Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Matt Ranta
[00:01:43]
Welcome to the e-Commerce Marketing Podcast everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Matt Ranta who is a partner and head of Digital & eCommerce with Nimble Gravity which is a consultancy specializing in data science, digital strategy, e-commerce, near-shore engineering teams, analytics, and organizational strategy. They work with companies ranging in size from startup to those with billions in revenue, and across varied industries such as endangered species protection, healthcare, DTC clothing, and more. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.

[00:02:24]
Matt:
Yeah, thanks Arlen. It’s great to be here. I appreciate the chance to have a great discussion.

[00:02:30]
Arlen:
Yeah, likewise. And thank you for joining me. I appreciate you coming on, and I’m really excited to talk to you today. We’re gonna be kind of just breaking it down to just some kind of core things I like to think of as, I guess you could say, Things that, uh, often companies overlook. Every, every e-commerce business is always trying to, you know, shoot for the moon, I guess you could say, in their, in their marketing efforts and try to do these big things.

[00:02:53]
But if you kind of dial it down a bit and focus on just some core. Fundamentals, we can have success. So we’re gonna be talking about the simple things that e-commerce companies can do to improve their performance. So I know we’re gonna, you’re gonna be enlightening us on, on us on with some powerful nuggets today that I know are gonna go a long way with our listeners.

[00:03:12]
But before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and you know, specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

[00:03:18]
Matt:
Yeah, absolutely. So, gosh, you know, it was about 24 years ago when I started in e-commerce, so really long time ago, back in 1998. Okay. I was working for a company called the Vans dot Com’s Incorporated, and not the shoe company, some people too for that, but it was a.

[00:03:38]
Was a consumer electronics and appliance retailer based in the state of Montana that went online in, in 98, and I was fortunate to be a part of that team and then worked my way through a whole variety of, of different e-commerce related roles, both in B2C and b2b, doing things like creating, uh, Interwebs or franchisee only webs for Cricket Wireless, where people could come and buy fixtures and security devices and this kind of stuff for their phones and stores.

[00:04:06]
And then moving into electronics where I ran a global marketplace selling electronic components, you know, in 156. Plus different countries and you know, you know, have two and a half million to 3 million skews at any one time. And then moved into mobile MarTech and mobile advertising, helping games to get, you know, downloads and installs of their application, their game, and then get engagement in the from players.

[00:04:32]
And then finally took the leap into consulting a little over, you know, a year and say four months ago. Maybe six months, a year and a half. And I did that for a little while as a solo shop. And then, you know, I was working alongside Nimble Gravity on so many different projects. And the founders in Nimble Gravity are friends of mine from past life where we all worked at Aero Electronics together.

[00:04:55]
Okay. And it was kind of one of those conversations where it was like, well, this is silly that we’re working on the same project, but we’re two different companies. Right. When we all know each other, we’re all in the same place. Why don’t you just come join us and we’ll be, you know, better able to serve clients all around.

[00:05:09]
Right? Yeah. Like you as a solopreneur will all of a sudden have the ability to have a data science team and to talk about building, you know, engineering teams to help people build software products and we’ll have, you know, the e-commerce skills that you bring to the table. And so it just made a heck of a lot of sense.

[00:05:26]
And then, you know, January of, of 22, I joined up with Nimble Gravity. Okay. And I’ve been. You know, loving it ever since. Okay. We’re working in the consulting world.

[00:05:34]
Arlen:
Okay. That, that’s awesome. Good story. Thank you for, you know, sharing that with us. And yeah, it’s just kind of also att testament to the fact that, you know, the relationships that you build in these, in the business world, you know, you never know what can happen in the future.

[00:05:48]
So, um, you know, the work, the wise is you, you never wanna, you know, burn bridges or, you know, tarnish relationships because Yeah. You never know what opportunities can happen in the future. And so it’s good that you, you know, you maintain that relationship. With founders of Nimble Gravity and, and are now able to work with them to do, you know, do do some big things.

