Hi, Eric. And welcome to the podcast.

It's great to have you here. Jesse. Pleasure being here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no, it's awesome. So before we get started, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to our guests? Tell us a little bit about your business and your background in e commerce. Absolutely. Eric Melcher. I'm a Texas expat living in Eastern Europe.

I enjoy playing tennis. I play tennis with Roger Federer. That's right. I I put on YouTube and I look at Roger Federer highlights and I get in front of the TV screen and swing the racket there. And I'm also into e commerce. I'm an e commerce partnerships director for OptiMonk. We are basically an all in one CRO customer not customer conversion rate optimization platform that you can use the brands use to increase their conversion rates.

Awesome. Yeah. I've been a big fan of OptiMonk for a good number of years now, probably five or six, at least four or five years.

I must've come across you not long after you launched. So there you go. Aging myself in this world of e commerce awesome. So so first and foremost, like, do you want to tell us a bit about the OptiMonk product and sort of like its history, where it came from and where it is now? Yeah. History founded founded, I think in 2015 and it started out as a pop up conversion tool.

And so if you ever needed exit intent pop ups, that's what we became known for. We were the first to create those type of pop ups. People started using us specifically for that. But then a little over a year ago, we transitioned into a personalization platform. So you can do fun things like dynamic content embedding things to do to increase your average order value.

And now, now, because of AI and the power of chat GPT and all the other tools that are coming out, we're starting to release some features that are more AI related. And so that's coming down the road. And it's something that we are very, very excited about. But like you said you can find us, we have integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and over 50 other.

Different types of email marketing and and e commerce related platforms. So we, we've been around the block, I guess you would say, Jesse. Yeah. And like, what's the top feature that your users are using most often now? Is it still that kind of exit intent or is it something else that's now more popular?

I think it's the average order value increase that's becoming very popular. I think brands realize that it's not enough just to get the one. The one sale, like the one thing in your shopping cart , that it really makes sense that if you have a pretty high customer cost per acquisition, that you need to really increase that average order value.

And so there's some cool things that you can do within the OptiMonk platform that helps you to do that. So that's probably the, the, the most popular feature right now, I would say. Okay. That's awesome. Cool. So what, diving into the questions, what do you think are the biggest mistakes brand make brands make with optimization, you know, conversion rate optimization on their websites?

Yeah. And it's not so much what I think. I recently had the pleasure of working with. Over five different CRO specialists, experts in the field, and they were actually doing some free consulting and auditing for some of our brands. And listening to them, they, they they said that the biggest mistake that CRO people make or marketers make is focusing just on the homepage.

And so they look at the homepage, or they look at the landing page, and they start thinking of different headlines to test different layouts, different messaging to test. And they said that that's the last place they start with. And I was really surprised to hear that. And so, of course, I asked why, and they said, the first thing they start with is the page.

Or the part of the journey that is closest to the checkout, because that's going to have your biggest impact on actual sales. And so all of them focus on the product page. And to me, you know, their philosophy was, Hey, at any given time. There's probably 3% of people that are ready to buy 80% of people that are just not ready and about 16% that are on the fence.

And those 16% of people are the ones that get to your, your, your checkout page, your shopping page. They probably put something in the cart, but they're still not quite ready. And they leave your website. And so they really focus in on trying to convert that 16%, the ones that are on the fence, and therefore they do a lot of AB testing.

They'll do things like adding different social testimonials on the product page, maybe adding a little bit more information on the product page, like bullets about the product or even reducing elements on the prodding page. Like maybe there's too many elements, maybe. You don't need to have that shipping information on there.

If you already showed it and the customer journey. And so that to me was really, really insightful. And I think that, you know, if marketers had that, that opportunity to talk with CRO experts in almost all of them saying you should really start with a product page, I think that could be a game changer for your business, Jesse.

