write one that converts. It's not just having the content, you need to also be thinking about how you're writing that content. And then we can really talk about frequently asked questions around the product descriptions that I get, because I get a lot of questions about it. Once we start optimizing, people start thinking about it, a lot more questions come up than you might imagine. Partly, that's why we're doing the show today, it makes your head spin a little bit. That means there's a lot of questions there and you're not alone in that really. Maybe we can just break those four down and discuss each pretty briefly. Ryan: Yeah, I'm excited for it. What's the real job of a description of a product? In my mind, it's to describe the product. It's a blue t-shirt, congratulations. Jon: Yeah, right, exactly. If you just said blue t-shirt, how many sales do you think you're going to get? Let's just poke a hole in the idea that the job of the eCommerce product description is just to describe the product. I think that that's not right. Given the name, it makes sense that most folks think this, but product descriptions aren't there to just describe what's on your eCommerce site. They're also there to qualify. Do they help your visitors quickly assess, is this for someone like me? Do they persuade? Is it a compelling description? Is it customer centered on the reasons they should be considering that product? And then it's also there to surface. And what I mean by that is to help people find the product. This is the third one on purpose because a lot of people will stuff keywords throughout in terms of search engine optimization in optimizing the product description, but look, SEO keywords and search terms, and if you use those in a natural way, you'll get the page to show up and you want it to show up in search engine or even Amazon results if you're talking about optimizing your product descriptions on Amazon, which should also be done. Here's really one way to really think about this, product descriptions are a bit like your 24/7 in store retail associate for your online store. We often talk about if you wouldn't do something in a retail store, don't do it on your website. Let's take that analogy a step further and say, "How would associate talk about the product?" If you walked into a store and said, "Hey, I'm looking for a t-shirt," what questions are they going to ask to help you find the right one in that store? As a virtual retail associate, the product description can have that same kind of impact. And if it does its job well, it's going to draw visitors to your goods and then increase the conversions on those. And if it's done poorly, it's just going to frustrate visitors and push them away and hurt sales. It's very, very similar. Ryan: I like that. I think a lot of people, at least in what I think through is I don't think about qualifying. I'm like, you got to my page, you click on my products from Google shopping, you saw the price, just go buy it. And then if I'm in the jar looking at the label in the wrong way, from that perspective and I step out, I realize, okay, well I know conversion rates on shopping traffic is generally lower than category page traffic and so I'm like, oh well, possibly because my category is doing a better job describing a product or qualifying that person coming in and I'm just leaving that there rather than pulling it through and looking at qualifying them. Jon: Yeah. You're not alone on that. A lot of brands look at a category page as an opportunity to convert. I look at a category page as an opportunity to help somebody to the next step in the funnel, which is get them to that product detail page. And that's where you can really convert and sell and make sure people are getting the right product for them. Ryan: Okay, I concur. Tell us then okay, once I decide that it's more than just describing a product, what's a template look like that's going to help me through creating this product description that is going to be more than just describing my product? Jon: I love when I can change minds. And I'm glad we're helping do that today. All right. Ryan: We are. Jon: Again, here. Ryan: I'm taking notes. Jon: There are a handful of bullet points of things that you want to ensure are included. First of all, you need a descriptive headline. Use a product title that's going to hook your audience. Bonus points if you can connect with them emotionally. We don't want blue t-shirt, we want the t-shirt that makes your dad bod look hot. Ryan: I'm getting those ads on Instagram, by the way. I'm like, no, this is terrible. Jon: Ryan's looking good today in his shirt, by the way. All right. Benefits focused paragraphs. Use a descriptive paragraph to explain why, and I mean exactly why the customer benefits from the product. Too many people talk about features and that's it, they're just bullet point features and then don't talk about the benefits. You know how I led with the t-shirt that's going to make your dad bod look hot? That's what we want to be talking about here. What's the benefit? Not that it's a blue t-shirt. Yeah, that might be in there, but what's the benefit of wearing that t-shirt? The other thing we want to have in here is a key benefits list. Follow that description with a bulleted list of product features and benefits and this is where you can get into those details that if somebody is just skimming, they're going to look at that list. You're really what you're doing here is you're providing the benefits in a paragraph, maybe even telling a little bit of a story could be really helpful there. Don't make it too long. But then if somebody really wants, just give me the details. I already know I want a blue t-shirt, I just am deciding between two or three different ones and they want to know the specs and the features, that's where they're going to go is the bullet list. Don't bury those in the paragraph. The paragraph should be, hey, here's the benefits to you. If you want to know the features and the details, look at the bullet list that comes next. And then the fourth thing is, add some additional motivations. Really what we're trying to do here is just minimize those remaining purchase hurdles. Will it fit? Do others like it? Do things like credibility, social proof, you can bake in product reviews or even urgency. And of course, make sure you have a clear call to action. So many brands, we talk to have four buttons to add to cart and it's like, oh, you can use quad pay, after pay. You could use Amazon checkout. You could use both. And it's like, just give them one button and then push that to the next step. Get them to commit and then ask them how you want to pay. Ryan: Because my brain goes in funny directions when you say urgency, can you explain what that means from you, your perspective? Because it's probably not the little popup thing on Shopify that says, "Hey Bob in New York just bought this and Suzie in Florida just bought. Jon: You know me well. Ryan: Because I guarantee you don't like that one because I don't like that one. Jon: Yeah, nobody likes that. Ryan: And I don't have as many dislikes as you. Jon: I call that one of those wildfire apps and I call it wildfire because they just spread without anyone knowing how it started or why it's spreading. Ryan: Yeah, my competitor's probably doing it so I did it, and that's the worst way. Jon: And you don't see those apps as much anymore, a couple years ago, it was really popular and then everyone installed it and they realized this isn't doing anything. And also half of the companies using it are aligned about who's purchasing what, they all had Bob from Waco, Texas and it was kind of like you see Bob from Waco, Texas. Ryan: That guy shops on every site and I've been on. Jon: Exactly. And you're kind of like, that's the default it gives you. Here's the other thing. I really think what you need to be thinking about here in urgency is stock levels. And I'm not talking about lying. I'm saying, okay, only a few left. And what I mean by few? Well, I have two or three and you'd better buy it right away or it's going to go out of stock. There's some great tools, especially if you're on platforms like Shopify that are great apps that will do dynamic badging around quantity left so it can pull your quantities and do a dynamic image overlay on your product images. It will put a badge up in the corner that says, "Two left, one left," whatever. That's what I'm talking about with urgency. Or something like, hey free shipping. You're doing an offer, not a discount. When I talk about urgency, I'm not talking discounts as you know quite well. There could be some offers. It could be, right now it's a buy one, get a free gift. There's a whole litany of offers you can do that are not discounting and so I think when I'm talking about urgency, I'm talking about those type of items. Ryan: And so generally if you're a brand that has just tons of inventory, you have to focus more on getting creative and incentivizing without discounting to get that purchase from the product page. Jon: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Create urgency if it's necessary. The other thing we see perform really well in terms of urgency is if it's out of stock to sign up to get notified when it's in stock. We have a client we've worked with for years, that is a really well known Japanese outdoor brand, outdoor camping high end. And what we have done for them over the years is help refine their out of stock notifications. They have some products that never are in stock because as soon as they send out that out of stock notification, they burn through their stock again. And I'm not talking that they only get five or 10 in, no, they get thousands. But the thing about it is, is that consumers have all signed up for this list and they want these products. We say, "Hey, you want this product? Sign up to be notified." And then we send out on an email and that email goes out, "Back in stock, click here to buy it," adds it right to the cart and they're able to purchase. And then before it even ever hits the site and it changes the product detail pages show how much stock is left, it's gone within hours. Ryan: Geez. Yeah, I'm going to test pre-sale. I'm going to say, "Hey, this new blend from Joyful Dirt's coming out, we're going to start advertising it and pre-sell it on social so we can start demand, figuring what demand looks like, what our production runs need to look like." Jon: That's a great idea. Ryan: And hopefully there's a lot there, but if not, they were like, "Yeah, we're only going to produce a few hundred. We'll be fine." Okay, so what else do we need to be considering what's average eCom business owner not going to be thinking about that you know that they don't even know to ask? What don't I know that I should know. Jon: Well, I think there's some simple questions that need to be answered. Let's look at this as maybe I don't know, questions that somebody doing a natural deodorant product might have. You need to think about this, who's the customer? That's always the first one, who's the potential customer? When you're starting to write this, you need to be thinking about that first. Let's say here, it would be men and women who are fed up with chemical packed deodorants. Just being a normal deodorant and saying, "Hey, people who don't like to stink," that's not going to be good enough. What's your differentiating point? The second is, what problems does it solve? This is where you can get into it helps keep them stink free. The potential customer is not the problem, it's what pain are you solving for them that is a little bit deeper than the surface level? And then the problem it solves is really the high level okay, people buy deodorant for this main reason. But the differentiating point is what's going to define that potential customer. Then you get into what desires does it fulfill? For this theater and it would be something like feeling healthier, more responsible towards their bodies and the planet, maybe just feeling less dirty and smelly. They could be that generic. And maybe they've been fertilizing their garden all day with a Joyful Dirt and now they don't want to come back into the house and smell. And then you need to be thinking about what objections people have. And this is where it's like, hey, why are you using a natural deodorant? Or maybe other natural deodorants just don't seem to work or they lie about the ingredients. Those are all types of things you should really be thinking about there. The next question you really want to ask yourself is why you? Why your brand? Compared to the other guys, why does this deodorant actually work? And then last of all, definitely not least, but you really want to think about what words your consumers are using so you can mirror what they're looking for there. And this is great, this is where user research can really come in, just interviewing consumers, doing some user testing, for instance so when they talk about what words they use, things like natural, fresh, perhaps scent or confident, and those are words that you can bake into your product description. They're going to write it for you. And if you go and you answer all of these questions in an outline, kind of like I just did where I answered each question a little bit about deodorant, you'll have most of your product description written and then you can move on from there. Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, the podcast focused on eCommerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with eCommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Ryan: I know though, pictures are worth more than words and so do you consider the images on the side of a product description as part of the description? Or is that different entirely? And that's a whole nother conversation around the images? Or do you use them together? Jon: I think it's a whole nother conversation, quite honestly. Although people say a picture's worth a thousand words, I think that's true. And that's why pictures, we should do a whole nother episode on that because I do think it matters. And I think that there's a lot of things out there that you could be doing. I think on model, off model, 360, in use, size comparison. You really got to be thinking about all the different types of images that you could be doing. And a lot of brands will focus on the words, because a lot of consumers will go to the words and with one good photo you can still get them to convert. But after that, you really need to dive in and start thinking about all the other photos that you could do. And that's a ripe opportunity for optimization as well for sure. Ryan: Got it. You've done a lot of obviously user testing and listen to a lot of people go through the process of buying, are there certain types of people that are only going to pay attention to image and some that only pay attention to the words and that's just is a personality or a person? Or is it everybody's taking all that information in together? Jon: I think that as humans we're visual, but there are some people who will, if you have a video, they're just going to watch the video and they're going to skim. This is really huge on B2B websites where you want to bake in video because what's going to happen, meaningful video, Telling you about the product and walking you through it, et cetera, because consumers are going to just scroll until they find video and then watch that video while they're doing something else like on a bus or in traffic or eating lunch. I just did that. I was evaluating some software for our business, for The Good, over lunch and I was eating lunch, watching product videos. I didn't want to read about it. I just wanted to sit there and watch the video. I just put it on one and a half speed and then go. And I think that's a lot of people will do that. And I think in terms of images, it's similar. A lot of people will get that content from the images, but they're not going to get all the features and benefits that way. They're really not. People still need the bullet point list to see all of the features. People who are going to be watching the video, looking at the images, that's where they're going to start and if you don't get it right there, they're not even going to go on to read the bullet list. It is important for a segment of the audience for sure. Ryan: I think of product descriptions kind of like I think of one on my website and I think of the one on the Amazon and I probably put more time into the Amazon one, but I have more volume on Amazon right now. And so, but Amazon has multiple areas for information. You get the top there's image and then a short description and then you go down and you have A plus content and the expanded descriptions. And now that I think about it, a lot of websites have that same type of feel built out around them. Are you seeing a lot of focus needing to be on the short snippet, kind of at the top, more than at the bottom? Because sometimes the descriptions I see, especially on B2B, all the spec tab that is really long and drawn out, you can tell people are just dumping information from an SEO perspective sometimes in there. Is there one area that's more important in all of that? Jon: Yes. I think in the concept of the description, this is what those towards the top of the page. Often you'll have images on the left and then all the product description content on the right. As you scroll down, you can take those bullet points we talked about earlier with the benefits and the specific features and that bullet list and break that down throughout the page. That's typically what I would recommend. Have the bullet point and if people want to dive into each one of those, so say you're talking about the deodorant as we talked about earlier and you want to look at the ingredients list. Well, you can say all natural ingredients as a bullet point. And then at the bottom you could start saying all natural ingredients and then you break out what those ingredients are and talk about the benefits of each and how it's truly all natural and it doesn't include, what is the big one? Aluminum or something that people don't like? I don't know. But I think, it's something like that where you would use the rest of the page to truly break it down. And that's where you can also inject some brand. And it's also where you should be injecting supporting content like blog articles. To me, too many brands put the blog on the homepage, so they have like this lineup of blog posts that nobody cares about on their homepage. The blog post is top of the funnel. It's great for getting people to your site. It's great for SEO for instance. But then if they're on product detail page and you send them back up the funnel, you need to make sure that it's done in a supporting fashion so that you're not just sending them right back to the top of the funnel for no good reason. What I mean by that is maybe you have a blog article all about those ingredients or a specific ingredient that you're using and you want to talk about why it's more superior and you need a 1,000 or 1,500 words. Well, that's not good for your product detail page, but it would be good to link to that and say, "Hey, want to learn more about this? Read this blog post about it." That's also going to help your SEO and Google find all of that content together. Ryan: Yeah, I think exactly zero times have I ever gone from a homepage trying to research a brand for a product and gone to the blog and be like, hmm, let me read some blogs. Jon: No, not going to happen. Ryan: Never happen. And I'm like, no, I'm here to buy a product or research the product, not read about how the product worked on X, Y, Z in these conditions. Jon: Yeah, but when you're on a product detail page and doing your research and you're far enough down that step, it might be relevant to some degree to know that it's there. Ryan: Awesome. No, obviously Jon you've broken down and torn apart a lot of product pages over your life. What are some of the questions that you've had clients ask you as they've gone through the process and tried to implement a lot of what you've talked about, even with your template? And are there any funny ones or when it makes sense that other people are probably going to be asking after they start doing this? Jon: Yeah. Yeah, you're right, I've probably broken down hundreds of thousands of these at this point. I don't know that might be exaggerating, but it is kind of like what's that movie with the kid where he's like, "I see dead people." That's me. I can't go down the internet and shop without seeing messed up product detail pages everywhere. It's just unfortunate side effect of my job. But I will say, I do love when we have a positive effect on those. And so I'm always happy to answer questions, but yeah, I do get some off the wall ones. I think the biggest one I get all the time is, can't I just copy my description from a competitor? It's working for them so why not? I hear that all the time. But I'm shocked I even have to answer this. But yeah, the short answer is no, you can't lift product descriptions from your competitors. Look, beyond the SEO challenges of that, meaning that it's going to be a challenge where Google sees the same as that content across two sites and then you're playing a really hard to win game because Google is going to pick one of them or when they do that, it's likely not going to be you because it knows that content has been on the other site longer and so that's what it considers the original source. Ryan: Now what about product descriptions from the supplier or the manufacturer? Especially if you've got a site with a 100,000 products on it. Jon: Well, you might want to evaluate why you have a site with a 100,000 products. Ryan: True. There's a lot of them out there. Jon: Yeah. I wonder how many of those are just dropped shipping, not doing that great. And that's why they're not doing that great. If you really want to be successful at something like that, you need to customize the heck out of it. And so you really do need to sit down and do this for all the products so it's not just the manufacturer description. Now you can base it on that manufacturer description, but don't copy and paste that because everyone else who's drop shipping that product is doing the same thing. Or on top of that, you're not really adding any additional value and I can promise you, most of those subscriptions are D level work. They're not even a passing grade in most cases. I think copying is a moral issue for me in addition to the SEO issue so it's two strikes you're out rule, really. Using the manufacturer, I think is the SEO role and ineffective. It's just a non-starter. Ryan: And I think that if you are in the eCommerce world and you are assuming something, you're going to lose. You never assume that this is working for a competitor because they're doing it and you think they're bigger than you. And you assume that somebody knows what they're doing. Obviously I have a wine and beer read business and you drink wine, if you read wine descriptions, those are generally written by somebody sitting at a desk at a winery that's coming up with weird terms. One of my friends owns a winery and I'm like, "Well, how'd you come up with your descriptions?" "Oh my wife and I started drinking wine and decided, let's start putting these things in there." You can't assume that, if it works it's on accident many times. Jon: I have a good friend who runs an agency that does nothing but branding and labels for wine and spirits brands and that is the number one challenge that they get from brands, their customers that they work with, is that those vineyards will send over the descriptions and they're like, this isn't going to fly, we got to help you optimize this. It's a challenge. It's not unique. They're like, you might as well just label it alcohol, alcohol from grapes. And that's always the joke. My friend is always just like, "You sent me this description. I'm just going to change it and say alcohol from grapes." Ryan: We're planting wine grapes right now. And I told my wife, it's like, "We're going to make some wine with it." She's like, "You think it's going to be good?" I'm like, "Probably not, but we're just going to call it Ryan's Yeast Juice. It's going to be great. It's going to sound like crap." Jon: When you gift me a bottle, I'll know. Ryan: Yeah, Ryan's Yeast Juice. That's actually why, I add grape juice with some yeast in it that sat in the bottle for too long, became alcoholic. Jon: Can't wait, can't wait. Ryan: I can't wait for my marketing to go, all the marketing energy I have, Ryan's Yeast Juice. I should probably trademark before it gets out. Jon: Yeah. Made with Ryan's fertilizer. How's that? Ryan: Yeah. Jon: Joyful Dirt line. Well yeah, I think the other question that I get a lot here is how long product descriptions should be. And I think it's not a one size fits all. It's long enough to be helpful, short enough to be digestible and depends on the product. A few quick sentences could work for your products or you may need to write 1,500 words, but I think it's something where you really need to understand your audience. Are they here quick? Are they deciding between a couple of things and want a feature list? Or should you put more effort into the story? Also, there's the brand aspect. There's a lot of brands who have a lot of fun with their product descriptions. And then there's a lot of brands who are just dry. That's just kind of their brand and you go from there. Ryan: Okay. Over the past, let's just keep it recent, three years, who would you say of companies you've at least seen their site, you don't have to work with them, probably did the best with their product descriptions? Jon: Yeah. Are you familiar with Chubbies? Ryan: I'm not. Jon: Ooh, okay. Chubbies is a men's, mostly men's clothing brand and they do some hilarious descriptions. They started out, I believe selling swim trunks. Ryan: Oh yeah. Yeah, now I remember. Jon: And it's now a bunch of other stuff, but they've always done some good work. I haven't looked at the site in a while, but they were pretty good one from back in the day. And I think, generally there's brands like OLIPOP and a few others like that who are new and are doing a really, really good job with it. I don't know if you've heard of OLIPOP. It's kind of like a new flavored seltzer brand. They do a really, really good job with it. I also think that there's a couple out there around more around eyeglasses, Felix Gray, things of that sort, that do a really, really good job. And I think that their biggest competitor is Warby Parker. And I think Warby Parker does a good job, but Felix Gray has really made their calling card being better content on the page. Ryan: Got it. Jon: The other one that I really like is Cards Against Humanity. I don't know if you've ever been to their site. Ryan: I love that game. It's the most inappropriate fairly game we've played with my in-laws. Jon: Okay, I was going to say, yeah, that could be awkward at best. Ryan: Oh it for sure is. Jon: They have a teenager version I've played with my cousins and I will tell you, that got awkward real quick too. But they have add on packs and all this other stuff and they do a great job with branding. And they have a couple of sentences, they'll say, "Hey, this is just," they'll be very quick. This is all about these topics. It's 300, but they'll inject some brand. They'll say, "All new absurd box contains 300 mind bending cards that came to us after taking peyote and wandering in the desert." And it's kind of like, that's funny and I know what I'm going to get is just weird random stuff. And then it's, they did in the bullet points. 300 brand new cards to mix into your game. This one's pretty weird. They're going to be weird, I get it. It's an expansion. It requires the main game. Now I'm like, okay, I get it. It's expansion pack. And you have nothing to lose, but your chains, I don't know what that even means, but that's what they're telling you. I think, it's on brand because it's super random. And I think that last bullet point is all meant to just demonstrate the randomness that you're going to get out of this pack. And then if you go down the page, they have a lot more info about and some samples and stuff, but that kind of gives you a good example there. Ryan: Thank you. That's awesome. Any parting words or places people need to be focusing and getting started on? Jon: Yeah, I think look, it's there's a simple formula that you can follow and too many brands don't even try to follow the formula. And if you go to The Good's website and on our insights or articles page, or just go to thegood.com/insights/product-descriptions, we have a really great article that breaks all of this down and more. Gives you ton of examples and it's a great way for you to just take the template we've got on there and start using that and applying it to your product descriptions and Ryan, it sounds like you may have some work to do, but it will get you a higher conversion. Ryan: I think I might. But thanks for the time, Jon. I appreciate it and educating me as always on how to make my site work better. Jon: All right. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing the results on that. Thanks for chatting today. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com

Please check out the new Bryan Air Live on Tuesday evenings 7pm SA time. LIVE on YouTube. Today we celebrate the 50th episode of Bryan Air - As much as today’s show is dedicated to the fire-fighters who fought the horrendous fires in Cape Town over the past week I also want to commend my crew. I could not have done this alone, it was a team effort from day 1. Brett and Ryan - Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. On this episode: ✅ IATA’s recommendations are ignored    ✅ DPE wants a realistic buyer for SA Express   ✅ SAA begins training its pilots   ✅ Airlink has a new APP and Safair has a great special    ✅ The crew gives a run down our live show   ✅ We celebrate number 50   Check Out Our Sponsor websites:  Simaero https://www.sim.aero Aviate Innovate Navigate: https://www.aviatein.com Aviation4SA: https://www.aviation4sa.co.za You can view all Bryan Air content on my webpage https://bryanroseveare.com  Brett has also launched his own site with an emphasis on managing emotions and disrupting your life for positive outcomes https://www.brettmarkpreston.com  You can catch Ryan’s content on https://www.ryanparrock.com Ryan has some awesome ideas for the future and is finding his way in the content creation sphere, watch this space.  Get in touch and join the discussion on our YouTube channel: We have launched a second show ‘Bryan Air Live’ The live show is available on Tuesday evenings 7pm (Local SA time) http://www.youtube.com/c/BryanRoseveare  Or connect with any of the crew on LinkedIn Bryan Roseveare: linkedin.com/in/bryanroseveare Brett Preston: linkedin.com/in/brettmpreston Ryan Parrock: linkedin.com/in/ryanparrock Thank You!        

