Growth: Turn Discounts into a Profit Engine with Smarter Promotion Strategy with Dan Bond, RevLifter

[SPEAKER_02]: If we're running a promotion, yeah, you could put 10%, 20% off everything and just look at conversion rate. [SPEAKER_02]: But also what impact is that having on IOV? [SPEAKER_02]: And then are you looking at margin? [SPEAKER_02]: Are you looking at the LTV of those customers?

[SPEAKER_02]: You've acquired that way. [SPEAKER_02]: What's going on with that cohort that you've acquired with that particular promotion? [SPEAKER_02]: If you're running 10% off on a eerie mouse sign-up, the people who've used that often people just use that when they're about to buy and then unsubscribe eerie mouse. [SPEAKER_02]: How many people [SPEAKER_02]: people are doing that.

[SPEAKER_02]: You've got to get a much bigger, deeper picture of the impact those things are having before we get a good idea of how they're working, what impact they're having on your business. [SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Chloe Thomas, the host of this e-commerce marketing focused podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: If you're not familiar with our format, we release five episode mini series that dive deep into one e-commerce marketing topic.

[SPEAKER_00]: It could be channels like email, SEO or Facebook ads or a big topic like acquisition, retention or analytics. [SPEAKER_00]: In each episode, we release new ones on Wednesdays. [SPEAKER_00]: I interview a different expert to explore the latest advice on making it work for you, and then after each five episodes, many series we take a week off to give you time to take action on what you've learned. [SPEAKER_00]: At the moment, we're spending five episodes exploring a brand new topic, so we're all about growth.

[SPEAKER_00]: In the first episode, we talked creative and branding in the performance marketing world. [SPEAKER_00]: Then we celebrated our 300th episode with a mega collection of tactical and strategic growth tips. [SPEAKER_00]: And in this episode, we're getting back to the big stuff, the big growth levers and exploring your discounting and promotion strategy. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a huge, a huge opportunity to improve the performance and the profits of your business, and I guess we're taking us through the different levels of this that you can do, how to get started, and we'll also be sharing some really cool places to optimize you might not have already thought of.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do make sure you listen right to the end because you want to hear his quickfire inside the tips, and you want to hear my suggestions on what to listen to next as well. [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, I'm chatting with growth expert Dan Bond. [SPEAKER_00]: Dan is VP of Marketing at RevLifter, an e-commerce technology company helping retailers optimise conversions through intelligent promotional offers. [SPEAKER_00]: Working with e-commerce brands as diverse as lathe weights, club Lundon and Radley, hello Dan.

[SPEAKER_02]: Hello, Chloe. [SPEAKER_02]: How are you? [SPEAKER_00]: I'm good. [SPEAKER_00]: It's lovely to have you on another one of our podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: First time on this one, but it's always good to be sharing your thoughts with the audience. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much for being here. [SPEAKER_02]: You're welcome. [SPEAKER_02]: You're welcome.

[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you are. [SPEAKER_02]: People aren't getting tired of me turning up everywhere. [SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully. [SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully not.

[SPEAKER_00]: How could they? [SPEAKER_00]: How could they? [SPEAKER_02]: I thought I'd put that to the end of the question, isn't it? [SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, Dan, how did you get into the world of e-commerce growth? [SPEAKER_02]: It's a good question. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I've been a marketer for about 20 years or so. [SPEAKER_02]: I know I don't look old enough to have been in it for 20 years, but I happen.

[SPEAKER_02]: But proper classically trained marketer, old school marketer, trained in the ways of four peas and... [SPEAKER_02]: and how to, how that helps drive growth brand as well as performance on those sorts of things. [SPEAKER_02]: And I've worked for lots of different companies publishing companies, not for profit, technology, mostly technology, and my career basically brought me to work at Rev Lifter who in the commerce space. [SPEAKER_02]: I really like the commerce space.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think what's interesting about it is it's real, it's real purest in terms of marketing and sales and the commercial side how that works is real purest area. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you're selling to consumers. [SPEAKER_02]: You're very much see the impact of the things you do, the brand work, the performance work in terms of the output and the performance you're seeing, the sales you make, the people coming to your website. [SPEAKER_02]: So I think it's a really interesting area to work in.

[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I've become incredibly interested in finding ways to help to help understand, you know, performance, understand the commercial side and how we can help retailers do better, basically. [SPEAKER_00]: is kind of mad that I think we would all say discounts is well-known as a strategy for growing a business, but intelligent discounting and intelligent promotions to grow a business really well is an untapped lever for so many businesses. [SPEAKER_00]: It feels like people are still doing the, oh, well, let's just do 20% off because the shop they walked past on the way to the office had 20% off in the window, where they went, it seems there's so much science we can bring to it, but yet people are still doing it so unscientifically.