Yeah, that's so interesting. Cool. So and does OptiMonk do anything specifically around the product page or help improve that in any way? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Good question. We allow you to do a lot of different A B testing. On any page of the website, so that obviously means the product page too, and you can do things like a B test, different different messaging whether or not you want to add a customer testimonial on the product page or not, whether or not you want to have different images.

Different bullet points, different copy different, you know, value propositions or product descriptions. And so we allow for all that not to get too far ahead. But one of the things that we're embedded testing right now is called the smart page product optimizer. And basically, basically we're going to do the work for you.

We're going to let a I do the work for you. Let's say you have multiple product pages on your website. You don't have time to go and implement tests for each 1 of those. So, basically, we're going to use our functionality functionality. To do the testing for you, and it would be done automatically. And whenever there's a winner, it will move automatically and just show the winner and continuously test, you know, different things like product messaging also, you know, different layouts.

And so that's a cool feature that we're beta testing right now. And I think people are going to get excited about that, because just as the CRO experts said. That's the one place that you should really focus on when you're starting to do conversion rate optimization. And so that's what we're trying to to make it super easy, super hands off and just, just basically automatic for all of the brands out there that have product pages.

That's fascinating. So I mean, I guess that's following the model that kind of Google has taught us where you, you put in a bunch of different headlines, you know, and copy lines, and then allow the algorithm to find the ones that perform best rather than assuming, you know, best it's kind of applying that thinking to.

The product page, which I love. I'm curious, how are you allowing the brand owners to kind of edit or check what the AI is suggesting? Because I think we've all found that with AI, it wouldn't be a good idea to just let AI publish things willy nilly. It can't, you know, AI comes into its own when there's a human who kind of curates the output of AI.

Is there going to be an option for that with your tool? Absolutely. It's going to mimic what our headline with what our headline AI testing tool does right now. So right now you have the ability to test multiple different headlines and the recommended by our AI, you know, feature, and you can actually see the different headlines that it's recommending to test.

If there's one that you don't want, you can eliminate that. If you want to add one or edit one of those, You can simply do that as well. So before you actually hit the run button, you could see what they're going to be testing what headlines are going to be testing. Same thing with a product page optimizer.

Before you actually push run, you'll see what, what elements or what copy will be testing for you. Amazing. Okay. So you're already doing that on the headline basis and you're kind of adding it for other elements of the page. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. So how do you guys go, I'm curious, how do you guys go about developing features for your app?

Like how do you come up with the ideas and what do you, you know, how do you prioritize what you think is going to move the needle for your clients or your customers? Yeah, I mean, we do a couple of things. One of the things, obviously we have heat mappings tools. And so we see how customers are using, utilizing the platform what they're doing what's inside the platform.

We have different surveys that pop up and ask people, you know, what are they like about this feature? What, what do they don't like, what improvements can we make? And then obviously we send out surveys through email periodically, asking them different segments that we know who are using the tool. Our different features and we just basically try to get their feedback from it.

So I, I would say it's a consistent a consistent game of surveys that are done within the platform. And then also usually through email marketing. Yeah. Interesting. And you guys must have access to a lot of data about like consumer behavior online and on websites. Is there anything interesting you can share with our audience around that, like around, you know, how the landscape is changing.

Yeah, so humans, you know, we humans were pretty smart. We know when something is not, is not genuine. So some of the things that we've noticed, like you have this generic pop up and you may have like the sense of urgency, like, Hey, you know, use this discount code and it's only good for 24 hours. You see that a lot, right?

What people realize is that, wait a minute, if I come back tomorrow and I see the same pop up, I'm going to see the same discount code. So I can use that discount code anytime. But if you actually put in there something like, Hey, you can use this discount code only good for July and the code itself actually has like the name of the month before the code.

So it could be something like, you know, July VIP 20 or something like that. And people will actually. Look at that they're intrigued by it and it's it's a little bit more eye catching and it's a little bit more memorable because you have like the month associated to the code and it actually converts higher.