[00:06:06]
So that’s, that. That’s good to hear. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned at the top of the episode today, we’re gonna be talking about, you know, just, just the simple things that often do get overlooked by e-commerce businesses that, you know, can really help improve their overall performance. So I, I really want to, where I want to start with is just if you can share just some common.

[00:06:26]
Mistakes. Cause I think you can learn from a lot of mistakes these days that, you know, common mistakes that e-commerce companies make, you know, when it comes to marketing and just the overall performance.

[00:06:36]
Matt: 
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve, I’ve written articles about this, so definitely a, an area of passion. One of the first things I’ll, I’ll talk about is just, Flat out, make your site faster, and Yes.

[00:06:49]
Okay. More performant, right? Mm-hmm. And like a lot of people don’t tie that into SEO ranking, and they don’t tie it into marketing, and they don’t tie it into customer experience, but it goes into every one of those things, right? Mm-hmm. Like if your site is slow to load and it’s not interactive yet, and the customer’s trying to press on a button and they’re getting frustrated, that’s a problem, right?

[00:07:10]
If your site is slow, Uh, and it’s slower than all of your competitive set. Google’s gonna take notice of that, and they’re gonna rank your competitive set potentially higher than you because you’re having a lower performing website, right? It’s super easy to go out and go to like page speed, dot web.dev, and test your site.

[00:07:30]
And get a list of all the things that you need to go fix. Right? Yeah. Do you have unused JavaScript, unused css? Do you, are you loading images that are way down the page that are huge before they’re actually even needed? Right. Like lazy load, those don’t bring ’em in and in your first call to the, to your resources.

[00:07:48]
Right? Right. And then it’ll even tell you things like, Hey, your images are in an old format. Right. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, people are still arguing about, do you say gif or GIF or whatever, and that’s an old image format. Like who cares? Right? Right. Like leave it alone. Yeah. And start talking about A V I F and Web P because those are a, a more compressed image format that are like half the size of even, you know, the smallest gift for jpeg, right?

[00:08:16]
Mm-hmm. And so that is gonna make your site faster and, and gonna make it load better. Yeah. You know, what are the other things that I see Arlen. Is people that don’t surface their content well, right? Mm-hmm. And so spend all this money on content writing, and you maybe hire a freelancer or you have a staff internally to your organization and they’re, they’re writing articles, they’re writing blog posts, they’re creating marketing copy and content.

[00:08:41]
Maybe they’re describing whole categories, whatever it might be. And then you get it buried on your site. You would be amazed how many sites that I have seen where. Content might be 40 or 50 clicks deep. Wow. It’s just, it’s unbelievable. Right. You, you’d have been better off sitting in the parking lot of the building you work in or your driveway if you work from home and like just burning $20 bills, right?

[00:09:05]
Yeah. Basically. Yeah. It’s like, what are you doing? Right? Yeah. So, you know, if you’re not using simple things like pagination, if you are interlinking your articles like. You write a new article, put a link to an old article in there. Mm-hmm. Do you have breadcrumbs at the top of your website? All these kinds of things surface your content much better and make it much faster, not only for a, you know, a crawler to get to that information and to index you well from an SEO perspective.

[00:09:34]
But they may get more user friendly for an actual user. Yeah. And I, I think that’s what people have to, to really focus on. Yeah. You know, I could go on about new social channels or non-branded search or, or lots of other things, but the one that stands out to me that I would wanna mention too is like doing email better.

[00:09:54]
Mm-hmm. I mean, in this day and age, like my, one of the founders in Nimble Gravity, this guy named Tony og, he and I share like, Awful emails that people send us with each other because we get a kick out of ’em. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like, it’s, it’s poor grammar. Mm-hmm. It’s like they leave in somebody else’s name.

