Ep 178: Add $4.5M Per Year To An Ecommerce Businesses Using CRO with Jonny Longden

Jaryd Krause: (00:00)

This is how you add 4.5 million per year to your eCommerce business. Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause host of the buying online business podcast. And in this episode, I'm talking with Jonny Longden who is the conversion director at Journey Further, which is a performance marketing agency working with the world's leading brands, including likes of Liberty London, Krispy Kreme, Lick Home, and during his 15-year career of improving websites with strategy experimentation and data he has built and led the conversion team at the sky, as well as overseeing the eCommerce strategy and operations at Principal Hotel Company.

Now in this podcast episode, Jonny and I specifically talk about how he was able to add 4.5 million per year to a business through just one CRO tweak, CRO standing for conversion rate optimization. We then break down what about a little bit about CRO and talk about what tests that you can run in your own eCommerce business with little to no budget and how you can start to track and test your user experience on your site and how to pull that data, how to use that data and get feedback also directly from your consumers that allows you to know exactly what you should be doing to increase the revenue in your business.

Jaryd Krause: (01:20)

We also talk about how powerful this data actually is but also about the value that's in the data and not just trying new marketing techniques, that people are shoving down your throat on podcasts and new YouTube videos and webinars and seminars and all that sort of stuff or just because they made a lot of money in their business doing this one marketing tactic doesn't mean you need to do it in your business.

And we talk about why the data is far more valuable. It's going to allow you to grow your business with confidence because the data says, so we talk about going deep into the data as well. Why seeing the value is very deep in the data, rather than getting a lot of different data points and just going super wide and, and how we can make the most from the data that we do.

Jaryd Krause: (02:03)

Have we also talk about if CRO is so important, when should you do say CRO in conjunction with PPC? When should you do CRO and then PPC, should it be together? Should it be done at the same time, if so then why? And when this is such a valuable episode, if you own an e-commerce business are going to own an e-commerce business, or know who somebody who owns an e-commerce business, you're absolutely going to love this podcast episode. Let's dive into it.

Do you want to build or grow your content website? Niche website builders have helped hundreds of people to take their content websites from a few hundred dollars per month to over tens of thousands of dollars per month with crafted content creation, buying age domains, and link building strategies. These strategies have helped people increase their traffic authority, monthly earnings and their website valuation two head to nichewebsite.builders/BOB/ to get 10% off, any link building or 10% more from their content creation services. I'll put a link in the description too.

Jonny, welcome to the show. Welcome to Buying Online Businesses podcast.

Jonny Longden: (03:20)

Hi, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Jaryd Krause: (03:21)

Looking forward to this chat. You did just mention some cool things and I was like, hang on before we hit the record buttons let me hold that story. Let me hold that juice for the podcast I wanted to get you on because a lot of people are looking at buying eCommerce businesses and then they buy this business and go, well, I need to do digital marketing but digital marketing is like this massive thing.

Like it's this massive umbrella, and under that there's their own parts of digital marketing. And I wanted to break down some of those in how people can think about where their business is at and what they should start on first. But you were going to mention a brand that you've been working with over in London and some of the cool things that you've done with them, which you have a bit more insight in because you get to see into their accounts. So, what's the name of this brand?

Jonny Longden: (04:04)

They're called Liberty. So Liberty is a big department store in London. Very famous department store. It's not as famous as Howards, but it's not necessarily a similar brand but if you know London, if you live in London, it's a sort of popular, it's a beautiful old building and it's very high end product, and they have a very strong website and eCommerce brand on the side of it as well. So we as an agency, we do multiple things for them. We do PPC and SEO but I obviously I run the conversion optimization division of the agency and I work personally on that account as well. And we've had a huge amount of success with them and it's a good example of how we work as well.

Jonny Longden: (04:53)

So the story behind it they do a really decent amount of sales through the website and they've got a fairly small internal team that deals with digital, in the grand scheme of things really,, but they also have in-house it, and the background is they've always really struggled to get anything done to the website through their, and that is a really common story. For any ecom business it will manifest in different ways.

You might have in-house developers or they might have a digital development, a web development agency or something like that. But it's a very common story that it can be very slow to get things done either for process reasons or because they don't have a huge amount of budget or whatever.