So that's something that we noticed. And within our tool, we have this thing called smart tags and you can automatically have the month updated. And so if you're in June, it could say like June VIP 20, but once it goes to July, we'll say like July VIP 20, and it just automatically does that for you.

So you don't have to do any manual work, but to the consumer, to the visitor, it looks like it's automatically being fresh refreshed, you know, every month and that it's current. You know, it's, it's trendy. So that, that, that's, it's just eye catching and that, that, that's something that we know, you know, from, like you said, we've got a lot of customer data where we, we look at what works, what doesn't work.

That, that's something that it's a very little, very little thing. It's very subtle, but it's important for the audience. Yeah, I guess it's an example of like it's customer psychology and action, isn't it? So if you create a sense of urgency around an offer and that urgency is believable, then they're more likely to take action on it versus if the offer seems like it's not genuinely urgent and it's always going to be there.

So they're not going to know it's going to refresh in August and refresh again in September. They're just going to think this July. Yeah. Another, another example, Jesse, if I may I'll be. Is an e commerce brand, they bootstrapped and started off for 10, 000. And within three years, it grew to about 3 million.

And Ronak Shah, he's one of the co founders. And if you watch any interviews, I mean, this is a brand that's competing in a heavily saturated market. It's protein powder, protein powder. Jesse, I'm sure when you walk into the supermarket, you see all kinds of brands. Isles of it right where they've been able to successfully grow their brand in this heavily saturated market.

And when you, when you look at interviews at the sea of the CEO, and you ask him, what was some of the ingredients for success? CRO was a big ingredient. Specifically, they were able to scale using Facebook ads. And what they did was, was that they had different value propositions. And so if a Facebook ad said something like regrow your hair faster.

With Avi, you know, protein powder. When somebody clicked on that specific ad, they got to the landing page and the headline was associated with the ad. The headline said something like, you know, grow your hair faster or something like that. But if there was another ad and the value proposition was the best tasting collagen protein, obviously appealing to a different customer segment, somebody clicked on that ad and they went to the landing page.

The headline mimicked. What the copy was on the ad, it said something like, you know, the best tasting protein powder out there, right? And they did this for every different value proposition and every different ad that they were running. They made sure that if you clicked on that ad, the headline on the landing page was aligned with the messaging on the ad.

Now, you're probably saying, Eric. That's nothing new. I mean, we all create multiple landing pages for different campaigns. The thing is, though, is that within the platform, you can have one landing page and then based on the UTM parameters in the messaging within your ad, you can have the same landing page, but the headline adjusts based on whatever ad that you're running, running.

So it's the same. Game changer. Yeah, game changer. And, you know, think about it, Facebook advertising has gotten really hard in the past couple of years with the iOS 14 upgrades, and you don't have that same kind of tracking as you did before, but they still saw a really good return because of this little tactic that they did.

So that's something else that, that is a little, it may not, it may seem insignificant, but no, it matters a lot. So that's with OptiMic, they did that. Wow. So, and you basically. You set up your UTM and then in the background, you're saying this UTM matches this. This headline, this UTM matches this headline.

Yeah. If somebody lands on this page with this UTM parameter, then it can match this headline. That is awesome. Yeah. So that's, it's interesting. Like there's a few things here with like kind of borrowing from the world of Google ads because that tactic of like having, I've definitely seen that tactic for a while in Google ads where you have the keyword.

Pulled into the, into the landing page. So that your landing page is super specific to the keyword, the person's search for, but I've never seen an application of that for Facebook ads, and that's super powerful, especially because we're getting to a world now where we're really optimizing the ad towards certain personas.

So I could see how like if it was the yoga mom versus the like career mom. No, you could have a different headline for each that matched the ad. And then you maintain that scent. That's really, really cool. So is that pretty easy to sit up with your tool? It's pretty easy to set up. We have a step by step instructions on how to do that.

We actually have this cool tactical library. Anybody can check it out and depending on what your goal is. So for that, that example is specifically it's, it's to increase your, your roast, you return on adspin, uh, you click on that and then you'll see like the instructions on how you would set that up in the platform.