[00:10:12]
The, you know, half the email is blank, or part of the template that they use to write off of is still stuck in there, or whatever it might be. Mm-hmm. Right. And if people could just do email better, they’d probably find. So much more marketing revenue coming in, more sales coming in, if they’re doing cold outreach, whatever it might be, right?

[00:10:32]
Mm-hmm. Proofread people, proofread, have somebody else read it, read out loud, put it into something like email on acid, and understand does my email look good in all these different clients and browser settings and all this kind of stuff, and just do that so much better. So there’s a few things for you.

[00:10:48]
Arlen:
Yeah, those are great. Yeah. And, and one of the key things about all of those things are, I mean really those are things you really need to get in order before you do any large scale mar large scale marketing campaigns. Totally. You know, so this has nothing to really, even to do with your direct outreach.

[00:11:03]
These are things you gotta kind of clean up in-house, you know, to get thing is in order. You know, it was interesting you mentioned, the first thing you mentioned was the page load speed. Yeah. It’s, I think, More important than ever. Not only because it is a factor with the search engines and for seo, but I think these days it’s, uh, people are more accustomed to things loading quicker because of the bandwidth increases that we all have.

[00:11:26]
You know where I am, you know, my place, I get, I mean, I’m getting the plan, I have, I’m getting between 300, 400 I megabits per second download, which is, you know, a really good amount of speed. So, If a site is loading slow, you know, one of the first things I do, I’m like, all right, is my, is my internet connection good?

[00:11:43]
I immediately do a speed test check just to, because I’m like, all right, it must be on my end. It can’t be on their end. And then when I see that, you know, I’m getting 300 and the site is still slow, I’m like, all right. It’s, it’s something on their end, obviously. Totally. So, you know, we, we can’t get away with it anymore.

[00:11:57]
You know, you mentioned you came out, started getting into the business in 98 and you know, that was in the age of the dial up service and Yeah. Back then slowly, yeah. I mean we were getting, you know, I mean just a very small fraction of the speeds and so when things loaded slowly, yeah, you can get away with it because, yeah, I mean that’s basically the infrastructure at that time, you know, there was an overly.

[00:12:19]
Fast loading sites, people just got accustomed to it. But nowadays, yeah, it’s just no excuse. And people are more aware of any, any issues like that when it comes to, you know, page and, you know, site loading. Yeah. So, you know, with e-commerce businesses, of course these days everybody is, It’s cost conscious.

[00:12:37]
Any marketing effort, any money spent on the business, everybody these days is kind of watching it because, you know, it’s just kind of in the, in the world. We’re in the economy. There’s all these talks of the recession, the inflation, so everybody is kind of a little bit on edge, on, on, on spending. So I wanted to see, could you, could you share some cost effective and just easy, easy to implement strategies that e-commerce business can use.

[00:12:59]
To just optimize their, not only some of the factors that you mentioned earlier, but the conversion rate and then the overall user experience. Totally.

[00:13:06]
Matt: 
Yeah. So a couple things come to mind there, right? One, the biggest websites in the world are out there testing stuff. All the time. Right? Right. And they’re creating a paradigm that people want to operate in.

[00:13:23]
Right? Like there is expected functionality when you go visit Amazon, or if you go visit walmart.com or whatever, you know, a really large internet retailer. Mm-hmm. And you’ll see that they do common things right, like. They don’t hide their search bar up in the corner underneath a magnifying glass. Right, right.

[00:13:42]
It’s really big. It’s right there in the, you know, the top center of the page. Yeah. You should follow that example because you know, so many people already go to those websites that when they come to yours, it’s gonna feel familiar. So go steal ideas essentially from people and, you know, figure out, okay, this has gotta be working.

[00:14:01]
You know, Amazon’s doing it, Walmart’s doing it, best buy’s doing it. Whoever, right? Why, why would I fight this trend and say, you should do it differently when you come visit my website, right? Mm-hmm. That’s like if you had a retail store. And you said, well, we don’t put the clothes out on the floor. You gotta go back into the warehouse and unpackage ’em yourself and see what you like.