[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly, yeah, and you know, it's a difficult like there's a lot going on. [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot going on for retailers. [SPEAKER_02]: There's lots of things that need to work on, you know, they're optimizing their emails, they're optimizing their SMS flows, they're optimizing their ads. [SPEAKER_02]: They're optimizing the on-site, you know, CRO, the user experience, you are all that kind of thing.

[SPEAKER_02]: But you've got this one area, and this is what Reply to really identify. [SPEAKER_02]: You've got this area, which is discounting promotions deals offers, whatever you want to call them. [SPEAKER_02]: They're all basically the same thing, which is kind of unoptimized, undrixploided. [SPEAKER_02]: As you say, people just tend to stick them out as a bit of an afterthought when they want to sell some stock, or they're looking like they're going to not going to hit their performance numbers.

[SPEAKER_02]: But with the way technology has gone, with our understanding of data of people coming to your site, of everything that's going on, of what's going on in the external environment. [SPEAKER_02]: There are ways we can optimize offers and use them more effectively. [SPEAKER_02]: And they're one of the biggest and also most dangerous levers that a retailer has, you pull that lever, you will see improvements in conversion in AOV because you're offering a discount, but you can see damage to your margins and brand from that.

[SPEAKER_02]: So it is an area where there's a huge amount of potential to do it better. [SPEAKER_02]: We think. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it is good that you mention the potential damage you do, because there are famous stories of businesses nearly going under Hoover, the most obvious one, which actually young people are listening to this, probably know this, Hoover, the vacuum cleaner. [SPEAKER_00]: Back in the day, I mean, like it was like the 90s or the 80s or something, wasn't it?

[SPEAKER_00]: They offered free flights when you bought a Hoover, but no one had done the maths. [SPEAKER_00]: And they very nearly lost it all by doing a stupid promotion. [SPEAKER_00]: So, [SPEAKER_00]: I think most people are using promotions, more as a tactic than a strategy, going proper old school marketing talk here. [SPEAKER_00]: They're using it as a quick win, a quick something to do to get something happening, but they should be thinking about it more strategically.

[SPEAKER_00]: Would that be fair to say? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly. [SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, as he said, as I was saying, and you were saying that the typically user is an afterthought bit of an afterthought, we're not going to hit our sales target for this period, or we've got some stock in our warehouse, we need to clear. [SPEAKER_02]: And so that's when they typically come on, or it's habit, because, you know, everyone does those, those annual sales, those quarterly sales, those half year sales, whatever they are, you just get into a bit of a habit of using them.

[SPEAKER_02]: And that's how you do them. [SPEAKER_02]: Or we typically find, [SPEAKER_02]: really when we ever we speak to a retailer is they don't really have an idea often they don't have a position just having our idea of a position or a strategy or a approach to discounting like it's a perfectly sensible and perfectly realistic approach to say we just don't discount and we do meet brands who say that you know we never discount we're a premium brand of it that's fine. [SPEAKER_02]: At least you've thought about it.

[SPEAKER_02]: or if you meet a discount retailer who's like, you know, that's our business model is we buy things, we discount them until until we sell them basically until we clear them out. [SPEAKER_02]: But there are lots of brands who sit between those two extremes who are not super luxury and aren't super discounting and they don't really have a clear idea of what is our approach to discounts. [SPEAKER_02]: When do we use them when do we not, who are they for, who are they not?

[SPEAKER_02]: And so just often what we try to do is just get teams to sit down initially and just say, what is your approach to discounts? [SPEAKER_02]: When do you use them? [SPEAKER_02]: When do you not? [SPEAKER_02]: How much do you want to use them?

[SPEAKER_02]: How premium are you versus discount? [SPEAKER_02]: Let's find out where you are on that spectrum. [SPEAKER_02]: Then we can decide what your approach is and then we can build from there strategy should lead tactics, not the other way around basically and that's much better way to do it. [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't have to be hugely complicated, does it?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just making decisions on a couple of key vertices. [SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned there when we discount who we discount to, the level we discount to, you didn't mention product. [SPEAKER_00]: Is this something which should go down to kind of like skew level category level? [SPEAKER_00]: Does that come in at this point as well?