Awesome. So is that tactic library, something that. Like anyone can access, can we share it in the show notes or is it something? Yeah, absolutely. It's optimum. com forward slash tactic dash library. Yeah. Amazing. We will make sure we link to that as well. Cool. So what was I going to ask? What advice do you have for, for entrepreneurs and the e commerce space?

Like what do you think are the top most important? Kind of drivers of success at the moment. It might not just be, you know, related to this topic, but you know, if you were sitting down at the, at the pub with a, with an e commerce entrepreneur, what would you advise them right now? Being someone who's been in the industry for a while.

Yeah. Last year I had the pleasure of going to a Clavio e commerce summit in London and chat with a lot of different experts and the various fields and listening to I think email is something that a lot of marketers just. Just feel like, Oh, this is, you know, this is something that we have at our disposal.

You can run a campaign on it. You can push a sale on it. You can just create different email funnels and then that's it. But listening to some of the experts, there's a lot more that you could be doing with it. And one of the things that I think most marketers are not doing is getting good customer feedback.

From, from people that are on the email list and that's simple things like, you know, just different surveys. And then the other thing too is segmentation and segmentation. If you can do email marketing combined with segmentation, right? And find out, you know, which of the customers that are churning, which customers stay on longer, which ones are profitable, then you can create various segments through email marketing and really, That's it.

I mean, it is, it is such a low cost way to do this. I mean, you could hire an expert or a consultant that's really good at that. And I think that could be a game changer for your business. The other thing I heard a lot too was video. And so I think shoppable shoppable videos are going to be huge. We are already starting to see that trend where consumers, especially the younger generations.

Oh my God, I sound so old, Jesse, but the younger generations, they're already, this is already like becoming the normal for them. They go to a retail site and they see like a video of the product that it's being used, how it's being treated, how it's being cleaned or washed. Some of the things that you can do with it, you know especially, especially great for fashion or even bags or luggage or anything like that.

But I think videos is, is, is, is huge and it's coming out now, but also live, basically live video. Like live video during shopping. So let's say one day a week you have for like an hour and you can show like your new products that are coming out and you have this video appearing on your, on your own website.

And obviously you can promote that through your email list or your Facebook list or whatever, but consumers get to know who you are. Who the brand owner is, and you can talk to them and engage with them and show them like, you know, just different new items and things like that. And I think that's going to be very powerful because you have the opportunity to show your personality you know, share your story and customers just get a better, a better sense of who you are.

And that's, that's, that's going to be a lot more powerful than just reading the about page on your website. For sure. Yeah. Funnily enough, we just released a podcast episode last week which won't be last week and. By the time this one comes out, but you can go back a few episodes and I'll put this in the show notes, interviewing a live shopping expert.

So she's a live shopping host that works for one of the biggest. German e commerce websites. And she talked to us through the ins and outs of like how you, how you can successfully do live shopping for an e com website. So, yeah, I was really fascinated by that. Yeah, okay. What do you think of the biggest mistakes?

Brands make with optimization? Well, the first one, obviously, is just starting with the homepage. I think the second one is trying to do too much. And that's something that we realize. I mean, we have this tactical library. There's over 30 different Transcription Optimization tactics that you can do tactics to, you know, try to increase conversions or increase your email subscribers, or get a better return on ad spend or get a better average order value.

There's so many different things that you can do that it's overwhelming. And so what we recommend is go through our checklists. We have this optimization checklist, and it's also a questionnaire because every brand is different. So for example, if you have a lot of visitors, let's say one of the questions is, are more than 20% of your visitors international.

Right? Because if so, then you can create a specific experience for your international visitors. So if you go to, let's say there's a person from Germany, they go to a US retailer website. You can have a nice little message that just, that just says, hi, welcome. We ship to Germany. All prices are in euros and all prices include taxes.