Jonny Longden: (05:47)

And there's always just a lot of other demands going into those sorts of development functions. So for Liberty, they have trading and merchandising teams that are just effectively like content teams that are changing and making product pages and things like that. And they have constant demands for it and things like that. So it's very difficult for them to do the things they need to do to the website to actually deliver commercial benefit.

And they don't know what to do. So, that's a really key point. I'll come back to that actually. So we do experimentation for them. We are constantly running research and an analysis to try and understand the best opportunities and the best problems that we can solve. And then we're running experiments continuously on the website in order to improve things.

Jonny Longden: (06:37)

And we've had some enormous successes with things that we've found and more importantly we have driven a lot of strategic learning for them, and an example of that would be just recently they had a kind of unconventional vertical navigation on the desktop website where the navigation is down the left hand side and the right hand side, and we noticed through eye tracking studies that people were struggling to find the search function, which is in a kind of an unconventional place.

So we wanted to test making a much more traditional, horizontal navigation across the top, and it was a big deal for them because they'd made a big significant design decision to do that in the past and had a lot of conversations about it but they eventually agreed. And that's a complex test to run, we completely redesigned the navigation and the information architecture, the taxonomy and everything to fit, and we built that in Optimizly in an AV testing tool.

So we managed to build and redesign and deploy a test to completely change the nature of the website without touching their it at all and ran that. And it is been enormously successful. It's worth over about four and a half million pounds for them a year or so to make that change.

Jaryd Krause: (07:58)

Also benefited in terms of revenue that made it.

Jonny Longden: (08:02)

It has a huge impact on the conversion rate, and you can see all sorts of things within it. It's just the amount of people who are using the search function is increased by around 30%. Various sort the functional things like that. So that's just an example but I mentioned the strategic aspect of it as well.

And there are things like we've done tests on the product imagery. So, they do a lot of clothing and they have both images of simply the product and then product on models, and they were investing a fair amount of money in taking this photography of shots with models. So we tested that, and it makes very little difference whether the product is on a model or not.

Jonny Longden: (08:57)

So they've been to deinvest in that and sort of change their strategy for product content, and things like that. And so there are tons of examples of that, but that's just a good example of how we work, and the story is very similar in most brands, they struggle to understand what to do to their website and what can be commercially beneficial.

The running research and analysis really helps with that but then also they don't necessarily have the time or the process to be able to do those things through it, and by testing them, by building those things in experiments in a front end AV testing tool, you are able to run that process far efficiently. It's much cheaper and quicker to build a test in a testing tool than it is to actually do it to production.

So if you have 10 things that you feel like you want to do, guaranteed, probably only one or two of them will actually be worth it. And if you test them all first, then you're only going to do the things that actually work, and so you're massively reducing the drain on your development. So, there's a bit of an overview of how we work.

Jaryd Krause: (10:06)

That's really cool, and congratulations on not just helping them increase sales from helping, I guess you could call it better user experience on the website, through that search bar which I'd say it probably is that but also finding out testing images to see which ones are going convert more and is it worth spending the money on this or not?

And the only way to really grow a business is what I like to teach people is to have a look at the data and let the data, tell you what you need to do, what you should be doing more of and should be doing less of. It's easy for us to just say, oh, we just made all these tests. We've just did 10 tests, and one of these tests is going to work for people that have an eCommerce business, Jonny how do they go about starting to test things like images and different things within their site? They've got just a very small team, and how do they go about simply doing a test to see what is working or what might not be working.

Jonny Longden: (11:08)

On the one hand it's actually fairly straightforward. So, anybody can quite easily tag Google optimize, which is free to their website, and it has various tools within it to allow you to, to set up and deploy tests without necessarily having any front end development skills. So that is on the face of it, incredibly easy to do on the other hand, doing it right has quite a lot of skill to it.

So you build and run tests in Google optimize and then be making incorrect decisions off the back of it, because actually measuring tests is reasonably complicated tools like Google optimize, don't do it, and it's not just that it's sort of slightly imperfect, it's that you could actually be making incorrect decisions off the back of it but we appreciate that everyone has to start somewhere.