Psychology plays an important part in business no matter what business you’re in or how you’re getting sales. The best tactics to convince us to spend money are the ones we’re not aware of. Retail stores have been using music, scents, and merchandising to get us to spend more money for decades if not centuries. Those tactics online now have a name and its Dark Patterns. Jon explain just what Dark Patterns are and why your brand should avoid using them. Read more about Dark Patterns: https://thegood.com/insights/dark-pattern-ecommerce-ux-design/ Transcription: Ryan: Jon, psychology plays an important part in business, no matter what business you're in and how you're getting the sales. Now, the best tactics to convince us to spend money are the ones we're not really aware of. And retail has been doing this probably for hundreds of years, even though I haven't been involved in it, using music's sense merchandising of how they put products on the shelves to get us to spend more money. And all of that research and data is out there for the taking, but I would venture a guess that most of the public is unaware of actually what's happening in those retail environments to commit us to spend money. When it comes to e-Commerce though, and the way our economy is moving to transacting online, I'm finding a lot of these "psychology tactics" are much more in your face, or at least I'm more aware of them. And maybe it's because I'm spending too much time in front of my computer talking to e-Commerce business owners and looking at e-Commerce sites. But I see it all the time, and a lot of times it just bugs me and you have a term for it called dark patterns. And that's a new term to me, but probably not to you because you work in the CRO world, but you recently mentioned it on LinkedIn. And I wanted to learn more about it because it fascinates me, the intricacies of psychology because studying sales my whole life and now having a retail store with my wife, it's just always there. And I think most of them I see online are garbage, some plugins on Shopify sites that maybe should never have been put on in the first place, but I want to learn about dark patterns. And I learned from one of the best in the world, who should be you. Jon: Awesome. Ryan: It sounds evil, but I just want to know more. How do we use our powers for good? Jon: I'm looking forward to it. Ryan: Jon, why don't you just take a moment and give me a high level of what do you mean when you say dark patterns when it comes to e-Commerce and e-Commerce sites? Jon: So when I talk about dark patterns, what I'm talking about is similar to, if you think about hacking and in a way that there's white hat and black hat, right. And black hat hacking is when you're doing something intentionally for a negative outcome, it might be a benefit to somebody like it's going to be benefits to the hacker, but you're hurting somebody in that process or you're creating a problem in that process. Where a white hat hacker is really just trying to help. They're trying to do things for positive. Maybe they're looking for bugs, but they're going to report them to the software maker before they do anything to exploit it. So you think about that. Exploitation is really what comes in here to my head when I think about this more than anything else. So, what we're talking about here today is really when an e-Commerce store makes something difficult because they want to influence the outcome that they're trying to do. So whether that's something through psychology, you talked about in a retail environment, the type of music they play in the background that calms people down, or how they price, where they make things $2 and 99 cents instead of $3, right? You start thinking about all these psychology tricks that come at play well in e-Commerce there's all those psychology tricks. Plus there are ways to actually increase barriers intentionally on a website so that the consumer can't take the action that they're trying to take, instead, you've made it more difficult. Some examples of this really easy one, an email pop-up pops up when you come to the site to sign up for email lists and there's no way to close it. So the only way you can get back to what you were trying to do is to give them your email address, or I like to call this negative intent shaming. So where the button in that pop-up says something like, no, I don't like discounts or I don't like saving money, right? There's all these types of dark patterns. And it can go even more, really sinister and you make it just impossible to unsubscribe without calling, right? So for years, and it may still be this way, but Skype was an amazing case study of this, where they would claim massive retention rates, but their user rate was super low and usage. And the only reason they had retention rates that were so impressive is because the only way to actually cancel and delete your Skype account was to call a phone number in the U.S. So, if you're an international user where Skype was way more prevalent than in the States, you had to call international, talk to somebody in English only, and say, I need to cancel my Skype account. Please delete it from your servers. Why won't you just do that when a click of a button? So this is a good example of a dark pattern where the brand really valued retention, so they made it near impossible, right up, maybe to that legal limit. And one of the things you saw on LinkedIn was I had posted to an article it had run in what's called The Hustle, which is a great entrepreneur email. If you're no signed up for a free email, it comes out every morning, just around entrepreneurship and the tech industry and whatnot. And they were saying that there's new legislation coming in that is all about making these dark patterns illegal. And that most things need to be self-service, and it shouldn't be a challenge. So that's really where I was going with this was not only is this just bad to do and lead to a horrible brand image in the longterm, but it's also going to become illegal fairly soon. And I hope it's sooner than later, I have my doubts that would happen anytime in the near future, but I hope it's sooner than later. Ryan: So could you also bundle in to that broad, I guess I would probably try to broaden dark patterns a little bit and say it also includes what people think is helping from a psychological perspective, but it's actually just stupid. Well, one of my, I guess, favorite, least favorite was the one that I noticed the most is there's a plug-in on a lot of sites that says, Oh, little Jimmy just bought the pink t-shirt and Oh, look over here, Susie just bought this vase. And Oh, people are buying all over on the site and I can go to some sites and I've seen maybe the analytics behind the scenes and maybe some of my audit. And I know for a fact, there's no way that five people just bought something in the 30 seconds I was on their site. Jon: That's exactly it. Fake social proof is a great example of this, right? So it's having a random number of view, people are viewing this product right now, having X number of people who just bought this product from wherever in the world. And consumers always distrust that now, because it's been abused. Right. But it's a dark pattern because what are they trying to do? They're trying to influence your psychology around social proof and having fear of missing out. And you want what everyone else wants and, Oh, well, if so-and-so just bought that product, then it's probably legit and I should buy it too. And we see this more and more, a really good example is well, and we're getting through a lot of good examples. I could go on for days for examples, but another great example is a fake countdown timer, right? They're introducing scarcity, but it's false scarcity. What I mean by that is sign up within the next five minutes and we'll give you something or okay, we've talked about this in other shows, we did a discounting episode, not too long ago. And you were talking about how your wife just leaves products in the cart, abandons the cart, waits 24 hours and knows there's the discount email coming. You know that that clock is no good. Okay. Reminds me of the old TV commercials call within the next five minutes and you get this free bonus. They have no idea when that commercial is going to run, down to the minute, they don't know. And if you think about it, especially when you see these on news stations, right? News stations have somewhat of a cadence for ad timing, but it's never down to the second, to down to the minute. So there's no way you could start a clock and say in five minutes, right? I guarantee you, if you called them in a week, they'd give you that same price. And it's the exact same thing happening here where there's a whole bunch of these dark patterns that are playing on people's psychology or making it really complicated for them to actually take an action they want to do in order to benefit the brand. Ryan: So what we're not talking about though, is actually having your inventory show on the siting. I actually only have three of these left because Amazon, I see doing that. And based on some of my experience in Amazon, on my brands, I feel the trust that at this point they might change, but that's not what I'm talking about as far as scarcity. Jon: No. Ryan: Okay. It's the manipulation of faking scarcity or faking a countdown timer. Jon: Yes, exactly. Now, if you're just always going to say that there's only three of these left, in order to have scarcity when none exists, then that's a dark pattern. But if you're actually trying to help the consumer, get the product they want and know that, Hey, if you don't buy it, now you're going to have to wait for the next batch to come in. And that could be six weeks or whatever. Right. Then I would put that under the white hat, right. You're really trying to help people and you're giving them more information to make a decision. And that's why this is such an interesting topic. How do you prove what's dark and what's not? Right. If you look at a brand, you mentioned, well, I've had experiences with Amazon. I trust that based on my experiences there. But if you just saw that on some random new e-Comm site that you've never been to before, how do you trust that for sure. How do you know for sure that, that's the reality? Ryan: I personally would have trouble with that. Just knowing as much as I do about e-Comm. Jon: Yeah. You've been burned before, right. There was a great Twitter thread, a few weeks back. It was what is one thing about industry that you work in that the general public doesn't know? And this falls under for e-Commerce that I saw somebody posted, well, I run an e-Commerce brand. And we tell people our products are selling out, when they're not. I was like, okay, well, there you go. That's a dark pattern, right? Ryan: Yeah. Happens often. Ryan: Obviously we don't like them. And I would believe they're hurting brands to a degree, but I bet you probably have some data about how does some of these products that you've seen actually do opposite of what this business owner probably intended for it to do, this countdown timer or, Hey, everybody's buying this all over the world. You need to buy now. Jon: Right. Ryan: Do you see it actually hurting the conversion rate? Jon: Well, I will tell you this, first of all, does it work for the initial conversion? Sometimes, perhaps, right? It might, probably not as well as people think, because if you have to get to that level to get people to buy, you probably have other systemic issues that you need to solve. A product issue, a pricing issue, a brand trust issue, right? There's a lot of other things that you should work on solving instead of trying to take the shortcut. So let's say you get that original purchase, right. Then the person comes back to buy again and they notice that, okay, well now I've got another countdown timer, or maybe it happens where like your wife, you wait that timer out every time. And you know, it's not happy now you trust that brand a little less, right? So I would say that on the first purchase, it might work, but for the longer term customer lifetime value growth, and maybe a brand perception angle, no, it's not going to work. I argue that it's going to hurt you more in the longterm. Ryan: Yeah, I guess an argument could be made based on that. But if you only get one sale ever you're selling mattresses, you don't care if they ever come back. Jon: Boom. That's a great example, right? A mattress store, you go to any mattress store. They're always having the best sale ever, always. And you walk into a mattress store, I guarantee you, you're not going to pay the price that's listed there. You can talk them down because they're going to give you a price that is just a random price. And you're going to be able to go in and just say, okay, well, last week it was this other price or, Hey, well, what if I give you a $100 less? And they're probably be like, okay. Yeah, that's true. If the goal is to get that first sale and that's it at all costs, and you're never going to sell to them again. And you just don't care about your brand over the longer term of, with that customer or even your reputation perhaps. Then I would argue sure. Have at it. Still, not ethical or moral in my point of view. But if you don't want to grow a sustainable brand and revenue, then have at it. Ryan: Yeah. And I would argue though, that even if that is unethical, not great, your business won't be around anyway, because people are going to see through it more and more, I think. And then the marketing costs of getting traffic to your site, necessitates at this point, a lifetime value on a customer. Jon: Right. Ryan: If you're not playing the lifetime value game in e-Commerce, I don't think you're going to be hearing from me and Jon in a couple of years. Because you won't be in commerce at the end of the day. You've got to have that. No matter if you're a retailer or if you're a brand that's selling through retailers and on your own site, you have to have a plan for selling to that customer multiple times in the future. Jon: Right, right. Ryan: Building trust, obviously we focus on that on both of our ends of marketing constantly and dark patterns can interrupt that even if it's short-term creates commercial rate increase, but are there some areas in this that you say are valuable on both of those counts? Like increases conversion rates and while some people might think this is maybe in that space, it actually does good as far as building the lifetime value as well. Jon: Well, I would say that if your intent is to put up a barrier for the consumer, that there's no positive, they can come of that in my point of view, right? People are at your site because they're there to complete a task, right. They think that your product or service can help them complete that task. And now if you are trying to actively prevent them from completing the task, they want to complete only because you want them to complete the tasks you want them to do. There's no positive that's going to come out of that. Right. For instance, you're in a checkout and the default check is yes, subscribe email list, right. How many times do people just leave that checked, right. Or you use confusing language check here to not receive our emails lists each week. Ryan: I love that example of yours. Like, wait, what do I... Is it checked? Jon: Exactly. Yeah. All of that stuff is where I end up getting really, really frustrated. And when I see that stuff often, quite honestly, I choose not to work with that brand. I just say we're not a good fit because our mission to remove all of these bad online experiences is not going to be further long by working with them because they don't really want to help the consumer. Right. Maybe it's a mistake if there's one of them or maybe they got some bad advice at some point, if it's just one thing that's happening, or they using an app that makes it too easy to do that. Like one of those purchase apps you were talking about that come up out of the corner and telling you that somebody purchased recently, but they didn't. But I would say, at that point there's really not anything I can do to change the ethics of that company. And that's, I think what this really comes down to. And there's too many brands out there that want to help consumers and do the right thing that they don't... We don't need to work with the brands who are only just trying to use psychology to trick people into purchasing. Ryan: Yeah. I think both of us have been as long enough. We know there's a lot of people in our industry that loves selling some snake oil and there are a lot of them giving bad advice and I come across constantly. So that's why my mission's probably not as holistic or maybe pretty as yours. I'll say mine is like, I just want to put all my competitors out of business that are selling snake oil and then sell [crosstalk 00:17:04] behind me. Jon: Exactly. Ryan: Save e-Comm brands from stupid advice. Jon: Hey, that's a good moral lesson in that though. Right? Just making it happen. Right. And I think the reality is, is you guys have won it Logical Position, and you've gotten as big as you have because of the way you treat people and handle these accounts. Right. You would never be serving 6,000 clients if you tried all these tricks because there would be a handful of people out there who would be okay with it. But the vast majority of brands are good. And I wholeheartedly believe that, but unfortunately, what do they say? That one bad Apple spoils the whole bunch. Is that the phrase? Ryan: Yeah. At least it does on my phone. Jon: Yeah. I've been apple picking once when I was a kid maybe, but I can't claim to have much farm experience. Ryan: So, just as in most things in business, as long as you filter through some type of lens that says, is this something I would be comfortable with my mom getting or being presented with like, Hey, if I'm lying that somebody is checking out and there's an app for that. Why on earth would it make sense for me to put it on there? If I know that, Hey, this might convince my mom to buy something she doesn't need and be a good human at the end of the day. If you do that as a business owner with an e-Comm site, you're not going to be putting these things on there to do this. And hopefully we're going to help you put your competitors out of business who are trying to do those things. Jon: Well, I think that's a great lens to put this through the mom test, right. Be thinking about this. If you are doing something that you wouldn't want done to your mom. Then don't do it. Right. And I think that, that's a really good way to look at this. If it would trick your mom into doing something that she really didn't want to do, then just get rid of it. Would you want your mom automatically opting into this privacy statement or would you want your mom to automatically get these emails? And you know she'd be frustrated if she just wants to purchase a product. And all of a sudden was getting marketing emails every day. Or if she got tricked into doing an upsell on a product, because it was default added to the cart, the highest, most expensive shipping option was chosen when there were way cheaper options. There's a lot of things like that that happen all the time. And the problem is, it's really something that would frustrate most people. But I think I see it more than probably the casual online shopper, but I also have [inaudible 00:19:40] and obligation to resolve those problems when I see them as much as possible. Ryan: Yeah. And if you do convert optimization, right, you don't need them. Jon: Right. Ryan: And that's the crazy thing. You don't need gimmicks, if you've got a solid business, good products, and you've worked with Jon, or if you're not quite to Jon's level, you're doing just good things at the end of the day. And I think the example of shipping is a phenomenal one that I didn't even think about until you said it that as a business owner, you're like, Hey, shipping, we make margin on this shipping or not this shipping. And we have free shipping here or not, but you can just check this one because it just makes sense maybe from a business perspective where is, we need more margin here because we're giving it up here. But at the end of the day, if you just do what is right, that you would want done to you, you've got that potential for customer lifetime value. Jon: Right. Ryan: And that's where your profit can come from. Jon: Yeah. I really like your approach of, if you've wouldn't do it to your mom, don't do it on your set. I think that's great. I wholeheartedly believe in that. And I think all of these things would fall under that. Right. Would you really want to do face fake scarcity and make your mom believe there's only one item left when there's not? Ryan: I'll tell you your mom, she's an idiot that she doesn't want to save money. I know my mom wants to save money, believe me. I'm not going to call her an idiot for not- Jon: Exactly. She doesn't want your emails. That's why she's clicking no. But... Ryan: Yep. Jon: Yeah. Well, I think this has been great conversation though. Ryan: Yeah. Me too. So is there anything anybody needs to know that we haven't touched on when it comes to dark patterns or things you can or might do to your site even by accident that you just want to be aware of? Jon: Yeah. I would think the first thing you should do when you add any app from the Shopify app store or any of those is give it a good look. Don't just use it because you see a competitor using it. Don't just assume they have positive intent here, go install it and then really dig in. Do some user testing on it, get understanding from consumers. Is it really being helpful for them or is it causing a another barrier in their road to conversion? And if it is ask yourself, am I putting up that barrier because it's better for me, or am I putting up that barrier unnecessarily? And it's actually making it hard for them to complete the purchase, which is what you ultimately want. And I have yet to hear an example that fits into both of those. Again, it's either black or white, it's either white hat or black hat, and there's really nothing in between that I can find. And if somebody listening to this has a great example of that. Please let me know. I would love to have some good examples of that. Ryan: Put it on LinkedIn, share it with Jon, so we can all see. Jon: Yeah. Tag Ryan and I. Ryan: Well, thanks Jon. I appreciate you giving me an education and anybody else's listening for that because it's very helpful. Jon: Awesome. Thanks Ryan. Appreciate the conversation. Ryan: Thank you.

It seems most brands are using email popups on their website. Today Jon dismantles this practice with passion, explaining why they're bad for everyone, and offering better alternatives. TRANSCRIPT: Ryan: Jon, we've spoke together quite a few times around the country, and then recently just around the internet, since we can't leave our houses. And almost every time we talk, you ruffle quite a few feathers when you're answering questions about email pop-ups. It seems that most retailers and brands out there on their websites, they are absolutely in love with their email pop-up campaign, they think it can do no wrong. And I personally don't like them because they're just annoying and I close them immediately because I'm trying to look at something else. And, but you're distaste, some may say hate, goes a little bit deeper within this space, but so many, again, so many brands are using these. It's just making me crazy. So, I want to talk about these and get your opinion, the backend and the numbers that are guiding your distaste for these. But even to start with, what do you think is pushing this trend and what data are these merchants seeing that's causing these email pop-ups for discounts or anything just to become the norm? If you don't have it, you're weird almost at this point. Jon: Brands, what they're doing is they see another successful brand they look up to have email popups and they say, "It must be working for them. We need to do this as well." It goes in line with all the little Shopify apps that are out there that just spread like wildfire overnight, and then they'd disappear just as quickly once everybody realizes they don't actually move the needle, but they saw their competitor trying it out, so they thought they showed as well. Tons of examples of that. I think that's generally what happens here, first of all. Second of all, the brands see that email is their highest revenue channel, most likely. And so, they say every time I send an email, it's like printing money. So I should collect more emails. And that sometimes even comes down from the executive level, down to that marketing manager who is needing to implement that, whether they think it's right or not. And third, I think what happens is that brands look at a success metric of how many people do we have on our email list. And they see these pop-ups collect email addresses. And so, they assume they are working. And I guess the goal that they usually have is just to collect email addresses at all costs, right? And they're thinking, "If I get someone on my email list, I can then continue to market to them and the rest will fall into line." And that just is a huge problem. It's, to me, it's the wrong way to be thinking about it. And after optimizing sites for 11 years, statistically, it's not accurate. Ryan: Being an e-commerce brand myself, I know that if my email list goes from 10,000 to 20,000, I'm probably making more money from email. So, where are brands missing the logic behind these pop-ups and not equating to larger email database equals more revenue from emails every time I send one? Jon: Yeah. I think, I don't have an issue with collecting email addresses. As I said, it should be, and looking at 10 decades of content and data around emails, it definitely can be your highest revenue channel. The problem I have with is the method of collecting, right? So, let's just start with that. I mean, we could, there's lots of directions, we'll, I'm sure we'll go today about the method of doing it around discounts and everything else, but let's just talk about the pop-up form in itself. And what I mean by that is just there are multiple ways to collect email addresses. You can start with those who have ordered and how you have the actual customer contact information that you own, right? If you doing an owned to sale, as opposed to something like an Amazon, then you have that information, people you can remarket to and continue to sell to. However, if you just put a pop-up on your site versus maybe even baking a form into the page, right? Where customers who are actually interested, will scroll down to your footer and they'll enter their information because they're super interested. Right? I would almost encourage anyone listening to this to set a separate form up in your footer and tag people who fill that form out as higher intent, because they actually are interested in what you had to say. Now, the problem with a pop-up, let's just talk about straight up pop up, not an exit intent, right? Ryan: So, you're categorizing your email pops up into different buckets? Jon: Yes. Yes. There's different types. And I think that's important here because the one that I want to eliminate from the internet is just the pop-up. As soon as I come to a site, or maybe as soon as I start scrolling or even the timed ones that come up within a couple of seconds of loading the page, those are the ones I want to eliminate. Now, exit intent. Let's put that in a different category. I'm not as opposed to those. But what I'm talking about here is the disruption to the consumer experience, the interruption factor as well. Think of your site like a retail store. Now I know your wife has a retail store, right? If I walk into her store and she jumped out at me and said, "Here's a clipboard, give me your email address." I'm going to probably have a negative reaction to that. Right? Ryan: At least she's cute. That does help. Jon: Well, Hey. Ryan: Popups, aren't as cute. Jon: Hey, you know what I mean? You could make, you could put a nice looking picture on a pop-up, but that still doesn't change the fact that I'm there because I have a problem that I'm looking to solve. And I'm at the website because I think that their product or service can solve my pain or need. And all of a sudden now, before I know anything about the brand, something led me there, was it I clicked on an ad or a Google search or someone told me about it, so I have idea that they can help me solve my pain or need. But then all of a sudden I just get there, I still don't know about the value proposition of the brand, I don't know much about their products yet, but then I'm getting hit up right away being asked to give them information. And I think that that's just disruptive and I can promise you every test we've run where we've eliminated that pop-up conversion rates have gone up on the site and sales and revenue. Now yes, you will collect less email addresses. But I argue that's not a bad thing in this case, with this type of pop-up. And the reason is a couple of faults. So, first of all, the email addresses you're going to collect out of those pop-ups are going to be very, I would argue they're not going to be very effective, right? Because you're getting a consumer who is entering their email address into that pop-up specifically to get rid of the pop-up in a lot of cases, because they... This goes into more things like negative intent shaming, because maybe in that popup, it's a pretty common trend now for a company to say something like, "No, I don't like discounts and offers." Ryan: Gosh, I hate that. I had that happen a couple of days ago. And I was like, "Of course I like discounts. I'm not an idiot, but I just don't like you telling me that I don't like discounts." Jon: Right. You're you're hurting the brand, right? And you're hurting your customer experience and that's damaged that you now have to repair. So, within the first five seconds of getting into the website, you're already have dug yourself a hole you have to get out. Ryan: Yeah. And I think brands are getting kind of like, "Ooh, we're kind of that little unique, give it to the man brand. And we're going to use that humor." [crosstalk 00:07:34] That doesn't necessarily come through because I actually don't know you yet. And maybe that's my first... I don't know that that's the type of brand you are. I was looking for a pair of board shorts. And now all of a sudden you're telling me I'm an idiot before I even know that you're, that's the voice of your brand. Jon: Exactly. Okay. This is another great example of real world for this, right? Popups are just like those people who canvas on the street corner, who come up and you're just trying to walk by and get to your next location, right? You're trying to get some job done in your life, going to the coffee shop or whatever it might be, you have a meeting you're walking to. And Greenpeace, not just to pick on Greenpeace, but they're out all over in Portland. They run up to you with a clipboard and they say, "Hi, can we chat for a minute?" And it's like, "No, I'm trying to get something done. This is not a good time for me." And then they follow you, "Well, did you know that this is happening with the environment? And this is happening." And it's like, "Yeah. You know what? That might still be important to me, but now's not a good time." And they're like, "That's fine. Just give me your contact information. We'll follow up with you." And it's like, "No, no, no. I don't know who you are." Right? I don't want to just give some random person my contact information. And then what are you doing with that contact information? So, I think the problem is, is that marketers stop having empathy for what the consumer is going through on the other side of the screen, and they just feel like it's okay because they can't see that person to do these really poor consumer experience activities on their site. And that's what I try to fight against with this. And unfortunately pop-ups is the worst example of this on the internet. And so, that's why I ended up fighting against it. Ryan: Oh yeah. And it's people like me that are probably helping give them bad numbers since my computer saves the email address na@na.com for all of my form fills that I don't want them to email me on and I'm like, "Yeah. Yeah, here you go. Have that." Jon: Well, that's exactly it. So, now let's talk about the data that a marketer's going to get back out of this pop-up, right. So, a new site pop-up, you just came to this, a new visitor pop-up I should say. I get a form. Sometimes it just says, "Give me your info and you can stay up to date on the latest product releases, et cetera." So maybe they're not really dangling a carrot there. Right? I can't figure out how to close it. Maybe there's no close button and it takes over the entire screen and it's really annoying. So what happens? You put in an email address that like na@na.com, right? So now the brand has pretty muddy CRM, right? Their customer data, their marketing data is pretty horrible. Now what's going to happen there is, they're going to start using all that data. Some will clean it, but I guarantee you most don't based on our experience and what happens is they're going to use those email addresses that are uncleaned. They're going to start sending them through their email platform. And then they're going to get a ton of bounces, a ton of spam complaints for those who might be okay, it might be good, or they're going to get a bunch of generic Gmails that never get opened. And I promise you one thing that's happening with your emails and large providers like Gmail, MSN, et cetera, is they're tracking when you send an email out to a thousand people, Gmail knows that at that same email is going out to a thousand people on their platform, and they're looking to see how many people are opening and clicking on that. And they're tracking that data to make sure that spam doesn't get through. And if nobody's opening it, nobody's clicking it, it's more likely to end up in that dreaded promotions folder or just directly into spam. [crosstalk 00:11:07]. And that's not even without people who are actually seeing that email and marking it as spam, which is only going to hurt your deliverability. So, over time what's happening is the quality of your email list is going way down only because of how you collected that as emails and the methodology you went through. And so, what happens then is you've turned what should be your highest revenue generating channel into something that is no longer producing at the level it used to, even though you have more email addresses on it. Ryan: Got it. Okay. That makes a lot of sense there. And you can kind of send yourself in a downward spiral. But I can also see the logic behind getting to that point. If logic states that me as a brand or a website, I'm willing to break even on my first order from Google ads when I'm buying traffic to my site, and then if I don't have an email up and I put it on, I'm like, "Oh, 10% discount. That's only going to increase people's conversion rates because I'm giving 10% off. But then these are people that maybe weren't going to buy, but now are because people that were going to buy, maybe they would anyway without the discount." So, I understand that logic to a degree, but how do you see that logic break down when somebody actually starts going through with that execution? Jon: Well, so now we're combining two negatives. We're taking an email pop-up that's disruptive and we're making it a discount. Now what's happening is same thing. As you said earlier, I just got to the brand, I don't know anything about the brand or their value proposition, et cetera, but now you want my contact information, and also you're already giving me a discount. Now, why are you offering a discount to somebody who just got to your site? They haven't exhibited any signs of intent to buy just yet, other than showing up at your door and you're giving up precious margin and you're creating a discount brand right away. Where it's the first thing I know about this brand is, they're going to give me a 10% off for giving me an email address. It's like, "Well, okay." And what's going to happen here is a couple of things. One is, you're creating a discount customer who sees your brand as a discount brand forever, just because that's the first impression they have. And the problem with this is you've done it just to collect an email address. Well guess what? What's going to happen now is that person's going to put in their junk email address again, the one they use just for discounts and pop-ups, right? Ryan: Everybody's got one of those. Jon: Exactly. We all use Gmail for that, probably. Right. So, then what happens from there? Well, perhaps they might open the email, maybe not, more likely not. They just wanted that discount code. And the worst offenders in these popups are the ones that, where they collect the email address without any verification, they don't email you the discount code. They just show it in the box in the pop-up. So, they just give it to you right away. Well, then that's even worse because you're putting in whatever email address you want and you're still going to get the discount. The other thing here is that, now every time I come back to buy, I'm going to want that discount. And I know I don't need to pay retail. I know that you're going to offer 10%. So, what am I going to do? I'm going to open your website in incognito, and I'm going to give you another fake email address just to get another discount code or another junk email address, or I'm going to do that Gmail trick, where you can put a plus sign and then anything you want after the plus sign. So, it's like Jon+, whatever I want @gmail.com and it ignores anything with the plus sign and after that. Ryan: That I did not know. Jon: So, you can create [crosstalk 00:14:31] a million email addresses just out of your one Gmail address. And most email platforms allow you to use a plus sign because it's a valid email character. And so, it's really interesting when we start working with brands, one of the first things we do when they put up a fight about removing their pop-ups, or at least running a test around it, is we go into their email database and check for the plus sign and see how many emails have a plus sign in it. And most of it it's like, plus spam is what people put, right? Or they'll even get more tricky. People who are really, want to know if you're selling their email address, or if you're giving it away or if you're abusing them and they do plus in the brand name. And then it's like if you sell that email address or share with a partner, do anything else, they now know where that came from, and they're even more upset with you when that happens. So, I think it's really important here that people, brands really need to think about not discounting because you're basically taking what is a bad consumer experience and you're making that a bad experience for your brand too. And you're just doing that to collect an email address. And now you've created a discount customer right up front, who's forever going to look at your brand as a discount brand. And that's a really hard hole to dig out of in the future. Ryan: Well, and I think a lot of brands don't give consumers enough credit, and I think people pick it up pretty quick, where they know the strategies to try to get discounts. Especially people like me that just because I can, I'm not going to give up 10% of my money to a brand just because I like them. If I can keep 10% in my pocket, I will, even if I can afford the full price, which generally is the case, if I'm shopping for it. And so, my wife knows that I'm the cheap one in the relationship. And if she's going to go buy something, she knows that if she can tell me she bought something, but got a discount, and I'm like, I'm much less likely to put up a fight about that. And so she knows the strategy. It's like, "Okay, all I need to do on my computer is start to move my cursor towards the navigation bar and boom, exit intent pop up." Or she even tells me now, she'll just, if she's interested in something, but it's not a need, it's a more of a want, she'll go put things in shopping carts, and then just wait a few days. She's like, "I don't need it right now. They're not going to run out of inventory. I'm going to go set up a shopping cart, I don't care. See if they sent me a discount." [crosstalk 00:17:29]. Almost all of them do. I mean, just people figure it out. It's not complicated. Marketers, I think sometimes think too much of themselves like, "Oh, we're going to do this. And we're going to trick all these people into spending so much money with us." And I'm like, "Nah." Jon: Well, I think that's exactly where having empathy for the consumer really comes in, right? And just saying, "If you, if this is happening to you, what's the experience you want to have?" And I think this goes back to a whole nother episode we can record on discounting and why that's a challenge. I mean, we just did, you and I just did a webinar yesterday and a big portion of that was about discounting with one of our partners. And I thought it was really interesting because so many brands are discounting. And when you think about this, you could be doing so many things that are and offer and not a straight percentage or dollar off discount. And I'm okay with doing an offer in an email. And there's a lot of other ways to collect email addresses that tie in with offers, right? I mean, you could do "Coming soon, get on the list to be first notified," and that's providing value for an email address that they wouldn't get unless they gave you the email address. But it's also valuable to them. You could do, something where it's like, "Hey, if you sign up for our email list in checkout, you get free shipping." Right? So, you're giving some value. It's not a straight dollar or percentage off discount. You're doing an offer and there's scarcity. You could say, "Hey, these products sell out. It's sold out right now. If you sign up for this list, you'll be notified." And we have a brand we work with, a really high end camping brand, that a lot of their products, they sell out before they've even landed in the United States for manufacturing, where they just have a running list on their product detail pages that say, "Hey, this product is sold out. We have a new product coming in soon, get on the list, we'll notify you. And it will be presale before it goes up on the site." Now there's a lot of value to a consumer who wants a product and is interested in that and giving their email address for that purpose. And it's a much better way to collect an email address over offering a discount. So, now they're selling these products before they've even hit the site. They're selling them at 100% margin or, well, not 100% margin, but without draining their margin by discount, right? Ryan: Or marketing. Jon: Or marketing costs. [crosstalk 00:19:54]. Yeah. What? Fractions of a penny to send that email. So, I think it's really interesting that brands immediately go to this discount right upfront and present that discount through such a disruptive manner that they have to use an email pop-up. Ryan: I think it's just, I mean, it's the easy button that they're thinking about. They're not taking that next step and actually having conversations with people, strategizing what could my options be? Because even me, having you as a friend and a business partner and various things, I come to you and I'm like, "Okay, Jon, I know you don't like discounts, but I know that there's value in somehow doing something like that, that maybe is not a discount, that keeps me from being a discount brand." And you've got phenomenal ideas for ... Now, we should probably do one, a thing on that. But you don't have to give a discount to give a discount type thing, which is a difficult thing. You have to really think through it. Jon: Right. Yeah. And you got to be creative with the offer, right? And sometimes people, like you said, it's the easy button. There's so many Shopify apps, for instance, that do these pop-ups and do discounts. Then there's apps that are really cheap to free that will do customized discount posts for email address exchange, stuff like that. It blows my mind because they see other brands using them and they think it must work for them, so we're going to do it too. Or they just, they think discounting is the only way. And I really argued that as soon as you get into discounting, it is impossible. It's like a drug, a really bad drug. It's really hard to get off of that. You got to wean yourself off of it because now everybody is expecting and they're not going to pay retail price. I mean, we talk about how your wife sends you to Michael's to pick up stuff on the way home. And you know that she's going to have a 50% off coupon, no matter what. And if she didn't, for whatever reason, she couldn't find one right then, or whatever, you just ask the person at the register when you're checking out, like, "Hey, what's that? What's the coupon that went out in the mail last week? Do you have it?