[00:14:22]
Right? Like who does that? Yeah. Nobody’s pretty crazy. You know, why are you trying to break paradigms? So don’t break paradigms, right? Mm-hmm. And that’s free and, and cheap and easy. Like you can just go design around that if you want like an actual. You know, thing that you could put on your site and that you could do.

[00:14:39]
So Microsoft Clarity, great tool. Right? Totally free. Mm-hmm. Captures tons and tons of sessions. It’s supposed to be unlimited. It does cap out around, I, I think a hundred thousand a day or something. But for a lots of small businesses, that’s more than enough. Right. Okay. So what is Microsoft Clarity?

[00:14:56]
Microsoft Clarity is a free to install a little piece of JavaScript on your site that will give you heat mapping. It’ll tell you about rage clicks on your site. It’s the equivalent to like a hot jar or another quantitative or so not quantitative, qualitative analytics platform. Right. And this’ll tell you points of frustration where people are running into challenges with your website.

[00:15:18]
Mm-hmm. And the only effort that this takes to put onto your site is putting that tag in your tag manager. Or into your site code in some way, shape or form. So it’s not completely free. You’re gonna spend a few man hours doing it, whoever might be doing that work for you, but it’s as close to free as that you’re gonna really get.

[00:15:36]
Mm-hmm. And we’ll give you a ton of insights on how actual users on your site are. Interacting and finding problems. Yeah, those two things. Yeah. Okay. Great. 

[00:15:46]
Arlen:
Great. Yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. I hadn’t heard of that tool. I know there’s a lot of other solutions. You mentioned Hot Jar and some other solutions.

[00:15:52]
A lot of is SEO tools Will, will have that functionality is kind of add-ons, but yeah, that’s that’s great. I’m glad you mentioned that. I’m gonna check that out in a, definitely encourage everyone to check it out as well as it is a free tool. You know, you, you mentioned a couple key things here as far as what the big guys are doing.

[00:16:10]
You know, but they’re always, they’re, they’re testing, they’re testing, testing, testing. And so a lot of this kind of goes into when they’re doing these things, they’re creating, you know, kind of a repository of analytics so that they can make the right decisions of, you know, like you said, simple things like keeping that search mark.

[00:16:27]
Very prominent, top and, and visible of, of, of their product pages. So things like that. But wanted to see, in your experience with all that you’ve done in e-commerce and even with Nimble consultancy, what do you think are some key performance indicators that, you know, any e-commerce business should monitor to make sure that they measure the success of their marketing efforts?

[00:16:49]
Matt:
Yeah. You know, so there’s all the obvious ones. Like you gotta watch what your return on ad spend is. You need to be watching. Things on site, like, you know, bounce rate and how is that performing? You know, what are your exit pages? What’s your overall conversion rate? What’s your dropout through your conversion funnel?

[00:17:07]
And, and kind of learn those, those pain points through the metrics, right? And understand, you know, if I could improve the flow through from heart to checkout or through, you know, checkout steps. It would impact my conversion rate by x i. I think there’s some other things that people really need to be looking at though, from an e-commerce health perspective, right?

[00:17:32]
And kind of having some, some thought processes around operational guys, right? What’s, what’s your percentage of same day shipments, right? Like do you have same day shipping on your website? Are all of your packages making it out same day or are you missing, you know, 10%, 15%, something like that? Yeah.

[00:17:56]
Knowing, knowing those kind of operational things are good as well as say something like, well, when should I hire a new sales rep? How many, you know, individuals do I need? Manning chat, email, phone, whatever the, the contact sources are that we have, and how many dollars of revenue do, are they able to bring in individually and be responsible for and be measured against.

[00:18:19]
Yeah. And when can I really, truly afford to bring another one on from a customer service level? Right. Like, don’t make a reactionary decision and say we’re a little bit busy and some of these calls, you know, like. We’re, we’re missing 10 calls or two chats or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah. Like know, know what that real threshold is, right?