Jonny Longden: (12:02)

So I would say just start getting some tests running if that is your goal, if that is your plan, which it should be, then you need to think about the proper resource to run a program like that at some point. And you need to think about scaling towards that with having the right resources, whether that's using an agency such as ourself or there are various sort of agencies like that or whether it's bringing in specialist in-house resource at some point you need some sort of resource like that. There are so many people out there that are running CRO programs on the website where unwittingly, they might as well, not really bother because they're not really doing it.

Jonny Longden: (12:46)

And the other thing is that you really to get anywhere, you're going to need front end developers to be building the experiments because these tools allow you to do it yourself but you can only get so far responsive web design and things like that means that it's not, it's nowhere near straightforward as they make out.

But just get started is the first thing and then have a plan to try and put some more experienced resource around it at some point but it is just to reiterate it is so important and it is such a valuable thing to do and a valuable thing to put any sort of investment behind because at the end of the day, you just cannot guess what to do to a website.

Jonny Longden: (13:29)

I've been running experiments on websites for 14 years now. And it would be so easy for me to sit around saying, I know what's going to work on websites. I have absolutely no idea because every day we test things that you would think would be no brainers and you think are obvious and they don't work. They have the opposite effect. It happens every single day. And there are no real sort of patterns where you can say this one thing will always work or whatever.

It just doesn't work like that. Every website is unique, every audience is unique, and also you just cannot guess you can't use your rational brain to decide how customers are going to behave around things, it just doesn't work. So if you are intending to improve the user experience and the performance of the website measured by conversion or revenue or however, then you need to be doing experimentation and you need to be testing and learning. Even if it's imperfect that's fine to begin with but you have to do it like you won't get very far if you dont.

Jaryd Krause: (14:34)

That is just so well said, Jonny, and I just enhance this, and add to what you've said a little bit more because there's so many people that are looking for, what's the next thing that I need to do in my business to grow it, and they will go out and listen to a podcast or a YouTube video, or go to some seminar, and somebody's teaching you how to do this type of marketing. And they've got to result in this area, in their business, it's been so good.

You have to go away and put it into your business, plug this into your business, and it will do exceedingly well. Sometimes it can work a lot of times, it won't work and because it's very business dependent. And that's why the only way I think I mentioned earlier, the only way to grow a business based on the data of what's telling you what to do, and you can only get that data by tracking things and doing tests.

So beautifully said, what would you say are some of the first starting point, like the first two, one or two, or maybe even three things that people should be testing with their eCommerce businesses?

Jonny Longden: (15:41)

Well, just before I do that, and just to touch on what you were saying and something you said right at the very beginning, I think what's probably quite important is just to think about what it is you should, what it is you should tackle first from a digital marketing point of view, and it's easy for people to think.

We need to drive more traffic to this website, and that's easy to do. It's easy to just shove money into PPC or into social advertising or whatever. It's you just switch it on and it starts, and it starts doing stuff it's easy. And so everybody gets caught up in thinking that is what we need to do. We need to just pump track money into media but it doesn't make the best economic sense.

Jonny Longden: (16:27)

Like it feels like it does but it doesn't, and that's because digital media, and traffic driving activities, every single penny that you spend is subject to the law of diminishing returns. So, you are already getting traffic to the website and the more you spend, the more you have to go out to irrelevant audiences. And so the less that spend will actually be efficient. So the more money you're spending, the more you're driving, irrelevant traffic the profitability of it is completely diminishing.

On the other hand, if you invest in improving the throughput of the website or the conversion rate of the website, then for a start you are not having to completely increase every single associated cost with the website. You don't also increase the cost of hosting and the cost of your CMS platform or anything like that.

Jonny Longden: (17:21)

The relative cost is smaller. So for a start, it's more profitable to do that, and you are having effectively the same effect like you, if you want to hypothetically, if you want to double the revenue output of the website, then you can either double the traffic or you can double the conversion rate. It has exactly the same impact on the revenue but it's more profitable to double the revenue, to double the conversion rate than it is to double the traffic.

Hypothetically, it's not necessarily that easy to double either of those but from the point of view of how that works it's more economically sound to focus on the conversion rate of your website. And there is also just the sense of why would you send people to something that isn't working now? Obviously it will be working but it's a bit like if you buy a physical retail store, it's not very good.