[SPEAKER_00]: Or is that later? [SPEAKER_02]: I'm absolutely can do. [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's, again, retail has been really aware of their product range of their merchandising and thinking what we often see. [SPEAKER_02]: We've seen lots of retailers like this who have, you know, it's the Pareto principle.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not always exactly 80, 20, but you have a big load of products, but typically you have a smaller subset, you're gonna pay a road product, do you sell a lot of? [SPEAKER_02]: And you always sell those and those are always doing well. [SPEAKER_02]: And those are the kind of things you're like, we don't wanna discount. [SPEAKER_02]: We work with one retailer who have this small range [SPEAKER_02]: they all sold really well and actually our advice to them was these are not only should you never discount they use you should might want to look at actually increasing the price because you sell these really really well and you can probably charge more for them and then they have lots and lots hundreds of other products that they basically sat in their warehouse for a long time people weren't buying them that quick you know some sold faster than others and slower than others so what you're trying to do is understand [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I don't like to use the technology of Uber, but it weighs like Uber, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: What Uber are doing is understanding demand for taxis and then supply of taxis. [SPEAKER_02]: If you can understand demand for products and supply of products and bring that data together and you can understand what is the right conditions, what is the right price to be able to sell it for. [SPEAKER_02]: So we have products for, in order to meet the kind of level of demand you want there to be, and often that's about adjusting prices with something like a promotion or a discount.

[SPEAKER_00]: We set our strategic decisions of the who, the when, the products, the why, which I guess at the beginning or a bit of a hypothesis, just some extent. [SPEAKER_00]: And then do we go into a series of testing, both to work out? [SPEAKER_00]: if we actually do this. [SPEAKER_00]: Does it work?

[SPEAKER_00]: But also there's that whole thing about what level and what promotion you run because we're talking a lot about discounts, but actually a free gift or a free PMP or a free at faster delivery can, sometimes be more powerful. [SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of testing that goes into actually developing this strategy, isn't that? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there's a lot of testing. [SPEAKER_02]: And it really depends where you're starting from.

[SPEAKER_02]: The speed to quite a few brands and often there are either in one of two circumstances, they're already using discounts quite extensively and they're potentially aware that they're overusing them. [SPEAKER_02]: So the use case in that scenario is they want to reduce their use of those promotions, but they know actually did me a brand who said they'd gone completely cold turkey, they just stopped offering discounts because they thought they were over using them. [SPEAKER_02]: But what happened is their performance tank.

[SPEAKER_02]: So they need a way of withdrawing for discounts a bit without that massive, you know, sudden withdrawal and that sudden damage. [SPEAKER_02]: And then the other end, I spoke to a brand not very long ago. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, number, I'll actually mention these guys, Yeti. [SPEAKER_02]: They make very expensive, nice cooblers and and mugs and things, American, American company.

[SPEAKER_02]: For people to put a back on the back of their big trucks and go to cook-outs and things. [SPEAKER_02]: They've known that he was saying, I think they've run like two discounts in the entire time that existed on SPAP 13 years. [SPEAKER_02]: So they have never really discounted. [SPEAKER_02]: but they're aware that as they're growing, they might need to get into discounting in order to keep driving a growth target.

[SPEAKER_02]: So that's an interesting scenario because then you're talking about we've never offered discounts, but we're going to, and then it's a case of rather than just going straight to 20% off for everyone, you might want to just do it quite slowly and strategically, think about where it makes sense to do that. [SPEAKER_02]: And then as you were saying, [SPEAKER_02]: What is the sort of incentive you need in order to drive behavior? [SPEAKER_02]: We've had people come to us and say, what we'd rather than necessarily drive particularly conversion rates or AOV is say, get more people to click in collect.

[SPEAKER_02]: Is there a way we can get more people to click in collect? [SPEAKER_02]: What's the incentive that will drive more people to click in collect? [SPEAKER_02]: And then, as you say, it's back. [SPEAKER_02]: testing, figuring out what incentive will do that, and sometimes you find that it's not actually possible because the incentive will need to be far too big, but you can try and work that out and move back and forth and test different levels and see and see if you can do it.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's all about, as you say, continual testing and optimizing, basically. [SPEAKER_00]: And you mentioned there about a brand who's gone cold turkey. [SPEAKER_00]: I expect there's a lot of brands listening who would like to get out of the discount spiral. [SPEAKER_00]: What is a good way of trying to get out of the discount spiral?

[SPEAKER_00]: Is there one? [SPEAKER_00]: Is there an obvious playbook to follow? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, it's just, so what we do is start up for the position of where are you and what are you, what is your current approach discounts? [SPEAKER_02]: And then it's a case of again, making those small changes and tweaks to say, it's basically becomes more about a decision of when are we not going to discount?