[00:18:39]
And then, and then possibly the other one that people should think about is really kind of, what’s your re-engagement? What’s your rebuy metrics look like, right? Mm-hmm. So I used to understand when I was a direct operator of that marketplace that I was talking about, when have 85% of my users. Made a second purchase.

[00:19:02]
Mm-hmm. Right. And I didn’t wanna wait for a hundred because waiting for a hundred, you know, you’re, you’re never gonna get there. Yeah. But 85% is a large enough chunk of your users to give you an indication of, hey, buy 121 days, and that was my number. Mm-hmm. At that business, 85% of my users who are gonna rebuy have made a second purchase.

[00:19:23]
Okay. What am I gonna do with that information? Okay, well, great. If you’ve reached 121 days and you’re a customer of mine and you haven’t made a purchase a a second purchase, I’m gonna be reaching out to you. Mm-hmm. And I’m gonna be talking to you via email. I’m gonna be giving you an offer. I want you to come back.

[00:19:40]
I might even give you a phone call, right? Mm-hmm. I might, if you’re a big enough customer. I might personally reach out to you as the general manager or the vice president or the founder, or c e o of the organization and say, Hey, we want your business back. Yeah. Come shop with us, right? Mm-hmm. And, you know, shame on me if I actually even wait to 121 days, right?

[00:19:59]
Mm-hmm. Why? Why should I? Before that period in time, I would have an email campaign set up that would push out to those people, right? Mm-hmm. And say, here’s an offer for you. Here’s 10% off your next purchase. You know, Hey, don’t forget about this, this offer that we made for you, trying to recapture more of those customers.

[00:20:19]
And so, you know, while that doesn’t necessarily work in every business, maybe you have subscriptions or your SaaS software or something like that, for those people that are selling goods that have, you know, they’re expendable. Their commodity goods, these kinds of things, that kind of tactic can work really well to drive more business and as a metric they should a hundred percent pay attention to.

[00:20:39]
Arlen: 
Yeah. Yeah. It really is. And I think you’re right, they should pay attention to it and a lot of times just don’t, um, you know, they really don’t kind of look at those specific metrics. But yeah, I mean that’s a, that’s a key one because you can kind of anticipate, you kind of know when most people. You know, rebuy, they repurchase.

[00:20:57]
And then if you can kind of get in that window, not even wait that long, but even before that, just any engagement. Yeah. So that your top of mind is, is, is really key. Yeah. It’s just, it’s, it’s all of those touch points that make a difference. I mean, we, we see, I mean, not in not only e-commerce businesses doing it, I was, I was thinking of a local.

[00:21:15]
Barbecue restaurant that I go to here in the suburb of Orlando. And one of the things I noticed that they do is they kind of have somebody, I don’t know what their, the signed role is. They probably have other roles, but they, they always have someone walking around. A lot of times restaurants do this. The manager will go out, but they, they do this.

[00:21:32]
I mean, this is just a, I guess you could say a fast casual type restaurant. And so, right. It’s, they’re starting to adopt it. Normally you would see like a manager walking around in more of a, a higher level restaurant, but now these fast casuals are doing it. They’re coming by. They’re asking you how it was, they’re asking you, okay, do you want something special?

[00:21:50]
Sure. Or I’ve even been there when they’ve offered me a. You know, a free dessert cuz they, they added something to the menu item. And so it’s just all of those little touch points stick in your mind. Cause you know, you see, I, I’m remembering these things and so I remember that experience and so when, when you, when you reach out to people, you can also think of that, that kind of, uh, don’t reach out to them empty-handed.

[00:22:10]
You know, maybe you can offer them totally something, you know, and so you, they’ll, you’ll definitely stand out. You know, opposed to the competitors, cuz of course there’s many competitors. People have a decision when it comes to purchasing, so for for sure. Yep. Yeah. You know, these days we’re, we’re really in this kind of world of social media.