Jonny Longden: (18:19)

The staff aren't very good, and there are things that need sorting out the layout doesn't work. Then why would you sudden, why would you then invest tons of money in driving people to that store when you're not happy with how it works? And the service that people are getting inside, it is the same analogy. The best thing you can focus on first is to make sure the user experience of the site is really sort of well oiled.

So I think that's a really important point but then to answer your actual question, there are a few sort o things that are sort of really obvious that we come across when we start working with sites, like I would say things like well we have a heuristic model that we use where we look at the experience of landing on a website and there are certain sort of user experience principles.

Jonny Longden: (19:07)

Like won't go through them all but for example legitimacy and credibility if people land on a website and they've never heard of it before they instantly need some sort of indication that it is a business and that it's an established business and it's not sort of something dodgy, that's trying to just calm them out of money. So there are a whole series of user experience principles like that you can very easily review quite quickly and try and find things to improve, and that's sort of experience of just the instant percept yeah.

Perception of the website as you land on it and what the value proposition is saying, and why it's compelling versus anything else they could have clicked on stuff like that. So there is some quite obvious things around that but on the whole it's really makes a lot more sense to exactly, as you said, look at the data first running some fairly basic AEs in Google analytics and using tools like hot jar can be really enlightening.

Jonny Longden: (20:10)

One of the easiest and most impactful things you can do is hot jar which is both a session recording and heat mapping tool. And an online survey tool is free or incredibly cheap, and you can run very easily, little popup surveys on the website and for an econ business, what you want to be doing is triggering a little survey when somebody looks like they're struggling, either spent too much time on a page or whatever that just says.

Is there anything that's preventing you from purchasing today? You can word it differently. A hot jar gives you different examples, and you won't get a ton of people responding to that but you will get a significant amount of people responding, and what they say can be incredibly enlightening. It's from the horse's mouth.

Jonny Longden: (21:01)

That's the important thing. It's very easy for us to sit around going that user experience doesn't work. It's irrelevant to what customers think, and just as I was saying, you can't guess what customers think. So actually having them say it is far is far better.

They will say things like, I don't understand how long it's going to take to get delivered or whatever, and then you'll see from that some of the significant things that people are having problems with, and those are the best things to dive into first, just those really obvious things that customers are actually saying, and they won't necessarily work. You should still test them because you never know but you know that it will make those first tests more likely to be positive.

Jaryd Krause: (21:45)

I love it because the feedback, like you said, it's from the horse's mouth, and I think for people that are listening sometimes we get into the position in our business that we just don't want to put out any more fires and negative feedback is not good. In fact, negative feedback is the most valuable feedback when they're telling oh, your website sucks. The navigation's no good, these sorts of things, and I can't find the product I want, or I just don't know if it's got the warranty or what's the return policy.

If it doesn't fit me, what happens then this is just such good stuff. May look like there's a bunch of work that you need to do but this is the exact work that's going to get you more sales. Even though if you look at it in a negative light, it may be negative feedback but it's very constructive and that's the most powerful I believe.

Jonny Longden: (22:35)

As part of what we do as an agency, we regularly run quite extensive research audits on websites as one off projects for people. And we have to really caveat front. You're not going to hear anything positive in this. We're specifically looking for problems to solve because otherwise it can feel like we're just of ripping them apart but that is deliberate. Like that's what we're trying to do. We're not correct.

There isn't a huge amount of value in focusing on what does work because you're looking for opportunities to improve things, and that means you need to look for the negatives, and then you're right. There will be tons of things. There'll be massive long list of things, but the key thing is to try and find some way to prioritize that, to use the data, to try and find what the most significant things might be, and in doing that you're looking for the best balance between quantitative and qualitative customer data.

So a survey where a significant number of customers say the same thing is hugely more valuable than just me going. I think you should move that element around because that's just my opinion and opinions are fairly relevant.

Jaryd Krause: (23:56)

The brand, It can go the other way. If one person says I need it to be, I need the page to look like this and then you change it. And then another person says I need it to look like this, which is different and you're chopping and changing and nobody's winning. You want to see what the overall arching feedback is rather than just yeah because that can really cost you time and money.

So if hot jars, one really good way to start with testing some things, is there any other sort of free or cheapish valuable tool that can allow people to do some other tests for CRO for the e-com sites?

