Tanner Larsson 0:07
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Optimized Ecommerce Podcast. I’m your host, Tanner Larsson. And today, we got another one of the Build Grow Scale team members on the call with us, Joseph Liu, we are going to be diving into some cool stuff with him. So a little bit before we get into it, Joe has been with us for Well, let’s see, well over a year now, what are we at now Joe? Two years. Yeah. See, I’ve been screwing that up on every podcast ago. It’s only a year. But you know, I’m the guy that when I talk to my wife, and I go, Hey, babe, remember a couple years ago when we did that, and she goes, I mean, 10 years ago, I’m really bad at numbers. And like how long ago things were. So I also don’t know my own age. So I usually ask my wife how old I am when it comes time to answer that. But anyway, back to things I do know about, which is e commerce. And Joe knows a lot about e commerce too. Joe is one of our revenue optimization experts. And he works in our amplified partner program, working on our amp stores and doing all the optimizations and helping these stores grow. But also, he also works with our ads team, he helps work on information side of the business as well in terms of teaching what he knows to our students and everything else. So he’s really, really well versed in what we’re going to be talking about today, which is customer avatars, and what a customer avatar is why they’re important. And then how do you leverage them in your business. It’s a topic that gets kind of talked about, but then glossed over, because it’s hard work. It takes and by hard work. I mean, it takes time. It’s not like a magic push button thing that you just create. And it’s done. So most people don’t like to spend the time to do it. But it’s super, super valuable. And Joe is going to kind of walk us through this whole process of what a customer avatar is, and how we can leverage them. So with that said, Joe, thanks for having thanks for jumping on.

Joseph Liu 1:51
Yeah, thanks for having me. Absolutely.

Tanner Larsson 1:54
So let’s just dive right in. Alright, so let’s start with the basic question for those people who don’t know, what is a customer avatar? And why do people care? Why should they care?

Joseph Liu 2:04
Right, right. Yeah, definitely. Um, so customer avatar is so important for business, because in marketing, there is this quote, we pass around very often, but like you said, it’s not done enough. And that is, if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one, that’s your message to the market. Right? So if I had asked somebody, you know, in one of our e commerce, education, you know, one of our students asked him, what’s your customer avatar? And they would say, Oh, you know, they’re working moms, and they got two kids. That’s not enough. That’s just your customer profile. But when it comes to customer avatar, you got to identify their goals, their value, the actual demographics, how they feel what they always talk about, what do they feel about certain solutions towards their problem, and all the rest, and all of a sudden, you get to have a clear picture of who you’re really trying to sell to. And that’s what makes customer avatar so important for business as kind of like, you know, that story where a couple of blind people, they, they’re blindfolded, and they’re trying to figure out what an elephant looks like, one touches the elephant’s leg and thinks an elephant looks like a trunk, and one touches the elephants, you know, nose, and then that person thinks an elephant looks like a snake. And you know, all the rest. But in reality, they just got to open up their blindfold, and look at the whole picture of what an elephant is, then they know what it is and actually describing. So when it comes to marketing, when it comes to selling your product, or you know, a natural person, you can’t guess you can’t touch it once and just say, Oh, you know, that’s what I’m selling, who I’m trying to sell to, therefore, I’m gonna create my product, create my copy around that. And just kind of skip over that research part. So customer avatar, the most important thing is to understand your customers more than they understand themselves. Then from that point on your marketing, your product, your your message, your customer service, which is kind of fall in place. And you have Yeah, you have more more chance of success than anybody else.

Tanner Larsson 4:28
So customer avatar, you know, guys in a nutshell, like what he’s talking about is it’s this very detailed, all encompassing snapshot of who your ideal target audience is. And you know, in some cases, your business may have multiple avatars. Typically, you’re not going to see more than maybe two or three, but it is possible that you do have more than one. Ideally, in a perfect world. You only have one you can zero in on it. But as we get into this, it’ll make more sense but the The thing I want to touch on is very often people think their avatar is this. And then when they actually get into their data, it’s something else completely. And we’ve seen that a number of times, in our partner stores and stuff, we even had a client who was convinced that their avatar because they’re a 20 year old company, and that their avatar was basically 55 year old women, 55 plus year old women, okay. And that was who their their demographic was targeting, or excuse me, their marketing was targeting their ads, their their imagery on their site, their messaging, their verbiage, everything. When we got into Google Analytics, and started actually doing everything, and looking at the real data, we found out that they were actually around 35 to 45 year old women. Okay, so now people think, well, that’s only, you know, 10 to 20 years, that’s what’s a big difference. Think about you. Do you relate to someone who’s 20 years older than you? Do you think about things the same way you don’t at all. And when we showed them that they were Mind blown, and they had once and then they realized that man, they were successful, in spite of the fact that they were marketing to the wrong audience, that 55 plus audience was only was less than 10% of their actual audience. So it’s not uncommon to have the wrong avatar, or, you know, you start with one, but as your business develops, your avatar changes. So this is something that kind of has to be, you know, revisited from time to time.