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, it's right here. Here you go." And they just scan it [crosstalk 00:21:55]. Ryan: Yeah. That actually happened a couple weeks ago. [crosstalk 00:00:21:58]. I was, I got in line, she was like, "I couldn't find my code. Can you just pull one up on your phone and do a search?" I'm like, "Okay, yeah. I'll figure it out." Jon: Exactly. So, they're a discount brand and you go to them because they're a discount brand. There's nothing wrong with that if that's how they want to do it. But I would argue that, they're never getting out of that, right? They're just going to have to slash all their prices if they want to stop doing discounts. Then what promo or offer can you run because you've got razor thin margins at that point? Ryan: Yep. No. And I think one of the points you hit on too, is part of that other bucket of email popups, which you don't hate, those exit intent things. And this one works phenomenally well, for me at least, with one of the clients you've worked with in the past is Nike. One of the shoe companies you're based in Oregon. And I have an affinity for Jordan 4's. I'm not a sneaker head, but that's the one shoe that I grew up always wanting and I couldn't get them because didn't have enough money for them when I was a kid. But now I can. And so, I do keep up on the releases. And so, in this case, I gave Nike all my information to avoid the FOMO, the fear of missing out scenario. And I went to Nike site today just to see what they were doing, saying, "Okay, Jon worked with them. Did they get the message when he was working with them?" And they use only exit intent, no discount. Do you ever advocate for discount at... Well, I already know the answer. But exit intent, how should brands be looking at that? Is there anything besides FOMO or anything to do besides offering a discount that you've seen be successful? Jon: Well, I think that there's a lot of options that you can do in these pop-ups. But specifically in exit intent, this is where it's one of those things that you should really be looking at segmenting your audience and tailoring the message with those pop-ups. So, for you, let's think about the journey you just mentioned you went through. You were, you love Jordan 4's and you were looking at those on the site and they popped up with an exit intent and you were like, "Yeah, sure. I'll do that because I want to be the first to know when new ones are released." There's value there for you in that, right? And they knew, this is a collector shoe, if you will. And most of the people, you claim you're not a sneaker-head, but let's be honest, you probably are if you're into Jordan 4's, right? Ryan: Probably. Jon: And so, the reality here is they know that. That people who are looking at this shoe aren't discount motivated because for them it's all about having the Jordan 4, that they don't need the discount. They could sell those out, no problem without ever discounting them. And in fact, you and I living in Portland, Oregon, we're blessed that we get to go to the Nike employee store occasionally. And whether we're working with them or, somebody who does work with them is able to share a pass with us occasionally. And I can tell you that they have some Jordan's there, but it's not their top sellers. I say that because at the employee store, there's a large discount when you shop there because you get employee pricing, but they don't have their top sellers, usually, in the collectible ones, like Jordan's et cetera there, because they don't need to discount them. If you want them, you're going to just go up on the site and buy it at retail. So, I think that too many brands skip right away to the discount when there's other value adds you could provide. And that's where, again, you got to do a little bit of thinking on that. It can't just be the easy button. Ryan: Okay. So, pop-ups, avoid coming to the site pop-ups. Exit intent could be worth it, but you make sure you're adding some value to that, that customer that causes them to want to give you a real email address and not necessarily just throw a discount out. So, all companies want more emails. Do you have any strategies that you've seen be successful in your experience over the past decade in the e-comm world for brands to get more emails? Jon: Sure. I think there are some great ways to do, I mentioned earlier, some segmenting. So, let's say you run somebody in to your site from a Google ad that has a specific message, your value prop in it, aligning that with the message that you share for an email signup, right? So, maybe they're searching for a specific item and they get to your site and it's out of stock, well, there you go, now you should do not a stock email collection. I think that the biggest mistakes I see around email forms are that they're missing some key information. The first is you really need to set expectations on this email form. What does that mean? Well, you need to tell people what they're signing up for and how often they're going to hear from you. Pretty simple. But most brands say stuff like, "Sign up for updates." It's like, "Why do I care about updates from your brand?" Right? "I don't need more updates." Nobody needs updates. But if you me, I'll be the first to know when Jordan 4's are released, I'm in, right? That's what I'm here for. That's what I want to know. So, it's all about saying, "Okay. Well, how often are you going to hear from me?" Well, maybe it's, "I'll email you once a month." Okay. I'm okay with that. If you say, "I'm going to email you every week," I have to think twice about it, but if I really am into your brand, maybe I'm okay with that. Or maybe it's where we have special product bundles that are only for email subscribers, "Sign up and you can learn about our bundles, exclusives." Right? Things of that sort, that aren't straight up discounts. Ryan: Almost like a merging some of this email acquisition with your loyalty program. Jon: 100%. That is a great way to build email is through loyalty. It's through having, whether you want to do something as complicated as a point system, or just as simple as saying, if you're on an email address, you will get access to things that people who aren't on the email address. Ryan: And people are willing to give you more information, generally, when you're providing value outside of discount. For example, Nike, I give them my birthday. No other company gets my birthday. [crosstalk 00:27:51]. But they're telling me I'm going to get a special reward on my birthday. And I'm like, "Cool." I like Nike. They do have some trust. They built a brand that says, "I can trust them with my data already," just because I have an affinity for them and I've been wearing Nike's for, geez, 30 years. So, there is some of that that maybe not every brand is going to be able to get to, but you can probably do some pretty solid segmentation in your customer database if you had everybody's birthday. Like, Hey, this person's 20, this person's 40, they probably need different messaging. They probably have different interests, different disposable income level. Jon: Yeah. Yeah. The 20 year old is aspiring to get the Jordan's. The Ryan Garrow age folks are really out there to [crosstalk 00:28:35]. Ryan: 22. 22. Jon: Okay. Okay. If you say so. And so I think it's, now you can afford the $300 pair of Jordan's and you're excited to buy them because you've earned that right over all these years of hard work, right? And so, or those two years of hard work, if you will. But I think it's one of those things where most brands aren't even segmenting. They're just doing that really clear scatter shot, hoping to collect email addresses, just to build their list. And I just, again, that's the wrong philosophy, whole-heartedly, full stop. Popups are not the way to do that. And I just, it pains me when I see brands do that. Part of me is because our mission at The Good is, I say all the time is just to remove all the bad online experiences until only the good ones remain. And email popups are such a bad online experience. I'm on a crusade to eliminate those. And part of that is to help brands understand what damage they're doing with these initial email pop-ups. And it's true, I don't hate them just because they get in my way as a consumer, I hate them because of what they do to the brand over time. And the experience that you're putting consumers through is really negatively affecting the brand and the brand perception. And then most brands are applying a discount on top of that, so they're kind of adding fuel to that fire of just negativity and it's really just going to hurt them. Ryan: And the one thing I'll leave with would be the best emails you can get are from people that have purchased from you. So, if you just got more aggressive on getting more customers through marketing or driving people to the site, those people in your email database are going to be infinitely more valuable than anybody that just wants a coupon code or signs up just to have you go away or an email pop-up. So, I would challenge a lot of brands just to say, if you're comfortable giving an additional 10% discount, so you're taking 10% off your top line for somebody, why don't you just get 10% more aggressive on your marketing and get that customer to actually buy something and get more of them and increase your market share because that's the type of emails in my database that I'm going to be in love with. Jon: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned right up off the top that you're happy to spend your initial margin on that first purchase to acquire the customer through Google ads or whatever advertising you would do to get them to the site, so that you can continue to market to them and go after that customer lifetime value. And that's the right way to approach this because that's sustainable. Where if you're just going to give a discount and someone's only going to purchase once, because they can't get that discount again, or maybe they just see you as a discount brand, then you're going to have a bigger issue. So, I'm all for paying to get people to purchase, but I'm not, I don't think you should do that through a discount upfront. Ryan: Yeah. Don't go the lazy way. If your marketing team or your agency is telling you, "Use discounts or we can't do our job." It's time to maybe look outside that. Jon: Yeah. Find a new marketing agency. People come to us all the time and they say, "Well, we've been doing optimization on our site." And I say, "Okay, great. Let's talk about what you've been doing." "Well, we put a pop-up on, we offer discounts and our conversion rates went up." I was like, "Well, yeah. You know what? Every house will sell at some price. Ask any realtor. And they'll just say, 'Well, we'll just keep reducing the price until it sells.'" And it's like, well, eventually you're going to sell it for less than you bought it for. And that's exactly what's going to happen with your brand too. Ryan: Oh, and didn't you, you have some stat around, you give a small discount, your conversion rate has to go up just some astronomical percent. What was that number? Jon: Yeah. Mackenzie did a bunch of research on this. They surveyed and did a bunch of research on the, it was like the top 1000 e-comm sites. And what they found was that for every 5% that you run a discount on, you have to acquire, it was like 19% in additional sales just to break even on that discount. Ryan: And most people are not only giving 5%. Jon: Right. It's way more than that [crosstalk 00:32:36]. Ryan: It's usually 10, 15, 20%. Jon: And so, you really have to think about this. Now for 5% discount, is that 5% discount going to get me greater than a 19% additional sales? Likely, that's not the case. And, in fact, the article that I read on that said, and I'll have to quote it, but it said "This rarely to never has ever happened." And I was like, "Okay. So, they said rarely, never, and ever in the same sentence." Ryan: Yeah. Having done this a decade, I can almost guarantee you that that has not happened. I mean, because you would just double that maybe for 10%, you have to get 38% increase in revenue for a 10% discount. There's no way. Jon: If, I mean, if that's how the math works out on that, then yeah, you're screwed if you start discounting at that rate in reality. Because yes, you've collected email addresses and markers will come back to me and say, "Jon, yeah, sure. That's if I only do it on that first sale, but now I'm going to have those customer in my database for a lifetime." And I'm like, "Yeah, but what are you going to have to do to get them continue to buy? You're going to have to give another 5% off and another 5% and another 5%. where do you get out of digging that hole? Right? How do you fill that hole so that you're getting your margin back and your customer lifetime value and your average order value keeps going up? How do you make that happen?" You're better off it doing an offer. And, yep, it may equate to 5% off, but in the mind of the consumer, you're giving them an offer, not a straight dollar or percentage off. And then you come back the next order and you're not having to fight on a discount, you can give them some other offer, perhaps if that's needed. So yeah, we should definitely do a whole show, Ryan, on discounting. I think that could be another way to share one of Jon's things he hates on the internet. Ryan: Yes. I think we for sure should do that. Man, there's so many, so many good things in this. Jon, thanks for the time. I appreciate it. And I come away learning lots of things, including just adding a plus sign to my emails now. [crosstalk 00:34:30]. I can track where I'm being sold. Jon: There you go. Well, I appreciate you bringing the topic up and helping me share one of my missions. So, thanks for doing that. Ryan: Thank you

Today Jon takes a look at how to improve your category pages on your website. He'll explore what you should know about headers, footers, navigation, bread crumbs, and more! For help optimizing your category pages: https://thegood.com/ TRANSCRIPT: Ryan: Hello Jon, and welcome to the podcast. Ryan: I was digging through one of our shared clients analytics, and this is a rather large international brand that most of our listeners would probably recognize if we mentioned their name. And outside the home page, the largest volume of traffic to their site is condensed into just a couple category pages. Now that's not unusual for a lot of major brands because of Google's algorithm, on the organic side, favoring category pages over product pages. But it also means that there's a huge opportunity for a brand capturing a lot of this traffic to really make that traffic work better on category pages specifically. Ryan: So through this, I'd really love to hear some of your suggestions and best practices on improving those category pages. And maybe even at least some tests people can be testing as they're looking at their category pages to make some improvements. Kind of like our CRI name we coined. What do you think of that category pages and the importance of them? And should we continue down this path? Jon: I love it. Let's gain some knowledge on this. Ryan: Fantastic. So most of the listeners probably haven't had the amazing opportunity I have of hearing you talk about landing pages as much, and just seeing some of your tear downs. And so as with most of these, let's start at the top and kind of work our way down, and even some of your general best practices, probably, in header navigation can be applied to other places of the site. Especially if you keep it consistent. But do we need to think about mobile and desktop separately in this scenario? Or just pick one and go with it? What's your usual recommendation? Jon: I would recommend that we start with desktop and keep it to that for today. The reason being is that even with e-com, I think we're seeing the vast majority of traffic is now on mobile, but still a very, very large majority of conversions are happening on desktop. Now that varies from site to site, of course, but I do believe in what we see here at the good on a daily basis is conversion kings is still on desktop. And so it always makes sense to start there. The other reason is that if you fix your desktop experience and you have a responsive site, that should, for the most part, filter down to your mobile website. And so there's no longer just a desktop and a mobile version of a site. It should be responsive or adaptive for the most part. And so with that in mind, I would highly recommend starting with desktop. And then of course you could look at mobile later, but I think for the point of today's show, we could just stick with desktop. Ryan: Yeah. And if you do maybe have a mobile site and a desktop site, you may need to contact us because we may have some abilities to fix that [inaudible 00:03:12], because that's probably a struggle for your business. There's maybe some lower hanging fruit for you, before you get into Jon's conversation about it. Jon: The number of sites I still see, it's dwindling. But there is still a number of sites out there that they have mobile on a separate domain. And that's always... It's like M dot, the domain dot com. That's when I know there's a bunch of opportunity there to increase sales and conversions. Ryan: God, John knows he's going to make that company a lot of money when they listen to them. Ryan: Okay. So let's start right at the header, very top as you're scrolling down this page as soon as you come onto it, a lot of companies do things that are not great in the header. What are some of the things that they're putting in there maybe that aren't needed or that distract from the actual conversion that they're attempting to get these people to take on the site? Jon: Well, I think the first thing is that it always blows my mind when I see a header, and these brands invested so much to get people to their site, right? Whether it be content marketing or paid ads or SEO, whatever it is. And then they immediately show them social icons, and show them ways to bounce off the site. Right? Social is great for getting people to your site, but once they're there, keep them on your site. Don't send them back out to those channels. And so really be looking in the header to keep people on a site, as opposed to sending them back off through something like social links or icons, things of that sort. That's the biggest one I see. Ryan: Okay. So as far as distractions, social is the biggest issue there. What are the things that maybe companies are missing out on in that header that they should be thinking about putting into them? Jon: Well, I think that the biggest thing people miss out on is just communicating very simply what the brand is, what the value proposition is. Jon: Now, most people don't think about including that in the header. And I'm not suggesting putting your entire company story there, your entire value prop. But what I am saying is you can communicate these things through perhaps your navigation and the language that's being used there through the utility navigation, through what's the lines of texts that goes right next to your logo, right? Jon: So a lot of people will just put a logo up and expect that because they're on your website, they know exactly what you do. Well, think about it through the eyes of a new to file customer. That customer just got to your site by clicking on a link that a friend posted on social. They have a little bit of context, but it would be great to get that reinforced and the first place, especially in Western cultures, folks are going to look is the top left corner of your site. That's generally where people put their logo, but then they miss the opportunity there of including additional context. Could be just one sentence or one line, does not have to be very huge and it can be blended in with the logo, even. Ryan: Dang it. I am taking notes. I think I need to go to some of my brands and add some, maybe, lines of contexts. Jon: Well, if you want a good example just go to thegood.com and look what we do in the top left hand corner right next to our logo. Ryan: No, that's brilliant. And I think as a business owner myself, and working with brands constantly, I'm in the business too often that I don't step out of it often enough and think about the perspective of a brand new user. I clicked on a link, maybe not even necessarily thinking before I clicked, and boom. Logo. I'm supposed to know what you do right before that, but probably I don't. Jon: Well Ryan, this applies to you based on what I'm hearing right now, but it also applies to almost every e-com brand and e-com manager. Is that it's, and I've probably said this a hundred times on this show already, but it's very difficult to read the label from inside the jar. Right? You are so close to this, you probably helped to wire frame out the site, design it, define the navigation, lay out all the content. And so you're so close to that, that you know what each link does, you know what the site is, you know your value prop. So it doesn't occur to you that other people might not get that, might not understand it. And it could use a little assistance there. Ryan: Yeah. And you've helped me a lot on navigation so I'm going to jump into that in a second. But before that, site search is a often misguided location on the site. Do you recommend that as high up as you can, as obviously as you can in the header? Or do you recommend other places on the page for that? Jon: I am not opposed to having search be front and center. Having search front and center is great for people who are second time visitors or repeat visitors to your site. They know exactly what they're looking for. Think about things like a car parts dealership, right? Or car parts retailer. People may come and know exactly what model number for that very specific part that they need. They're definitely going to know what car model that they want to put that on, so they might just search by that car model. So anyway you can give people a shortcut down the funnel, and skip steps of the funnel so that they can just get to exactly what they need as quickly as possible, is better. And I can tell you that search is going to convert twice as much, if not more, than just a regular visitor. So encouraging people to use search can really help boost conversions and sales. Ryan: Wow. That is an impressive stat. So just on average from what you see when somebody uses at least a decent search, because there's different levels of search quality- Jon: Of course. Ryan: ... On a site, but an average search you see approximately 50% increased conversion rate on the traffic that uses search versus doesn't? Jon: Right. And an easy win for listening to this is just look at your top five, maybe 10, search terms that people are using and search those yourself and see what the results are. They're likely lackluster. You can easily fix that, just go through your product detail pages that are relevant and add some additional meta information to those pages to have them pop up in search results. Things like common misspellings or the plural of an item. I can't believe how many times people don't think to add an asset at the end of an item because people may search for it that way. And also just make sure that the search results page... The results themselves matter, but also that search results page that shows those results needs to be optimized as well. A lot of people just forget about it and just show no context at all. They just show the title of the page and link to it. Why not have the description there? You already should be, on your product detail pages, having some meta-description that Google can pick up, why not display that there if it's already part of the page? Ryan: No, that's great. And I think making sure that a search that happens on the site has a listing of products, generally, make sure that you can look at that in an incognito window when you scrape the URL and paste it. That way you can use it, from a traffic generation perspective, you can drive traffic from a paid search ad. But also, if you're having enough people search that on your site, you should probably make that a category page so that Google can start indexing that as well, because you're probably not alone on your site in people searching for that product. Or group of products. Jon: Exactly. Yeah. And an easy way to find out what people are searching for, just go into your Google analytics. Most platforms, I mean they all have a little bit different perhaps, but most eCommerce platforms, the search results page is just something that ends in a question mark S equals. So if you figure out what that URL pattern is, and then you can just run a filter for that question mark S equals or whatever, and then you can understand how many times people are hitting each of those search terms. Jon: So it's pretty simple to figure out with about five minutes of work and I can promise you it will increase your conversions immediately. Ryan: Awesome. Okay, one area you've helped me a lot in sites and understanding how to improve the experience for the users is navigation. And a lot of companies tend to do this wrong. They seem to think that more is better. What do you often suggest to companies when it comes to navigation? Jon: Keep it to five items or less, first of all. Anything over that and people just assume that it's going to be a lot of work and they're not at your website to do work, right? So they just like, "I don't want to weed through all these options," and it becomes more taxing than it needs to be. What I would recommend here is you keep it to five items, but also have the navigation copy, be in the context of your customer, not of yourself. What I mean by that is so many brands try to promote themselves in the navigation. They have things like about us. Nobody's coming to your website to learn about us. Now they may want to learn more about you, but not in the main navigation. They typically will scroll down to the footer and look for that, or that information that's on your about us page should be throughout your site in places that people are actually looking for it in context. Jon: So a lot of people will do things like put home as the first navigation item. Really, we all know, we've been trained over years, that if you clicked the logo in the top left hand corner, it's going to take you to the homepage. So you can eliminate home out of your navigation. That's a real easy one. Also, highly recommend if you're an e-com site and you have only a handful of categories, that you just list the high level categories in your navigation and leave it at that. That will do two things. It clearly tells people what you sell, how you can help them. And in addition to that, it gives them a quick and easy way to get to the place they want to go to. So that again, they're skipping steps that are in that funnel by having to kind of continue to drill down and find it. Jon: So there's a lot that can be done in navigation. It needs to be clear. It needs to be concise. You need to keep it to five items. And you need to try to keep yourself out of the navigation whenever possible. Ryan: Got it. Now on many category pages I will see, in addition to the top navigation, a left hand navigation or kind of a filtering system on the left hand side of the category page. Do you have an opinion on if that is good, bad, helpful, indifferent? Jon: I think it depends on the amount of product that you're trying to sell. So let's talk about that. We were actually, just before we got on the recording here, we were talking about a shoe manufacturing brand that had a left hand navigation that was filtering, that contain, I think, 40 to 50 different check boxes, right? That you could filter by. Right? And the problem with that, I mean, they had every single shoe size as a filtering option. It wasn't a dropdown, it was just a whole bunch of check boxes. So imagine being a consumer and trying to filter, but you have to look through all of these items just to find the ones that are relevant to you. It's really not that helpful. In the end it actually, I would argue, makes it more complicated. Jon: Filtering in that way can be helpful. I think it needs to be a high level filter. What are the main differentiating points? And then once they get down to the product level within that category, then you could start doing some other points, like size, availability, in stock, out of stock, et cetera. So helpful, but it depends. And the thing it depends on is how many products are you selling? If you have a handful of products, then you don't need it. People will scroll and look at your six or eight categories. If you have 50 categories, so many that you really just can't list them all on a page. Then of course you need some filtering for categories. Ryan: Got it. Okay. Makes sense. I've seen some that are great on that left hand side and the other ones that I get lost and I just leave. Ryan: So on each category page, generally speaking, best practices are to have a piece of content for the search engines, usually three or four sentences talking about that category. It's great for SEO. A lot of platforms default to having a place for that content at the very top. Have you seen that impact conversion rates being at the top, the bottom, the side, or is it kind of like it hasn't mattered too much to what you've seen? Jon: Well, I think that ideally I would put it below. If you need it for SEO purposes, that is. Right? Because most of the time that SEO type of content is not going to be helpful to the consumer. You're trying to write for Google, you're not writing for a consumer. So in that sense, I would get it out of the consumer's way. But I do think that some content above the products on a category page could be helpful in letting people know A, where they are. So any type of wayfinding you can do there, that type of stuff can be really helpful. I do think that if you're running a promotion on one category, that could be a great place to do it. If you have a little bit, or just maybe even some branding stuff where you have an image that relates to that category, showing it in use, something of that sort, can be really, really helpful. Jon: Say you sell tents and you are showing a family and you're on the category page for four people tents, right? And so you show a family camping and are sitting around a campfire with the big tent in the background. Right? Something like that can be helpful. You're setting the context and the tone. Ryan: Now also at the top, a lot of times you're going to see bread crumbs. And I've heard some good things from you about breadcrumbs and some bad things about breadcrumbs. So how do you decide whether or not breadcrumbs are helpful? Or are they always a terrible idea? Jon: I'm not really a fan of breadcrumbs. I think at this point that what has happened, it's a hold over from SEO practices of yesterday. It's not something that I see quite often anymore that is actually helpful for a consumer. And typically you're just giving them information either that they're already aware of, or that they don't really need. And if they want to go back up a level to the homepage, for instance, because you're only on a category so you're probably one level deep, maybe two. At that point they're probably just going to click the logo and go home or look at your main navigation. So overall, likely not that helpful. It's just another piece of content you're asking your visitor to wade through before they get to the content that they really are at your page for. Ryan: Okay, good. And so, just a general question going deeper, do you like them more on product pages that can get you back to a category page? Or is it just kind of across the board breadcrumbs are not a great idea? Jon: I think that it's helpful to have a navigational item that takes people up one level. Now, when you say breadcrumb I think that it starts out with homepage, next page down category page then, then your product detail page, right? So now you're four or five items long. Most people put the entire page title in those. It's not just so and so category. Look, the breadcrumb typically is dynamically built and the way that the platforms do it is that they will use the entire page title. And so they put that into the breadcrumb. Now your breadcrumb ends up being like 300, 400 characters long. It's massive. It's stretched across the entire page. It's distraction. It's not really helpful either at that point. And all of the eye tracking that we've done at the good over all these years, people never look at the breadcrumb. It becomes blindness because they see it and they stop, maybe for a split second, but they're definitely not reading the entire breadcrumb. And that's why I say it becomes a distraction and it gets in the way. Because you're making people stop and think before you're giving them the content you want. Ryan: Got it, okay. So sitting on a category page, you see a list of all the products. More and more often on a lot of these SAS platforms, I'm seeing the ability to add to cart from the category page or even just a kind of a quick view, popup JavaScript. Have you seen some direction on whether either one of those or both of those as good or bad? Jon: I personally am not a fan of those. Unless you have a product that's like a refill or something like that, where you have a limited number of products and you have a product that somebody is coming to the site and is quickly looking for that product and knows they're going to want to buy it without having to see any additional details. Jon: Here's the thing, on category pages people are still looking and browsing and trying to find the product or service that is going to solve their pain or their need. And the challenge here is that you're putting a really high intent to purchase call to action by saying add to cart, likely when they're not at the stage where they're ready add to cart. And if you just give them one image and a title, and maybe it shows the stars and the price, and then says add to cart, I would think most products, that's not enough to get somebody to purchase. So you're blowing an opportunity to send them to a page that you can convince them and show them all the wonderful benefits of your product and how great everyone else says it is in the reviews, and show it in use, and all these other things. So you're shortchanging yourself by just having the small little thing that comes up, gives minimal details and then asks people to add it to the cart. Likely not a good idea. Ryan: Probably [inaudible 00:21:29] in the quick view as well, just from, if nothing else, an analytics perspective. Where it's going to be much more complex to track that process or that funnel like category page, product page, purchase. Whereas if I go quick view, it's got to be an actions in Google analytics, if it's a JavaScript overlay, you don't get to do as much optimization on the JavaScript overlay popup necessarily. Jon: Yeah. Ryan: That's what I would say. Jon: You end up recreating that funnel in Google analytics and it's a lot of extra work. And I just think all of the negatives outweigh any of the positives. Then people say, "Well, I added this to make it easy for people to add to cart." Well, if they're not ready to add it to cart then it's not easier. Ryan: Moving down, anything else that I kind of skipped in that middle page where we jumped into the footer? You've seen products, is there a good way to put products? How many across? How many deep? How many products on a product page makes sense? What's your default response to that? Jon: I think on the category page, there's so many times where people will do a couple of things. They'll list hundreds and hundreds of products here. I think that's obviously the best use case for filtering, and I would do that filtering at the top of the page. Jon: Great example of this is we helped, a handful of years ago, to optimize Easton Baseball's website. Now, if you don't know what Easton Baseball is, they're the number one supplier of little league aluminum bats. In little league college, about 99% of swings are done with an Easton bat. They don't do anything in the major league baseball because they don't do anything with wood and aluminum's outlawed. So what does that mean? Well, the vast majority of people coming to the site are parents looking to buy their son or daughter a baseball bat. Or a softball bat. And if you went to their category page, all you saw was a wall of grid of bats. And if you can imagine what a little picture of a bat looks like online, they all look the same. Jon: They're all these sticks that are different colors, maybe. Right? But you can't communicate out of that picture. What the benefit is between the different bats, right? And they have wildly different prices. I mean, you can get a hundred dollar Easton bat and you could go all the way up to, I think, a five or $600 Easton bat. And so if you think about it, you're a parent, you get really confused. And right away, you're just upset, right? You're like, "Man, I don't know what bat to get. I'm going to be here all day clicking through all of these." And you just get frustrated really quickly. You probably just log off and go to your sports sporting goods store and just ask the guy which bat you should buy. Who's just working the counter. Not a great experience. Jon: And so once we dug in a little bit, what we found was that there are four or five different leagues, little league being one of them, that have certifications for different bats. And if your bat that you start swinging with does not have that logo of certification on it, then the umpire is supposed to not let you swing with that bat. And so the big problem is that all these parents were buying the bats based on price or the color they thought their kid would like best or whatever that is, and would end up getting to the game and the bat wouldn't be able to be used. And that's a huge let down, not only for the parent who just invested all this time trying to figure this out and got through that frustrating experience, but then the child who is up at the plate to swing, and they're being told that they have to use someone else's bat. Jon: It was creating a really poor brand experience. And what we found was that there were a couple of things parents knew about their children. What league they were playing in, and then they knew what style of hitter that the person was. So were they swinging for the fences or are they somebody who's just trying to get on base or something in between, perhaps. And then they generally knew what size of child they needed. So right? The bat is going to be different weights based on the size of the person swinging it. So they would say, "Okay, well I have a 12 year old. He can probably swing a heavier bat than my six year old," for instance. Right? So generally you have an idea of what weight you need based on the child who's swinging the bat. Jon: So what we did was we added some filtering and we made it three quick questions. With easy dropdowns. What league is your child playing? What type of hitter are they? And then do you know what weight bat you should be using? And usually what we found, we came to that third one because coaches would often tell the parent, "Buy this weight of bat for your son or daughter." So they already had that knowledge that they could bring. So what was really great there was we turned a wall of bats into something that now became three to four options. You answered those questions and it gives you a couple of options and a range of price points. And then you could decide, for your budget, what would work best and what was the bonus of stepping up a level? Jon: And it took all the frustration out of it. And their sales went up online 200, I think, 240 something percent Euro per year. Just by taking the pain point out of their category page. Ryan: So you're saying CRO has a return on an investment? Ryan: Little shameless plug for Jon's skill set there. Jon: We wouldn't have been doing it for 11 years if there's not a return here, I can tell you that. But at the same point, I think that it's all about just increasing that consumer ease of use. And if you just have a laundry list of products on a category page, that's not very useful. Especially if they all look the same or there's very minimal difference, or if they're all wildly different products. That also was a problem. And so it's like, "Where do you start as a consumer?" You think about walking into Walmart. If you didn't know what you wanted, when you walked into Walmart, you're going to be really overwhelmed because they sell everything. Jon: Yeah, it's a very similar type of experience to that feeling that somebody would have, and you want to make it as easy to use and help them to... Let them know they're in the right place, and help them make that decision as quick as you can. Ryan: Got it. And so I would advise people, a lot of times what I've heard you say, is take your category page to Starbucks. Buy somebody coffee and have them try to do something on it, to try to see some of that, because I'm guessing the Easton people didn't even conceptually think about that. Like, "No, we have all these bats. We know which one you want. Just get this one." Rather than, "Oh, you're not a parent trying to buy a bat." Jon: That's exactly it, is that they were too close to the product. They were inside the jar, and they didn't understand the pain points that the parents were having because the parents don't know as much about the product as the staff did at Easton. Ryan: Got it. Okay. So in conclusion, we've got all the way down to the bottom of the page. We've seen all the products. What are some of the things and quick best practices to be looking at in the footer of the category page? And what are some of the things you see that people do wrong down there? Jon: Well, the first thing in the footer that most people will do is they just dump all their links, extra links, down there. And it's just a grid of link after link, after link, no order to them. Maybe they put a header above them, but generally not that helpful. Jon: The first thing you should do in your footer is you should repeat your main navigation down there. And it should be the first thing on the left hand side of your footer. That way people don't have to scroll all the way back up to continue the shopping experience. If people scrolled all the way down to your footer, they are interested in your company and in your products and they want to continue shopping. So give them an easy way to do that. Ryan: And then do I add in all the navigation links you made me take out? At the top. Jon: I think there's a place here for a secondary navigation, and there's generally room for it. So that's a good thing you could add here. I think that another thing that you could add in here is your email sign up. That's always a great place. If people are still interested, but they're not ready to buy, they reached your footer, that's a good time to say, "Hey, you know what? Sign up for email and we can stay in touch." Ryan: You mean if they ignored my popup giving them 20% off their first order if they signed up with an email? Jon: Yeah. If you have those popups around by now, we're going to have some big issues because you obviously have not been listening to the questions you ask me. Yeah. Ryan: Yeah. Do not have popups. Everybody listening to this, do not have popups for email. Please put it in the footer. Jon: And maybe we'll do a whole episode on popups. And then I- Ryan: It'd be very short. Ryan: Simple answer, don't have it. Jon: Yeah. You can get me really riled up if you just keep asking me about them. Jon: Yeah. And I think the thing that should also be on the site in the footer there is your contact information. And that should be in the bottom right hand corner. And I'm always surprised by the number of sites that don't have contact information in their bottom right hand corner. But here's the thing, it increases trust if people see that you have a way to get ahold of you, but more importantly just put a physical address there. Let them know that you're not running the site out of your parents' basement. I mean, even if you are, just list your parents' address on there. It doesn't matter, right? Nobody's going to show up to this address. What they do want to know is that you're a viable business that's not just drop shipping and with no care. That you are actually reachable by either phone or support email. Ideally the physical address is really just a reassurance tool. We see that trust increases dramatically if you list one. So I would highly recommend that. Jon: So having your contact information in the bottom right hand corner is just standard practice. That's where people are going to go if they want to get ahold of you. Somebody comes to your site, they're immediately going to scroll to the bottom right hand corner if they want to reach out to you. Ryan: Yeah, I can actually vouch for this. Recently I actually didn't purchase from a site because they didn't have an address. That just, it made me concerned like, "Oh, you're just drop shipping, you're living on the internet, you're a fly by night organization." Just surprised me after I got done. I was like, "They just didn't have an address and that's all that caused me to not buy from them? That was weird." Jon: Yeah. It's surprising, right? I mean, the return on investment in this is pretty darn high because all you have to do is go to mailboxes et cetera, or a UPS store or any of those places, right? And just get a box from them for, what is it? Five bucks a month? And nobody knows that that's the address, right? People aren't Google Mapping this address. They're literally just saying, "Is it there? If it is, okay, I feel better." Ryan: Yeah. And I mean my wife and I, we have five businesses and live where we registered a lot of the businesses. And I have them on the internet, you can find my home address and nobody comes to us. Thankfully. Because I want to keep it that way, keep my privacy. Jon: Well now we're all going to show up. Ryan: Yeah. Ryan: But I think it does. I think it's a very simple thing that I've never really thought about, even until last week when I just didn't buy from a company. And I spent all day online looking at sites. And just the simple act of putting an address in a footer would have gotten that company a sale. Jon: Exactly. Ryan: Okay. Anything we've ignored or haven't touched on on a category page that you think we should be aware of? Jon: Yeah. Don't have popups. Ryan: Just email sign in at the bottom. They're not going to get a discount, it doesn't matter. Jon: Yeah, I think we've done a pretty good job of working our way through the entire page. So I feel pretty comfortable that we've answered the majority of concerns that I would have on a category pitch today. Ryan: And understand too, you'll never be done optimizing your site. You can't. Jon: There's always something. It's interesting you mentioned those tear downs that you see me do quite often at conferences and the like, and I'm never at a loss to find content for those tear downs. You can continually optimize the site and always be iterating on the site for a better experience. It's just a fact of life, but it's something that gives you a big return on that investment. It's well worth it. Ryan: Yeah, it's kind of like that Gordon Gekko thoughts. Like, "How much is enough?" More, well what's a good conversion rate? Better. There's no answer. Jon: One that is always improving. Ryan: Yes. That's your perfect conversion rate. Ryan: All right, Jon, thank you for the time and enlightening me as well as the people that are listening into us. Jon: Yeah. Thanks. It was a great conversation. Hopefully everybody's learned a lot today. Ryan: Thank you.