[SPEAKER_02]: Who's not going to see a discount? [SPEAKER_02]: Where can we initially start to not show discounts in a certain context to a certain audience? [SPEAKER_02]: And then you just start doing that. [SPEAKER_02]: And initially, we've done this with several brands.

[SPEAKER_02]: And even initially, just started to see, [SPEAKER_02]: Ah, we're managing to maintain those conversion rates and those AOV rates that you want, that are your target. [SPEAKER_02]: But we're reducing the spend on the promotions, we're reducing the damage to margins over time and we're starting to see. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's small improvements at first, it's 2% for 8%, but gradually over time, you test an optimise and you get that bigger and bigger saving. [SPEAKER_02]: but you can maintain that performance, the key thing is can you maintain the performance while reducing the spend on promotions?

[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, that's all about choosing the right segments, choosing the right offers at the right time. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's easy because we're talking so much about people's beginning this journey of actually running promotions properly. [SPEAKER_00]: It feels like we just set it up and then it'll be fine forever. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's been six months testing and it'll be fine forever, but of course, that's not the case either, is it?

[SPEAKER_00]: Because objective change like you said the clicking collect push someone was wanting to have or the customer base changes, the source of new customers changes. [SPEAKER_00]: So this is a constant part of our marketing strategy or it should be. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, 100%. [SPEAKER_02]: And the biggest one that I always mentioned to people is the external environment changes.

[SPEAKER_02]: You need to be aware of, you know, someone comes along and they suddenly put tariffs on on everything coming in and out of a country. [SPEAKER_02]: That's suddenly going to change your performance. [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't matter, you know, if very easy to get my optically focused on your internal performance, what are we doing to improve or e-commerce performance? [SPEAKER_02]: What are we doing to improve our own CRO?

[SPEAKER_02]: But if something comes along from an external factor or a pandemic say, that's suddenly going to change everything and you're going to need to do things differently. [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, being aware of your goals, changing, consumer habits, changing external factors in the economy, changing these consumer confidence high or low, what's going to affect that. [SPEAKER_02]: all these things all the time can dynamically change the time of year seasonality is also a big one as well depending on what you sell that sells more in summer or winter or you know at certain times that at times of the year all these things affect it so you can't ever really stop it's always about continuing to be figuring out how can we just keep tweaking this to achieve the performance we want to achieve.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, factoring in margin, as you've mentioned there, because I think that's something which people forget about when they're running promote, they forget the product cost and the delivery cost and the council's cost and the tariff cost, if that starts to come in. [SPEAKER_00]: So it is super important to manage the, not just the uplift on sales or the increase in lifetime value, but the margin element of that too is your success factor. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, 100% the deeper metrics.

[SPEAKER_02]: We talk about these sort of deeper metrics. [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously there's conversion right in AOV. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a classic thing. [SPEAKER_02]: I think everyone's a little bit guilty of this.

[SPEAKER_02]: We always reach for the metrics. [SPEAKER_02]: They're easier for us to get to, they're closer. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's much easier to look at the revenue coming into the site. [SPEAKER_02]: That's a nice simple metric to see conversion rates AOV traffic.

[SPEAKER_02]: But it's about going into those deeper metrics, things like margin, things like, you know, [SPEAKER_02]: We do always do, um, control group testing because we're trying to prove incrementality. [SPEAKER_02]: We're trying to prove that, you know, if we're running a promotion, that should be driving incremental extra revenue or incremental extra sales, not just cannibalizing existing sales. [SPEAKER_02]: And if you're running a promotion, for example, one of the classic things is, yeah, you could put 10%, 20% off everything and just look at conversion rate, but also what impact is that having on IOV?

[SPEAKER_02]: And then are you looking at margin? [SPEAKER_02]: Are you looking at the LTV of those customers? [SPEAKER_02]: You've acquired that way. [SPEAKER_02]: What's going on with that cohort?

[SPEAKER_02]: You've acquired with that particular promotion. [SPEAKER_02]: If you're running 10% off on a eerie mouse sign-up, the people who've used that often people just use that when they're about to buy and then unsubscribe eerie mouse. [SPEAKER_02]: How many people are doing that? [SPEAKER_02]: You've got to get a much bigger, deeper picture of the impact those things are having before we get a good idea of how they're working, what impact they're having on your business.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now this is now starting to sound like the sort of thing which is gone beyond a Google spreadsheet and some codes. [SPEAKER_00]: This is sounding like the sort of place we might want to deploy some tech and some AI out. [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, people can start off with the straightforward spreadsheet planning monitoring it themselves who give you the lines, et cetera. [SPEAKER_00]: But there's definitely as Ecommerce becomes more complex and more competitive.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you really want to use this to grow, you need these software to do it, which I know is what you guys sell at RevLift. [SPEAKER_00]: So how do you find that benefits people actually having software that's helping them with this rather than trying to do it manually? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and it's a combination for us. [SPEAKER_02]: So we provide the software, but we'll also provide the service.