Joseph Liu 6:24
And that’s crazy, right? That’s like, the one of the most important ROI work you can do on a site where you can do for a business you can do, you can optimize your site to perfection, you can have, you know, everything done, right, but if you’re sending the wrong people to that to your product, they’re not going to convert

Tanner Larsson 6:45
At all. So okay, we’ve talked about kind of the overview of this, we’ve given him a little bit of a, an idea where we’re going with this, but let’s get into the nitty gritty. So let’s start breaking it down. What are the different components that make up a customer avatar?

Joseph Liu 6:59
Right, so let’s knock it out. There’s a lot we need to go through. So let’s just knock it out. We got demographics. So obviously gender, you know, is your product more suitable for women or for men, you got to figure this out? What type of age you’re going for, we just spoke about that. And that really, talks about age really directly impact your, your product pricing, because certain incident age range brackets have more disposable income, right? If you’re selling products to, you know, 13 to 18 year olds, they have to ask their parents for permission for buying anything. And then you know, different age level have different disposable income levels. Right? And then we got race, nationality, we got religion, income level, occupation, you know, relationship level. And the product, you know, are they currently buying something from a brand that you you’re trying to compete with? Right? Are they do they have? How often do that buy those products? and other stuff? Like? That’s kind of a demographic part. And then we’re going to go into more on the customer profile side. So we’re like, what’s their common pain points? What are they talking about, about your subject all the time, for example, if we talking about car products, right? For a lot of people, it’s either you go full garage worth, say this a car polishing. For a lot of people, it’s you got to have your own buffer, and you have to have your compound, you polisher, all that, you know, different levels of stuff. And then there are people who just want to have one single product that solves everything, you may not be as good as you know, all the tough work, but hey, it gets the job done. So what are people talking about when it comes to what you’re trying to sell? How do they feel? How do they think, you know? That’s, in a nutshell, that’s the components of a customer avatar.

Tanner Larsson 9:12
The thing, guys, when you do this, like it’s, he’s giving you the individual pieces, but you got to get nitty gritty in there. Like when you go into, let’s say, relationship status. Okay? Are they you know, single, married? Are they separated? Are they separated with children? If they have children? How many children do they have? What are they have what age group is that are their children in? This is especially important if you’re selling to like moms, okay? Because moms who have you know, babies like in infants and or are very different in needs and some who have toddlers versus teenagers. Okay, or are there if you’re selling to moms that are like all over the place with lots of kids, then you need to know that as well. And these are things you literally need to build into your avatar. Now, obviously, every customer is slightly different not. You know, if you say my avatar is women with two kids, now, some women may have three, some white may have once and they have four. But you’re kind of looking for the median, the average of like, Hey, this is the, this is the ideal customer, if someone has more or less, that’s great, but we’re speaking to the absolute best version of what our ideal customer would be. So if that’s a divorced mom with two kids, or two toddlers, then that’s your ideal customer, if the mom who buys your stuff happens to have a toddler and a teenager, cool, but you’re speaking to that, you can’t speak to everybody. So you have to narrow it down to you know, one really core audience. And then it gets even more detailed into the, when you get into people like race and religion don’t matter? Well, they actually do matter in certain types of products, you sell certain types of products you sell during different seasons of the year, you know. So all those things, play a role, and you need to build that into the customer avatar, you’re not being racist, or anything like that by saying that your customer avatar, you know, is black or white, or, you know, Hispanic or whatever, that’s just who it is. Like, if you have a product that, you know, is made for a specific type of, you know, person, then that’s who you’re marketing to. It’s not it’s not racist to say that to your marketing to and have that as your customer avatar. It’s just factual. Okay.

Joseph Liu 11:23
Yeah, definitely. That woman with two kids can mean many, many different things, right? Yeah, single mom and married mom is very, very different. Their lifestyle is very, very different. So that’s something that you got to tap into, to be able to relate to your customers. And that that’s something you know, you can then use and really create good messaging that your customers can relate to. Yep.

Tanner Larsson 11:51
So let’s, we got the components. Now, let’s talk about how to actually put those pieces together and create a customer avatar.