Ryan is excited to dive into the often overlooked remarketing options for re-engaging those prospects who don't convert on their first visit to your commerce website. Contact Logical Position for remarketing needs at https://www.logicalposition.com/contact. Reach out to Ryan Garrow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryangarrow/ Transcript JON MACDONALD: Ryan, good to talk to you again. Today we're going to talk about remarketing and re-engaging your audience, how does that sound? RYAN GARROW: Man, nothing gets me more excited, John. [laughter] RYAN: Marketing is a huge piece of online marketing driving traffic, it's an often-overlooked piece of digital marketing. I'm excited to drive into some of these details with you and hopefully shed some light on the mystery that is remarketing for most companies. JON: I really want to talk about a few things today, what do you do when someone doesn't convert on your site? You spend a ton to get folks to a site but then when they don't convert on that first visit because let's face it, most visitors aren't going to convert on their first visit, how do you keep marketing to them and close the sale and get that conversion? As my understanding, and hopefully, you're going to school me on this today this is typically what is called remarketing and it can be extremely powerful when done right. I do know that, tell me a little bit about how you and the team at Logical Position define remarketing? RYAN: Man, nothing as a marketer can make you more frustrated than somebody not doing what you wanted them to do when they came to the site because he spent all this time and energy sculpting traffic, eliminating waste saying, "All right, they are searching for my exact product and service. They are ready to buy, they're ready to put a credit card in." To get you into the right category or the right product page and then conversion rates on websites dictate that for almost every company we work with over 90% of that traffic goes somewhere else to do something and not take an action, and it just is frustrating. Especially if you do some of those real-time heat map watching and watching people on your site behind the scenes, you just get frustrated like, "Why didn't you click that? What's wrong with you? You should have just gone and clicked add to cart and buy?" Remarketing ends up becoming the step in the process next. You almost need to look at remarketing as a bunch of different layers. It's not just one simple, "We're remarketing, we're good." There's search remarketing, there's remarketing through email, there's remarketing through display ads. There's so many different things you need to be doing and be aware of in the e-Commerce space to help bring those people back to the site and take the action you want. Each one of them needs to have a lens of what's the return, am I doing it properly, is it generating the type of return that I need it to be as its own entity? When you look at driving traffic through paid search, and I think one of our earlier podcasts we talked about all traffic is paid traffic. At this point, it is requiring some level of investment to get that traffic to your site. Whether that's just time, energy, money, thought, something's happening that you're putting out there to bring people in. Paid search, hopefully, there's a return that's making sense with paid search as its own entity, search shopping, Bing, Google, Yahoo, whatever that looks like for you hopefully there's a return that makes sense. An additional marketing piece needs to be re-marketing, and it needs to have a return that makes sense for the business and for the products and services that you're selling. Within that re-marketing entity, there's different layers within that that say, there's this type of re-marketing and this type of re-marketing and this type of re-marketing and each one of those has different expectations for return. It may be five years ago re-marketing was vanilla and now we have the Baskin Robbins if you're in the Oregon area and you know Baskin Robbins, there are 31 flavors. There's all these different things you can be doing with re-marketing that for some brands it's overkill, you don't have enough traffic to use all of these wonderful different things. Other brands are using just the most basic remarket and they should be using a really complex additional layers of re-marketing to help drive different types of traffic, different ways, with different expectations. Brands should be doing it and they should be doing it more than likely more complex than they are. I think on average, most companies are not utilizing all the things they can be doing, even just through the simple Google platform of re-marketing, there's a lot there. JON: I look at this as two sides. One is what is the data that you need to be tracking or where are the points where you can then have data to know who to remarket to and then on what channels can you be re-marketing? Maybe we break that down. What events or obviously, there's the simple page view. Somebody views a particular page like a product detail page, you can then start re-marketing that product to them. What are some other options there for how to get data to know who to remarket to? RYAN: For simplicity purposes right now let's just focus on the Google re-marketing platform. Most companies are at least familiar with it, most people probably understand conceptually what the Google re-marketing is inside the Google Ads platform. All re-marketing is dependent on the data you're putting into these lists that you're re-marketing to. If you've got really crappy lists, you're probably going to get crappy re-marketing results. Step one is understand how you are breaking up your data. I would say as a general rule, more granular is better because you can combine those audiences into bigger groups. If you have really granular data sets within your lists in audiences, wonderful, use those, make sure that are in there. You can always make bigger groups but if you don't have the small granular groups you can't get to them. At least set them up there whether you use them or not, at least get them in there. By granular groups I'm talking about you should have a list for shopping cart abandoners. When I say list, it's an audience within Google ads. Let's have one for shopping cart abandoners, let's have one for product viewers, people that have viewed a product page. Let's have one for people that viewed a category page and people that only view the homepage, what's on the homepage and left. Site depth would be a good way of looking at that, the deeper they go on the site, the more likely they are to convert through remarketing and the messaging is probably different. What we see when we do this, when we add these in, and we add the audiences in for not only display ad re-marketing, which is an important piece to follow people around appropriately, we'll talk about some of the details on what's appropriate and what isn't later, but also re-marketing lists for search ads. If people go back and there's a heavily researched product that, "Hey, I found this one, it looks like it's good, then let me go back to Google and do a couple more searches to make sure that I'm not leaving a lot on the table as far as options or price point," you can bid on those people differently based on where they went on your site now. What we see, generally speaking, you're going to have a higher return on re-marketing the further down into the site they went. For example, people that were a shopping cart abandoner that you're re-marketing to are probably going to have a higher return to re-marketing than the person that went just to the homepage and bounced, fits the logic generally too. JON: These are all intent signals, you're looking for high intent? RYAN: Yes, to a degree. If somebody comes through a shopping ad they're obviously going to land on a product page. That same searcher could also land through a text ad on a category page. The search is exactly the same, I'm looking for a purple widget. If I click a text ad, I should land on a category page for purple widgets but I could also have clicked a shopping ad and landed on a product page. Same search, same intent that we saw on Google went to different spots on the site, but if I landed them on a category page and then they went and clicked on a product page we're probably getting the same level of intent on a purchaser as word there. If I clicked on the product image with a price point off of Google to your site, probably likely that they're looking to purchase one rather than I'm clicking on a text ad because I'm going to go to a category and do some more research. Then if I bounce re-marketing maybe a little bit different than someone that took an extra step. JON: That covers what you should be looking at to form that audience as you call it. It's not a list because you don't know who's part of that audience specifically, you can't get the individuals. Google masks that and tells you generally how many people are in that audience, is that correct? RYAN: Yes. Then each audience will tell you how many people you can re-market to on the display network and YouTube versus on a remarketing list for search ad. Because then you might have a 100,000 people in that audience but maybe only 30,000 of them you can remark it to as a remarketing list for search ads type thing. There's always going to be different numbers around those because of how Google is collecting data and allowed to present information around that as a re-marketing list. If you have medical devices of some sort or you're treating some medical problems, you may not be able to remarket at all on Google because that could potentially be personally identifiable information. If you share a computer with somebody and you don't want them to know that you may be feeling sick, you may have these symptoms or you may need-- I'm older than my wife so maybe if I need a knee brace, maybe I don't want her to know that I'm getting old and fragile. [laughter] RYAN: Google won't let people remarket it to me cause my wife might see that. That type of thing is a limitation within remarketing based on some products. JON: We both know we're getting old and fragile so we'll leave it at that. In terms of the platforms of which you can then take that audience and market to them, I heard you say Search terms, search ads, I heard you say YouTube, obviously display ads. What other mediums can be used for remarketing? RYAN: YouTube is a big one that I think most companies overlook, and there's this general opinion or thought around YouTube being complicated or difficult because you have to create a video and there's that barrier to entry there. Creating a remarketing video is really not difficult, it can even be very basic, it doesn't have to involve human or video, it could just be static images with voiceovers or image textovers. There's a lot of things you can do to make a pretty basic video on YouTube that can still be effective but the cost of YouTube is so low that your reach can go so far. What I tell people about YouTube is you do remarketing true view, which means they have to watch a certain amount of your video to be counted as a view that you actually pay for so they skip it. Everybody's seen those videos on YouTube that you skip before watching the cat video your mom sent you that you have to watch because she's going to bring it up when you're at dinner tonight. If you skip it, they don't pay anything. There's still some forced branding though because you have to watch five seconds but if you watch it, and you can do all kinds of overlays and allow people to click and go right to the site and the product that they were viewing, but if you watch it, it usually costs $0.10 to $0.12 for that view. The average click on the display network can sometimes be up over $1, $1.50, and so lots of opportunity on Youtube that people don't pay attention to as much. YouTube, email, you can remarket through email. In certain areas, you can remarket on the display network through dynamic ads or static ads that show the product you're looking at, and you can also do a list that allows you to bid differently on them based on their behavior of your website in the past. JON: That sounds interesting, it can get really complicated then. Of those, what do you think is the most powerful or has the highest ROAS, return on ad spend. RYAN: That is really going to vary, it's my most often response but my least favorite response, is it just depends. Every online company's probably going to have slightly different numbers based on their products, based on their website, and their conversion rates. Generally speaking, I really like the remarketing list for search ads, especially if you have a research product. People are going through the process are going to do a lot of searches before they buy something, finding out if that person is valuable or not to be bidding on again, and so many companies don't look at this. You can actually take this list of all the people that have visited your site before, and let's just say you sell coffee cups-- I'm staring at one in front of me. You sell coffee cups and this person searched for white coffee cup, came to your site, didn't buy, that's a list I can put in there. If they go back to Google again and they search for gray coffee cup or red coffee cup-- you don't even have to change your bids in there and you can see them because normally you'd be bidding on them again anyway because they're searching for another coffee cup, which you sell. You can see, "The people that have been to my site that searched this term either perform better or worse than the average person searching for this product off of Google." If it does better, you catch them again in the research process, and they perform better you bid up on them, be more aggressive because the return is higher, you have more you can be spending on them. If it's worse and once they've been to your site and they leave they're not going to buy on their second visit, then you just save the money, don't bid on them at all. You can actually spend that money on acquiring a new person to the site rather than somebody that's already been there and you know is not going to buy based on the data you see. There's a lot of levers that Google is now giving us as marketers that really can get creepy to a degree, but also really gives us actual leverage to push more return when it's necessary and then pull back when it's not. I think that those search ad remarketing lists can be super powerful. You can even do your past customers. Google does have an email match, you can upload your past customers into Google and create an audience around them and say, these 100,000 people have bought from me over the past decade. I upload them to Google Match generally, it's about 50%. Let's just say you have 50,000 people in an audience, you can now bid on them differently based on their search. If you sell mattresses, they're going to buy a mattress one time every 10 years on average, even though we're supposed to buy it more often than. That list of people, if they're going off and you know that they've bought in the past and they're searching again for another product you sell, maybe you can bid more aggressively on them. Because now you sell pillows, for example, and they're searching for a pillow and are like, "I really did like that mattress and they also sell pillows. That's great, I had a great experience on the mattress, now I can buy pillows." You can bid more aggressively on them even though it's a general search on pillows that maybe you wouldn't spend a lot of money on just by itself, but knowing something about that customer gives you the ability to be more aggressive than your competitors. It's a phenomenal subset of the remarketing world because you have some information about them. JON: This sounds like its own specialty. Just running ads is a specialty that you have to know a lot about, but even just going into the remarketing this is way deeper than I would have thought. RYAN: Man, we have an omnichannel strategy group now internally at Logical Position and the reason they came about largely is because of all the demands of our clients trying to figure out how to get all of the use out of remarking that they could. They were having so many of these conversations with our clients saying, we need to be doing this, we need to be doing this and the strategists having to work with all of our teams like, "Hey, we just need a department that can do this." So we've scaled internally, we've got a whole group that handles strategy across all of our accounts and a lot of it is around remarketing. JON: That's great. RYAN: Just the things you can do that are-- again, I say it's creepy [chuckles] but really fantastic as far as the marketing person's concerned on the things you can do with these levers that Google gives you. JON: On the flip side of creepy, it could be helpful because you're reminding folks of where they were, what they were doing. In terms of conversions, we see at The Good that you only have a certain amount of time to convert someone on your site and that's a couple of minutes typically if that. If they get distracted they end up onto something else. It's often even just personally I forget what I was looking to do and then I see a remarket and I'm like, "I really needed that." Then I end up going back and completing it. It seems to me, I'm hearing, that there's a ton of data that can be collected to ensure proper remarketing, and you just listed off a ton of them. It gets real intricate pretty fast. JON: Folks usually default to thinking about remarketing only on Google, what other kind of tools do you think could be used for remarketing? I know there's other providers out there, there's other toolsets that aren't Google, display ad networks, and things of that sort. Am I right in that thinking? RYAN: You are. Google is probably one of the most well-known just because if you're spending money on ads it just becomes very easy to see there's a section for remarking on display ads in Google. Everybody tries to claim that they have the largest display network on the market. When you look at remarketing a lot of it is done on the display network with display ads. As you're reading an article on a new site or something you're going to see images that are ads all over as you're scrolling down. We've been doing that for a while, most people know about it, most sites, not all, but most sites aren't going to say no to a display network that wants to put some ads on their site. A lot of these ad buys are done behind the scenes on a secondary market that most people don't even-- it's like the matrix, most people don't even know it's there but all of these ad buys are happening in this big secondary market that's an ad desk that all these networks plug into and they all compete in real-time to whose ad's going to be where. It's crazy when you start looking under the hood of the display network world. From a remarket perspective most companies are aware of Google, not a bad place to start, it covers almost everything. There's a couple of other competitors in the display space of note that we come across most often, it's Criteo and AdRoll. Both of them have some good things and some drawbacks and they have some exclusive sites that may be Google doesn't have access to. By and large, most companies should at least start with Google because it's already there with every context that gives you an idea of how remarketing is going to work for you. AdRoll and Criteo can do arguably better ads. Google's use of the HTML5 stuff now can make pretty darn good ads if you have a good creative team but from what I've seen, you do go into buckets within Criteo and AdRoll. They say, here's the return you need, this is your bucket. Here's what we're going to do for you. Done. It goes and it just does a lot of work. You don't have a lot of extra leverage to push and pull within their platform. It's kind of a, "We do it for you", scenario and it can be good. The only thing I caution people to look at when they're at Criteo or AdRoll is generally those companies out of the box are taking full credit for a sale through remarketing for an impression. If I'm scrolling through and reading a website and I happen to see a remarketing ad from a company who I was on, I didn't click on it, I just kept scrolling and finished the article and then later that day I went and bought direct. I just typed the website in, went and bought and finished my transaction, generally, the pixel for AdRoll for Criteo will say, "Hey, Ryan went and bought and we did it. Our impression generated it and we claim 100% credit for that." Their report will generally say, and most marketing platforms take a lot of credit so you just have to understand how to look and filter that data to get a real number. Because you can see in Google Analytics the click data, "AdRoll and Criteo they had 50 clicks and this much revenue." Not hard but trying to assign a value to that impression becomes complicated and usually requires conversation. All that to say AdRoll, Criteo for the display products out there for remarketing along with Google. Yahoo in the past has done a lot through remarketing but they've shrunk down and they're not as impactful so generally, I would say for display, those three. Video remarketing generally lives on YouTube, there's not a lot of video re-marketers that compete yet with YouTube and the scope and size of them. Email remarketing has become a bigger and bigger player in the space. Most people that come to your site, you can get an ad in front of them through a display network. Regardless of what you choose, you can probably find a website that they're going to be visiting and you can get an ad on. If they have an ad blocker on you're probably not going to get that cookie, you're not going to be able to remarket to them. There's been recently over the last couple years, a couple of companies that have come up with the ability to send emails based on the pixels. They have a list of-- I think the latest I heard is somewhere around 300 emails, they have permission to email these people. These people have opted in and said, you can email me and they've been able to combine that with a pixel or a cookie saying, "Hey, they went on your website, they didn't buy. We can filter that against converters. Let's send them an email and say we'll give me 10% off if they want to buy." They email themselves on behalf of one of their partners, which would be you. It's actually been gaining some good traction and it's another opportunity to get in front of people that you couldn't get in front of before possibly or in a way that they're actually going to pay attention to. It is a little bit promo heavy so you might give a 10% off discount coupon code, but for many of these companies, they're willing to do it for free for a rev share. It's just an add on, "Hey, if we're going to get a 10x with a 10% off, we're going to get a 5x at the end of the day, that's not terrible." JON: I'm pretty sure this happened to me the other day because I was on a site, I didn't give them any information and I left. Then I got an email from them about an hour later just like, "Hey, noticed you were on our site and didn't buy, here's a discount if you want to come back." I was like, "How did they get my email?" That's pretty interesting. RYAN: If you looked at the bottom in the fine details of that email, you'll probably see that it came from a company you've never heard of on behalf of that company. JON: I see. RYAN: I think if you haven't tested it and you've got enough traffic, and enough traffic would be you've got 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 visitors a month to start generating a real number through remarketing, I would at least consider it at least testing it. That's my general rule with most marketing test and measure. If it's working do it better or more, if it's not working stop it and then maybe come back and revisit it later once you understand some of the things that may have caused it to not work well. As we live, especially as Americans in a very busy, complex society, our attention is being drawn all over the place. You and I both have kids, John, we're not sitting down in the evening doing anything without an interruption, we're not alone. Understanding that as our day - as I go between three screens and I've got phone calls and emails and SMS and text messages coming on my phone that's on the other part of my desk, I'm going to get interrupted in the process of purchasing something more than likely. Remarketing, I believe, is going to have a bigger and bigger place in the overall online marketing scheme over the next few years. We're not going to get less distracted as Americans, I don't think. Understanding the appropriate way to get in front of people in the way they want to be communicated with. Text remarketing is becoming a bigger, bigger thing, especially with millennials that want to be communicated over on their phones almost exclusively. It's fun but complex. JON: I was going to ask you SMS like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, all those are platforms you can do remarketing on too, is it not? RYAN: You can. Social remarketing has been a big one. In a lot of companies, I suggest that that's the way they test social marketing. If you've not done ad buys through Facebook and Instagram yet, an easy way to test it and the validity and what return you can get is start by remarketing on them. Again, we'll go by my coffee cup example, if you're selling coffee cups and you're going to remarket them on Facebook, these people have been to your site, they've seen your product, they know who you are, they haven't bought yet. If you put an ad in front of them on Facebook and Instagram to try to draw them back and that ad does not work at a profitable level or rate that makes sense, the chances of going out and finding a broad swath of customers that have never heard of you before to buy at a rate that makes sense for you is much lower. If remarketing works, that tells me that there could be some potential to draw in or prospect new customers off of social channels through ads. There's always some ways you can do without ads, but at least through ads. It's a good way to test it all and see if that can make sense for your brand. JON: Okay. This has been really educational for me, I appreciate that. I'm now wondering what budget should be reserved for remarketing versus driving initial traffic? Is it maybe a percentage that someone should be setting aside of their total budget spend on traffic? What do you typically see there or recommend? I know it varies but is there a general rule of thumb? People should be at least trying a certain percentage of their overall budget towards remarketing? RYAN: It's my wonderful it depends answer again, unfortunately, but the bigger and more complex and the more research that is done to make a purchase of your product or service, the more you're probably going to spend on remarketing. You want to be staying top of mind. If you're selling $10 coffee cups, you're probably not going to have a huge portion of your budget on remarketing. There's probably going to be somewhere between 5% and 15%. Again, there's going to be outliers on that. 100% of the time, there's always going to be outliers. Step one is just start doing it if you're not doing it and then understand that you need to have frequency caps so that you're not blasting somebody and spending $20 remarketing your $10 coffee cup in one day because you won't stop being in front of them. Understand that you're going to test and measure your promotions, sometimes you're going to need promotions to get people back to the site to buy something. Sometimes you won't, it's just timely like, "You forgot that something was in your shopping cart," or, "I was looking at that red shoe." Also, when you cross apps, bring apps into the space, that's another big one. I tend to be a sneakerhead and so I buy stuff on Nike's app and the remarketing potential within that space for them is even more creepy and awesome. Because they have all the first-party data around what am I doing on their app and on their website and what type of products do they want to prospect me with, "Hey, you've never seen this shoe. You should think about it." I'm a huge fan of Jordan 4s so anytime there's a new Jordan 4 release coming up they know they need to let me know about that before. Even though I've never seen the product they are remarketing to me with a brand new product because they have that data of what I've purchased in the past, so much opportunity in the space that you probably need to be a little bit uncomfortable with your remarketing budget. I love saying that to people because they're like, "I'm going to dedicate 10% to remarketing." That's good but if you see it working don't be afraid to go to 20%. Why not? If it's there and you can put money in front of it and you're getting a return that makes sense for your brand there's no reason not to do it. JON: It's an awesome way to just attack the people who are already interested. They're obviously already interested so get your ad back in front of them because they were already on your site. That's a great way to attack that marketplace that is there for more conversions getting back to your site, for sure. What's the biggest common mistake you see around remarketing? RYAN: Oversimplification. I think we've got the data, we've got all the levers we can push and pull to get the appropriate message in front of the appropriate person at the appropriate time. Often I see just blanket remarketing as the name of their campaign in [unintelligible 00:28:59] one campaign, all visitors in there, they have no frequency cap then it's like, "We spend $1,000 a day on our general marketing and we spend $100 a day on remarketing, done," and they just let it run. They just think that it is what it is, like we randomly get a sale, we don’t… It is probably necessary to build multiple campaigns for multiple audiences and change the messaging throughout the time to K model. Day one you have one message for them when they didn't buy. When they don't buy. If they don't buy you move them to your three-day remarketing lists with a messaging change or the ad changes, you're staying fresh. If they don't buy then they move to their seven-day remarketing list. You're always moving converters off of these lists as they go down, you can store pixel on somebody's site for 540 days. We have a long term pixel list that we use for friends and family events or discounts online or when they want to run a big promotion. We can get more aggressive with those people that have been to the site in the past when they're searching for a broad non-brand term or something. Not getting complex enough is one of the biggest issues most companies are having, there's a lot more leverage you can put into your re-marketing starting just with all that data that you're tracking. Having the granular list that allow you to do some of that really cool/ creepy re-marketing to make your company more impactful in this digital marketing, is traffic generation. JON: Ryan, this has been a super educational experience for me, I really appreciate you sharing your experience on remarketing and re-engaging your audience. I know this is something that you have that whole I'm Your Channel team you mentioned at Logical Position that handle this. People wanting to get a hold of you, ask you any additional questions, we'll put into the show notes how they can email you directly. It's been an amazing experience, I look forward to our next topic coming up here next week. RYAN: Thank you so much, John, I appreciate it. Any time I can get into the weeds on helping clients get more success from all of their marketing in general, I'm in for it. Having such conversations individually, with anybody listening, I'd love to because it's just fun for me. JON: All right. Thanks, Ryan. Talk to you soon. RYAN: Thank you.

