Bonus Episode: Ecommerce Insights: The Power of Customer Conversations with Nick Trueman

Nick Trueman is an expert in digital marketing, specializing in PPC and SEO strategies that drive real revenue. As the Director of PPC & SEO Consultancy at Spec Digital and Host of the Winning With Shopify Podcast, Nick has spent over 17 years helping brands scale through search and performance marketing.

Nick founded Spec Digital, a leading PPC & SEO consultancy, in 2011 and has since worked with over 1,500 brands across various industries. His expertise has even influenced changes in how major search engines operate. Before Spec, he launched and successfully sold TrueLine Marketing to the Collider Group in 2013.

With a deep understanding of Google & Bing advertising, website optimization, and revenue growth, Nick’s insights help businesses maximize their lead generation and ecommerce success. On Winning With Shopify, he shares actionable strategies, interviews top industry experts, and dives into the latest trends shaping digital commerce.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:09] Intro
• [01:29] Scaling from local to global brands
• [04:27] Turning an unexpected role into success
• [05:10] Building a business beyond a podcast
• [06:12] Making decisions with outdated data
• [08:40] Navigating post-COVID economic realities
• [12:13] Optimizing margins through smart supply chains
• [16:29] Maximizing ROI without increasing ad spend
• [19:11] Creating collections that actually convert
• [22:49] Investing in tools but never using them
• [25:40] Knowing your strengths in business growth
• [26:57] Testing before launching new features
• [29:40] Analyzing conversion rates vs. order value
• [32:02] Standing out beyond basic discounts
• [34:03] Forecasting demand with creative strategies

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Digital Marketing Agency in Surrey spec.digital/
• It's Time To Win, With Our Shopify Podcast wwspodcast.com/
• Follow Nick Trueman uk.linkedin.com/in/ntrueman

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

 

Transcript

Nick Trueman 

If you don't do customer feedback surveys, you're missing a trick. It's an opportunity to talk to customers. How many of us sit there scratching our heads going, what email am I going to send next? So I think the first thing is to talk to customers. 

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct to consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business. Let's get on with the show. 

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm bringing to the show another podcast host. So we will talk a lot about nothing. No, Nick is the director of PPC and SEO Consultancy of Spec Digital over in the UK. He's also the host of the Winning with Shopify podcast. Nick Trueman, welcome to the show. 

Nick Trueman

Chase, it's good to be here. As you say, we will probably go on many tangents as podcast hosts because our job is to fill the space. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much for having me on and hey to everybody listening. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Yeah. Nick has been so kind. I will also be on his show. We're trying to orchestrate this to where it will come out the same week. So, go find the other episode. If you get both parts of it, you win a prize, which is knowledge.

Nick Trueman

You can hear my version of everything Chase has said so far on our episode over on our channel. So yeah, it should be good fun. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. All right. Well, talk me through your career so far. You've been doing this a long time. What's your path look like? What are you guys specializing in these days?

Nick Trueman

Yeah, I mean, I'll keep it brief. If anyone wants a longer story, then feel free to reach out. I don't want to bore anybody. But when I was 17, I'm 34 now, so I'm a little bit older. But when I was 17, 

I wanted to get a car and I asked a friend of mine to start his own company. Hey, can I have a job? And he said, look, this is Google Ads, click buttons, make changes. I really enjoyed it. 

I was studying music and it was all very mathematical, doing music. I just found maths was like a completely second nature thing to me, was probably one of my only strong points, maths and maybe IT at school. 

Two years later, I started my first agency. So that would have been in 2009. Then in 2013, I sold that, moved completely from opposite ends of the industry, from working with tiny little local businesses in my business for a couple of years with a couple of staff.

It went right up to the other end of the scale. Sorry, four years it would have been. On the other end of the scale though, I'm working with some big global high-street retail brands. Kate Spade New York, launching them in the UK was one of my first big flagship things. I stayed with those guys till 2015. 

My business, Spec has officially been running since 2011. I actually kept the company shell, sold the assets out. But yeah, then I went into more consultancy. So it's always been PPC and SEO. Google has always been the main thing that I focus on, paid listings, organic listings. 

We do so much around that, around CRO, we work a lot on Bing, we work on Amazon ads, we work on Meta ads and stuff. But Google really is the core, is people searching stuff and finding us. I guess the big change, the big thing that makes me different, the reason I, when I quit the industry, a sort of third time, why I didn't stay out, why I came back in. 

For me, it was really moving into consultancy. I know it's a wish-washy word. The other word for consultancy a lot of people think about is advice. We've actually changed that and defined consultancy as to change a client's position and condition.