Joseph Liu 11:59
Yeah, so a couple of steps we can kind of go through, and we’ll talk about the actual, like the tools and all that, because that’s something that it can get kind of complicated. And that’s something we do teach with. Something we do teach at BGS. We talk about all that in eCommerce business blueprint, in the beginning stage. And this is not something I only done for the beginners should do. If you’re just starting out, this is something that a lot of established companies that they kind of skipped. And once they come back and do all of this, their business kind of pivot from there as well. So Alright, so let’s talk about the steps, right, number one, identify their goals and their value. So that’s kind of, it’s a little bit vague. So what do you mean by goals? Let’s take an example. And this is an example we used in e commerce business blueprint, Jeremy talks about a lot. So let’s say say someone’s name is Gary and Gary sells custom made cars for for clients. So basically, he takes these old cars that’s rusted and not working anymore. He says an engine swap, and cleans out the paints does the interior and make it look look amazing for a customer and sell them high value, all right, and his goals would be he wants to, he wants to have his car perfected, so that his customer will see the value of his work. All right, that’s his goal. And his value would be his committed to doing honest work his committed to doing quality work for his customer. He doesn’t take any shortcuts that his commitment. So then that in finding your goals and value would be knowing what your customer wants, with a desire and how they’re committed by what was set of rules or set of more moral moral rules that would you know, sit them on a on a guide towards their their goal. That makes sense. Uh huh.

Tanner Larsson 14:16
Yep. Yup,

Joseph Liu 14:18
and then the second step would be you got to find sources of information that these your customers are getting their most of their day to day information from so that includes like what book did it but books they read? What kind of TV show do they watch? What kind of magazines do they do they read to get information about cars? Do they listen to any podcasts? Is there any YouTube channels that they always go on and binge watch? Is there any Instagram pages they follow? type of events that only these car people will go to? Is there any gurus that they follow on the internet and get information any influencers in the space You could, you know, potentially look at their messaging. And once you dive into each of them, you’ll be able to actually look at, let’s say, say podcasts, or let’s say, YouTube channels. Once you find how your where your customers are always spending their time, a lot of these social platforms have comments, right? And people love commenting on things they love, and things they don’t love. So if you look at a YouTube channel about some car, let’s say Donut Media, they’re one of the biggest car companies and consecration about cars on YouTube, when once you go into the comment section is, you know, some guy in there is talking about specific coilovers for certain cars. And people will go on and commenting their questions, what they’re excited about what they hate about this thing. And once you dig, dig in, there are things that basically overlaps, like what people are talking about repeats a lot. That’s what your market thinks. And you write that down, and you move on to the next video. So this could take hours and hours and hours of work. But if you get it down, and actually realize what people are talking about, that’s something so powerful that so many of us haven’t got it. Alright, so we got identifying their goals and value we have finding their source of information. And this is just not YouTube, right? That we’re talking about book reviews. We’re talking about. Products reviews. Different page. Yeah, product reviews exactly on Amazon, right. Go through all of that. Look at the five stars, but look at the one stars, look at the two stars, what people are hating about this. And it’s not just what they hate about a product, but sometimes they bring their context into the review. For example, I could be looking at a, you know, a buffer for the car paint, right? This? How do you call it? It’s called buffer, right? Yeah, yeah. So I’m looking at the buffer. And then the product review, I look at a one stars, it’s not only about oh, this doesn’t rotate as as fast as the other ones. But the cord isn’t long enough, I have a small garage, and the court is only less than two meters. My plug is all the way down there. How am I supposed to, you know, polish my car, with cord being two meter long, it should be a 10 meter long cord, and then you start to realize, oh, okay, like in certain places, people have smaller garage than other people. And you kind of have to fit their need with, you know, better product specimens. So this is not only about how they feel about something, and how they will they talk about certain products, but it not only helps you to better your copy, better your targeting, it also helps you create better products. Right? Alright. And what type of events do they go to, is there any special events that only these cars guy car guys would go to? Are there any in one state once you identify that you can look at, okay, what type of products have been sold on those events, what type of topics have been talked about at those events. And that’s where you can get really deep into understanding where there are getting your information, because that’s the language you will use. When you speak to your customer. And they can relate to it. They know Oh, you’re one of ours. You know, I’ll buy from you. You know what you’re talking about? Yeah. All right. So that’s finding the source of information. The next step is kind of what we talked about just now is gathering their demographic information. So