[00:22:27]
Social media, cheers. It’s really exploded. I mean, now we’re getting ready to get to this next level, which is this whole metaverse, which I think is probably really gonna explode. I think. Come June, I think Apple has announced they’re gonna come out with their whole VR goggles and systems. And I think that’s gonna really propel things.

[00:22:42]
They always tend to lead the way. So that’s gonna be part of this whole social media thing. Now, how does an e-commerce company really effectively leverage social media to just improve their. Their overall performance and just, you know, reach that larger audience. Cause that’s really what people wanna do when they get out there on these platforms and they’re trying to reach a larger audience.

[00:23:03]
Matt: 
Yeah, yeah, for sure. The very first thing I think that companies should do is stop saying things like, my customers aren’t there. Right. Like a hundred percent. They’re, they’re there. They might not be the largest population of people there, but there are grandmothers and grandfathers on TikTok. Right?

[00:23:22]
They’re, you know, there are people on every one of these platforms. There are people on Pinterest, they’re on WhatsApp, they’re wherever, right? Yeah. They’re on a disc, they’re on a discord server somewhere. Right? True, true. Right. And, and like literally like, You talk to some people and they’re like, what’s Discord?

[00:23:39]
And you’re, it’s like, okay, we’ll hold on a whole other conversation. But, you know, there are, there are all these different channels and you know, your, your comments around the metaverse are super interesting too, right? And, and how do you manage all of them and effectively leverage them, right? So, You’re gonna need to have some kind of internal management in your organization or an agency that you’re partnering with to manage that on, on your behalf.

[00:24:06]
Yeah. You’re gonna have to participate across channels, you’re gonna have to have organized operations around that, right? Mm-hmm. So you’re gonna want some kind of scheduling, whether you’re putting it into a calendar and Excel spreadsheet, a tool like, you know, HubSpot has tools if you’re in B2B or managing social media.

[00:24:24]
Hootsuite, et cetera. Like you can do these all kinds of things for b2c. And you can also find these tool sets out there now that for small business owners are, are actually super cool where they’ll take your posts, right? Like you could spend your Sunday afternoon, your Monday morning at work, your, your Tuesday, whatever.

[00:24:44] If you’re an smb. And compose 30 or 40 different social campaigns, right? Or, or tweets or posts or whatever you want to call ’em. And these platforms now have a little bit of AI builts into them, and you’ll be able to go out and post. They’ll schedule it for you. They’ll try them all out. They’ll say, Ooh, this one got the most engagement.

[00:25:03]
I’m gonna actually just actively repost that on your behalf. You don’t have to go do anything. Right? So there’s a bunch of things coming in in that fashion that’ll allow people to extend. Their impact and their interaction level within social media by using those kinds of tool sets. But I think you also need to explore the cutting edge of things, right?

[00:25:27]
Mm-hmm. So, you know, live streaming shopping on social platforms is actually becoming a thing, right? Yeah. So a lot of us would think about like QVC or whatever, right? Mm-hmm. Like you’re selling stuff on television. Guess what? They’re selling stuff on television. It just happens to be television that exists on Facebook or Instagram or, or wherever it is.

[00:25:46]
Right? Yeah. And people are participating in these live shopping events and making purchases there. Mm-hmm. This huge in China. Right. Mm-hmm. Massive on, on Chinese platforms. And the other thing that I would say is figure out how to use influencers. Yeah. If they fit for your business. You know, influencers were huge in the gaming space that I was in, right.

[00:26:12]
And they’re huge for VPN products, right? Mm-hmm. You, you get an influencer talking about how, hey, you can circum, circumvent. Netflix’s regional show selections by using a vpn. Right. And, and say, Hey, I wanna watch TV from the uk. Mm-hmm. Uh, okay. Totally different selection on Netflix if you’re in the UK versus what you see in, in the us And maybe you have access to different movies or different shows or whatever that interest you.