As the coronavirus pandemic is changing the game for businesses around the world, Jon and Ryan offer some timely advice on what you can do to propel your ecommerce business forward instead of just sitting on the sidelines. TRANSCRIPT RYAN GARROW: Jon, we are all working from home, because there's a virus running around the country, scaring us but also driving us to be safe and do different things. I'm not at all making light of that, but it is changing the game for every business. If you're a business that hasn't been impacted by this in a positive or negative way, you might be on vacation somewhere not knowing what's going on. As you're talking to companies over the last week or two, what are you hearing? Have you seen anything work, anything that's been terrible? What's the general gauge of customers that you've been speaking to or prospects you've been speaking to when it comes to business right now? JON MACDONALD: Good question. I'm hearing two camps, pretty exclusively, and it seems to be clear cut one or the other for e-commerce. The one camp is, "My sales are going better than ever. People are home, they're not shopping on retail at all and we're picking up the slack." A lot of brands that also sell through retail are seeing this because they still have a demand for their goods and they're still shipping. A lot of them are even offering special deals right now to get people to purchase even more. I see a lot of e-commerce brands I'm talking with that fall into the camp of, "Things are better than ever," and that's great. I'm so glad to hear that. Then there's the other camp that are saying, either, "I'm already out of stock of items, and I don't know when I'm going to get more," because they're having challenges-- In the United States, we're probably, what? Eight weeks behind where China was with this health epidemic. You look at that and you say, "Okay, eight weeks before the factories got going again." If they're full scale in eight weeks, we don't really know and then, the ports are really backed up and people aren't able to get the goods, even into the country. If they are, they'll be in China right now. We have a lot of issues with supply chain and I'm hearing a handful of folks that are saying, "This is a problem, I need to stop all spending. I'm not going to drive traffic anymore, because, why would I drive traffic? Why would I spend to convert my site if I can't get any product in the hands anyways?" I'm not suggesting that's right or wrong. I would love to hear your opinion on that aspect, but that's what I'm hearing. It's one of those two camps. What about your side? What are you hearing on these daily conversations? RYAN: Because we touch companies that are all e-commerce as well, we've got probably the full gamut of it. We have some small local businesses that only have storefronts and they've-- Obviously, nothing is happening. I can think of escape rooms like for entertainment, those companies stay with small little companies, didn't spend a lot but we helped them do well but nobody's going to go to an escape room for the near future. They have just nothing, no chance to market. They've got to do some interesting things. We're advising them in different ways. E-commerce, there's a lot of gut reaction we hear, mainly from smaller clients that it's like, "Pull everything back in, don't do anything. We just got to ride this out and huddle and protect what we do have." Then we have other companies of all sizes, saying, "Hey, this is great. Let's step on the gas. Let's go." Again, there's supply chain issues all over the place. Some of them are pivoting, some of them had backstop because of the previous issues with China production last year with tariffs, so that has some of our clients. They have a bunch of back stock from that even because they were worried about 25% tariff, so they had loaded up before that. We have, like you said, the full gamut. I don't think we go back to where we were three weeks ago. We're going to have a new normal for almost every business in the United States, no matter what your business is. Just lots of change. JON: Yes. Talk about that new normal a little bit, then, I'm interested. What do you think won't change? What do you think will stay the same, and what do you think will change? RYAN: What's not going to change is people are going to buy stuff online. People have already been buying online, they're going to continue buying online and so that doesn't necessarily change. What you're buying right now, I mean, if somebody had an online toilet paper retailer, they are probably in great shape right now. That's probably the ones that are like, "This is great, this is the best thing that's ever happened." I think we're going to have a reaction to that and people that sell petits are probably going to be doing wonderfully well because people are going to be sick of buying toilet paper. I think there's going to be a shift in retail, obviously. I don't know if-- I knew retail was going down and you've probably known this as well, like, it's not been a secret. Somebody told me today, I haven't actually found the article, but JCPenney may have like Forever closed all stores and gone online totally. Probably it was a good decision anyway. JON: They were headed that direction before, right? RYAN: Yes, so it accelerated that. What I see with a lot of these things that happen-- I mean, this is a very rare occurrence. I did a lot of research and I was preparing for talks around what do you do in a down economy, and you look back at the depression, and you can see how you can spend through that and you can do depressions-- Companies that advertise through recessions, depressions do better. There's a bunch of studies around that, it's no secret but when you have a cliff that we fall off of, it's not necessarily economic related. You do have to look at it from different lens and the easiest, closest thing I saw was 1918, when it was the Spanish flu, the first H1N1 and it was after World War 1 and the US was already in a recession to a degree and so this exacerbated it, but it was also, we had people that couldn't find work already and then people couldn't move. It was a very similar scenario, kind of a lockdown. They also didn't have e-commerce, they had local stores. That was basically all you could do. Retail obviously came back from there, but very unique times, but I think what it does is that when things like this happen, it shines a magnifying glass on things that were going really well and things that were going really bad. If you had a store that was already not doing well, it's really not doing well now, unless you randomly got some of the products that people need right now. JON: Right. I'm hearing that same thing that the best way to think about this is that your company needs to be able to survive this initial shock. I keep hearing the biggest similarities economically are 9/11. You get through that initial big shock and then we'll get into the recession, and then we can deal with the financial impacts. If you had a business that was having challenges already, you're not going to survive that shock because all it takes is one shock to a weakened system if you will, and your business is going to suffer the ultimate consequence because of that. If you were able to get through that shock, then you can probably pick up the pieces and we should see-- I'm not an economist, I'm just telling you what I keep hearing is optimism about this coming back up quickly. That, "Yes, we're going to hit a recession for a minute, but then we'll work our way back up pretty quickly." I think the long term effects are going to be more of an issue because of all the bailouts and money we're pumping in, we got to pay that back somehow as a United States economy, but we'll get there. The reality I think is if you are already running a business that couldn't survive the initial shock, then you had other issues as well, and if you run a decent business that had some cash that could weather the storm a little bit, then you're likely going to be better off coming out of this because maybe you'll run a little leaner, maybe you'll make sure that you're spending more effectively. I think that for you and I in terms of E-competence is what we're going to see on a regular basis is more emphasis on return on ad spend, coming out of this. I think there's going to be more emphasis on conversions for sure. I'm hearing that already from our customers and our clients. We did some research reports and interviewed everybody and the data was very eye-opening, and where people are going to cut and how they're going to cut. Are you seeing the same things? RYAN: Yes. Every company is a time to step back and analyze what's going on. I think what companies have to protect themselves against is making a really quick decision, just like, "Oh my gosh, we got to pull back and stop everything and then figure it out." It's like, "Let's stay calm, even if everything goes down." Let's hypothetically say the economy drops 20%, that's a big drop, but that still means that we have 80% still going. That's not a terrible thing. It's painful, bad things are going to happen. There's going to be people out of work. If 3 million people lose their job. I, it's 3 million people that can't buy your stuff but it also means there's still 97 million people probably working. It's not the end of the world. For some businesses, it will be, but I think it's-- Step one, remain calm and understand where we're at and that it's not a death sentence for every business out there. JON: I pulled up the data from our survey we did of e-commerce store owners. We ran the survey for about a week, last week, and I feel like it's already been a month since then, just in terms of how quickly things are moving. At that point as of the end of last week, we asked the question, "Have your e-commerce sales been negatively impacted by the recent health and economic events?" 52.2% said no. Again, it's been pretty split down the middle there, right? 52% are saying that they have not been negatively impacted. I know you sent out a bunch of great data as well, from what you're seeing from January to February, February, mid February and then end of March. Any thoughts on that data? You said January 1 through February 17th, that shopping impressions were up by 17% year over year, and revenue was up almost 14% year over year. RYAN: We saw really normal data. E-commerce has been steadily growing at that rate for years. For us, it's like, all systems go, everything's normal. I think we've got somewhere around 3,200 to 3,300 e-com clients. Then for some reason, I don't know why, I pulled some big snapshots of large segments of our e-comm data. Something happened on February 18th, couldn't find a news article or a reason. The first death in the Us-- this is US data by the way, first death in the US wasn't until February 23rd so in my head, there was something building up, some reason that people are starting to shop more. Impressions jumped to 37.4%, I think, year over year from the February 18th to 28th. I eliminated the 29th because of the leap year but that significant bump for no reason. External, there's no holiday involved and this is your year data too. Then we went into March and we looked at March 1st to the 9th, year over year and it got a little less crazy but it was still up 27% year over year. We didn't have a big move of Easter this year. I mean, there was no data other than people are online to buy things or search for things at a much higher rate. I didn't bring conversion data into those yet because latent conversions are important in a few of our clients that we just couldn't calculate that yet, but people are online. Even take my family, for example, we've been buying our groceries online for store pickup and delivery for, I don't know, a couple of years. Now, we have four small kids, nobody wants to take four kids under six to the store to buy groceries and out of everything. You can't get meat at Fred Meyer, for example, here in Portland. We had to check Walmart, can't get meat there. Costco, you could probably get meat but you're going to wait in line for an hour to get in. You're going to wait in line an hour to get stuff. They don't do pick up or delivery. Found Whole Foods, so we did a lot of searches actually just to find certain things we needed. That could be a part of it. Just continuing to search at a local level for certain things. Again, if you're being appropriate with your budgets and search, then you can capture a lot of these people that are trying to find various things. If you have it, people want to buy and they're not going to stores. JON: I think you made a good point there. I think there's goods that you need to purchase locally. You're not going to get online like meat, but even then, it's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of frozen meat companies out there that will ship you-- Omaha Steaks, things of that sort. RYAN: Exactly. If I could order Omaha Steaks for every meal, I totally would. Unfortunately, I haven't made enough money for that to be the case yet, but someday Omaha, you're shipping my steaks on a daily basis. How about that? JON: Love it. It's interesting because I'm also hearing, despite all of that, one of the questions we asked was, "Do you anticipate seeing your e-commerce sales grow as people take health precautions by not shopping in retail?" Again, 52% said yes. It aligns with those who feel their sales have not been impacted. They're also hopeful that they're going to do more of the capturing that retail group that is not buying at retail. I think that's really interesting that we'll see some hit from the e-commerce world, but it probably won't be as bad as retail. RYAN: I sure hope not. We do a lot in e-commerce together, so it'd be bad for us. I look at this, I'm an optimist. I'm an eternal optimist. I always think I'm going to win. I always think things are going to be great. I fail, of course. That's the way I look at it. I get excited because I see economic downturns as opportunities. The last time we had a big downturn, 2006, 2007, 2008 I wasn't prepared. I didn't have businesses in the places that I do now, so I couldn't capitalize when things got bad, they were house deals all over the place. If you had cash in 2008, 2009 you have a fleet of rentals at this point that probably tripled in value because you had that and you were prepared. I see this, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is exciting. I am prepared. I have the ability to move in and get aggressive where it's appropriate." Businesses, you might be able to buy competitors for pennies on the dollars very soon if they weren't prepared. If you're an e-com store for example, and you don't have the overhead of a retail and some of your competitors have expensive retail spaces, they have to support and still pay rent, or they have employees that maybe aren't being utilized in an e-commerce scenario, they're going to be struggling and it creates significant opportunities. For me, I'm excited because I think there's so much to do and this is where companies that really want to win will be able to distance themselves if they take appropriate actions. JON: I think that's a great point of taking the optimistic view of this of, "Well, how can you help someone out by perhaps bailing them out a little bit, buying their company and helping them turn that around and everybody win from that?" I think we're going to see a lot of that coming down the line just from an economic standpoint. You mentioned there's going to be deals to be had and if you're an e-commerce company in a position to be able to invest and take advantage of those, you're going to be doing I think very well coming out of this. JON: Well, we asked a question as well around what is the response these brands are going to take. "I predict my brand will respond to these health and economic concerns by," and reducing marketing spend was 61% of the response and I thought that was interesting because that's not taking advantage of this opportunity. I mean ad-words and stuff, are going to get a lot cheaper because people aren't bidding. RYAN: I feel bad for companies that their default reaction to the tough times is to pull back marketing, especially when we're in e-commerce. For example, my brand. I separate my accounts so I have brand terms and non-brand terms. You've heard me say this constantly. I probably preach it every event you're at with me. Non-brand, that's a free agent. If somebody is searching for your product but not you, they have intent to buy based on the search, they're choosing you or a competitor. There is no scenario for a business that I am involved with in an ownership and I have some say where we are not spending down to break even to buy that customer, no scenario. I want that customer and I want them more than my competitors do. It's going to become mine so I am turning up marketing. In fact, I hired people last week in the middle of this to increase production like we are going in and we're going in aggressively. Hey, it might not well be able to win as much as I want or could, but there's no scenario. I'm actually taking it. I'm going all in and if I fall a little bit short, oh well, at least I've made some gains and I got some clients that maybe I wouldn't have been able to get even as recently as two weeks ago because my competitors hadn't pulled back their marketing yet. JON: I think that's interesting because in that same response, 8.7% said they're going to spend more on marketing. I think that's 8.7% that's going to win. I look at that and I'm like, "If you're in that minority of 9% let's just say, you have a big opportunity where you're just going to be able to take over your competition and if you keep marketing through this, there's a very high likelihood that you'll have more revenue. You're going to have more resources when you come out of this, frankly, be able to overtake your competition and just in overall spend, because they're going to be limping along through this. They're hurting themselves or their sales not being able to be propelled by this marketing. When they come out of this, it's just not going to be as pretty for them as it would be for somebody who tries to maintain their marketing as much as they can." That's been a big message to my team here too. It's like, "Let's continue to keep marketing." Now, it needs to be done tactfully. Let's not get mixed up in the COVID-19, "Here's how we're continuing to serve our customers," emails. That's not helpful. RYAN: Oh my God. That's like popups to me for you. It's like, really? Thank you 500 people that I've ever bought something from in the last 10 years emailing me. Kudos. JON: That's exactly the problem. Most people aren't going to be upset about those emails, but they're certainly not going to read them. It's not a good opportunity. RYAN: My password keeper sent me an e-mail, the one on my iPhone that stores all my passwords that I pay for once a year, sent me an e-mail. I was like, "Do I care if your developers are working from home or working from the office?" JON: As long as I can get to my passwords. RYAN: I don't care. Why would you waste the, I even cost you something to send it like human capital, fractions of pennies for emails. Like, Oh my gosh. JON: There's that for sure. The way to get through this in terms of the marketing is to acknowledge it's a problem and just say, "Hey, you know what? We know that this is going on. Don't ignore it, and certainly don't take advantage of it and try to say 'Oh, we're running a shop from home sale because everybody's stuck at home right now."' That's not going to go over very well. RYAN: No. I was talking to one of our clients that sells, it's a beauty skincare cream. They focus on organic and teens or preteens. It's something like that. They're like, "Okay, what do we do with COVID-19?" I'm like, "What do you mean? You sell skin-- You're not going to talk about that. That's terrible." They're like, "Well, people can't go out for Easter." I was like, "Well, yes, they can't." "What about getting Easter baskets? You're going to buy your daughter some makeup for," I was like, "That's great. Maybe you can do an Easter sale and push your heart on social and get some--" Influencers may be involved, but you don't want to necessarily say, "Hey, you can't go out on Easter. You still want to dress up." I mean, that's just rubbing into somebody's face because there's going to be a lot of disappointment. Every Easter we do a big event at my barn with my whole family, because I have a large one and we do a beer tasting. We work our way through the Easter letters. The beer had to start with E one year, then A, we're around S which was a great one because there's a lot of great beers that start with S or they have to have like Jesus in them. There's some bad beers with Jesus. I'm just telling you that right now. [crosstalk] JON: I can't imagine it's good beer. RYAN: But we're doing it virtually, we're doing a virtual tasting. JON: Talk about taking advantage of a situation, naming your beer off of religious figures. RYAN: Oh man, there's-- I won't mention a brewery but there's a pecan Jesus beer that it is not very good. JON: Pecan beer sounds horrible to me. RYAN: Everything about it was like, "That is not a good sounding beer." JON: I'm much more of a wine person, unfortunately. RYAN: Well, we could do wine tasting too, but it's changing. Don't push it on people.There's two things I'm telling a lot of companies [unintelligible 00:21:30] is number one, assume everybody knows I'm going to tell them to keep marketing. Outside of that, you have to be creative but move. If you don't do anything, you're never going to start moving. Understand that you're going to make some mistakes and you're going to go out there. Maybe you accidentally mentioned the COVID or coronavirus when you maybe shouldn't have, but at least you're out there testing something and you realize, "Oh, that wasn't great." Get out there and do something to expand your brand. You have to think outside the box. This is unprecedented. None of us have been through a giant downturn related to a virus. If you find somebody that's been through this, I'd love to know what country they were in when this exactly happened. They had e-commerce versus Amazon not being able to send anything but toilet paper. Getting out of, it's going to take some testing. I say also talk to an expert, whether that's Jon, whether that's me, somebody else. Talk to somebody that understands something about what you're trying to accomplish and run some ideas by him and then say, "Hey, I'm thinking of doing this. Is there a reason that you would say bad idea or yes, it's worth a try. Let's measure it." Pull back quickly if it's not working. JON: I mean one of the benefits of a slowdown right now for e-com brands is that there are experts like you and I who were a little bit slower perhaps than what you would typically see and we're giving our time back and saying, "Hey, I'm happy to chat with you. I'm happy to help as much as I can, answer questions, let's do these things." We're stuck at home. We have an extra hour a day because we're not commuting. We have extra time on our hands as a whole, as a community that I think is really interesting. It's really, really fun to see how you can use that goodwill in a way that-- I'm answering questions. I sent an e-mail out last week instead of an article which we've sent out for seven years in a row over seven years now. We send one every Tuesday and last week I was just like, "Team, it doesn't seem right to send an e-mail out this week with an article that's quite frankly a topic we had booked three months out. On our content calendar. It's not really relevant to what's going on. I don't feel we should send that out this week." They were like, "Well, we don't want to just send no e-mail. Let's send, 'hope everybody's doing well."' I was like, "No, no, no, that's not going to go well. Nobody wants to hear that." Instead what we decided was let's send an e-mail that's basically being helpful. We really wanted to just be as helpful as we could for these e-com brands and be in it with them. The whole goal was,"Okay, we have all this content, seven, eight, nine years of content that we've have up on our site that we've written. It's super helpful." I just said, "Hey, if you're having a challenge, you want some expert advice on it, reply to this e-mail and we'll look at our back catalog of content and send you the article that's specific to your need along with some context and a little bit of help on that." The amount of responses I got is overwhelming. We sent it on Tuesday, we're recording this on a Thursday afternoon. I still have dozens of emails in my inbox that I need to get through. The benefit of that is not just that we get to help the community, but also that now I'm basically writing content because I'm answering these people and saying, "Here's the old content, but here's all the stuff I would update on this right now and here's how I would be thinking about it." Then I sent that e-mail to our marketing team and they're taking that and they're updating the content on the site, or they're writing new content based off of what I'm suggesting. We're able to produce a lot of great content with this extra time that we have on our hands because everybody's working from home, not commuting. We do have some clients who are like, "Hey, talk to me in two weeks when things calm down." They're not dropping but they're saying, "Hey, I just need some time right now," which is understandable. I think that it's really interesting to see how we can all band together and help each other out and really use this to generate some great content that will be everlasting out there. I think the knowledge base, the communal knowledge base is just going to grow so much. RYAN: I think it's going out with the idea people want to give help, they want to be helpful, but they also are going to be looking for help. I think it opens up a lot of doors to maybe a partnership that you wouldn't have even been able to approach or do anything with before. One of my companies is a brand that sells to retail as well as online and my retailers are closed. They're struggling. They still have expensive rent to pay in certain areas, and so I'm like, "Okay, well, you don't sell online. I do. I know how to do it. Let's get some of your stuff online, how can I help you move product?" They're going to sell more of my product probably with some of these things as well but it's like, "Hey, you're being forced as a local business to start selling online now, let me help you compete with some of those big retailers," because a lot of times it surprises me. We have some rather large advertisers and some of them came in and said, "Yes, right now we're going to cut budgets 50%," and there's no data around that. We didn't have anything to say around it. They just dictated that. We're going to go back and talk to them through some of the logic, but that was an e-mail we got yesterday and I was like, "That makes no sense." If you have one of the largest advertisers in a category that's going to pull back 50% of their digital spend, small guys have a huge opportunity to fill that void because people are still buying these things. The volume is still there. JON: That's so true. That goes back to just that small 9% in that survey that said they're going to invest more or continue the same. I think those are the folks who are going to come out winning. If nothing else, their brand is going to get in front of new people that they wouldn't have been able to afford to get in front of before. There is some bright spot here for sure. RYAN: I'm excited but it's also, I guess I get nervous, but it's almost like an excited nervous. We don't know what's going to happen. I'm pretty confident with our team's skill set and what we're going to be able to do and your team skill set, we're going to come out of this fine. Hopefully, most of our clients do and we're able to help that but if some of their competitors of our clients don't make it. JON: Maybe they should have talked to us first. [laughter] JON: I think there's a bit of a Machiavellian message here. I don't want to say take advantage of the situation but definitely think twice about how you can utilize this in a way that is going to help your company instead of hurt it. If you start thinking with that mindset, I'm not suggesting even a growth mindset, I'm just saying every company is going to have down revenue this year. If you are just thinking about how do I maintain, then when things pick back up, you're going to really pick back up much quicker. If you say, "Hey, you know what? I know we're going to have a 20% drop, I'm just going to cut everything." Like you mentioned with that one customer, that's just the wrong mindset. I understand. Of course, that sounds, coming from you and I, of course, we should be saying keep spending on marketing because that's our business. I cannot stress the data that's behind this and the reality of this. I know I've seen you do presentations on just how car companies back in the depression came out of this and how Ford really blew up coming out of that because of the actions they took versus what is it, GM at the time? RYAN: Chrysler. JON: Chrysler. RYAN: That was crazy. JON: I think the same situation can apply here. People who keep moving forward, keep marketing are going to grow like Ford versus Chrysler did back then. Different time maybe different industries, but I think the same tenants apply. RYAN: Yes, I probably would agree. If you Google recession studies, and I think I've referenced one from the '70s and then one from the early '80s they were recessions. They did some studies around companies that advertised in, during and after a recession and compared their growth to companies that cut marketing and every time companies that advertise and marketed through the recession, despite what maybe they felt like doing grew and their marketing wasn't even as traceable as our last-click attribution type tracking that we have online. We have unprecedented tracking online that if you have profitable or even break-even marketing, I don't care what the economy is doing, there's no reason not to spend that money. I mean it's just, it's layups. JON: Well, Ryan, this has been a lot of fun to connect about this today. Hopefully, there's been some value here for listeners, some things they should be thinking about. If nothing else, hopefully, they decide that they can be the Ford of the world versus the Chrysler coming out of this in a way that is really going to help propel their business forward versus sitting on the sidelines. RYAN: Yes. Hopefully. If anybody wants to reach out to either one of us, please do. This is fun for us to talk through and help companies and advise them. It's what we live for. JON: Yes. RYAN: And we've got extra time with no commute. JON: There you go. I'm happy to help. I've been putting this on LinkedIn. Anytime I see any of our partners or any offers out there, I repost them on LinkedIn. It's like, ''Hey, guys, look, e-commerce community is banding together.'' I don't know if you saw, Privy just came out with today ShopSmallEcomm.com. RYAN: I did see that, yes. JON: Ecomm with two m's at the end. It's just amazing. They're really trying to just help all of these e-com businesses to get listed in this directory and they're doing this effort for free. Yes, it's a marketing thing for Privy, nobody's hiding that. The reality is that it's helpful and it can't hurt to list your site on there. Right, so why not? RYAN: No, not at all. I already sent it out to my wife's businesses. I've sent it to all our directors and VPs like, ''Hey, there is no reason not to support a partner, number one, because we want to do that.'' JON: I'm hearing things like Brex does credit cards for e-com. They usually offer net 60 terms with no fees and they're extending those terms out to 90-120 days with no fees, no interest. Things like that are like, ''Hey, can you see three months in the future right now. If you are sure your business is going to be around in three months, why not do this and give yourself that runway, and perhaps be able to pay some employees in this time. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to and keep advertising and take advantage of this opportunity." There are ways out there. I know there's Clearbanc that does funding, as well B-A-N-C, Clearbanc with a C. There's a ton of these type of things out there that are offering a lot right now. They understand that your balance sheet looks low, there understand what we've all been going through and they're willing to work with that. If you can show that going into this, you were doing okay, they're confident you're going to do okay when you come out of it, and they want to help you see that through. There's a lot of stuff out there right now, Ryan and everybody's got a little extra time to contribute. Everybody's kind of banding together, it's been amazing to see the e-com community. I just recommend that as many as e-com brands can take advantage of these opportunities that are in front of them and the help that has been extended, will really see it through. As you mentioned, we're both happy to help on paid search and how to keep marking on that front. Also on conversion to make sure that once you get those people there, that those dollars go as far as possible so definitely reach out. Any last thoughts on your side, Ryan? RYAN: I think the last webinar was probably just when in doubt, go. Just do it. See what happens. Again, that's kind of just get in motion. I think you can't fail if you're moving somewhere. You'll figure it out. JON: I'd rather go down swinging, right? RYAN: Heck, yes. JON: That's it. All right, Ryan. Thank you. This has been fun chat today, considering the sad circumstances and topic, but I think we're going to pull through this. RYAN: I agree. JON: I'm very excited to be able to help everybody. Thanks, Ryan. RYAN: Thank you.