[SPEAKER_02]: So at the moment, we're a managed service, because what we were finding is when we were talking to retailers, they were kind of saying, as I said, there are so many different things that retailers need to optimize. [SPEAKER_02]: You've got your own site performance. [SPEAKER_02]: You've got your emails. [SPEAKER_02]: You've got your SMS flows.

[SPEAKER_02]: You've got, you know, you're merchandising, you're inventory. [SPEAKER_02]: The way things are displayed, what products you sell. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, if you're always able to de-to-see retailers when I meet them, you started, [SPEAKER_02]: a business like that because you all you want to do is serve really nice products you want to build a good brand you want to provide a great customer experience. [SPEAKER_02]: Those are the things you want to worry about and then basically once you start that business you then realise there's all these other things that everybody else is telling you you need to worry about as well.

[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a huge amount of things to worry about so we try to help brands buy we give them a platform and we also give them someone to help them we work with them to help them understand [SPEAKER_02]: And as he said, it's complicated, right? [SPEAKER_02]: So it's, you know, when we first work with a retailer, we tag their site, we collect the data and we look at where there might be gaps, opportunities, where the right approach might make a difference. [SPEAKER_02]: And so, and then it's about having someone who can help them with that and say, well, look, these are suggestions, here's our advice.

[SPEAKER_02]: and then we can improve your performance over time. [SPEAKER_02]: And then continually work with them to kind of say, right, what's coming up or the new things coming up, what events are coming up, or that kind of side of things. [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, the tools help and the expertise help and we're trying to provide the base of those things together to make it much much easier for brands to meet the performance thing. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a one hub that you can go to that then enables you to manage promotions across and see the results right there in one place is needed.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're not digging it out of your Google Analytics and digging it out of here. [SPEAKER_00]: It's all coming together to make it really easy to optimize and measure and run new tests. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly. [SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, we absolutely have testings all in there, AB, multivariate testing, and the whole picture.

[SPEAKER_02]: So, we're trying that we've got pretty sophisticated reporting sweet. [SPEAKER_02]: So, again, we're not just trying to show you those superficial metrics, we're trying to really drill down and dive deep dive into it and say, you know, yeah, we're running control groups for you. [SPEAKER_02]: So here's what we're reporting on in terms of incrementality. [SPEAKER_02]: Is all the metrics in terms of progression through the funnel, performance through the funnel, what on the outcomes you're getting.

[SPEAKER_02]: And always report back to say, well, what was your goal? [SPEAKER_02]: What is your main aim? [SPEAKER_02]: What are you really looking to improve this year? [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe you are looking to improve your conversion, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe it's AOV. [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe it's about selling deeper into your catalog or whatever it is. [SPEAKER_02]: At the same time, saving your money and your promotions and reducing the impact of those. [SPEAKER_02]: And those are the things we'll report back on you to you on and make sure you're aware of all those metrics.

[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it's all about trying to be super outcome focused and then give you all the data you need in order to make sure you are going to achieve that and you're able to observe that that is happening. [SPEAKER_00]: and a cheeky question down, trying to pick some of your secret source here. [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, these are going to be things to test because nothing, you know, everything people here on these podcasts should be something to test, not definitely just going to deploy and assume it's going to work.

[SPEAKER_00]: But are there any kind of, [SPEAKER_00]: screamingly obvious things, it's worth people testing or starting to test as they go down the root of building their promotion strategy. [SPEAKER_00]: Is it the first thing to do is to test inquiries versus buyers or to focus on AOV rather than conversion rate or to, I don't know, pink products, or something really random, using a couple of things to get people started. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think let's coalesce around a couple of different things.

[SPEAKER_02]: So increasing conversion rate, conversion and abandonment, basically the same thing, two sides of the same coin, who convert to who abandons. [SPEAKER_02]: Definitely, we start with a lot of browns on exit campaigns. [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, pretty obvious how it's a campaign's work. [SPEAKER_02]: Someone looks like they're going to leave and then you offer them some kind of incentive to make sure they don't and make them more likely to convert.

[SPEAKER_02]: But what we do is we sort of, again, it's that diving in a bit deeper and saying what else is going on here. [SPEAKER_02]: So, typically we'll look at running different campaigns depending on, if it's a browse exit. [SPEAKER_02]: So, someone who's just looking around just sit and they need to look like they're going to leave versus a basket exit. [SPEAKER_02]: So, someone's got something in the basket before they get to check out and they're going to leave or check out exit.