[00:26:40]
Mm-hmm. And so understanding influencers and, and how they do that, like, Influencers talking about that can create hundreds of thousands of downloads for games, right? Yeah. So how can you get an influencer talking about your company’s lipstick, your new tennis shoes, the new album that you just dropped, whatever it might be.

[00:27:01]
Right? And those kinds of things are really gonna allow you to leverage social media in very different ways mm-hmm. Than just if you’re doing it in-house, in, in more traditional methodologies. Yeah. And. It, I think your money’s gonna be better spent in those, in those newer areas as well. 

[00:27:18]
Arlen:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, I totally agree and yeah, you brought up a good point as well.

[00:27:23]
It, whatever you do, it’s gotta be managed properly. It’s gotta be scheduled. You gotta have somebody on your team that’s dedicated to doing it. I, I deal with a lot of small businesses and why, what I do, and I, I, I kind of, kind of can glean into their processes just from the relationships that we have. And a lot of times I do see it’s, Lot of businesses don’t have anything formally structured as far as social media is concerned.

[00:27:46]
It’s like they’ll, you know, they’ll do some posting one week. They won’t do it the next week. It’s nothing formalized. There’s nobody really tasked to do it internally. It’s gotta get shuffled around and so, or even need, the owner will be doing this himself and or herself and you know, That just doesn’t, that’s not gonna work.

[00:28:04]
You, you, you’ve got to have something formalized, scheduled and just organized so that you, you know, you remain consistent with it. Yeah. I think that’s, that’s also a very key thing. Now, Matt, we get ready as we get ready to wrap things up. I just wanted to see if you could share some successful case studies where, you know, e-commerce companies have just made some.

[00:28:21]
Simple changes to the marketing strategy that resulted in a significant improvement in their, you know, their overall performance.

[00:28:26]
Matt:
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one client in particular of ours comes to mind and they’re in flower sales. And, and we had a, a great experiment with them where we were testing, you know, against a control variation and then have three variants really, where we’re just changing essentially the imagery.

[00:28:48]
Mm-hmm. Uh, for the particular. Product that we were trying to drive more sales for. Mm-hmm. Uh, and also we kind of wanted to, you know, in the flower industry, what they’re doing when they sell those, they’re, they’re also in, you know, death tech, right? And so what they’re doing is they’re powering websites for funeral homes and selling flowers on those.

[00:29:11]
And then they have to route that flower order to a flower shop. In the city of the funeral home. Right, I see. Right. Because that’s where the event’s taking place. Mm-hmm. And that’s where the flowers need to be delivered and everything. Right. And so the other part of that is trying to reduce order refuels, where if you have kind of a set flower recipe, maybe the.

[00:29:34]
Floral shop you’re working with in that particular city doesn’t have all the ingredients to put together what you ordered, and so they’ll reject that order. I see. So we were both trying to get down order refusals as well as increase actual sales. Mm-hmm. And in testing, just the imagery that’s, that was used and landing on one that essentially increased click through rate.

[00:29:57]
From the product landing page into a product detail page, we were getting 184% more clicks onto like the category product listing page, and then 23% more clicks, uh, into the product detail page that resulted in a 6% sitewide margin lift. It dropped the number of service touches by 60,000. Oh wow. But they didn’t have to like have this opportunity where the florist was like, don’t have it.

[00:30:26]
Go find somebody else. Get involved. Right. Like it eradicated that and it dropped the refusal rate by 23% because we were essentially highlighting this florist. Choice. Mm-hmm. Where the florist got to go in and for a set dollar amount, make the, the best, most beautiful bouquet that they could. I Right, I see, I see.

[00:30:45]
Promoting that we were able to easily drive those kinds of results and, okay. That happened in two weeks. Right. Oh, wow. So that’s like, it’s super fast and super easy. You’re replacing images and you’re, you’re also just kind of at the same time impacting all these other things. 