Jon outlines what businesses should be paying attention to as they begin the CRO process, in order to make sure your commerce website's revenue continues to grow over time. TRANSCRIPT RYAN GARROW: Jon, usually my goals are around revenue, new clients, employees, you name it, but as a sub-point of some of my goals I find myself penciling in a line that's usually says something around improve website. Usually, when I'm penciling that in, in my head, I'm not articulating it correctly, but in my head, I want to increase the conversions with the traffic I already have, because I've already got some traffic going to these sites. I just want to get more out of it, how to squeeze this lemon a little harder and get more juice out of it, but given the dynamic nature of conversion rates based on traffic type seasonality, I've struggled with even figuring out how am I supposed to be setting a goal around my conversion rates other than just better. I want it to be better. It's never going to be good enough, everything make me happy that we've got this conversion rate, I just need to be better. As an expert in this field and probably the smartest person I've ever come across in the conversion rate space, [chuckles] should I even be setting goals around conversion rates, or should it be like am I going about it in the wrong way? JON MACDONALD: First of all, Ryan, I appreciate this topic. I think it is timely and it is something that a lot of people I talk to on a daily basis struggle with. The reality is, what gets measured gets improved. There should be some goals here, and you do need some data to make data back decisions about how to improve your site. With that in mind, I think it's only helpful to really be thinking about goals, but around conversion optimization improvement there. Yes, there's tons of goals you should be thinking about, but just better is probably not going to get it done because where do you start from that? RYAN: [chuckles] Good point. I always keep putting it on there, and I don't actually have anything around it. [laughter] Probably not the way I should be going about this. JON: One of the things to be thinking about here is that you really want to break that down a little more. I would think about it in terms of are you looking to increase average order value? Are you looking to increase the amount of people getting to a particular point in the site? A conversion rate, let's just start there. Overall, most people think it's just converting the amount of visitors into buyers, and overall, yes, that's true, but there's so much more underneath that. Think about, do you want to get people from a landing page to the next step in the funnel, and then from there to a product page and then adding to cart? Then once they're in cart to actually completing that process, and then what even happens after that? How do you get them to come back in order again? You really want to be thinking about all of the different steps that go into this and then just look at improving each of those steps. That is what is going to bring you sustainable growth and conversions as opposed to just saying, okay, I really need to just get more people to buy. We all want that, but unless you're improving every single step of the process that our consumers going through on your site, you're not going to see much of a sustainable growth there. RYAN: Got it. There's a lot in that statement from you. As an econ business owner myself, my goal is, click-buy. My thoughts around conversion rate is, all right, well, if I change my button from pink to blue, and test that A/B, one of those colors is going to cause people to buy more, but you're saying, yes, you could probably do that, but it's probably not a great good idea. You should probably start thinking about how people are getting down to that product page or getting into the shopping cart experience. Try to not lose people on the way and that would probably be and you can fix my verbiage, maybe there's a better way to starting your conversion optimization process, rather than just looking at the Add to Cart button. JON: Right. I think you brought up something that you've heard me rail on 100 times probably. Maybe that why it's in your mind. RYAN: Yes, just maybe. [laughs] JON: Is the button color issue. Here's the thing, changing a button color are very unlikely to do much for your site, but if you go online, and you Google conversion rate optimization, one of the first things that comes up is a case study around a brand that somebody wrote this article. It's been handful of years, now it's been out there and it's a running joke with our team, but a brand said they changed the button color on their website and got like $5 million in additional revenue because of that. I call bullshit, first of all. RYAN: Wow, I'll do that. [laughs] JON: Exactly. Second of all, it's really setting a bad precedent for conversion optimization because it's really not about button colors. You go online, the second thing you're going to find is checklists all over the place of things that you should just do to your site. Here's a bunch of checklists. The problem is, they're not based on data from your specific site visitors. Now, are there best practices, of course, but do they apply to you? The only way to know that is to truly understand your site visitors. That means collecting data. All of this, I've said already, data back decision making is what's imperative here. If you don't have the right data, you don't have good baselines for where you're at today, how do you even know if what you're doing is working? That's where you have to track every click and movement that people are taking on your site. What's that mean? Well, get Google Analytics, but Google Analytics out of the box, it's meant to help people like you Ryan, some more ads. RYAN: [chuckles] It's good for that. JON: It's all about driving traffic. It's great for that, but most people, unfortunately, try to use Google analytics as a viewpoint for how to improve their website, but out of the box, it's horrible at that. Doesn't mean it's not good for it, you just have to take a different view of the data and do a little bit of extra work. What does that mean? Well, really quickly, you could just go in if you're an e-commerce site and make sure you have e-commerce tracking turned on. There's so many sites, even some large ones doing tens of millions a year that don't have that box checked, and it's an easy win. RYAN: Blows me away. JON: Yes. I'm sure you see that all the time too. RYAN: I do it, just I don't get it. JON: It's all because again, only the marketing team that's driving traffic has really used GA when the e-commerce manager who is actually trying to get more sales out of the site really needs to be paying attention to this data too. The second thing is, get those heat maps, click maps, scroll maps, understand how people are engaging with each page of your site. You can get all of that data through a handful of tools. The one we love the best here at the Good is called Hot Jar, H-O-T J-A-R. It's a really great tool and helps you have a good understanding of how people are engaging with your site. Now, all of that data can then tell you what people are doing, but you also need to understand what they're thinking. That's where things like doing user testing can really come in. Understanding. What does that mean? We send people to the site, who match an ideal customer profile and we ask them to complete tasks on the site. While they're doing that, we record their screen and their audio. Now we could do a whole episode on user testing, we probably should because if you're real deep on this and the insights are just amazing. Really, the point I'm trying to make here is that you have to understand what people are doing on your site and why they're doing it, and then use that data to help you understand what you should be optimizing on your site. Then you can set some goals. At that point only should you be setting goals. You can clearly say, "Well, I'm having a huge problem where people can't find the right product that's a good fit for them. That means that I need to help them filter a little better, or change the content on my site or the navigation." There's a lot of different things to be looking out there already that you could set goals around. Maybe I want to increase engagement with my navigation by 20% because you know that's an issue. Look for the places that people are dropping off in your conversion funnel, and then set goals around that. That's going to be way more effective than just saying I want to increase my overall conversion rate. RYAN: Obviously, if you're an e-commerce site, your goal is to get more revenue to the site. You're saying, if I'm understanding correctly, I'm going to look at who converted and almost use the Google analytics visualization tools to work backwards and say, hey, well, they went here, here, here and then you had drop off here. Maybe that drop off where I'll make it up. I lost 70% of my traffic going through the funnel, maybe I go to that page or that area of the site and say, all right, how do I keep people flowing through the process to the next step in that overall conversion? JON: Exactly. RYAN: Got it. For most businesses that you've seen going through that process, is there a specific part of the site you say most e-commerce companies are overlooking the importance of that part of the site and the flow down the funnel to buying? JON: Well, I think everyone puts an emphasis on their homepage. It's the entry point for the vast majority of traffic, so it's a great place to start. I think though that you should really be focusing on what people do next. What's that second step they take from there? That's truly going to be where the decision is made or broken, and here's why. On the homepage, you're going to have a lot of people just bounce off the homepage that right away they weren't a good fit or they clicked on an ad by accident, whatever. If the highest bounce rate is going to be your homepage, almost always, but secondly, once they get to that next step, that means they're actually interested. At that point, you know in your funnel, those are the people that you need to start paying attention to. Now, I'm not suggesting ignoring your homepage. It's important. Trust me, Ryan, you've seen me do teardowns of websites hundreds of times probably now, and you know how many times I can rail on a homepage. RYAN: Yep. JON: I will tell you, there's a ton of optimization that's it's almost more meaningful for actually converting somebody at that second stage because people who get to that second step are actually interested in your product or service. RYAN: I would say it's almost more than likely a category page after that homepage leads in the e-commerce realm. You'd probably get to a product page from the homepage. JON: I would hope not because, at that point, you really are helping these people do one of two things on your site. They're trying to decide if your product or service can help solve their pain or their need. If they get past your homepage, they think that there's a chance you can help solve that pain or need that they have. Then so they're on a category page now. Now, you need to help them to understand which of those products is going to help them solve that pain or need. RYAN: Interesting, because one of the things I talk about in driving traffic, when I'm separating out like text ads versus shopping ads, almost across the board you would prefer searchers coming to your site off a text ad than a shopping app because it can land on a category page, which most of the time will convert better than a product page. I get horrible generalization across e-commerce sites, but even then, being able to focus on that category page could reap phenomenal rewards in the paid search realm in making that traffic channel much more effective and you can scale it quicker if they're converting or getting through that process quicker at least going into the next step. JON: Right. I've heard Ryan that when you send people to shopping to an individual product, I think I've heard this from you, the vast majority of people don't actually purchase that product, they buy something else, so why not send them to that category page? RYAN: Yes. If you use shopping traffic to get to the site, which I assume most e-commerce companies have done it at some point, when they land on that product page, you want them to find a category page as quick as possible. Breadcrumbs or other things, because really that's when the shopping of your site starts. A lot of product pages get bounced off of from shopping traffic because they couldn't get to a category page and find the product that they were actually looking for. If I'm taking something away from you, at least in this section, it's let's focus on some category pages. If you can, in the e-commerce space, leave the homepage, maybe for the second step as you're looking at conversion rate optimization. If they're not utilizing a conversion rate optimization agency like yours, which they probably all should, what are some of the things they need to be aware of now that they've got hot jar on their site, and they're able to watch people on the page and you can really, I mean, you can get lost in watching people click on your site? It's fascinating as you're in there. You can look up and all of a sudden, an hour's past and you've been watching people just click around on your site. Other than giving us a checklist, how should they be looking at this traffic now that they have some of this data that they've never experienced before? JON: Well, I think the first thing to think about here is most people will set these things up, pay attention to it for a week, and then they forget about it. Now, for all of your sites, how often are you looking at Google Analytics? RYAN: Probably not often enough because I'm not in the weeds as much. [chuckles] Hopefully, some of the people doing the marketing around there are more, but probably not. JON: That's fair. Think about it this way. Most of the people and I surveyed them when we start working with them as a customer, maybe I'm in an initial exploratory conversation, or we just decided to start working with them, the first thing I hear from them is, "I don't know what people are doing on my site." I say, "Well, you already have Hot Jar installed. You're using GA. Well, what's preventing you from understanding this?" They said, "Well, I just don't look at the data." I would say the first step here is just spend 15 minutes a day to set a timer because you can't get lost in it. I think the problem is most people do, what you just said is they dive in, they spent an hour at it, and then they're like, "Wow, I'm overwhelmed," and they just ignore it from there. Instead just spent 15 minutes and try to take away one small insight a day. That's it. Instead of trying to solve all the world's problems on your site, and right away, just say, okay, I'm only going to focus on watching what people do in my category page. I'm going to spend 15 minutes and try to have a good understanding here of how far down the page they're scrolling, what content they're engaging with, how they got to that page, and where they're leaving to go. Just do those four things and spend a few minutes you will learn a little bit more about your consumers that day. Then come back the next day and build on top of that knowledge. You will just continue to learn, day over day, a little bit more about your consumers, where they're dropping off and what frustrations they're having. I say this all the time, but it's really hard to read the label from inside the jar. What I mean by that is, if you are the one who designed or developed your navigation or outlined your part of category pages, you know your products so well that you just assume everyone else has that same level of understanding. They don't. Following what other people are doing on your site will really help you have empathy for that consumer on the other side of the screen. RYAN: Now, that's fine. I didn't quite write quick enough, but what are the four things you say I should be looking at for 15 minutes on Hot Jar or Analytics? JON: Where people came from, so how they got to that page. Where they're going next, so you have an understanding of whether they are clicking into a product or they are doing something else on your site. If they are clicking into a product, what are your top products? That will help you understand where to look next the next day. What they're engaging with on that page. Are they scrolling down and seeing a lot of products where they're dropping off? What content they're engaging with, et cetera? RYAN: I'm always worried on my businesses about distracting with additional information. I have one goal of driving traffic to my site, and that is to get products sold. I know some people go to sites to do research and there's a longer sales process. How aggressive should business owners be at creating that simplicity on their site and avoiding the potential distractions on the site, whether that's category or product pages when your whole goal is just to get them to buy something? JON: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head on me. Maybe it sounds too obvious, but avoid distractions. The whole point here is that consumers have lives happening while they're on your site. I have a three-year-old at home. I can tell you that I had this experience and I'm choosing a flight because this happened to me last week where I was booking a flight and my son interrupted me. I had found the flight out but I hadn't flung the return flight yet, and it just timed me out. I had to start the entire process over again. It didn't save anything, just took me back to the homepage, refreshed it, took me back to the homepage like I had done nothing. It didn't say, "Hey, we timed you out, because we couldn't save your seat anymore on that first flight, but here was the search you did, click here to start it again." That would have been such a great experience, but instead, I came back in 15 minutes, and I was just so frustrated, because it's like, oh, it's spent so much time finding that perfect first flight and now I don't remember exactly what it was. I got a look at my calendar and my agenda and start all over again. There's nothing that I hate more than wasting time and I can tell you that your consumers on websites are doing the exact same thing. RYAN: Got it. It's almost a rule of thumb and give them enough info to be interested maybe in your product or service, but don't overshare or don't put things in the way of them actually taking that next step and that can be almost a step one as you're looking at sites and trying to clean things up and the conversion rate process. JON: Yes. Look, consumers are only looking to do two things on your site, research and understand if you can solve their pain or need. If you can, they want to convert as quickly and easily as possible. Trust me, your goals are aligned on this, not only do you want them to convert quickly and easily, but they do too. Stop making it hard for that to happen. RYAN: Okay. As we dive deeper into this, like, what's a reasonable expectation for CRO improvement? Knowing that my end goal is to get more people to buy something, and I'm going back in those steps to move people through the process better, do I still set the end goal? Do I give it like, hey, I want to go from 1% to 2% on my site within the next six months? Is that a goal that makes sense or are you like you got to do it this way and it should be a lot different than that? JON: Well, I think the best goal to think about is what is the return on investment from the activities that you're doing to optimize conversion rates? The reason being is, I've worked with sites that if we move that conversion rate even a 10th of a point, it's millions of dollars in revenue. I've worked with sites where I'd have to double that conversion rate to even make it worthwhile to work with us. If you look at it in that way, it's going to be different for everybody. I don't think anybody would tell you they don't want to double their conversion rate, but the reality is that it's really hard to look at a conversion rate and compare to even your competitors. It's just that does your disservice. It doesn't help you, it distracts you. Instead, really just focus on showing incremental gains month over month, where you're looking for that small gain, and you're saying, I'm getting a small gain on my conversion rate, and that is enough to show a large return on investment from these activities. Now, how do you track that return on investment? Your goals around that should look at things even including ROAS, Return On Ad Spend. Now you're spending a ton of money to drive traffic, it's valuable, but once they get to your site, if you're not converting them, you're not making that money work as hard as it could be. It doesn't matter how good your ads are and how qualified that traffic is if your site is just tossing that traffic out the window because you made it too complicated for them to convert. There really is a nice synergy between those two areas. RYAN: A lot of the goal I'm hearing you say, would depend on how big is my site currently because moving the needle in one month, a 10th of a percent from maybe 1 to 1.1 could mean millions of dollars. That could also mean, you made an extra $15 and maybe that's not enough, and you had to get a larger goal to move the needle because you were spending more than $15 on CRO stuff. JON: Yes, and that's fair. Look, I think there's a point at which it makes sense to truly focus on conversion optimization and start working with somebody where it's a budget line item. I like to look at that in terms of traffic volume because typically there's enough traffic where we can start running some tests and get a nice return on that investment through detailed findings off of these tests. Now, that traffic level's generally around 40,000 visitors a month, which is probably much lower than you would think, but the reality here is anything below 40,000 visitors and it becomes really hard to prove a test out in a timely fashion and show a return on investment there. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be making data back decisions, or even perhaps doing testing, it just means that it's going to take you a lot longer to prove this test out. The best thing you can do at that stage is to have that data, start collecting it, start reviewing it, and then talking to your consumers and making changes based on what you're hearing and seeing them do. Instead of testing them, just go ahead and make those changes. RYAN: Do you see a difference at a high level between somebody that is a pure-play retailer and just selling a bunch of other people's products on their site, or a brand and the types of traffic and/or conversion rates, like if I was a shoe retailer versus a Nike or an Adidas? JON: For sure. I think that it all is about the context of what somebody is coming to your site to do. It's interesting, Amazon Prime, if you're a Prime customer, you're going to convert at an extremely high rate. I think it's over 70% of your visits are going to buy something on Amazon, because it's the marketplace. You have the widest selection of products possible. You can do all your research on that platform in theory and buy something and do that all fairly quickly that they've done a really great job of that, but if you're a Nike, for instance, people understand, I'm coming to Nike because I want Nike product. I'm not there because I'm trying to compare Nike and Adidas. You've already done that homework, you already have a brand affinity. If somebody is coming in with a brand affinity, they're going to stay on your site, they're going to purchase, but if somebody is just trying to buy something that is more of a commodity, and I'm not suggesting a shoe can't be a commodity but look, I play basketball, and I have a basketball shoe that I really like and there's different brands that I know fit my foot better. I have a brand affinity for those and I'm going to go use those brands. It doesn't matter how much the other brands are spending on their superstars to promote their shoes. That doesn't really matter to me. What matters to me is okay, was my foot comfortable in those shoes? It's a little bit of a different type of approach. I don't need to go to a marketplace. I need to go to the specific brand I know fits me well and I'm going to go there, see what colors they have, what styles they have and buy that. RYAN: Okay, helpful. Is there a time in the business lifecycle outside of traffic? Where does it make sense to start doing some conversion optimization? Like if I just launched a brand, it may not make sense yet to do full-blown, maybe some Hot Jar stuff, but where do you set those different things like okay, do some of your own at this stage, find some help at this stage, and oh, you need full-blown CRO agency at this stage? JON: I would say that, again, going back to visitors to your site, you need to have some traffic to your site before it even really matters to do optimization. Get yourself 10,000 visitors a month through driving some traffic, that proves it's not a product problem because no matter what, conversion optimization of your site, it's not going to help if you have a product problem. What does that mean? Well, if nobody wants your product, nobody knows about your product, your product isn't solving an actual pain or need, then it's not going to sell and it doesn't really matter at that point. Prove out your product first and get to about 10,000 visitors a month. That means that there is a need out there that people have found it and that you can successfully drive traffic through either free or paid channels. Earned or paid. The way that I look at that is between 10,000 and 40,000 visitors per month. You really should just get a list of things to change on your site. I'm not suggesting a checklist. I'm suggesting, go get an assessment from somebody who's an expert in conversion optimization. RYAN: Like Jon. [laughter] JON: Yes. I will happily do that, and really go in there and get one or two pieces of data, be it heat maps or et cetera, and make some decisions based on that data, and then just make those changes. Don't test them, just make them because they're probably at that stage where you would see a bump from just doing that. Now that you've got your return on ad spend high and you're starting to actually convert at a higher level because of those assessment changes, you should start to be comfortable spending more money and seeing a return on that ad spend, setting some goals around traffic and generation and what the revenue should be off of that. At that point, you should be able to get to 40,000 visitors. Now, it starts to make sense to do more of a tailored program where on a monthly basis, you are running multivariate or A/B tests on your site, you're starting to see a return on that, you're continuing to accelerate month over month. At that point, you will see a much bigger gain over time. RYAN: Got it. I think one thing that people also need to realize or get their mind around is something that was foreign to me before I started working with you and seeing the results of conversion optimization, but before Jon and I kind of like the pre-J arena of my life, my vision of CRO was like I spend a couple months in the site, get conversion rates up, go make a bunch more money, then maybe revisited a year or two later, get this conversion rates back up again, but that's in reality not at all what your clients are doing. They have line items of commercial optimization and their budget, and they are paying you every month and seeing phenomenal gains consistently. You've had clients for years upon years. We've shared a few clients for probably three or four years still, and it's still going. Explain that to a lot of people and how they can start reframing and understanding what a regular constant conversion rate optimization program looks like and why they should be considering that type of process for their business? JON: Yes. The best way I can describe this as liking it to here in the United States, we have a retirement account called a 401(k). Typically, what happens is your employer takes a few dollars out of your paycheck every month, you decide how much you want to put into it, and then that goes into an account that continues to grow and compounds over time. Somebody once told me that if I put $10,000 into my 401(k) when I'm 21, that would be like putting $400,000 in when I'm 40 because it just sits there and grows and compounds over time. It's the exact same thing with conversion optimization where if you just make some changes here and there, then come back to it a year later, you're missing out on that compounding effect. You're leaving a lot of revenue on the table, a lot of customers, a lot of conversions over that time. The second thing to be thinking about here is that customer actions are always changing. E-commerce is always changing. Your products are always changing. If you're a big enough brand that's doing this for years and years and years, you're coming out with new products, you're changing your product lines, you really need to understand how people are finding those products, what they're engaging with, et cetera. In addition to that, I hear this all the time, it's like Jon, how long should I expect to do conversion optimization? The reality is it does need to be a line item, it is something you should always be doing. Now, I will tell you, you will never run out of things to test. Where you need to make the decision about whether or not you keep going is whether or not you're continuing to get a return on investment from that spent. That goes back to having the right goals and tracking the return on investment that you're seeing from your conversion optimization activities. You should be getting a return on investment that continues to thrive over time. It may ever flow over the course of a year and seasonality et cetera, but in the end, you should be seen at least a 4:1. We see about an average of a 9:1 return on investment so for every dollar that you give the good, our goal is to get you $9 back in additional revenue. RYAN: That's great. JON: That's one of the highest marketing returns on investment activities that you can do. RYAN: Now, I think there's not many e-commerce businesses that I know of or that we work with that wouldn't be excited about a 9:1 consistently. As we're winding up now, the question that always comes up with CRO is probably one of the worst questions to ask you, but I have to. What's a good conversion rate? JON: Haha. I know this. I get this question daily. Hundreds of times a day. Look, here's the reality. I mentioned this earlier. It does not matter what your competition's conversion rate even is. I get that question all the time. "Hey, I think that our competition is converting a lot higher than us, I want to get up to that rate." Look, it doesn't matter. A good conversion rate is one that is always improving. That's all you should care about, is just continually making that small investment into your conversion rate so that it compounds over time, and you will see sustainable growth in doing that. If you're just looking for that once a year pop, I can tell you how to do that. Just go discount your products heavily. RYAN: [laughs] It's like the best conversion optimization right there. Just you get a 50% off sale. JON: Yes. The reality is that's not conversion optimization in terms of how I would define it, but you will get your conversion rate up. It's one of those things where if you really want to do this, you really need to be thinking about sustainable business over a longer-term. That means investing in it month over month, looking for small incremental gains, and just tracking all of these metrics we've talked about today, in whole, and then looking at that and saying, okay, our overall conversion rate is going up, yes, but there's also a ton of other metrics that are really important here. I think that's where if I see a lot of econ managers fail to sell CRO services through to the higher management, and maybe somebody sign off on a full budget, it's because they only focus on saying, hey, we're going to just improve the conversion rate. Instead of saying, look, there are four or five metrics that really matter to our e-commerce business, and yes, they ultimately gather and combined to improve your conversion rate, overall, but all of these other metrics matter just as much, because if we're not doing those metrics, then we're never going to actually convert the person in the end. RYAN: I think that's extremely important and good point there to finish up. As you mentioned, people should be starting their CRO in assessment. Funny enough, you actually do those for a lot of companies. What's the best way to get in contact with you for an assessment if they want to take that first step in CRO? JON: For those brands under 40,000, we have what we call our conversion growth assessment. That is basically gathering a couple of points of data and telling you exactly what you should change on your site based on our experience and looking at that data, and we'll help you bring those insights to the table. If you have over 40,000 visitors, we do a more comprehensive conversion audit. This is something where we spend about a month doing this audit. We're going to help you make sure you're tracking all that right data, get some great baselines, talk to all of your consumers, do that user testing, we're going to go real, real deep to help you track every click and movement on your site. Then we're going to put together a huge report, 60 to 100 pages, and we're going to tell you, not only what you should change, but how you should do ongoing testing to continue to see that compounding growth over time. All of that you can find on our site @thegood.com. RYAN: Fantastic. All right. If you need some help, or you want to take some steps in CRO, make sure you reach out to Jon and have him take things over and look at your site, and give you some feedback, but set some goals, make them appropriate CRO goals and let's have some fun doing it. JON: Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. This is fun to talk about it. RYAN: Thank you, Jon.