[SPEAKER_02]: and you can look at those different scenarios and say maybe we need to offer something a little bit different. [SPEAKER_02]: And we talk about two main things, it should who should see an offer and what is the right offer for them to see. [SPEAKER_02]: So once you start breaking that out, you can start thinking, well, yeah, should there be different offers? [SPEAKER_02]: And you can start testing and saying, let's test different offers at each stage.

[SPEAKER_02]: Probably you need to be a bit more generous from a browse exit to reconvert that versus, you know, check out exit. [SPEAKER_02]: But it might be something else, it might not be a discount at all, it could be something else. [SPEAKER_02]: So, exits and bannam and a really good place to start. [SPEAKER_02]: And the other thing, the other one I'd suggest.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, AOV is also a really good one. [SPEAKER_02]: A classic for us is using the old stretch and save, but again, it's going a bit deeper. [SPEAKER_02]: So, sort of giving people a spending target to say, right, if you spend £100, you're going to get £10 off. [SPEAKER_02]: But what we can do, again, is be a bit clever about this and analyse what's going on in your site and look at where those drop-off points are.

[SPEAKER_02]: So, [SPEAKER_02]: is it that you have, when a basket value gets to a certain level that you are seeing that drop off in conversion rate, we can make sure that's where we're actually targeting the offers, and make sure that's actually, you know, so if it's a hundred pounds, maybe in your cases, a hundred and fifty, maybe it's two hundred. [SPEAKER_02]: Thinking about what is the next logical product to add? [SPEAKER_02]: We work with a company called FlowKyx. [SPEAKER_02]: They sell Kyx.

[SPEAKER_02]: rather unsurprisingly it's very hard to get someone who's buying one kayak to buy two kayaks because who needs two kayaks. [SPEAKER_02]: So in that case you're thinking well there's no point that's trying to get people to buy another one. [SPEAKER_02]: What we said well they might buy those gloves or an or a life jacket so it's thinking right where are the logical products that could go along with this that we can offer an incentive that people actually will get those in their basket.

[SPEAKER_02]: And then it also you can just have those are sliding scale. [SPEAKER_02]: One of the things we've done for a lot of retailers is, you know, you can have a hundred pounds, spend a hundred pounds get 10 pounds off spend two hundred pounds get 20 pounds off and you can have those dynamically, you know, coming in and going out depending on where you want them to go. [SPEAKER_02]: So you can really favor high spenders versus low spenders things like that. [SPEAKER_02]: So, [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's quite classic, quite well established tactics, but when you start going deeper in terms of the metrics and the mechanics, you can start to make them much more powerful and achieve what you want a lot more easily.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so it's not an everybody gets whole of sight gets. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, behavioral data gets fed in to then enable you to build the nuance and the tweak and really deliver the discount to the person you need to get over the line, rather the discount to the person you don't need to get over the line. [SPEAKER_02]: Exactly, exactly. [SPEAKER_02]: And thinking about, I'll go mention them at the flow cards.

[SPEAKER_02]: We've worked with a few retailers who have a much higher basket value. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's that thing of thinking when you have a high consideration purchase. [SPEAKER_02]: So if it's more expensive, typically people spend a lot longer to make a decision to buy. [SPEAKER_02]: They put things in their basket.

[SPEAKER_02]: They leave them there for a long time before they push the button. [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, thinking about what can we do in order to get someone to be more likely to push the button to shorten that time period before they make a decision and things like that. [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, once you understand all these things, [SPEAKER_02]: and you've got that data as well, which is super important. [SPEAKER_02]: You can start to do something about it and achieve some really interesting results.

[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Dan. [SPEAKER_00]: It's been great picking your brains about all of that. [SPEAKER_00]: Listeners, make sure you stay tuned right to the end, so you don't miss out on Dan's insider tips on all of this and my suggestions for other ways we can help you improve your business even further.

[SPEAKER_00]: OK, Dan. [SPEAKER_00]: So far, we've gone deep into discount and promotion strategy. [SPEAKER_00]: Now you get to hours with your insider knowledge about the whole of Ecommerce growth. [SPEAKER_00]: So for the following questions you're on to conclude about anything to do with growth, which of course does include everything we've already been talking about.