Jonny Longden: (24:34)

Well, from an insight perspective Google analytics, virtually everybody has Google analytics anyway, and I'd say probably the vast majority of people don't know how to use it that well but it is very simply the best thing you're trying to do is to break down the conversion rate by different things and to learn from it.

So for example, it's very easy to go into Google analytics and look at the difference between the conversion rate for new and returning users. Anybody will be able to find that but what does that mean. So like and it comes with a bit of expertise and knowledge having done this for quite a while to know these things but if you just really start to think about what that means, that will give you clues.

Jonny Longden: (25:23)

So what I know is that a website where the conversion rate for returning users is really significantly higher than first time users has a particular profile around it. That really means that people are really having to think about that purchase. You're having multiple sessions before they decide to buy.

Now either that will be because your product is a very considered purchase. It's probably quite expensive and slash there is a lot of competitive activity in that area which means people are going away and comparing things and coming back, they're thinking about it a lot. They might be taking several days to make the decision to buy the product and then they buy it versus the conversion rate is not that different, and actually a lot of the purchases are happening on the first purchase.

Jonny Longden: (26:16)

That's a much more flippant purchase decision and people have just sort of like had a quick look around, found somewhere that looks decent and they've bought it. Now that's two very different profiles, and in the former where it's a very considered purchase, there are things that you can do like urgency and scarcity tactics. So showing people that like the stock's not going to last for long or whatever engagement tactics like that also you really want to be focusing on the value proposition and why it's better than the competitors and things like that.

So those sorts of things will potentially have the greater chance of being a successful test than other things just because of the nature of the profile of the audience and how it's working in the other one it's a much more flippant purchase.

Jonny Longden: (27:03)

Discounting is like hugely valuable, like people are just flicking around like they want to buy it. Theyve usually decided to buy it from some external source, like you are doing advertising or whatever, or it's a product that's available in lots of places. And actually your site is competing against your own product and third party sites and things like that. So any sort of like 10% off your first order or whatever will be successful in those situations.

So it's just an example where without necessarily needing to be skilled analyst and pull numbers and crunch numbers in different ways, just by going into Google analytics and looking at how your conversion rate differs into different reports and thinking about what that means, can give you a lot of clues to what it is that you should be doing. And it doesn't matter if you're wrong, it doesn't matter if you interpret the data wrong because you're going to test it. You're just trying to find clues from the data of what you should test, as opposed to just looking at your website and going, I think that's a good idea.

Jaryd Krause: (28:09)

I think that's the way to go. Like not just guessing testing based off the data.

JonnyLongden: (28:15)

It sort of a running joke in the CRO industry that people starting out, the first thing they always do is test button colors. Everybody does button color testing does not work.

Jaryd Krause: (28:35)

Better having your button color on brand rather than it be red or orange or something green, something like that.

Jonny Longden: (28:43)

I mean that's what people always end up doing and those things are just too subtle. It don't work, and also it doesn't really have any strategic learning benefit for you. That's the other important thing about running experiments like that I wanted to cover really is that you miss a trick, if you are not learning from what the D from what their experimentation tells you.

So what most people do is just come up with a ton of tests and put them in a big list and then just kind of churn through them and go that won't work. Let's move on to the next thing but you're really missing important data because every single experiment is telling you something binary about how customers behave.

Jonny Longden: (29:32)

And that is you learning about your customers in a valuable way in a far better way than you can ever get from any sort of research because it's a binary thing of they do this, or they don't based on this one thing, and you have to constantly think, what does that tell us? So for example, I was just presenting a conference yesterday.

We work with a client called Lick who they're a direct to consumer paint brand and home decor brand. They've always had this video consultation service where a customer can have a video appointment with a stylist who will literally have a look around the house and sort of help them with ideas about how about colors and things like that, and we observed early on that this seemed to really resonate with customers and help them with conversion whether or not they used it.

Jonny Longden: (30:28)

So literally just having this as a service on the site even if they didn't use it was a beneficial thing. I wonder if customers are actually are kind of wanting more from a brand than just a functional paint product that they want the brand to understand their style and things like that, and this helps with that. So we started to run tests where we replaced functional product imagery with lifestyle imagery. So rather than just a paint and a picture of a room with really stylish furniture and things like that, and those worked really successfully.