Ryan Daniel Moran was a preacher-in-training turned entrepreneur. He moved to Austin with little to nothing to his him name, and launched Amazon businesses that he eventually sold for over 8 figures. Ryan did us all a solid – really – by documenting and sharing his journey. The Freedom Fast Lane Podcast helps entrepreneurs at every stage of their business, from startup to exit. In this interview, Ryan shares his top three “mistakes”, or as discussed, things he wishes he did differently as he looks back. He openly shares his story and journey, in the hopes that other entrepreneurs do things to maximize the value of their business (and life). Through Ryan's conference, Capitalism.com, he helps bring like minded entrepreneurs and experts in the ecommerce space together to build brands and businesses that last. While he may be a preacher-school-dropout, Ryan still has a way of delivering the goods when it comes to advocating doing the right thing…so good things follow. Episode Highlights: [1:25] Who is Ryan Daniel Moran? [4:38] Is it better to buy or build? [6:43] Ryan thinks we're in a “seller's market” [8:05] What are Ryan's “mistakes” and what would he do differently. [11:30] Does it matter if you like your buyer? Does likability matter? [13:52] The likable buyer story…who won out over an all cash buyer. [15:12] Mistake # 1 – playing the short term. [17:25] Mistake #2 – telling people what to do and diminishing their talent. [18:51] Ryan shares his staffing team numbers. Inhouse and remote. [20:06] Mistake #3 – Ryan wishes he spent more money on advertising, customer acquisition, and brand building. [22:51] Why is a 100% Amazon business worth less than a Shopify store? [24:00] What channels would Ryan expand to – beyond Amazon.com [25:30] The first “nut you have to crack” [27:02] Ryan disagrees with Joe! [30:40] Brands last, product businesses don't. [31:06] Should you be thinking about a possible exit at all times? [33:05] What gives Ryan the “goosies”. Ok…he didn't say goosies, that was JLo. [33:58] Know what you will do with your money before you sell! [36:10] Should you plan your next brand before you sell, or stay focused? [39:29] How do you get more Ryan Daniel Moran Transcription: Mark: So if I could go back in time I would do a number of things different than I did in my entrepreneurial past especially before I sold my first company. And I have told you the story before that when I sold my first company I sold it for $165,000 only to find out that a year later the same person who bought the company got an offer for 350,000 without changing anything about the business at all. So … and there's a lot of regrets I have by not going back in time obviously I think anybody would like to have that ability. Joe: I'm glad it's that instead of saying you're bringing me on as a business partner. Mark: Well, you're here so I can't … I might not say that to your face. Only when you're on vacation and I have somebody else filling in as guest host. Joe: Well, Jason doesn't listen to the podcast, let's talk about him. Mark: Right. Exactly. Joe: Conversation … no regrets there. Yes and Daniel Ryan Moran was our guest and he talked about some of the regrets or as we called the mistakes because that's how he learns in life as many of us do by making mistakes and in trying not to make them over again. Fascinating … fascinating yes they're our podcast today Mark. I don't know if you recall … if you were there for his presentation at Smart Record over the last summer in Austin but he got up on stage and he spoke for 60 minutes with no script, no PowerPoint presentation and everybody was captivated. And the information that he has in it … volume of entrepreneurs that he works with and the velocities, and the approach, and everything about the way he does business and the way he literally … I mean not literally, preaches business. Okay, he's a … he was going to be a preacher so I want to say preacher school dropout. He chose to be an entrepreneur instead but the way that he talks about things is spot on with the way that we see the most successful entrepreneurs run their businesses. They focus on a number of different things and they implement those and maybe someday if they choose to exit they're in a great position to do so. Ryan talks about all of that including his own two exits that combined totaled over eight figures. Mark: Daniel Ryan Moran, same Moran that comes from Freedom Fast Lane right? Joe: Freedom Fast Lane Podcast where he talks about his story. You know five years ago he had a car and he drove to Austin, Texas and he decided he was going to launch an Amazon business and record his journey. And his journey is not over yet. It's on a new adventure, a different larger adventure but his journey kind of came to a new chapter after selling the last Amazon business that he had. But he talks about it all the way through on the Freedom Fast Lane Podcast. He got tired of seeing people do things the wrong way and learned ways to cheat at conferences and started to do his own conferences through capitalism.com and bringing good like-minded people together that build strong foundation long term value businesses and he talked about all of that today. Mark: Fantastic I can't wait to hear it. Let's go to it. Joe: Hey, folks, it's Joe Valley from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got somebody that a lot of you might know already. His name is Ryan Daniel Moran. Ryan, welcome to the show. Ryan: Joe thanks about having me in, let's make some magic. Joe: Listen I was having a barbecue last night we had some friends over and this is an absolute true story and one of them is an entrepreneur wannabe. She's in the corporate world and she bought some Amazon products and she tried something and it didn't work but she's going to go at it again someday and she's grilling me … she always asked me how things are with Quiet Light Brokerage and she starts asking about the podcast. I said yeah we're doing all right and hey have you ever talked to Ryan Daniel Moran just like that and here you are today we're talking to you. You're kind of a little celebrity I should say … little, you're kind of a celebrity; a rock star maybe for this … look it was a 50 year old woman. She's rather attractive and she knows who you are. Ryan: Well you know it's like my ideal market is attractive 50 year old women. We all know that that's the market I'm after right now. So tell her to give me a … maybe call me maybe. Joe: She loves listening and the fact that you're first and foremost helping people that's what she loves about it. She says someday she's going to get back to it but she loves listening and she's going to take that leap at some point in the future so good for you. And listen as I said prior to the intro we don't do fancy intros. So if you would … I know it's hard to talk about yourself but give folks a little bit of background about yourself; who you are, where you came from, and what you're all about. Ryan: Yeah. I invest in and I start physical products brands. And the way that I got to that point was actually as a pastoral student back in 2006. I built my first website and started my first business in between high school and college on my shared dial-up computer in my living room and hand coded websites using raw HTML in a software program called Dreamweaver. If you are old enough to remember Dreamweaver and you know it well. So what's funny is we hear a lot of people who are talking about building and … or selling businesses thinking about the good old or either like all the opportunity is gone now or the good old days have these … man, I was hand coding websites in Dreamweaver on a dial up computer. Do you realize how much more opportunity we have now being able to build websites on platforms and sell products on Amazon? So the opportunities are way way bigger now but I was just trying to find a way to supplement my … what I expected to be $30,000 a year salary as a pastor. Now fast forward a few years I did not finish the pastoral route for reasons that would be probably best left on a second podcast that you have Joe that's going to be called quiet skepticism. Joe: Yeah, some kind of … something where we're helping people, we're guiding them off that path right. Ryan: Exactly; quiet go to the light we'll call it. And I did not finish that route and I became a full time entrepreneur. So I was in really involved in the internet marketing space for many years until I really decided or realized I hated that crowd. I didn't like hanging out with those people. So I was like what a conference where those people hung out and I took the skill set that I had from Search Engine Optimization from Pay-Per-Click Marketing from Email Copyrighting and I applied it to physical products brands. And I've had a couple of different exits in the physical products world and now I'm an investor in physical products businesses because it's what I know. It's who I can help the most. And I think it's one of the biggest upside is in the market right now whether you are selling or building a business or buying a business, I think there's a tremendous amount of white space with the transition from big brands into more what I call micro brands mostly Internet based that's where I see the biggest opportunities right now. So that's a … I've had a couple of exits and the total over billed were eight figures in cash exchange. I still own a minority stake in a few of those businesses and have a portfolio business but my primary focus is investing in physical products brands and I have a media company for entrepreneurs at capitalism.com. Joe: Okay, so when it comes to investing people look at buy versus build. In fact, we had a podcast recently with our newest broker Walker Diebel who wrote about a book called Buy Versus Build and there's a really long subtitle and it was a … it quickly rocketed to the top 10 podcasts that we have. And you're talking about investing, do you think it's better to buy versus build at this point in your career or would you recommend somebody that's just starting out to scrape some dollars together and bootstrap something and start? Ryan: Yeah, it's better for me to invest but it wasn't better for me five years ago. In 2013 when I took my first sale on Amazon.com for a physical product I know business investing in physical product brands. I know businesses buying physical products brands now … back then I was buying a lot of websites. And you know what I was buying Joe? I was buying search engine friendly websites with email lists … social media followings weren't this big back then, but with audiences, followings targeting each market that sold affiliate products; because that was what I knew. Joe: That's what you knew. Ryan: I would have been a lot of people who are like looking for the system and that you are the system. You are the machine. And your machine is unique to you. So applying your machine to different opportunities is where value is created. So for me, I'm … at this point, I have more upside as an investor because I already have all the retail connections. I have the connections to sell businesses. I'm connected to other investors. That's my own skill set but the entrepreneur who I invest in is way better suited to start that company than I am and that's what capitalism is. Where I get the value that I bring in combination of the value that you bring and when we bring them together it's greater than the sum of our arts. And so for me yeah I'm … I have more value as an investor but to say like it's better I think would be a mistake. Joe: You know I think you're absolutely right. It depends upon the individual's situation without a doubt. I bought and I've sold and I've invested as well and I can say each were successful in their own way and each were very very difficult in their own ways as well. You'll learn along the way from the mistakes mostly. Ryan: If I could Joe I will add though, I mean globally I think we're in a seller's market. I think we're looking at buying versus selling if I give it a binary choice I do think we're in a seller's market right now. Joe: I have to agree with you 100%. When we have a good quality listing come … I had a conversation with someone this morning who wants to buy. And he's a referral from somebody who already bought and this guy is doing great so I want to do what he's doing. And the response is look when a great listing comes along you need to be prepared. So the more listings you look at the more you're going to know the right shit when it comes along. And you need to be able to act fast because you and a dozen other people are doing the same thing and they're going to make an offer on that business. So I agree it's a seller's market but at the same time, the multiple still don't get pushed too high. It's still the buyer to decide that. You and I as sellers, as brokers can pick whatever number we think the value of the business is but we don't make the final decision at the end it's usually the buyer. The seller's got a lot to say about it because they can say yes or no. But it's still the buyer makes the decision in terms of the value for the most part. But you just recently said you've exited a couple of different times in the last few years. What did you learn in that process if you look at the exit? Or maybe do you want to talk about the fact … the mistakes you made maybe building and what you can do to help the entrepreneurs that are listening or perhaps the exit and maybe a little bit of both. Ryan: Yeah well, there's one thing in particular that I think was on the stake if you will and it was thinking that the buyer had all of the control. By the way, this is C money right here or by a … my … he is the one who wants to make great on the Internet. Joe: For those listening and not watching somebody just walked into the background. Ryan: Yeah, so the mistake that I made was thinking that the buyer had all of the control. And if I could redo this Joe, the truth is if you built something, if you built a business you're the one with the asset. You're the one with the goods that money is chasing you, people want to buy you and so often the seller comes into market and is like the thing that I'm after is the check and I'm hoping that I get the check and that immediately puts you in the frame in which you're the after. You're the one who is not in the power position. So we share them with an offer and the seller is like thank you please oh please Mr. Money Pants I would like your money. And now they're in a position to beat you up over earnings, over … in the negotiations. So what I wish I had done was recognize the fact that I'm the one with the goods. I'm the one with the asset that people want. I'm the one courting the offers. People are making offers to me. There they want one I got not the other way around. So if you're in that position and you're willing to say no and you combine that with the turn ship that says here's what I'm looking for, that to me puts the seller in the frame of mind repair and the negotiating position. I didn't do that. I discovered that after the fact and I really could only have learned that by going through the process. I learned … I personally learned by making mistakes and paying for them later. Joe: We all do. Ryan: Yeah but that's a mistake that I wish somebody had told me before I went to market. Joe: Or is it … the buyer that you're referring to is it a strategic buyer or did you have your business officially listed and people came to you? Ryan: Yeah, we had it listed and we were acquired by an equity group. I still own a minority stake in that company and I'm in great terms with the equity group. I'm really happy with the buyer. I have become friends and obviously business partners at this point. But had I gone to the market with terms that I wanted I probably would have ended up in a more favorable financial position when it came to closing. Joe: Well, the next time you have a transaction you'll know that and you'll be able to make adjustments. Ryan: Right. Joe: Really I think like you said the check isn't the end all, it's more about … I think almost in many ways what your next adventure is going to be. I know that a lot of folks that I work with and myself included when I exited I was just … I sold too late. I was emotionally tired and I think that's the absolute wrong time to sell. You should sell … you should plan to sell, just don't wake up and decide to sell. But when you're emotionally tired you're not doing everything that you can to maximize the profits of the business and that's going to drive down the value. And you're going to get beat up at the end if you're so committed to that check that you can't negotiate a little bit more for something else and be willing to walk away from that buyer if they're if they're not a good buyer. And correct me if I'm wrong but just tell me how you think here, I always find that it makes an enormous difference if you like the person that's buying your business or the one … if you're buying a business from. It's not just about the check. It's not just about the money. It's the people you're doing business with. And I think that as a seller you can get more value if you're respected and professional and likable and the same as a buyer, if you're a buyer and you're professional and likable and complement the owner on the business that they built that you're going to get a better transaction out of it versus all the hard core raw street negotiations. What are your thoughts on that? Ryan: I don't know if you are right or wrong because I intentionally don't do business with people that I don't like. [crosstalk 00:15:45.7] Joe: So, therefore, anybody that wants to buy a business from you if you don't like them then you've got to do that to work with somebody you like. A classic- Ryan: I don't think everybody has that mentality though. I think I would even go as far as to say the majority of people are buying and selling based on numbers or like the deal and very few entrepreneurs get to find every purchase as a person. And so I think most people are approaching it by numbers and logically rather than is there a connection here. I personally … just like for the protection of my own lifestyle am willing to say no to anything that I personally don't like. And what that does is it always puts me in a strong negotiating position because if I don't like somebody I have no problem walking away. And the person who has … the person who is most willing to walk usually has the upper hand in the negotiation. Joe: I agree 100%. I find that from a buyer's perspective one of the questions I get a lot from buyers if I'm up on a panel or speaking or something like this is how do I negotiate up against an all cash buyer, somebody that's got more money than me? And the tried and true answer is really is be likeable. It's … you don't necessarily have to have more cash to get the deal done and I … the classic example is I sold a business last fall. It was about two and a $2.5M and the guy had two full price offers within the first 10 days. One was from an all cash buyer who was a little rough around the edges and was hard to work with. The other was from a really likable guy who was buying with an SBA loan and actually required 10% seller financing in that. The entrepreneur, the seller of this business had the choice; you could go for the all cash or you can go for the guy that he liked. He actually chose the full price SBA buyer and chose to carry a 10% seller note versus working with somebody that he didn't like. So in that situation, I think it makes a difference in terms of … buyers that are listening be likable. If you're working with a broker you absolutely have to be likeable because they're … as you said it's more of a seller's market. And there's a lot of buyers out there. There are buyers that are competing for that same business and when they're likeable they're going to build rapport and when you build rapport you sometimes learn about things before they hit the market as well. Ryan, talk to me about some of the mistakes you've made in your own business. Maybe two or three of the biggest mistakes that comes up at the top of your head. Looking back and learning damn I screwed that up if I ever do that again I'm going to it a different way. Ryan: Well, every time I've made a mistake it was because I was playing the short term. So when I have made short term decisions I usually make bad decisions. I like to say that the longer term that I can make decisions the wiser I am and the better decisions that I make. I said before that people forget that behind every purchase is a person … that goes for customers too and all relationships are long term relationships. Or the best relationships are long term relationships. So if you are aware that behind every transaction is a person and you play it like it's a long term relationship you end up building the better company. Sometimes in spite of a short term decision, meaning … for example as we're recording this there's a … in the Amazon there's a thing we're calling review gate where Amazon is coming in and hit them onto your businesses and removing their reviews. And it's been a bloodbath. It's been absolute bloodbath. And the people who are soaring through it are people who have been doing of the right things the right way for the longest. And the people who are being hurt the most are the people who are the most profitable over the last couple years because they played the tactic game. And like there's absolutely room for tactics inside of every business but those who have been building really solid brands and building audiences and building followings they're going to soar right through this and capture a whole heck of a lot of market share. So the mistakes that I made were always in saying what's the Band-Aid solution here rather than building for the long term. So we take a rule now in the business that we're building, we say okay here's the situation that we're in rather than talk about how we're going to fix it let's say what do we wish we had started doing 90 days ago and that would have made today a lot easier to get through? That's the decision that we need to make today which is a really hard conversation to have when you're in reaction mode. But we force ourselves to ask that question because it usually addresses whatever the root cause is that we need to fix rather than going for a Band-Aid solution. So that being mistake number one, mistake number two would be as a leader telling people what to do. There's a great book called Multipliers that really morphed my brain in terms of how I can affect [inaudible 00:20:52.9] people. And what I realize after reading that book was that I have been diminishing the talents on my teams by telling people what I wanted them to do rather than casting a vision and inviting people to build their piece of that. Now that seems kind of a nuance and maybe overly simplistic but I couldn't emphasize enough the accountability that this book brought me on how much I was diminishing the people that I was working with, And the difference in energy and growth that happened once I started correcting those issues. So as an entrepreneur, we often have like our baby that we're bringing in to our team and we're telling people how to build the baby when reality if we're working with smart people they'll probably own that area of expertise better than we can even if we can't see it. And the big distinction of that book highlights is someone who diminishes their team is usually the smartest person in the room but a real leader makes the rest of the team like they're the smartest person in the room. And that was a huge shift in my overall happiness and with the growth of my companies and it's something that I wished that I had done before I was building companies to sell them. Joe: What kind of staffing do you have just out of curiosity? Ryan: Well, the company that I just exited was a team of four. The portfolio of companies … of brands that I have is a team of five. And my media company capitalism.com is a team of six. Joe: And are all of those people in-house or do you do some … or the VA's are they working remotely or they come to the office every day? Ryan: I'm only counting in-house people so that does not count freelancers. But no not everybody … we have … there's, we are a distributed team. So like I'm recording this in my office right now, one of my team members is just right here my side. But people will come in and out. Some people … like we have a team member in Canada, we have a team member in Germany, but they're all full time dedicated to [inaudible 00:22:47.0]. Joe: Good. I asked that because you know most people that are listening would probably be considered lifestyle entrepreneurs and they have to outsource staff and VA's and people working remotely. So it's good to know that even though they're not coming into your office every day this is really important [inaudible 00:23:02.3] get their short term vision don't have that long term vision so that you don't have major major stomach aches with algorithm updates we'll review gates in that situation and then over managing of the staff you know let them be their experts; anything else that comes to mind? Ryan: As far as big mistakes that I've made … I mean we talked about the mistake in selling and as far as building the business I'll say I wished that I had spent more money on cold advertising. Like always like there's never been a business that was like ah you know I think I spent too much on advertising. I've only ever said I wish I'd spent more on advertising. Joe: Yeah, where would you have spent it because these are primarily Amazon based businesses correct? Ryan: The businesses that I personally built, yes. Joe: Right. So where would you spend that money? Ryan: So we just identified the problem because you said they were mostly Amazon based businesses so had I done things even better I would have doubled down on non-Amazon advertising. Because what … if you're an Amazon business which is like nails on a chalkboard to me because it means you're dependent on somebody else. Joe: Right. Ryan: It means that you're dependent on this channel and you've got to go double down on building a business has a different leg to the stool and that when you combine those things together magic can happen. If you've got an email list of 100,000 people that you've built from cold advertising or from buying tripwires and now you're combining that with the power of something like Amazon.com that's really really powerful. Most physical products sellers never make that [inaudible 00:24:32.6] or they get so myopic into one channel that they never spend the money and the time to go develop the advertising for another channel. I wish I had been comfortable losing my rear end on other advertising channels until I figured out those systems. It's interesting Joe, it's true that every channel you will lose for a while and then you figure out the systems and then you start to grow through it and you get profitable. The strange thing is that most people once they've figured it out and get profitable they're unwilling to go do that hard work in another area. So the way that Amazon worked in 2013, '14, and '15 was if you spend until you grab long enough you could outrank everybody else and go win but I never … I lost that hustle when it came down to Facebook Ads or influencers and people start looking for the immediate ROI. In what business is there immediate ROI? When you're building a long term brand that has sales potential … like buyers are buying the systems; they're buying profitable systems because you've already gone through that hard work of developing the systems that are profitable. But it requires you to go build them so I wish I had spent more on advertising, been more willing to lay it on the line, rolled more back into reinvestment. So I'll call that mistake number three. Joe: So for buyers and sellers that are listening, entrepreneurs that are listening it's that one legged stool, two legged stool, three legged stool. If you're 100% Amazon business it's riskier than if you also have a revenue channel from Google Ad Words and driving traffic to your Shopify store and you might be doing wholesale or B2B things of that nature but right away as I've said before if you've got a business that's just at within $100,000 in discretionary earnings that's 100% Amazon same business $100,000 in discretionary earnings but you've got 60% Amazon, 25% Shopify, I guess that would be 15% percent [inaudible 00:26:36.4] my math here, another percent of B2B that business on the other side is going to be worth 15 to 20% more. So you might be breaking even or losing a little bit of money on that land grab trying to grab more customers but if you can turn that into even the same discretionary earnings that business automatically is going to be worth 15 to 20% more because the buyers will pay more for a risk averse business that'll be around for the longer term so very very good advice. What channel would you go to first? Because there are so many options these days and building a channel off of Amazon is hard as you know. You've got to learn a whole new expertise. Where would you go first and what do most of your successful folks do? Ryan: Yeah and I'm actually going to cue on very creatively sidestepped this question because the obvious is Amazon. But where I would suggest is actually people double down on where the audience is. To me, this is the nut has to be cracked if their building a sellable company. And what that means to me it is for some people their audience hangs out following influencers. For other people that is they follow blogs or they have a blog where the audiences are already hanging out. Or some people they've got a Facebook where there's an audience. Now what most businesses, especially like a million dollar businesses, are doing is they're going channel first and trying to extract as much of it as possible. Like I'm going to go to Amazon try to rank and pull as much out of this pie as possible. Only a few people can win that game but if you switch it and you say where are my people who is the ideal buyer and where are they then the channel where you collect the order can always change. And that makes Shopify, Amazon, B2B a whole lot easier. The first nut that you have to crack isn't where the buyers hang out apart from the sales transaction and then you bring those buyers to the transaction. So the transaction to me … Amazon, easy no question. Put your product on Amazon the credit card is already there, people are already looking for it. No question, easy, done. The nut that needs to be cracked is what happens one step before that. And if there is … like if you don't have the influence, the list, the following, the traffic, the pay-per-click strategy that some way to go get those people and bring them into your ecosystem I think you are struggling from the get go and that's the primary question that I ask the entrepreneur. Joe: Yeah and I think depending upon as you say the product and what they're offering some of those different channels will make more sense. You know I had a conversation with someone this morning that has several brands and one brand has incredible numbers with email marketing and that same expertise applied to that different brand doesn't do as well. Ryan: Right. Joe: They're driving people to their Shopify store though Amazon keeps growing and out phasing everything else. So I understand identify where your customers hang out and then you've got to go find those customers. To own that list though you need to send them to your own store, not to Amazon. So are you sort of balancing between sending them to Amazon because it's all there or? Ryan: No, I just disagree. So I think that the loyalty to the brand is the customer experience. And you give the customer the ability to give you money wherever they are most comfortable making the purchase. I heard Brian Lee say where it's … Brian Lee is the founder of the Honest Company, the billion dollar brand with Jessica Alba, and I heard him say once that he considers it a win when the product is in the customer's home. That's when you've wo, not collecting it online e-commerce site, not getting into retail. It's when the product is in the customer's home. However, they get it and you want to release as little friction as possible getting the product into the customer's home. You will own the customer experience when you have their data. You have the ability to communicate a message in front of them. So if you've got the email list and you send them over to Amazon, Amazon rewards that and your conversion rate is probably going to be higher sending them to Amazon that sending them to your Shopify store. So there's a balance [inaudible 00:31:12.7] I know that I can get a higher immediate customer value sending them to my own web site because I can put them through upsells and cross sells to get their immediate data versus sending them to Amazon where I am going to have to work to get their data. I don't have any upsell experience. They might see a negative review. And so the entrepreneur is going to have to play the game of where the numbers make the most sense over the long term. But I think that the actual customer experience happens in when you communicate with them. And that's in the email message, that's in the outside of just a transaction, not just where their credit card is being added but words being communicated. Joe: Okay, I get and I'm just going to repeat it for those that are … well not smarter than me; let's put it that way. So it's capturing the customer information up front, building that relationship with them, and then simply send them to the place that they can buy the product and experience the brand with the least amount of friction and get it in their home. Ryan: Nailed it. Joe: Okay. Ryan: That's my opinion. Joe: And it all goes back I would say and it's kind of almost unspoken that the brand has to be pretty amazing so focus on that first. Build a great product, a great brand so they have a great experience and then do all that other stuff as well. Ryan: Yeah and let me address that because that often brings up the question how do I identify a brand? Like what exactly is the brand. And the brand is the way that trust is communicated to a very specific customer. Most Amazon sellers have no idea over their customers they know what their product is. If you know what you sell and not who you sell to you do not have a brand. Or you might have a brand but it's really lousy whereas if you know who the person is, it makes the product really really easy. I was just meeting with one of my team members today; we were expressing the frustration over one of our brands in our portfolio. Because when we acquired it, it sold a lot of product but it had no target market. And so we've had to do a lot of work to convert that brand into an actual brand where people are not just buying a product but they're buying something and it says about them sells. Those businesses last, product businesses don't because they're commodities. You forget about commodities and the minute that there's a better price or better customer experience their loyalty changes. But when you've got the brand people are very stingy with their trust. I want to give it to you, you have them for as long as you keep their trust. Joe: Very important message right there. Ryan, any thoughts in terms of whether someone should be building this business and always think about the future and possible exits; do you try to instill in them that they should know the value of their business in the event they wake up some day and want to move on or do you just focus on building that brand and when you're ready the time will come? Ryan: You know the real … the temptation for me is to say that no, you shouldn't be necessarily thinking about selling but I know that I'm in a different spot than everyone who's listening. So I would say if you are building this to make money, be building it to sell from day one. Because the very act of being in it for the money means that you will burn out, you will wake up and want to do something else. It's going to happen. So if that … and like let's just be real about it, if you're in it because of the payday, build it to sell because that's what you're in it for and the payday is the cherry at the end of the rainbow here. If you were in it because you've got a product you want to bring to the world then still develop the systems and processes that will keep you in the position to be in your zone of genius. And that will make you more sellable one day but I don't think it's necessary for you to know what it's worth or be making decisions based on that. So these are different goals. Now I build companies that I'm excited about and I am building them in the same way that we make something valuable because I want to be in a position where I'm just in my zone of genius. But it's a different mindset than if I'm building something because it's going to be profitable. Does that make sense Joe? Joe: Absolutely; excellent …excellent. Hey listen I know we're running out of time here I just want to say that last summer I was at the stock market conference and you got up and you spoke as did another dozen or so very very successful entrepreneurs. Each and every one of them had a PowerPoint presentation. You got up there with nothing. And you talked for an hour and the audience was captivated as was I. You have a gift thank you for sharing it. I appreciate it. Ryan: I just got goose bumps. Thank you so much, mate. I really appreciate it. Joe: How do more people get to experience that and listen to you and hear what you do share? Ryan: You know I'd love to answer that question, can I offer one more piece of advice before we go? Joe: You can offer a dozen more pieces of advice. Ryan: Wow, awesome. I'll leave it to one but if you are in this to please have a plan of what you're going to do with the money when you get it. Entrepreneurs are magicians. We remake things up here on thin air. We create value out of thin air. We create a bigger pie. We make money show up. And we also make things disappear. Joe: Isn't that true? Ryan: And if you do not have a plan of what you're going to do with the money it will slip through your fingers. I know you think you're the exception. I know you think all I have to do is invest this at 8% and I'm [inaudible 00:37:11.5]. I know you think that's how it's going to be. You will ball the money. I … right now I just heard you think “no I won't”, yes you will. So if you don't have a net for catching the money and allocating the money for your lifestyle you will be back in the grind very very quickly. I promise you, I know you don't believe me. I'm here to tell you that's the case. Have a plan for what to do with the money once you get the money. It's actually my favorite conversation to have. At some point, I'll probably have more chops [inaudible 00:37:45.3] about investing once you have a big windfall. But for now, it's like have a plan like a plan is better than no plan. And that plan would probably be best done after you sat on the money for about six months and you've gotten used to that money being in the bank account. Your second question or actually your only question was- Joe: Can I interrupt that? Ryan: Please. Joe: I definitely want to get to that but in terms of having the plan to exit, I'm always telling people look have your next adventure planned. Because entrepreneurs like you say they blow through the money, it goes through their hands like saying. I'm often saying maybe get that other opportunity started and launched long as it's not competing to get the ball rolling. So that you got some working capital maybe you're going to put it in … some of it you're not as bootstrapped although you'll be more successful probably if you are. Do you think maybe they should 100% focus on what they're doing on that brand before they sell it up until the day they sell or maybe when it gets big enough and good enough and they've done enough right they can take some of their attention and start Brand B while they're selling off Brand A? Ryan: Wow, Joe. The reason I'm saying wow is because my experience is pretty unique and that was I took about a week off and then I immediately went back to workaholism and it was the worst. It was a horrible experience. Now full disclose like at the same time I was going through separation and I'm going through a lot life changes. I threw myself into work right after the sale. I celebrated by reading books on my patio for like eight days and I was immediately back to workaholism. And I like … I roasted my body, I mean I so needed a break and I did not give myself that break. I don't know if every entrepreneur was as burnt out as I was. I was more burnt out than I [inaudible 00:39:40.5]. Joe: Most ideal [inaudible 00:39:42.8] they come to me tired, exhausted, ready to move on. Ryan: Joe, it's been over a year. I wouldn't even say I'm back now. You know I'm probably operating at 75% of capacity because I never really recovered. So should you go right back into it? I don't know. I think it depends on the level you're at and your own wiring. I make really good decisions when I'm relaxed and creative. I make terrible short term decisions when I'm stressed. And when I'm in that workaholic mode I'm a terrible entrepreneur. I wish I had just blissed out for like three months; I didn't. Joe: I don't know what the folks that listen to you every week would do if you would disappear for three months though. Ryan: Well here's the thing though Joe. I kind of did. Like my podcast sucked for like three months, three to six months and I was trying … like I'm sitting in front of mic trying to come up with things to say and I was uncreative as heck. So I sort of did disappear it was just a different way. And now I'm getting back to it and it's a completely different experience. But I actually think I did my listeners a disservice by not taking a break. And if have been just really upfront and be like guys I just got an eight figure check I am going to the beach and I will call you when I'm ready. My audience would've popped but instead, I was like operating from this place of like I'm so … oh my goodness I'm so tired and I turned off a lot of people. I know it's not the answer that you expected it's not the answer I expected to give you. Joe: No, I like it. Ryan: But I think it's true. Joe: I think sleep and rest and meditation or whatever it is to focus on is absolutely necessary. So back to that original question and you know finding out what they do with the money after they sell. How do they get more of Ryan Daniel Moran? How do they experience what that audience down at Smart Market and myself experienced where you just talked and everybody listened and took notes and all that? Ryan: Well, thanks so much, man, my media company is capitalism.com. My podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane. And I say things into a microphone and we hold events at capitalism.com that are specifically for entrepreneurs. And we're actually … we just rebooted the Freedom Fast Lane podcast. I feel as though- Joe: With fresh energy. Ryan: What's that? Joe: With fresh energy right? Ryan: Well yeah, I think you'd probably feel it from me. Five years ago I started this journey as a boy and I was … I just put everything I owned into my car, drove to Austin, Texas, started some new companies, I documented the whole experience from startup to sale. And then I kind of grew up while documenting the journey. And now there's a new journey and it's a much bigger one and so we just rebooted kind of the entire audience, the whole experience in the podcast. And my podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane. My company is capitalism.com. Joe: Okay. Well, I'll make sure those are in the show notes. I'd love to see you be more successful on this new adventure, this bigger journey. Ryan: Thank you. Joe: Let's stay in touch. I think I may see you at the capitalism conference at the end of August; let's see. At the very least we'll be to as many as we can be over the next few years. Ryan: Good to see you man, thank you so much for having me. Joe: Thanks for your time, I appreciate it. Links: Capitalism.com FreedomFastlane.com