[00:31:04]
Arlen:
Yeah, it Yeah. So amazing stuff. Right. really is. Yeah, I mean it just definitely comes to the, we kind of come full circle now with, that’s the great testimonial of just how such a small change can make a huge impact for sure. Just, you know, minor change to some images, and then it’s like a, you know, snowball effect where it’s just increased their sales.

[00:31:20]
I. You know, a lot of times exponential, exponentially. So yeah. Great, great testimonial. Thank you for sharing that case study for sure. Uh, well, Matt, I’ve, I’ve definitely learned a lot and you know, as we’ve said, there’s a lot of basic things that don’t cost a lot that any bus, e e-commerce business can, can do or cast somebody on their team to go through these things.

[00:31:38]
That can definitely make a difference. You don’t always have to just look at, you know, these huge. Grandiose marketing campaigns and think that’s the only way to improve your sales and your performance. There’s some small things that you just have to kind of look at in-house to That can definitely make a difference, for sure.

[00:31:55]
Matt:
Yeah, a hundred percent. 

[00:31:56]
Arlen:
Yeah. So Yeah. So as we get ready to close things out, I always like to switch gears so our audience can get to know you a little bit better. So if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think we’d be interested to note. Oh yeah.

[00:32:05]
Matt:
Okay. So. Fun fact, my Aunt Judy is Judy Shepherd Misse, who is the inventor of Jazzer size. Wow. So I, I’m, I’m related to the inventor of Jazzer size. 

[00:32:21]
Arlen:
Wow. That, that is a fun fact. Wow. The inventor of jazzer size. Yes. So, I mean, when you think about it, I mean that, that whole jazzer size. It was, I guess part of the whole, you know, aerobic rage in the eighties. But it was one of the things that really, I think started all of these gyms doing these classes and, you know, I mean, I totally, I mean, to this day it’s now gone onto, you know, all of subscription platform services now with the, you know, apple, apple fitness and all of these things.

[00:32:48]
So, yeah. Wow. Okay. That’s an interesting, fun fact. Okay. And does for sure. Does that brand actually, do you know, does the brand jazzer size, is it. Still live on is, are there people still?

[00:32:59]
Matt:
Oh yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s, it’s going strong and active and, uh, her daughter, my cousin is now the president and runs.

[00:33:07]
Oh, wow, okay. I have their own, you know, online store, still doing, uh, still doing videos, opening, you know, locations, uh, having teachers and instructors across the globe. Wow. It’s a franchisee model as well. Okay. So, Be a really, really great business that’s still, still out there and, and Okay. 

[00:33:27]
Arlen:
Thriving. Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s, that’s really good to hear that it just continues to live on even despite, you know, all of these changes and all of these competitors now in the landscape. So, good to hear. Good to hear. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Lastly, Matt, before we let you go, if you don’t mind letting our listeners and viewers know the best way for them to get in contact with you if they’d like to reach out to you and, you know, pick your brain anymore about, you know, any of these simple but easy to do digital marketing strategies.

[00:33:50]
Matt: 
Yeah, so, I’ll give you three really easy ways to, to reach out to me or Nimble Gravity. One is our website. Okay. Which is nimble gravity.com and the other two are both LinkedIn, right? Go follow either Nimble Gravity on LinkedIn or or me Matt Ranta on LinkedIn, and happy to connect with folks and talk about any challenges that they’re facing and how they might overcome ’em.

[00:34:16]
Arlen:
Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. Definitely encourage people to, to check you out on LinkedIn or the other social platforms as well as check out Nimble. gravity.com and we’ll be sure to have the link directly in the show notes as well. So it’s awesome talking to you, Matt. We really appreciate you coming on to the e-Commerce marketing podcast.

[00:34:30]
Matt:
Thanks, Arlen. Great talking to you too. 

Podcast Guest Info

Matt Ranta
Partner, Head Of Practice – Digital & E-commerce with Nimble Gravity