So actually, when we look at a brand now, and obviously, we're talking about Ecommerce a lot today. Half our business is Ecommerce, half is lead gen. When we talk about changing a client's condition, when we talk about consultancy, it's about coming up with what we should do. It's making that thing happen. 

We do a lot of doing, way more doing than I thought I would be doing many years ago. But we find we need to work with people like yourself, Chase, and actually execute stuff. You guys are great with code and design. But actually, when it comes to SEO tags, it's easier for us just to log in and try and explain to you what needs to happen and let you know what we've done. We work in partnership like that.

The third thing as well, which is a really key pillar of this is we train people like Chase, as much as we train our clients. It's not a training program. It's just working with us. We like to educate people on how SEO works, why we're trying to do what we do. That's kind of my career in a nutshell. I've had many failed side projects over the years. 

Actually, my podcast is my most successful by a country mile apart from my main business,

I am loving it more than ever, busier than ever as well. When actually I thought Google would be completely automated by now, but it couldn't be further from the truth. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely not. Google is still a wild card. How long have you been doing the podcast? 

Nick Trueman

We did a bit of an asset transfer of a business called Just Ask Parker and part of that was the Winning with Shopify podcast.

It was during COVID. Caroline, for lots of reasons, I won't go into publicly, but she wanted to take a break from everything. She called me and said, Nick, you'd be a great podcast host. I'd love you to run my agency. We swarmed all that up into Spec at the time as well. 

Most of the agency stuff is not really running anymore at all from her side. But that's when we started the podcast. So yeah, it's the one bit of the business I didn't want to do, had no interest in. Ironically, it's the only bit of the business still running and it's doing really well. So yeah, it's four years I've been podcasting, about four and a half at the time this will go out. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Obviously, we know there are some people that listen to this show that are also on our side of things in the agency world, but not to go a little super inside baseball. Give me the shortest answer to this. Is running a podcast for a service business owner still the number one growth hack? 

Nick Trueman

No. Absolutely not. I think we've got the opportunity because we've been running it for a long time. We have a good audience behind it. But we also have a community that we run where people have a login, they log into our community platform and chat about stuff. 

We've got loads of how-to videos, we run events. It's so much more than the podcast. We are actually just calling it Winning Shopify now. The podcast is one avenue and we've been growing loads on video. But loads of friends of mine who run the service base were like, Nick, I'm trying to do a podcast like yours. What's the secret? There isn't one. We've just nailed it. We found a niche. We've got lifetime listeners.

Those guys are really important to us and as part of that, we're gaining more. But I think there's other channels. As you say, we're not going to talk about too much. There's other channels for service-based businesses to get their name out there and make ends meet. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. So let's pivot over to our listeners. We both do a lot of work in ecommerce. We are recording this leading up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but it's not going to come out until 2025. So what do you think about a lot of merchants, not to call out any clients that we both may have or may not have. But what do you think are going to be some of the mistakes that are made during Q4 of this year? 

Nick Trueman

The biggest thing I'm seeing, as you say, it's just coming up Black Friday now. We're a few weeks before it. The biggest mistake I'm seeing right now is I think clients are still living in the 6-months-ago world. This has been a brutal summer in the retail world. Whether you live either side of the Atlantic or anywhere on the planet, it's been brutal. The cost of living is going up. People got less cash.

Luxury items seem to be less effective. It's general working people and people on average salaries, working in the economy, doing classifieds, very standard jobs, which are all really important and really, really required by society. They're the ones suffering the most at the moment. They're the ones that make up a massive proportion of sales. I think, what mistakes are people going to make? I'm seeing a lot of brands at the moment making decisions as if they're still running at 8 to 1 ROI on Google Ads when actually they're running at 4 to 1 or 5 to 1.

We've had some really tough conversations with our clients and clients we've started working with. Some are doing well, but it's like 30-40% are doing well and the rest are still profitable but nothing like what they used to be. Certainly growth has plateaued for just about all of that 60-70% of the brands we're talking to. I think the mistakes people are making are operating as if they're still in that big profit growth. This is not going to be a normal holiday season for any of us.

At the time of recording, we've already seen that. It's been a really rubbish start to October and into November. Certainly in the UK, our government has basically made it impossible for anyone to have any spare money. They've released a new budget a few weeks ago and everybody's terrified of it. The popularity of a prime minister has never been so low in the UK. Just to give you an idea as to what's happening here, how crazy it's been pretty much since COVID. 