E. B. Moss: Hey, it's E.B. Moss from MediaVillage and this is Episode 12, basically live from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I’m with MediaVillage Journalist David Polinchock who’s an expert at CES. So... We're mic’d up together and we're going to walk around, enjoy the ambient sounds of CES 2018, and I'm going to tap your brain... a Vulcan mind meld!, appropriately for CES. We're going to ask you to give us some insights. INTRO: Ready for some insights from those inside the media, marketing and advertising industry? Welcome to Insider Insight from MediaVillage. MediaVillage.com is the home for exclusive thought leadership with content by, for and about agencies and networks. From digital experts and add tech providers to CMO's and CRO's. With villages of content focused on everything from Wall Street reports to women in media. Now let's get some insights. David: First stop? We're here at the Google Home gallery. They've put together a kind of cool exhibit of what you can do with Google Home and how it's changing how we all live. E. B. Moss: Wow, great. Google has been sponsoring everything including the city monorail where they even piped in some pretty compelling audio. So when you're a captive audience on the monorail it's instructing you to learn how to utilize Google Home like saying, "Hey Google play me some soothing music" - which is good for when you're trapped on the monorail to hear little bubbling brook sounds. They really have done a good job in their convention sponsorship presence. David: This kind of new audio assistant is what we're getting in homes and in the rest of our lives. One of the AR head manufacturers announced a partnership with Alexa so you get voice control in your heads-up display now so you can see how this is changing how people are really doing things at home. One person on my last tour had one of the voice connection systems all throughout their house and realized they had to take it out of the kids room because the kids were doing their homework by asking it all the questions and just getting all the answers. You know, there's good and bad with everything. But this ability to ask a simple question, or check my schedule works because if I already have "Hey Google" phone I can use it and I get information there but now I can move it around from thing to thing. I think what people are looking for at large is a connection of all their things so it's not "I have this list over here and this list over here". So the fact that I can ask Hey Google on my phone but when I get home at night I can follow up the conversation with my Google Home Assistant because it's all connected. E. B. Moss: Oh, so the connectivity. Got it. David: The other thing they've been working on are ear buds that translate something like 70 languages. It literally is the communicator that we saw for 20 years on Star Trek. E. B. Moss: So, I can date a person who doesn't speak English! David: That's correct. And, if you look over here we also have it in air conditioners and washing machines and a variety of things now. So that's what, to me, becomes really exciting about this: you're seeing Hey Google as you're seeing Alexa and other products leave the single device and being incorporated into all of our lives. E. B. Moss: Google Home really was everywhere at CES; trying to connect the dots with audio and smart speakers and voice assistants. The other thing that was everywhere was Audio. I spoke to Tom Webster of Edison Research, as well as the head of marketing for Audio-Technica who had some unique ways to use headphones. E. B. Moss: Tom Webster was on the panel on the smart speaker research that just came out from Edison Research in conjunction with NPR. So I grabbed him afterwards. ...Hey Tom... That was fascinating. I know that you're going to be sharing some more of this information though MediaVillage in general, but specifically, a couple of things jumped out at me today were the fact that gifting over the 2017 holiday season really should've exponentially upped ownership of smart speakers. So that was good? Tom: Yeah, we've seen the initial adoption of smart speakers grow at a clip more than we saw smart phone adoption grow when we first started tracking. It's certainly both Amazon and Google coming out with $29 units had a lot to do with that but I think eventually we're going to stop caring about the devices themselves because that technology is going to just be baked into everything. E. B. Moss: So, that's an interesting point because Google is all over the show and promoting their digital assistant, Hey Google, but it's still only about 70% in devices own versus Alexa. What do you think it needs to do to compete more? By the way I think you said we're at about 16% ownership in America right now, so there's still plenty of growth opportunity there. What do you see the differences being and how do you see it competing more? Tom: I think, first of all I have no doubt that they're both going to be very competitive devices for a long time to come and for a lot of people it's just learning the use cases. We do know from the previous iterations of Smart Audio Report that we found with NPR 88% of the people who have an Alexa are Amazon Prime members. So there is a natural connection there. They're already being marketed to, in a way that is contextual for them. I think the more that Google educates listeners about what these devices can do and just more devices. Again the technology is just going to start being baked into everything and by the way it's already on your phone. One of the interesting things we found in our research is that 44% of smart speaker users tell us they're using the audio assistants on their phone more as a result of using the smart speaker. So it's just learning education and getting people context. E. B. Moss: And a brand that has good social media followers will do a service to those followers and enhances its own position by teaching them how to use smart speaker skills that they've created, right? Tom: Absolutely. I think we used to ask ten years ago "What's your mobile strategy?" Now I think it's a valid question to ask what your audio strategy is because people want to communicate with brands. They want to communicate with brands that they care about and they want to have those kinds of relationships and those kinds of experiences. E. B. Moss: So last question.... You mentioned a couple of the obstacles that we still have to continue to overcome: the perception of trust and the perception of security. What do you see happening? Tom: Well, those are valid concerns. First of all far be it from me to poo poo them because they are in fact valid concerns and when we interviewed people who don't own a smart speaker but who are interested in the category; three of their top concerns were all related to security, privacy, insuring their data, having the government listen in on their data. These are all valid concerns and all of the makers of this technology are going to have to find ways to address them because it's one thing to say "O.K. Google or Alexa play some Fleetwood Mac" it's another to start reciting your credit card number into it or something and those concerns are going to have to be addressed. E. B. Moss: ...So now I'm heading to Audio-Technica. You might know them for their turntables and headphones. They are giving me a welcome treat of a chair massage...I'm going to put my noise-canceling headphones on right now.... Speaker 5: "Let's begin by centering on the breath. ... slowly exhale and imagine your breath moving out through your ears as well. Cleansing them, forcing out all the toxic noise you've observed from the show floor and setting it a flame to burn off like so much painful gas..." E. B. Moss: That was one of the funnest ideas on the show floor. It was practical and sort of like a forced pre-roll listen in a good way. So I'm speaking to Director of Marketing Communications for Audio-Technica, Jeff Simcox. Jeff: Hi. How are you doing? Are you relaxed? E. B. Moss: I'm so much more relaxed. How did you come up with the idea? Jeff: Well, what's one of the reasons for wearing noise-canceling headphones? You want to relax, knock out all the annoying sounds and get into yourself, into the music. We just thought on the CES show floor we'd add that little extra thing to help you relax and lose yourself and have a massage while you're enjoying the headphones. My boss is like "You've got them in the chair so give them a sales pitch." And I'm like "who wants to lay there and just hear a dry sales pitch"? So it was our way of saying "Okay, you know, [inaudible 00:11:30] in that we can give you a little bit of entertainment, give you a little bit of a laugh. Now feel the tension escape from your ears like so much painful gas." It was one of my favorite lines.  E. B. Moss: As we made our way though CES you couldn't help notice autonomy everywhere. From autonomous cars to the super sonic Hyperloop; also autonomous public transportation helping the lesser abled. E. B. Moss: Initiating autonomous drive. I'm about to experience it, in 90 seconds. What it's like to be on the road and not in control. I'm at the Intel booth right now. Very cool. But I think it might drive me a little bit nuts if I had to hear all of the play by play of the autonomous driver. Pedestrian detected, anomaly detected, slow down. E. B. Moss: Now we're at Hyperloop and I'm talking to the Director of Marketing Ryan Kelly. Ryan, It looks like a long monorail pod from the future. What is it? Ryan: Elon Musk in 2013 had a vision for a new form of transportation. A bunch of VCs at Silicon Valley got together and founded Hyperloop One. Now we are actually Virgin Hyperloop One, three years later, which is very exciting. So now Richard Branson is now our chairman. Ryan: I'll tell you a little bit about the technology. Hyperloop basically the pod that you're looking at just broke a speed record, which is really exciting. We went 240 miles per hour in 300 meters at our test site 40 miles outside of Las Vegas. We're really excited about. So how does that work, how did we get there and why do we think it's the future of transportation? Hyperloop is in a tube so this pod was in a tube, we suck out almost all the air out of the tube to almost zero atmospheric pressure. It's not a full vacuum but very, very close. What that does is it provides frictionless travel. What does that mean? That means we can reach higher speeds than Maglev trains that you might see in Japan, in niche markets. It also means that it's more energy efficient and effective because we're using passive magnetic levitation. So that means once we start and accelerate at that point we're floating. So this actually levitates above a track, which is pretty unbelievable. From a cost perspective that's huge cost saving, not only for energy efficiency but also for building track, et cetera. E. B. Moss: I know the sustainability aspect is very important to Mr. Branson. Ryan: Huge. Yeah, it's absolutely. So sustainability is definitely something that we're looking towards. We'd like to get something up and running by 2021 and if you think about where we're going to be in 2021 with autonomous vehicles, with cleaner energy and we're completely energy agnostic solution, which we're really excited about. Not only going fast but thinking about how the future of transportation works. David: Right, so being both New Yorkers I know you've gotten some approval for New York track, from discussions. Ryan: Well, there's discussions. We are a very ... even though some people might see this as a cry in the sky opportunity a lot of our executives have worked in government before. We know how the system works in the United States. You have to go through a regulatory and safety process. We don't want to be seen as a paperwork company that's going to disappear in two years faking all these different things. Ryan: So we have directors of policy here that are working with the federal government. We've made headway in places like Colorado where legislature has signed a memorandum of understanding to look at these. That's actually started already but you have to remember that we need to make sure that it's safe for passengers and we need to go though our safety process. So we kind of understand that but I think it's really interesting because we kind of have a VC type philosophy and coming and working with government. Those are some of the slowest movers. So kind of working that out, working for structure has historically been or seen as a slower moving process. Merchants of VC digital world and then combining this with structure is a really interesting combination. Not only have we seen progress in the United States, we've seen progress in the UN [inaudible 00:16:52] road and transit authority there, we have a proposal to them. The Netherlands and some Scandinavian countries. Started to talk about the UK as well. So we've made some groundwork. David: So, if I'm inside what's my experience? Ryan: Sure. Actually we're partnering with Here Technologies and this is the booth that we're outside of right now. This is the first time that we're talking about the passenger experience in public. 2017 for us was what we call our kitty hawk moment, prove the technology works. Now 2018 is about lets get real, how do we commercialize, what's the experience going to look like, how we work with regulators, et cetera. In the same way that in the digital space we expect fast on demand and we expect a personalized, customized experience we're trying to bring that into the infrastructure mind frame, which hasn't necessarily been the case because this is one of the first new forms of transportation over 100 years, We're trying to incorporate this thing. Ryan: Let's say I book a ticket for the Hyperloop. I want that experience to be one, for example, where I'm here in Las Vegas I have turn by turn walking directions so if I'm inside this crazy convention center I see yes I know I have to walk down the stairs and to the right of the Starbucks to go get my Uber, which will already be there because they know that it takes ten minutes for me to walk out of this craziness. Take my Uber to the Hyperloop get in the Hyperloop, they know that I'm having a meeting with three other people that I met at CES so they're going to give me a customized pod with meeting table et cetera. Versus I've had enough of CES and I don't want to talk to anyone I know and I just want a silent pod and then when I get off the Hyperloop powered by Here Technologies in the future when we get this thing up and running. My Uber's already there and potentially maybe there are other apps like Seamless, et cetera, that by the time I get home my pizza is there. E. B. Moss: Will this exercise for us also because you just eliminated all of the walking that we do. Ryan: Well, I don't think it's there. All the pieces are there so I don't think it's that far of a stretch to get there. Imagine all the pieces and components are there we just got to put it together. E. B. Moss: Yeah, a much different experience than trying to get on the monorail with 5000 other people all crammed into one car, which took me 40 minutes. Ryan: Let's talk about that because that brings up a really good point. So what we'd like to do with the Hyperloop is have pods leaving, seconds; fast, fast, fast. When you have a train that has certain point A to B stops everyone is crammed on the train and then pushes out at the same time. Here we're aiming for consistency so that the other modes of transportation that we're connecting with create more of a flat traffic environment versus these waves where they're not ready. E. B. Moss: I love it. Ryan, thank you so much. Ryan: Thank you so much. E. B. Moss: So we stopped at the booth called Accessible Olli and I'm speaking with Brittany Stotler of Local Motors. So tell me what the connection is Brittany. Brittany: So we are here to show a new project that was announced last CES with CTA Foundation, IBM, and Local Motors. Talking about what it means for people with disabilities or that may not have the function that everyone else has and then as well as the aging community. Trying to make vehicles that are going to be pulling the drivers and age out of them because they're self driving vehicles. Trying to figure out how these people are going to start interacting with the vehicle, making it easier for them and ideally providing them more freedom. We based this on personaes, such as Eric who, though blind legally, he did not start out blind; he's actually an engineer from IBM and was one of the big people behind trying to help us figure out how to make a vehicle and make an Olli stop accessible for somebody who is visually impaired. Another persona is wheelchair bound but doesn't like to call attention to that aspect. So having the accessible Olli be able to communicate with them and use these vehicles allows them the freedom to be going out without someone else there to continually load them because they would roll onto Olli themselves and it automatically secures their wheelchair. Push a button to release them, they can roll back out of the Olli stop and they're all set to go. So ideally you'll have an app on your phone requesting to get on the next Olli that's coming into the station with your preferences set, so if you are in a wheelchair, if you visually have issues or maybe it's your hearing Olli can actually sign back and forth to you though the stop and through the actual vehicle. We’ve got a couple of different options that we're working with so ultrahaptics - a really neat technology system which, for those who can't see or have limited mobility they can actually ... rather than having to press a button ... can just wave their hand in front of it and you feel it and it creates like a virtual button for them. But there's also extendable to some vibrations that can actually drive them to an open seat so they don't have that awkward moment they maybe have to deal with on a daily basis of maybe actually sitting on somebody that's already there but they couldn't see them. E. B. Moss: What's the revenue model for this? Brittany: We are selling Olli and Ollie stops to cities - master planned communities, which is where a lot of the elderly will come into play - and then into large campuses and theme parks. Everybody across the board is thinking about how to integrate Ollie because it helps pull down costs: they can move people out of a bus driver position and turn them into another position, gives them a few new skill sets hopefully.  E. B. Moss: Is there an opportunity or a plan to take advantage of some of the data capture via the app? Brittany: There is potential. Currently we would own all of that data though our app but depending on the partnership it could potentially be a white label for a city’s Olli. They can wrap it however they want on the exterior. There's potential for glassine products, you can put text, you can have a video playing, and it'll go on any of our windows so it turns into almost mobile advertising. David: For our readers and our listeners in this case, I think, this is an opportunity to reach this new audience in a very compelling way. Brittany: Right. You're just the only [crosstalk 00:24:35]. So you're on a university campus and you have all these students that are getting on, they're going from their parking structures to a certain place on campus but they're going to go by Pete's Coffee every single morning and as they're rolling up or they're getting ready to go up to that stop Pete's Coffee advertising comes up on the app or it comes up within the bus to show come inside tell us you were just on Olli and here's your code and you get a discount. It starts driving traffic and then that's another way that the whoever's purchasing to actually operate the vehicles they can start recuperating and making money on the advertising piece. E. B. Moss: So a traffic driver driving traffic. Brittany: We're trying to get rid of traffic. E. B. Moss: Thank you so much for your time [inaudible 00:25:21] Beautifully stated and a very important application for all members of our community to be able to be more mobile ... Brittany: More freedom for them so thank you to all of our partners. E. B. Moss: For a less autonomous but very elevating experience we spoke to the Head of Marketing for Workhorse. He described their octocoper. E. B. Moss: So what are we officially calling this? This is experimental [crosstalk 00:25:54] Workhorse: That's a good question. We've just been calling it personal electric octocopter. Octocopter, eight things octo. David: What's the range on it? Workhorse: 70 miles. David: That's pretty good, that many miles. Workhorse: Gasoline generator that powers it so once you go 70 miles toward hop you gas up ready for the next hop. Not waiting for the lithium-ion battery for hours to charge up and all that stuff. You can just keep going. Normal helicopter you have to have pedals and those handles. This doesn't have any pedals or any of that stuff. We fly like a drone. So it'd be, you know ... David: You don't fly it like a drone. Workhorse: I mean we had this on display in Paris and all the kids that came in 15 they could jump in there, let's go, let's take it up because they're so familiar with the video game and all that stuff. So that's the way this flies. E. B. Moss: So what's the flying experience like? I mean I've been in a glider and I've been in a helicopter, somewhere in the middle? Workhorse: Yeah, I would say so. It wouldn't be as much as a glider, which is just pretty basic but it is also not as complicated as the helicopter. See this only has a ceiling height of flying of 4000 feet. Okay, so it's just enough that you're up and you're flying. So, it's meant to be like a different method of transportation. In America the helicopter's been here for 78 years, last year in America they sold 1000 of them new, that's not that big of a market. So we're not really planning on taking market share from commission on helicopter. We're kind of planning on creating a new category. So you've got to think of it as a new way of transportation, like we were kidding around about the New York City and all that stuff. David: And what's the price point on it or what will it be? Workhorse: We have price point at 200,000 dollars and at this show we can take your name and ... E. B. Moss: Take Credit Cards? Workhorse: $1,000 and your place is saved in line and then we would probably start delivering them in 2020. E. B. Moss: It looks like a Workhorse experimental aircraft. Workhorse: The name of the craft is Surefly. So it's Surefly with safety and that and background.  E. B. Moss: David and I saw AR, audio, autonomy, everything at CES and we talked about how it all came together. David: So one of the trends we just to look at in general is we just saw with Olli and what they're doing. There's a huge population growing old. E. B. Moss: Yes. David: And it's a key population that has a certain expectation level of service and experience and technology and that's only getting bigger. You're seeing a lot of brands really trying to figure out how do we deal with population that's having vision problems and mobility problems and hearing problems. All the things people my age are starting to think about. E. B. Moss: The 25 year olds. David: The 25 year olds. Again, when ... as we joked ... but when you think about the 25 year olds they are very tech savvy. They're the Hyperloop audience, they don't want to be waiting on the street corner for the M35 without having any idea, in the rain, when it's coming, when was the last time it was here, did I just miss it. You know, the stuff we do every day. So you're seeing mobility things like Olli and transportation systems and whole ecosystems. You're seeing companion bots. You're seeing machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision coming into play to do things like my mom lives far away it's hard for me to necessarily be on top of her. And I don't know if she wants me to be on top of her; all that family dynamic. E. B. Moss: So, we actually have a theme here and it kind of wraps things up beautifully because we've seen the connected appliances, connected home. We've seen the connectivity between devices and how to make things easier in life and not having to pick up one device to do one thing and one device to do another. We've seen the continuity between I want to get some place and how do I get there. So everything is connecting us whether it's virtually or physically like with Olli, like with the experimental aircraft, like everything we've seen today is all about connectivity. David: It really is and the big thing is it's connectivity that has value to you and me not connectivity that has value to some corporation. That's where people really get the difference. I'm excited about a technology that will help my life be better and in the course of my life being better the company makes money off of that, that's great. E. B. Moss: Like the last example with Olli. Where there is branding opportunities on and within it but it's giving me something of value. David: That's correct. There equates down when the consumer feels there's no value it's changed for them. Gen Zs might say, "We get that brands trap us every day and we're okay with that, that's the world and we're fine. But what they're not okay with is that you track me every day and then you don't know who I am, if you're going to watch everything I buy you should know what I buy. You should know what I've bought and stop telling me what I've already bought.” E. B. Moss: So if you're going to connect with me, connect in a meaningful way, connect in a valuable way and ... David: Imagine you have a friend who asks you the same question over and over and over again. Right, then eventually you stop hanging out with that friend. So that's where this connectivity has great value to us as human beings. Great value. E. B. Moss: David thank you so much. This was invaluable to have a guide like you. This is Insider Insight live from the Consumer Electronics Show. I'm E. B. Moss, Managing Editor for MediaVillage. Check us out MediaVillage.com and thanks for listening.  

Ryan Johnson, Head Copywriter at IWT (short for I Will Teach, Ramit Sethi’s company) steps up to the microphone with Kira and Rob for the 53rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. This interview covers a lot of ground, including: •  how after a grueling interview in his car, Ryan failed to get a job with IWT only to get hired a few months later (never give up) •  how to get inside the head of your client so you can speak with his or her voice •  his process for laying out all the moving pieces of a launch, and •  how he maps emotions to his launch plans so customers can’t wait to respond •  the 7 deadly email funnel sins •  two reasons to use long-form sales pages •  the “leap stacking” technique he uses to help his writers uplevel their skill (and what doesn’t work when trying to improve) Plus Ryan shares the “copy levers” that Gary Bencivenga used to get better at his craft, how he avoids writer’s block, and the one thing he would do if he had to start his career all over. Lots of good stuff packed into this episode. To hear it, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Ramit Sethi The Briefcase Technique Jay Abraham IWT AIDA Gary Bencivenga Abbey Woodcock Justin Blackman The Headline Project Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, and then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 53 as we chat with in house copywriter, Ryan Johnson, about he became a copywriter and landed a job writing for Ramit Sethi, how he tackles a massive launch, capturing the voice of your client, and how long it takes him to write a 50 plus page sales letter. Ryan, welcome. Rob: Yes, welcome Ryan. Ryan: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. Kira: Yeah, it’s great to have your here, and I think a great place to start is just with your story of how did you end up becoming a copywriter? Ryan: It was kind of a circular process to copywriting. I didn’t even know what copywriting was at the very beginning. My original interests were in film and creative writing, which led me into a delightful career waiting tables. After a few years of that, my first real job was in instructional design, and I was editing textbooks, and building training programs. I actually ended up designing an associates degree in business. I packaged and edited textbooks on business, and economics, and entrepreneurship before I realized that doing that was with no experience was totally crazy. But it was a good baseline. But while I was doing this, I can still remember. I was in the middle of editing this 500 page textbook on economics, which is about as exciting as it sounds, and my wife was working as a creative copywriter, and she was getting paid much, much more than me to edit this glossy one page ad. It looked like so much fun and so much easier than what I was doing. I’m like, “I’m doing something wrong, ‘cause there’s clearly a cap on where I am, and there’s no clap over here.” So shortly after I figured out how I could transition into marketing, into copywriting. It’s been a race every since. Rob: You’re working as an in house copywriter, but what does that look like today? What is the day to day ... How do you spend your time? What are you working on? Those kinds of things. Ryan: Yeah, so with Ramit at IWT / Growth Lab, I am the head of the sales team and the editorial tea...

Learn how to find ETFs and decide what to invest in. This episode is sponsored by Audible. It’s the way I “read” more books and stay ahead of the curve. Audible is, of course, the easiest way to read books because all you have to do is just listen - like you are right now! There are over 150,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or mp3 player and…your first audiobook is FREE! Just visit http://www.audibletrial.com/BeWealthyandSmart That’s audibletrial.com/bewealthyandsmart. Here is our listener question for today: Hi Linda! I have been listening to your podcasts for the past 12 months and love them! I can't get enough of them. I have been investing as a hobby for the past 6 months and trying to learn as much as I can. I have heard you and several other people talk about ETF's and how useful they are. Unfortunately I don't know how to look up the ETF's I would like to invest in. Can you do a podcast that answers the following questions: 1) How to find specific ETF's. 2) how to determine if they are the right one to invest in. 3) What are some of the key indicators I should look for? 4) Can I find ETF's based on performance of single stocks? I look forward to hearing your insights on the topic! Thank you for all your hard work and desire to help lift us to new financial heights! Regards, Ryan Thank you, Ryan! I appreciate you being a loyal listener! That means a lot to me and I love that you love the show! What is an ETF? Exchange traded funds are passive investments. They are a static portfolio that allows you to buy a basket of securities in an index or a sector. They provide diversification and low turnover and low fees. Since active management has had a difficult time outperforming indexes, investors have somewhat given up paying extra fees to managers who don’t beat the indexes, so they are buying the indexes themselves. If you have a manager who consistently outperforms an index, and you net more after fees than an index, that would be a preferable investment. Today it’s hard to find! How to find specific ETFs? Many investors who are looking for passive investments try to minimize fees. It makes sense, if you’re investing in the S & P 500, they are the same 500 companies whether you buy it from company A or B, so you may as well purchase the one with the lower fees so you net more in your pocket. Many investors have flocked to Vanguard because they have a reputation of having the lowest fees. While fees are not everything, in the case of passive investing because portfolios are identical, it makes sense to buy the lowest fees. That would not be true in an actively managed portfolio however. How to determine if the ETF is the right one? You always want to pay attention to asset allocation. In equities, you want large, mid and small caps plus international (outside of the US). You can also have some sector funds like REITs or precious metals or short-term bonds in 3 to 5% weightings. Can I find ETFs based on performance of single stocks? Yes, but I don’t recommend it. Typically, fund managers prevent any one position from growing beyond 5 percent of assets in order to manage their risk. Sector ETFs are more likely than actively-managed funds to have large positions in individual companies, mainly because they track market-weighted indexes that themselves are often over-weighted with a few popular companies. For example, the $12.9-billion Consumer Discretionary Select SPDR ETF, has 15.1% of its assets in Amazon, while the iShares MSCI South Korea Capped ETF with $3.8B holds 22.9% of its assets in Samsung. I don’t recommend investing in sector funds in order to invest in a particular stock. To me, that just shows that there is a need to rebalance a portfolio to bring it back into a regular proportional investment of 3 to 5%. If a stock is overweight in an ETF, it means it has already appreciated quite a bit and it may be a sign this isn’t the time to invest in it. When shares grow into a larger allotment than 5%, managers are often paring back, not looking to buy more. You should think like the professionals. Having said that, I also believe that you want to let your winners run and to sell your losers, so I would say if you want to own a stock, buy the stock. Don’t buy a sector fund to own 1 stock. I'm having a summer giveaway through the end of September...you could: Win 6 awesome prizes: 5 of The Wealthy Mindset Blueprint (audio course): Learn how millionaires think the right thoughts for wealth before it happens (value $197)                                      OR 1 Wealth Journal (book): Learn the 6 Steps to Wealth (value $67) Here's what you need to do: 1. Leave the "Be Wealthy & Smart" podcast a review on iTunes (or Stitcher Radio for Android). 2. "Like" my Facebook Fan page at http://facebook.com/lindapjonesfanpage (if you're on FB, if not, that's ok). 3. "Follow" me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lindapjones 4. "Follow" me on Instagram @LindaPJones 5. Send me an email @ lpjhome@gmail.com and let me know you did this! (If you're not on FB, TW or IG, that's ok, just send me an email @lpjhome@gmail.com and let me know you left a review). If you've already done all 4 above, great! Thank you! No need to do them again! Just email me @ lpjhome@gmail.com and let me know. All names will be dropped in a hat and a drawing will be done in early October for winners!  Move your net worth in the right direction by getting “11 Quick Financial Tips to Boost Your Wealth” at http://www.lindapjones.com.