And if you spend more than a hundred euros, shipping is free. That is, that is like in just, in just one little fraction of a second, you've increased trust. You've, you've not wasted the person's time because the person automatically knows, Oh, wow, they do ship to my location. Okay, great. Prices include taxes.

This is fantastic, right? But if you're a website that doesn't have a lot of international visitors, obviously you don't need to worry about that. Another question that we have on our list is, is your cart abandonment rate greater than 68%? Because if it is, then that is a really poor card abandonment rate, and here's things that you can do to try to improve that.

Right. But if you don't have a card, abandonment rate problem, then you don't need to worry about those. And so I think the mistake that CRO specialists do is that they try to implement tactics that are not going to get them a better return on their time and investment, where, if they spent a little bit of time answering these questions, they would know.

Based at the end of it, we basically have what we call a rice score. And it's basically on determined by the reach, the implementation effort and the expected impact. And we basically tell you, Hey, here's the top three or four tactics that we feel you should do to get the best return on investment.

Okay. So that's, that's something that we, we recommend. There's this good quotation. I think Abraham Lincoln said it, and he said, if I had four hours to shop, to chop down a tree, I would spend the first two hours sharpening my axe. And that's how I look at that optimization checklist is like sharpening your axe.

Totally. That's such a great saying, because I say that to brands who want to run advertising. If they're getting started for the first time, like. Most of your time is going to be spent on the creative. Like you can't just throw up some creative and then launch ads and expect them to work because that's like just chopping away at a tree with a blunt axe.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Awesome. So you mentioned RV. Do you have any other interesting case studies of brands that have done some interesting things and got some surprising results?

Yeah. Blendjet. Blendjet was a brand that launched in 2018. Ryan Pamplin was the the founder. He got into an accident and for many weeks he, he was basically bedridden and he could only eat food. He can only drink and eat liquids and he was disappointed with all the blenders that were in the hospital and the ones that people were bringing to him.

So he had this idea for Blendjet. And it was basically the idea was a powerful, but yet portable blender, easy to charge, and can basically, you know, chop up anything. Well, fast forward to today, I believe there's a Blendjet blender that's sold like every five seconds , highly successful brand. And when you watch interviews and they ask them, what are some of the the key ingredients for Blendjet success?

And he says that we really focused on increasing our AOV creasing, the average order value, because the cost of the blender was 30. And if you're paying, you know, a cost per acquisition of around 15 to 20, then obviously there's not enough margin in there to make any money. And so they really focused on that.

And some of the things that they did they did a lot of cross sale on the website, so they created their own smoothies, but they were able to trigger the cross sale opportunity as a key moments in the customer journey on the website. And the other thing they did really well was having sort of like a free shipping threshold.

So if once the cart was in the blender, let's say the amount was 30, but you needed to spend 50 to get free shipping, they found, you know, using our platform, really a cool ways to show that using like a horizontal bar, like on the bottom of the website. But that's something that they did really well is highlighting the free shipping everywhere on their website.

So somebody knew that. Okay. I just need to spend maybe two or more dollars to get free shipping. Might as well do that because if I don't ship is going to cost me 20 bucks anyway. And so they had a lot of success with increasing their average order value through using a couple of those tactics that I just mentioned.

Amazing. So how specifically does OptiMank uh, help with AOV? Like, what's the kind of mechanics of how it can, how it can help beyond the actual offer. We make it easy. Yeah. We make it easy to implement those tactics. And so you can have, if you want to have like a free shipping threshold based on the dollar amount that's in your shopping cart, we can do that for you.

Or if you want to offer like as percentage discount based on how much a person has spent. We make it easy to do that within the platform, or if you want to show offers everywhere on your website or just specific pages. We make it very easy to do that for you easy in the sense that you do not need to know any sort of HTML.