COVID was a grenade in our politics, probably similar to a lot of countries. Just seeing people spend less money, shop less. So I think the biggest mistake is probably overspending. Actually, I think people need to be conserving some of their stock and some of their cash for January, February. I think they're going to be a bit better than expected, but still lower than normal is my expectation at the moment. I don't know if you guys are finding the same sort of thing. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, man. It's wild how we are in two different countries in two different economies. But with just how the world works, it still is all the same. A lot of our clients have had low years as far as sales. Obviously, no one can say that the growth that happened during COVID was what they were going to consistently see. 

People are realizing that finally and understanding it and maybe saying it was a fluke. Last year wasn't as bad as this year for some. Just as far as growth goes and overall sales. There's been a lot of just unknowns, especially with our political climate here and the election going on. 

People holding back on making capital investments into their businesses, be that doubling down on paid ads or building a new website. A lot of people have been saying, we're gonna wait till January. 

Nick Trueman

Yeah, absolutely. I think as well, interestingly, the time travel of recording this early is hilarious because everyone will know who your new president is by January, which I think is interesting. But I guess it's hard. A lot of brands we're talking to though, we're basically doing the same stuff. Having worked in this industry for a while, I remember the financial crash. 

I obviously remember COVID. It was a few years ago. We're basically talking to brands about how we separate ourselves? If 80% of companies in your space, your niche right now, or niche as some areas of the USA, if anyone in your niche right now is, if 80% of them are going to struggle and contract, how do we get into 20%? What do we change our website to? What's our proposition? What do customers actually want from us? How do we help them?

Do we level with them right now and say, we can't lower our costs without being immoral or screwing over the people that work in our factories or actually just making the climate awful by the amount of emissions from manufacturing our products in another country to this country? I think having those honest conversations with customers is really important. I've seen some really interesting marketing campaigns recently of stuff. Instead of buying five items from us every quarter like you guys do on average, we want you to buy four.

You save a bit of money. So have a real think what items do you want or actually we're doing a five for the price of four sale in response to the fact that people have 20% less income according to this government funded survey recently or whatever. I think having that honest conversation over email, over marketing, over website content, over blogs, I think that is becoming really powerful. This is not going to fall on everybody's ears in a nice way. I'm really sorry, but I'm going to say it. I'm going to say it how it is.

When it gets tough economically, the businesses that have been riding a wave that shouldn't have been, they're the ones that will fall. Good, strong, stable businesses that know their customers, they know how they should operate, and they have good products, they're good for the planet, and there's nothing bad to be said about them, they are the ones that will survive. 

So I think there is some conditioning that happens in the economy of bad businesses falling away because they just can't thrive anymore. They can't survive at all, which actually does leave a stronger economy afterwards.

But I guess when you look at recent history,  this is the third round of this in what? 14, 15 years. It is quite painful. I think it has been painful for businesses and everyone's still got a bit of PTSD at the last one. Whereas the one in 2008, the financial crash like that, people hadn't had one recently. 

It was almost a generation had turned over before the next one. Then we've had kind of that COVID and now where we are post-COVID, kind of what's going on today. So it's definitely tough out there. But I think there will be a silver lining. But I think we might be a year or two away from really seeing it. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Here's the thing though. If you have a business and you're listening to Nick and I's podcast and you're hearing all of these amazing founders talk about how well they watch their books and how strong their margins are. If you're not emulating that advice, and if you're not reading, go read the book Profit First by Mike Mikalowicz and set your business on the correct path to not. If you have a strong margin, you can survive a depression. 

It's the honest truth. But if you are over-investing in performance advertising for no reason, you run into a few hiccups in your ad business. 

Nick Trueman

Yeah, I always ask the question. I know as marketing people, this might sound really stupid. But hear me out on this. When you look at conversion rate and you're like, okay, it's 2% or 3% on a website or we think we're crushing it at 6%. I mean, it's a stupid number anyway, because you should never look at a piece of data in isolation. 

But say it is a 6% conversion rate. Most of you listening would go, oh my gosh, that's like double or triple where I am right now. It's all relative. You could have a conversion rate on really cheap low margin products. And that's a bad thing. You need a really, really good conversion rate on those or you need better margins, as you say. I always look at it and think, okay, say it's 3%. 97% of people haven't converted. Why not?

What are we not communicating or what did we communicate wrong to get them here in the first place that they didn't purchase from us? I mean, if I could give three bits of advice to any brand, and this does come slightly out of frustration, so apologies, but also out of encouragement and optimization. One is to talk to your customers. 

I know it's so obvious if you don't have a focus group of like 20 to 50 customers that you talk to regularly and you send free products to, but you say to them like, here's a 100% of discount code up to $100. Go and buy stuff on the site. Have it delivered and tell me everything. I want to see videos of the delivery man turning up at the door. I want to see an unboxing video. I want to hear all your thoughts on the website. Tell me everything. 