[SPEAKER_00]: Dan, are you ready for these? [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, let's do it. [SPEAKER_00]: OK, let's start with new beadvice. [SPEAKER_00]: If we've inspired someone to take their first step, what they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's got to be testing and optimizing generally. [SPEAKER_02]: That's one of the reasons we ended up with promotions as our area of focus is, yeah, there are so many different areas where we're testing and optimizing is already a key part, but we didn't feel like discounts and offers were. [SPEAKER_02]: But everything in your site, everything in your process, everything in marketing can be optimized. [SPEAKER_02]: You can run tests on all of it and figure out how to do it better.

[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, starting with the test, [SPEAKER_02]: look at something, look at something you feel isn't working particularly well, find a good clean test to run on it, keep it nice and simple, you don't want to overcomplicate it, you want to make sure it's a nice and valid test, so pick a problem, find an intervention, or what I always say, all marketing technology is essentially works the same way, it's about some sort of intervention, whether you send someone an email or an SMS or an ad put an advert, you're trying to change their behaviour to get them to stop doing what they were doing and start doing something else, [SPEAKER_02]: thinking that in that context, what is the right thing that's going to come in front of that person and make them change the value of you.

[SPEAKER_02]: Come up to my days, test them, prove that works. [SPEAKER_02]: And then you can from there, you've you've done the what everyone should be doing and from there, you can build and you can keep thinking up things to test them and make them work. [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, just continuously optimize, keep optimizing. [SPEAKER_02]: That's a good, that's a good name.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to start a podcast over the name now. [SPEAKER_00]: Someone should start a podcast called Keep Optimizing, and now we've reached the Keep Optimizing question. [SPEAKER_00]: So once you've started, of course, you've got to keep Optimizing as Dan's just said. [SPEAKER_00]: So watch your favorite way to improve performance.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's testing and optimizing, but it's doing it in a systematic way. [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, picking those those one variable a time don't change too many things. [SPEAKER_02]: I remember when I started in marketing, I'm one of my early jobs. [SPEAKER_02]: I was an email marketer.

[SPEAKER_02]: And someone tells you, right, we've got to start testing and optimizing that's a good thing. [SPEAKER_02]: And then you immediately set off and. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you do an email subject line testing. [SPEAKER_02]: You write to completely different subject lines and send an email out.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, well, what did that teach you? [SPEAKER_02]: It all it taught you was that two emails with completely different subject lines get completely different open rates. [SPEAKER_02]: Doesn't tell you what it was about that open. [SPEAKER_02]: That subject line got open.

[SPEAKER_02]: So any start to learn rice about thinking about keywords and word pairs and all that kind of stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: So focus on those one variables at a time and look for patterns about what works. [SPEAKER_02]: Focus, focus, I always focus a bit higher up as well. [SPEAKER_02]: It's easy to get into the weeds and the details, but the bigger the thing you test, the bigger impact, the thing you test, obviously the bigger impact you're gonna have.

[SPEAKER_02]: So if you try to really substantially improve your conversion rate, you can tweak something like a button color, that might make a bit of a difference. [SPEAKER_02]: But it's more likely that your overall offer is gonna have a bigger impact, so you might be better off starting there. [SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, if you have a bit of a plan, have a think about how you're going to test everything, have a systematic plan, and make sure, as you want the most important things as well, make sure you collect your learnings and you share them, and you really spend some time thinking about them, because I've absolutely done sort of testing programs.

[SPEAKER_02]: you run sort of 10 tests over a series of period of time. [SPEAKER_02]: And then you think, did I learn from, did I actually look back up these results? [SPEAKER_02]: Or did I just run through my list of 10 things? [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, make sure you're always getting your learnings and you're, you know, processing those and you're using those to keep informing what you're doing?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so such good advice. [SPEAKER_00]: If someone listing wants to learn more, is there a cheap or free resource you would recommend? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, RevLeftet and RevLeftet.com, I write all the content on RevLeftet.

com. [SPEAKER_02]: So definitely go there. [SPEAKER_02]: It's tremendous. [SPEAKER_02]: We also have a podcast.

[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, Chloe, it's no near, no end. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not a Chloe Thomas, just to be clear. [SPEAKER_02]: But we have on call Browns Basket Buy, and that's got some good stuff in it as well. [SPEAKER_02]: And not also mentioned, I was like to mention, there's a few places I go to find some really useful advice in the Baymard Institute.

[SPEAKER_02]: They do lots of UX research. [SPEAKER_02]: They have this big online library, full of free. [SPEAKER_02]: free resources, free studies they've done on what works in terms of website UX. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a really great resource.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's lots and lots of studies they've done on there. [SPEAKER_02]: They've properly studied them. [SPEAKER_02]: They're properly done tests and come up with good advice. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's well worth having a look at some of their information.