So that could just be a test that you throw away and go yeah. That worked to go on but we're demonstrating something about the customers and how they want to interact with that brand and what that brand means to them.

Jonny Longden: (31:20)

And then that allows you to go back and further develop that theory. We like now we've proven we were writing some sort of aspect. So how do we then explore this theory, this concept more, or there other things that we can develop into the entire brand proposition that are developing this theory. And so experimentation should always be an interplay between these individual tests and what that tells you about the brand and about what you should do strategically as a business.

So if you're not learning from it properly, then you're missing a trick and that's not difficult to do. You just have to think, what does this mean? What does this tell us? What else can we do with this result? What else can we do with this information?

Jaryd Krause: (32:03)

I like that philosophy of what I hear is go in deeper into the data that you're getting, rather than going wide with the data of just trying to do it all, just go in deeper and get more out of what you've already got. I think that's a really good philosophy and I think that's so valuable that people just. So thank you for sharing that I wanted to ask you as well.

If CRO is like obviously we can see that CRO is more valuable to do prior to throwing traffic into the funnel and just buying a lot more traffic because you talked about diminishing returns. When does the conversation come up and when do we start to think about, we've done enough CRO, maybe we should test putting a bit of marketing and PPC budget towards the store. How do you know when you should start putting some traffic and paying, buying, doing some media buying to run through the CRO stuff that you already done.

Jonny Longden: (33:05)

In an ideal world, you should do it all in tandem really.

Jonny Longden: (33:12)

Also more traffic means more data quicker testing. Quicker testing and things like that. I mean, my point around saying, you need to do it first is sort of deliberately trying to get people to understand that they shouldn't delay it until a lot later it's a common thing that we find.

People saying, oh, we don't want to focus on that at the moment because we're just focusing on driving traffic and that logic doesn't really make sense in an ideal world, you would do it at the same time. You would drive traffic and try and increase the conversion rate as well. Which is an equally valuable and revenue driving activity as driving the traffic. So, and there's no reason why you can't do it at the same time.

Jonny Longden: (33:57)

I would just try and deal with them together, and the other interesting thing is that those two things we work in tandem anyway. So if you are learning things through experimentation on your website about the certain value proposition statements or whatever that are most compelling that are most triggering people to convert, why wouldn't you then test that language in your PPC copy or in your social advertising or whatever, it also works together.

So the customer journey runs from correct. The external source that they come from into the website, it's all one unified thing, if you treat it all the same, then you can treat it as a holistic thing and take learnings from one to the other and vice versa.

Jaryd Krause: (34:51)

I love it, you don't want to say one thing in your ad and then get to the site and it's a completely different thing and it not makes sense and not understand the journey of discovery to building a relationship trust and making that purchase.

So I'm glad that you said that Jonny, this has been so refreshing, and such a good conversation on CRO, and how we should be testing things in our store based on data I'm so into it. So thank you for coming on. Where can we send people to learn more about what you guys are doing?

Jonny Longden: (35:23)

One of the first things I would say is follow me on LinkedIn. I talk about this stuff all the time on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. So if you just want to learn and hear more about this stuff follow me on LinkedIn and plusI am literally always open to conversations about this regardless of whether it will ever lead to a sale for us, I just like talking about it as you can probably see, so I'm more than happy to just chat to people or answer questions if they've got that or anything or whatever but the agency that I work for is called Journey Further, we are a performance marketing agency.

We do PPC, SEO and conversion but we also have very strong, creative, brand strategy team and things like that. So, we kind of provide the whole thing. So you can have a look at our website or you can talk to me about any of those services if you want as well.

Jaryd Krause: (36:20)

So generous, thank you so much, Jonny really appreciate you coming on and sharing that, and maybe we might have to do this again since you love talking about it so much because so do I.

Jonny Longden: (36:30)

More than happy to.

Jaryd Krause: (36:32)

Thank you everybody, thank you for listening to the show. If you know somebody who either owns an eCommerce business or is going to own an eCommerce business, make sure you share this podcast episode with them. There are so many gold nuggets that Jonny shared. It'd be silly of you not to share this with them. Thanks again guys.