If you don't have that, you're missing a trick. If you don't do customer feedback surveys, you're missing a trick. It's an opportunity to talk to customers. How many of us sit there scratching our heads going, what email am I going to send next? So I think the first thing is to talk to customers. 

The second thing is we are talking so much on our show at the moment, exactly as you just said about supply chains. If you manufacture your own products, you're going to have a better margin because you're buying pieces of wood and turning them into something beautiful. That is a good margin. You're paying labor costs rather than import, export, labor, transportation, the whole logistics circle, taxes. You're saving loads of money. I think the supply chain is super, super important. 

The third thing, and this is the one that bugs me the most and is probably closest to both of our hearts, I would say, Chase, is like, do something different. Do something creative with your marketing. I interview brands all the time and so often I look at them. 

The ones we interview, as you say Chase, they tend to be the fun ones with a story where they're like, how I did 200% growth in 3 months because they did something crazy. When you do something crazy, all your competitors freak out and it's brilliant. It's the best thing that could possibly happen. But so many sites look like what I call marketplaces. There's just a list of products and you're just like, oh, we sell these 10 types of products. We've got 10 collections on Shopify.

Then we've got 10 products under each of our 10 collections. We've got 100 products in total and they're just there. And you land on a product page and this is much more your world than mine, I think, as much as anything, Chase. 

But when I'm running an advert on Google Shopping, if someone sees this beautiful picture, a cool offer or no offer, but loads of good reviews, and then they land there and you haven't got someone like Chase there to go, right, we're going to make this look and work amazing so that

actually, those reviews, we're going to cherry pick a couple to go actually in some of the product photos to go, you know, Kim Kardashian said this about our product. 

Now we're talking about powerful content. It's really cool that wherever she wears it, everybody wears it. It's awesome. Or she's the only one who wears it. It's exclusive. I really want it. You don't want to sit in the middle bit. You want to be at one end of that extreme.

I think about all the content and do something crazy with the design of your site and make it fun. Otherwise, just sell on Amazon, take a rubbish margin and have a nice life. That's not the game we're in. That's not why people are listening to this. We're talking about ecommerce and making it fun. So I'd love to hear your thoughts as well, Chase. Bringing a brand to life on a webpage. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, yeah. I mean, so I think one, you kind of alluded to this earlier. You work well with others and educate them on what you want to do. Nick and I, if our agencies were tag teaming, something for a client, that client is going to see amazing results. 

Because this isn't by design. It's just the life of a small business person. They're wearing 8 hats and they just forget to share things. And so I don't know that Nick's team is working on this buy 4, get 5 deal. So I don't have the idea to build out a landing page to that specific offer that speaks to it. 

So now the marketing message of those ads matches the landing page of the website that's set up to facilitate that purchase in the most streamlined way possible. Unfortunately, his conversion rate could be getting shot in the foot by this awesome offer because it's just going to some weird collection page that doesn't necessarily make sense. Right? 

So the communication between the different agencies and teams and contractors, whoever you have involved, don't gate that because you're just making more work for yourself. But, why do that? So that's something that I see that we're going to be doing a lot. We still do it now. We work with other teams very well. But yeah, I think next year, it's going to be. I don't know how quick we're going to see things rebound and go back up if everything goes the way that some people hope it goes. 

But if it does, I still think that people are going to be a little trigger shy on huge capital investments. And they're going to be wanting to increase the efficiency of the traffic that they can afford. So what that means is I'm already spending $20,000 a month on Google. I can't necessarily spend more than that. But I would love to see that $20,000 in spend, convert and hire ROI, which means that they need to increase the conversion rate and average order value on their website. 

That's where a team like ours comes in to make that stuff baller, make it more performant, make it make more sense. Do those customer interviews like you're talking. We even get deeper. We love to do the user testing. We'll hire people that don't even know the brand to run through the site. We'll look at heat maps and scroll maps and also obviously audited ourselves. A lot of stuff stands out pretty obviously. 

Nick Trueman

Just to interrupt, Chase, there's one amazing tool that I'd recommend to everyone right now. I have to say I'm on commission, but you'll understand the joke when I tell you the price. Microsoft Clarity is free. So I would recommend it on any site. I used to love using Hotjar. As you say, you're looking at heat maps or looking at where people scroll. Microsoft Clarity is one of the easiest tools I've ever used in my career.

Every time I go on it for five minutes and I'm emailing clients going like, Oh my gosh guys, I had a client the other day who, um, there's no way they'll listen to this. I won't say their name, but I'll share some details. There's no way they'll know it's them, but they weren't listeners. They basically said, all right, all our products we're going to make up our own collections based on styles. So they just came up with a name and said, they're an English brand. So, okay, this is the Austin Oxford range. 