[SPEAKER_02]: I wouldn't suggest it's taking it as red. [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely test some of their suggestions yourself to see what impact that has, but they've got some really great useful information on there. [SPEAKER_02]: And particularly around my checkout, check out optimization and think about that. [SPEAKER_00]: I've not heard of that one so I will have to have a look myself.

[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, Dan, it's crystal ball time. [SPEAKER_00]: What's coming up in the next six to 12 months that we should be getting ready for? [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I don't know if he's heard of this thing, Chloe called AI. [SPEAKER_02]: That's a, that's a thing.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not, I'm not going to, I'm not just going to say that because AI's already here, and he's not going to be a sound. [SPEAKER_02]: So I think always thinking about [SPEAKER_02]: The thing that's all the top of my mind being a market for the last, since GDPR came along is always thinking about privacy changes. [SPEAKER_02]: What's going on with those? [SPEAKER_02]: Are you on top of privacy changes in terms of your cookies, in terms of how you're collecting data?

[SPEAKER_02]: Google pushed away with, pushed away from doing the third party cookie deprecation, didn't decide to do that, [SPEAKER_02]: but there is a sort of direction of travel, which is heading more in the direction of things becoming, you know, privacy becoming more important than things getting locked down, you know, we can't track things as well as we used to, particularly people using Apple devices and things. [SPEAKER_02]: So thinking about that, thinking about, you know, how do you now measure things when things are harder to measure because we haven't got quite such direct tracking available in our [SPEAKER_02]: Thinking about things like that, thinking about how you making sure you're measuring, you know, when you're making changes to your site, are you actually driving incremental improvements in performance and things like that?

[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I'll definitely say, keep an eye on privacy things, follow some people who are up on on privacy and what impact that's going to have from artists because that's going to get more and more important. [SPEAKER_00]: I like that one. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Dan. [SPEAKER_00]: And before we say goodbye, please, those who are going, we need a discount strategy.

[SPEAKER_00]: We need it to really work. [SPEAKER_00]: We need all the levers working for us. [SPEAKER_00]: We need revlifter's help. [SPEAKER_00]: How can they get in contact with you and the team at revlifter?

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can go to rebelifter.com. [SPEAKER_02]: If you want to find me on LinkedIn, I am Dan Bond. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm actually think I'm the number one Dan Bond.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's a few, but I come up top because I'm quite active on there. [SPEAKER_02]: I know, so yeah, BrownsBasketBuy.com, if you want to listen to the podcast and you know, there's also that all point you towards towards us and how to get hold of us. [SPEAKER_02]: So that's it, that's all good.

[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing so much insight into a topic which I suspect the great majority of our listeners are not doing as well as they could in terms of growing and improving their business and their margins. [SPEAKER_00]: So thank you so much for sharing it with us. [SPEAKER_02]: You're very well, particularly I was always confused when I had the podcast was called Keep Optimizing.

[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, there is a medieval history joke coming. [SPEAKER_02]: I thought maybe it was about how to improve the tower in the middle of a castle. [SPEAKER_00]: So that's just a little bit. [SPEAKER_00]: I am here for the Medieval podcast analogy.

[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, make it happen. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, if that hasn't got you thinking more deeply about your discounts and promotion and strategy, I don't know what will. [SPEAKER_00]: So to start off, actually make some decisions around who you're willing to give discounts and offers to. [SPEAKER_00]: What, when, what time of year you're going to give them when you're going to run sales?

[SPEAKER_00]: What products are relevant? [SPEAKER_00]: What channels are relevant? [SPEAKER_00]: Start making some decisions around that, then start testing and then optimize optimize optimised basically everyone. [SPEAKER_00]: And as Dan said a great place to start off is with your pre-abandonment activity.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the links to everything we discussed, the full transcript of the episode, our notes are more at keepoptimising.com. [SPEAKER_00]: You can also use our special direct episode short links, just put keep.com forward slash the number of this episode into the URL bar and you'll be redirected straight to the right episode page.

[SPEAKER_00]: When you get there, you can also add yourself to our email list. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Keep Optimizing podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: If you've enjoyed this episode, then do check out Episode 2199 just a couple before this one, where Amy Budd from Launch is taking us through all things brand and creative, which we all know is now crucial for growth until even be sharing how to track it all. [SPEAKER_00]: You can also find our full thread of growth content by scrolling up your feed or use the short link, KeepOpt.

com forward-sash growth. [SPEAKER_00]: Please do tell your fellow marketers about the show because I want to help as many of you as possible to improve the performance of your e-commerce marketing. [SPEAKER_01]: Have a great week and make sure you listen to the next episode so I can help you to keep optimizing your marketing.