You do not need a developer. The platform was designed for marketers. So it has a drag and drop interface. I don't know HTML, but I know how to use OptiMonk. And so if I can, if I know how to use it, any marketer can basically figure out how to use it as well. Yeah, definitely. You mentioned when we were chatting prior to turn hitting record, you were talking about some interesting some interesting insights around zero party data.

And I know with, you know, with data privacy and the way things are going with cookie, cookie tracking, et cetera, we're all focused as brands on. Improving the quality and instances of zero party data. Do you want to talk to me a bit more about your thoughts on on that and how your tool can help with that as well?

Yeah, I mean, basically, if a, if a consumer or visitor is responding to questions, then you, you're okay. I mean, you're, you're okay in terms of that data because they're responding to a question that you asked them. Right. If, you know, obviously, if you were in Europe and you want to be GDPR compliant, you do need to have that little pop up that just says that we have cookie tracking.

And if you're fine with that, then either select, you know, yes, if you're not, then select no if you select no, then it's obviously not a good idea to utilize some of the functionality that is in our that is within the tool. And but if you're using 1st party data through surveys, then you're pretty much protected as always.

And surveys are basically just like little questions that you can ask. The example I gave earlier is. Is if if you know that you have a lot of visitors during during seasonality. So if it's like Mother's Day and you want to ask somebody, hi, are you shopping for yourself or somebody else? And if they respond, somebody else, then that is an example of collecting zero party data.

The benefit of doing that is that, you know, more information about the visitor, about your audience. And so if that person responded, I'm shopping for somebody else, then you can show like a little, a little pop up that just says, well, great. You know, here's our most giftable items that we have this season.

You could show like your 3 most popular items, or you could just say, you know, click here to see, you know, the trending products that we have this season. And now what you've done, right. It's taken them to the part of the website that is really valuable to them. And I think they appreciate that. I mean, if you walk into an H and M store and there's somebody there that says, Hey, how can I help you?

And you say, well, I'm interested and pants and they lead you to the section where, where the pants are. I think you appreciate that, right? That was very helpful. And you can do the same thing online with zero party data. Awesome. So it's kind of like. It's sort of the concept of quizzes, online quizzes, but a mini quiz, almost just like one or two questions to help, help direct people to the right place.

Absolutely. And again, is that something you can do with OptiMonk or is that more just general advice? No, you can definitely do it with OptiMonk. If you want to do quizzes, you can actually do quizzes too. It could be very yeah, it could be very sophisticated or it could be very simple. It's up to you to decide even B2B brands are starting to utilize it.

You know, asking, I think Valentin Radu from OmniConvert, who was on your podcast, if you go to their website, they're a B2B SaaS. But they ask you at the very beginning, you know, we want you to get the most out of this visit. Can you tell us if you are, you know, a tech startup, an agency or marketer? And then based on your response, they'll actually serve up different content that's specific to your, your persona.

Amazing. Yeah, that's really powerful. Awesome. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our audience? Before we before we share with them how they can follow you and contact you. I think the tactic library is something that you'll find interesting. You can go there and select the dropdown, whatever your goal is.

And again, your goal may be to get a better ROI in your Facebook advertising, or your goal may be to increase your AOV. Or just maybe increase your email subscriber list, right? Select whatever your goal is and we'll have different tactics that you can use and that shows you with instructions on how to implement those tactics within our platform.

So yeah, I think that's, it's free to everybody. That's something that you can easily bookmark and I think it's very helpful. Amazing. We'll do that. And how can people keep in touch with you? Follow you? Stay on top of what you're doing at OptiMonk. Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best way. You can just search for me, Eric Melcourt on LinkedIn.

yOu can also follow us. By subscribing to our YouTube channel. We, we, we have a lot of different videos that we roll out on a consistent basis about things that you could do with our product or new product features that we are rolling out that we're also, you know, on Facebook and LinkedIn too, under OptiMonk.

Amazing. All right. Well we'll wrap it up, but it was great to have you here and thank you so much for all the All the info nuggets and awesome ideas that you shared with the audience. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. My pleasure, Jesse.