As an example, that's not one of their names, but imagine it's the Austin Oxford, two very English words, the Austin Oxford range and this product falls under that. So as a customer, I said, well, do you know what guys, I think as a customer, if I scroll down and said, here are four other products in the Austin Oxford range, as a customer, I'd like to go, yeah, I mean, I obviously like this product. 

I've seen a Google shopping ad or I found it in a collection or site. I've clicked on it. I'd love to see the whole range. This is obviously my style. This is whatever this Austin Oxford thing is. It sounds cool. It's very prestigious English.

I said, we'll just have a button and we'll make another collection on Shopify because that's free. It doesn't cost anything to make collections. We'll make another collection. We'll call it the Austin Oxford Collection and put all the products in there that follow the same theme. They said, no. We just want to recommend three or four. On Microsoft Clarity, it's called Rage Clicking. People were scrolling down and seeing the Austin Oxford Collection and then four products and they were rage clicking on the H2 tag for the Austin Oxford Collection, trying to go to the whole collection.

Then I think it was in 5% of scenarios as well. This is all Microsoft Clarity. It's a completely free tool. They scroll up to the search bar and type in Austin Oxford and click search. Nothing comes up because they've not tagged the products properly. I went back and said, look guys, ego aside, I was right. We should definitely have a collection and you need to tag these products because people were trying to look for them. I looked up, I just did a quick download of all their search data out of Shopify. Again, it took a minute to download all of that. Did a quick search up on a CSV file on a spreadsheet and just how many people are searching up some of these different collections and quite a few people. 

You need to launch these as actual collections. And guess what? Austin Oxford, for the first time in this brand's existence, there's some branding there. That's part of it. Austin Oxford's part of their brand. There was one in particular, they're based in the North of the UK. I don't know how much you and your listeners know, but the North and South, it's, you might have seen Game of Thrones. It's based in the UK. 

There's a bit of heat between the North and South. I think the North dislikes the South more than the South dislikes the North, but there's definitely a bit of a divide. They're based in the North and they were set and they're, one of these things came up that was based in Cambridge, which is in the South. And they were, Oh no, can't we do the Huddersfield or the Leeds? I just don't have that same English vibe. I'm sorry. Maybe it's just me, but let's test both. And that's my point is test. 

So just think that Microsoft Clarity is, as you mentioned, like heat maps. It's such a good tool. No one was scrolling below the header on their homepage. But so much energy went into updating the homepage with the latest collections and featuring products and they believed if they put a product on their homepage, it would sell better. 

But we were, no, less than 0.1% of your people actually scroll below the header. They go straight into the main navigation, the same main navigation you want to shrink and reduce and have it all under a shop drop down instead of having it all spread out like it is now. Don't change that, guys. I've got the data now. Don't change that. So yeah, Microsoft Clarity is incredible. And as I say, I'm on commission, but it's free. Yeah. I get nothing for recommending it. It's brilliant. 

Chase Clymer

Microsoft Clarity is fantastic. We've been Hotjar partners forever. If you need a little bit more than what Clarity offers for free. There's a new player in the game, heatmap.com. So imagine Clarity. But they pull in all of the Ecommerce numbers. People that have seen this viewport made X amount dollars in purchases. 

Nick Trueman

Heatmap.com, do you say? 

Chase Clymer

Yep. 

Nick Trueman

I'm going to check this one out. Awesome. That is getting added to my list. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I'll introduce you to the CEO right after this, Nick. It's an interesting one and the price point is similar to Hotjar. But all these tools are worthless without strategy or someone that actually logs in. You have no idea how many times during onboarding or discovery where I'm talking with a potential client and you guys have something for heat maps or scrolling up? And they're, Oh, we have a Hotjar. We have Clarity. Oh, cool. Who's watching those things? And they're, Oh, nobody. And then you go to log in. 

Nick Trueman

Do we have it? 

Chase Clymer

Not installed or the payments have lapsed. And it's just, Okay, well, step one is we're gonna get that working again. 

Nick Trueman

Yeah, we find it's exactly the same bit at GA4. Even when Google were like, Right, 1st of July, you have to be on GA4 now.

Chase Clymer

Was that this year or last year? 

Nick Trueman

It was last year. Yeah, they extended it for a month or two without telling anyone. They just didn't turn Universal Analytics off because they realized like no one was ready. We were running webinars a year before that. 

Chase Clymer

Well they weren't ready either, let's be real. 

Nick Trueman

Yeah, they weren't ready. This even stuff now that they have publicly announced is in beta, which I think is hilarious. But GA4, we turned up and we had a client the other day, they're one of the biggest skincare brands in a certain country.

And I won't say which countries, you know, we have to work out. They are, but they, they rock up and we, we sort of won the pitch with them and had a look at GA4, they got no revenue data. Guys, you are really well, you're doing over a million pounds of revenue a month on your Shopify store. You're one of the biggest Shopify stores. In this particular country, you're targeting over here and you don't have GA4, so they're, Oh, why do we need that? 

I'm sorry, the Ecommerce team is asking me why we need you. I set it up and set up some Google Looker Studios and got my team to start setting up some reports for them in Google Looker studio. And they were just, oh my gosh, so if people are adding that to cart and not purchasing, yeah, add something to the cart to say why they should buy. 

Just because they've been added to cart doesn't mean they're purchase ready. We can monitor those stats. How exciting. We see how many people are purchasing things. I'm old enough to remember when conversion tracking came out. I remember when analytics

It's funny seeing all the kids today. I sound really old, but the kids are today going well, GA4 is amazing. It's cool. It's the same as UA, just slightly different. But works differently. But yeah, you're right. The amount of clients that have especially paid tools they don't look at is just ludicrous. 

Chase Clymer

Here, we'll do some more inside baseball stuff. When GA and Universal Analytics was going to go away, I basically made the executive decision to care or know about anything Google. We are not going to learn that stuff. We're going to double down on what we're good at and stop saying yes to other stuff. 

And that's something as any business. Any business should, I think, re-examine what they've done in the last year and figure out what they can delegate or automate. Or my favorite thing is to just stop doing it. We just don't do any advertising stuff. We don't do any marketing stuff.

I don't know anything about Google. I don't know anything about ERPs. I don't know anything about warehouse management systems. Because those aren't our sweet spot where we can be the most impactful. And so yeah, you're just talking about watching it change a bunch of times. I remember when I stopped caring. 

Nick Trueman

That'll be the day I retire. So we're the same but on Google. We've branched out. I mentioned earlier that Amazon ads, meta ads, we do it for a few clients. Amazon, I think, is more in our sweet spot. We do a lot on Bing.

Bing is quite a big channel for us now. We actually have some clients that spend more on Bing than they do on Google, but they're mostly in the lead gen B2B space. People aren't buying t-shirts there like they would on Google. 

Chase Clymer

You want to tell people why those results are so high? 

Nick Trueman

It's because well, Microsoft forced everyone to use Bing, is there? It's the truth. And they pay a massive fine to the EU every year. Billions. 

Chase Clymer

Microsoft is still the number one downloaded or installed operating system and it comes default on basically every office computer. So the receptionist or the contractor. All of these people that work in the office, their office computer runs Microsoft and Bing is the default browser. And so Bing stole a bunch of margin for people shopping at work. 

Nick Trueman

Yeah. I did a bit of research today and I can't get search data from Bing to tell me how many people on Bing type in download Chrome just to see what the data is on it. But that's why Bing's big. We're the same as you though. We're branching out into more CRO stuff, as I know you guys are as well, because it drives the main thing we do. And you're exactly right when you said, if I can double the conversion rate over a year of a client site, and that's on all channels, those channels include SEM, PPC, and they're often two of the biggest channels. 

And it's lovely to work with people like yourself, Chase, and other agencies we know across the world that we have that process. And you will be on as many calls with us as we are with the client anyway to go, look, you're going to need to implement all this stuff. And by the way, there's all the other stuff we're working on and you don't need to know any of it, but it's on a Trello board or something. 

You just see what's going on. Same with you guys because there'll be things. We find this more in SEO with Ecommerce agencies like you guys. Then this big tip for all of you merchants out there, if you've got a search marketing agency and you've got an Ecommerce agency, if the Ecommerce agency is deploying anything, we don't care from the SEO agency at least. 

Because then if it all goes wrong, you've got it in writing. But more often than not, they'll go, I see what you're doing. We've actually put some schema code in there or we've optimized something over here or there's an opportunity while they're coding this. Can we add a few notes actually to the design? Say, could you use this code here? Use H1, H2, H3. It's actually to break the page down. We might get better rankings as a result. And then because the amount of times I don't need to admit this on the show, Chase. 

I'm sure it's never happened to you. But especially this is your podcast, the amount of times we've had clients launch new things that look better, should work better, and even based on data, but they're not because they've not used an A-B tool to roll it out. So they've not rolled out the new version to 10% of their traffic and then optimize it so it is better. Because I think so often we get caught up in how many websites look awful but convert well and it's because people trust them.

They're just to the point. I just need the product added to the basket. But you must have seen some of that where you launch something that looks amazing. This is going to be better than sliced bread and it just flops. 

Chase Clymer

Oh yeah. I mean, they have such a high repeat customer rate and that customer knows how to use the old website. And so when they get to the new one, they're like, hell is this. But then there's also, I'm going to Amazon.

But there's also, running split tests on the PDP or building out an isolated landing page for some sort of offer, this is gonna crush it and then you launch it and it's blatantly obvious what you accidentally forgot to include or overlooked. 

Nick Trueman

Yeah. Absolutely. 

Chase Clymer

We forgot this whole section. It was on this wireframe but didn't make it to this one. It really isolates and brings all that stuff in. And it's funny about just split testing in general. You're going to run 9 tests and it doesn't really matter. But there's going to be the 10th one where it really did matter. 

I won an argument today with a client. Not an argument. It's a discussion. It's been going on for 2-3 weeks where they've done an A-B test or something I told them to test. They'd actually taken it off and converted it half. Put it back on. And conversion didn't double back up to where it was, which turns out as a combination of things is what we've learned. But in the new version, the conversion rate was lower, but the revenue was higher.

People are spending more. This is great. And you offer free delivery. So it's less delivery to pay for, less customers to manage, and you get more money. And your warehouse has still got more stuff in it. What could you possibly want more? You just use the new version and we'll turn the budget up. 

And they're like, oh, but the conversion rate is higher and we want a higher conversion rate. That's why we did this. So we might keep that. Guys, no, I'm not. Sorry. It's your business. But no, I'm not accepting this. And today they were like, we're going to roll out the new one. And I laughed and said, I'm really proud of everyone.

This has been a good experience. But yeah, I think when you're running a test, I used to make the mistake, I think, of going into testing going, I want to improve the average order value, I want to improve lifetime value. I've actually got into testing now, let's just launch it and watch the data and go, all right, average order value is better, but conversion rates are lower. 

So revenue is the same. So as a business from our, as you said earlier, strategy, what are we trying to achieve with our strategy? Which one plays better to it? Or actually, could we make a hybrid version in the middle somewhere and try and work it out. 

Which bits of the old version and which bits of the new version of the strong bits and we'll create a combo of them. I think brands are too quick to go, did it win or lose? And they look at it binary. It doesn't work like that. It's not binary. And you guys do way more CRO than I do. I'm preaching to the converted here. But yeah, we're doing a lot of it and enjoying it a lot. 

Chase Clymer

Oh yeah. And it's just setting true expectations for brands and stuff. I was talking to my business partner last week. And he was like, what's the line in the sand for sweat testing? I mean, there isn't one.

I was gonna pull a number out of my butt, it'd be $5 million a year. But if that's a luxury brand, $5 million is nothing because they don't get as many conversions. So they're not going to hit statistical significance. But in the same breath, you could have a million-dollar a year brand that sells really cheap widgets that have way more than enough conversions to actually hit statistical significance in a timely manner.

The reason why that stuff matters is you can launch a split test on any website. But it takes so long to do it that you're going to be updating your marketing copy for smaller brands faster than the test will even run its course. 

We often have people that come in that want to do CRO and we're like, I mean, we can help you guys with some best practices stuff. And there's some obvious low-hanging fruit. We'll knock that out. But you don't need to have us on retainer until you have the traffic to support running tests all times, you don't need us at all times. 

Nick Trueman

And that goes back to what I was saying earlier about newer brands, I think, need to do more radical things. Especially, I didn't say newer brands earlier, but it definitely applies to you guys. The smaller and more nimble you are, the more it's like, do you know what? Our color scheme is blue, but we don't get any repeat orders. 

So if we changed it to red, no one would even know because everyone's new. Let's change it to red and see if it's stickier. See if people remember it more. Oh, the lifetime value has gone up.

What did we do? We just in CSS changed four numbers from one number to another number, but four of them. And suddenly, well, I know it's not that simple, Jason. I don't want to belittle what you guys do. But it's that process, I think, of going, let's just make it red. Or some of our clients, we're going to go black and white for Black Friday. 

So we're going to A-B test it this year and one version will be black and white. One will be normal and one will actually be really bright. We're going to introduce a bright, I don't know, Batman style yellow light and put something like that on the site to go, this is so wacky compared. And it does not fit our normal color at all. But that's what we want. 

That's what we want to send all our email traffic to. Hey, we're doing something crazy. And then do an email afterwards. Hey, we're back to normal. We've all calmed down. Black Friday was crazy. And it's lightning all over the place. We're all back to normal. We're back to normal today. Wow, that brand did something pretty mad actually. 

And you remember that. You won't remember, yeah, they did 10% off. You're not going to remember that. I bought from the ones that didn't have 10% off. I might have bought it again. I don't even know. But you're not going to remember those guys. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Nick, now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that is going to resonate with our audience over here at Honest Ecommerce? 

Nick Trueman

I don't know. I mean, there's a billion things we could talk about. I think one of the biggest things I'm talking to brands about at the moment, especially as you guys will be watching this in January, I think one big thing that you need to keep a real eye on at the moment is stock and revenue. I know you're keeping on revenue all the time, whatever, but stock levels in January, you either find they're too high because Christmas hasn't been as good as you wanted it to be. Or they're too low because Christmas has been too good. 

Now I won't shout any of our partners out. We do have a partner if you want to check him out, but I won't shout out who they are. But there are lots of good bits of software you can get, especially in Shopify, that will help you forecast when stock's going to run out. You can tell it when you need to reorder.

I think going back to something we spoke about a couple of times already today is those suppliers. If you've got good suppliers, you'll know when you need to restock things. You can talk to them about turnaround times and that sort of thing. So I would highly recommend keeping a very close eye on that and make some fun and creative marketing decisions as a result of it. 

So if you've got too much stock, how do we get rid of some of it? I saw one company last year that said, right, Christmas decorations. We're going to pay you guys to store the Christmas decorations for us till next year.

What they did is they gave them a discount, but they made this angle of, we're going to pay you to store them because they're so good. We know you'll want them, but we'll give you a discount. And they're basically just clearing all their Christmas stocks. They don't want to sit on it all year. It's fair enough. We had another client that was doing it. 

Instead of pre-orders, because they'd run out of so many items and so many lines, instead of doing pre-order, they kept everything in stock and just made their delivery time longer. And I thought that was really smart. So just saying, it's two weeks for delivery because we know we'll get it from the supplier by then. So it's two weeks for delivery.

Actually, one client I've got, they basically do drop shipping, but it comes to them, then they send it out. So they only order on a Friday what they've sold that week. They know they have a deal with their courier that it will arrive on Monday morning and it arrives at the customer on Tuesday with next day delivery. 

But their warehousing cost is next to zero because they never sit on any stock. So the supplier makes it, sends it over the weekend and gets it to them on Monday. And that's the agreement they've got, which is cool. You could do that during the week anyway. But I think just get creative.

Put all of your eggs in the Christmas basket and you get to the end of it and go like, right, we've now got no stock, no cash and everything's gone wrong. I think, try and focus on that. The second thing I would do right now as well is write down everything that went really well and went really badly over peak. 

At the time of recording this just ahead of Black Friday, we are rolling out at least 10 marketing strategies that we wrote in January and February earlier this year. So January, February 2024, i wrote the marketing strategy, we're currently rolling them out and they're all going incredibly well. Those are some of the brands that are thriving at the moment. 

Because we learned what we learned from last year about what stock to have, what marketing campaigns to run, what to do on the website, etc. So those are my two things. We've not really spoken about so much. But I would really, really focus and double down on those heading into spring. 

Chase Clymer

No, I think that the post-mortem. Doing that, you should be doing that this week when this comes out. Because you need to do it when it's fresh in your mind. What went well and what didn't. You can Google post-mortem meeting strategies to get some more questions if you want. 

But honestly, just having a conversation with everyone on the team about those things, it will unlock things to try again at the end of 2025. Things to not do again, or things to iterate upon to get a better result. Post-mortems are something that I think a lot of businesses just don't do. 

Nick Trueman

Absolutely. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Nick, if I enjoy the sound of your voice. And I want to hear more. Where should I go? What should I do? 

Nick Trueman

Well, you can come and find yourself, Chase, on my show, which will be going out. We're going to try and synchronize the weeks as Chase said. Come check out Winning with Shopify. It's bright pink. And in terms of branding, it's not my color. 

But someone said we will stand out on all the platforms. And since we did that, we get a better click-through rate on sending an Apple podcast. We're on YouTube. We're on Instagram, TikTok, Winning with Shopify. If you want to check out the agency, it's spec.digital. It's our website, S-P-E-C.

And feel free to reach out to us if you want any help with SEO PPC. We won't suggest anything that doesn't make you money. That's always the caveat for us. But Chase, I mean, it's so good to be on your show. And it's nice to be the one. I'm being asked questions for once rather than asking. So yeah, appreciate it. And yeah, looking forward to getting you on our show as well. Hopefully at the same time as this. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Nick, it was great to chat with you today. And I'm excited to be on your show. Take care.

Nick Trueman

Awesome. Cheers. 

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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