what happens here is you want to create a fictional person from what you gather. So like I said earlier, their gender, their age, and you literally write it down like a fictional novel, novel based on what you gathered. So you can say Gary, is 45. And, and from that point on, and he lives in Reno, and he’s got two kids. And he’s single, and his kids in college, and what he’s trying to do is put his kids through, put his kids through college, without, you know, financial trouble. And every day he drives to work, gets this stuff done. And he on his way back, he listened to certain podcasts. And when he, you know, comes home, makes dinner for kids. And he sat down on the couch and he’s thinking about, you know, where can I find the best products for my work so that I can deliver a better value. You know, stuff like that, like really get into details about your customer, their day to day, like, write that information down and think about, where can you insert your message that will help them better their lives. Okay. Number four is find their challenges and pain points. So through all this source of information, you got to find what are they currently being challenged? In the day to day, when it comes to your products? How can you really serve them in a way that your product can solve their problem can solve their need, fulfill their need? A lot of times like e commerce stores, like we talked about, oh, like a product that does this a product does that. And it’s made with premium material, and we got fast shipping, good customer service. But how is it going to help your customer? You got to tie all your benefits, all your features into how is going to help your customers achieving their goal and filling their need? All right, and the last one is list out all their objections that they could have. So about certain products. So for example, like we just said, about the buffer and the cord not being too long. Can you list that out in your product page? Can you list that out in your ad copy saying hey, we got a, you know, extension cord comes in the package, right? And can you talk about, you know, what, what type of products have they purchased before that burned them? That they really had a bad experience? This is where the Amazon one star review really comes in? You can dig in there and look at what are people hating about these products? And can your product solve that problem? And specifically answer to those potential objections. And that’s a nutshell, the five steps identify your goal and value, find their source of information and fill in the demographic info create a fictional person, literally, and then then identify the challenges and pain points. And last one, you get to list out their objections. That’s awesome.

Tanner Larsson 22:05
Yeah, and that’s right on in, you know, some of that his giving you a very big task here, guys. And it’s it is it’s hard. And it’s honestly when in like our e commerce business blueprint, which is our, you know, startup and beginners training program for people who want to get into e commerce, we teach them how to build a business. And that’s one of the things people try to skip over all the time, because it’s hard, they get stuck on it because they don’t like it requires lots of research and labor and just kind of assimilating data and then looking at it and then putting it together. But once you do that, I promise you, it’s super valuable. But I want to touch on one piece that he said where he talks about, you actually write out your customer avatar. So ideally, your customer avatar should be basically, it should all fit on one page. Okay, and there should be a name, you should name them. And it shouldn’t just be John Doe or Jane Doe, or some like that. Give them a real name like Gwen, or what is someone in your like, Who’s your ideal customer? What do they look like if you have in your business. Now, sometimes this happens, you may have in your business, someone who as a customer just epitomizes the perfect customer. And if that person is Christina, then your customer avatar can be Christina, and you can build it based off of them. But you write it out, you write out the entire story. And if you if it makes it easier, treat it like a fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was a person named Christina, there’s a girl named Christina, who has two kids, Mary works at, you know, works at, you know, eBay, blah, blah does all this stuff in it, like you tell their entire story of their emotional state, why they what they struggle with how there’s, you know, spouse is, you know, into it or not into what they’re doing. Do they have support do their what’s the relation with their kids, all of that, and you build this story. And then the hardest part is you go out and you find a picture. Okay? A picture of a person. That is Christina. Now, if you did your job, right, finding the picture should be harder than doing the demographic stuff. Because once you’ve figured out the customer avatar, if it really is a good customer avatar, you’ll realize that just not any picture will do. Because you could go a slap the picture on there. Like that’s not Christina, that’s not my perfect audience avatar. So you keep finding that. And then what do you do with that avatar? We’re gonna get into that in a second. But one thing that I’ll tell you is we have it, when we have our customer avatar, we actually print it out. And it’s like a sheet that we give it out to people that need to have it in our business. Because the idea is that once I have that avatar, everything I do in the business focuses on that person. I no longer have to figure out how do I write my copy? What are they thinking? What are they What do I need to say to the person? Well, if I can read this story, I know exactly what how to talk to that person.

Joseph Liu 24:48
Right. 100% Yeah.

Tanner Larsson 24:50
So you know, there’s a lot you covered. Joe, I want to I want to get to this next point here, which was all of this stuff. Right there. Lots of areas mistakes, lots of things where people are going to screw up or cut corners or whatever. What’s the number one mistake that you see people making? When it comes to this? You might have seen different, but the one that I see is, they skip the whole thing they don’t do at all. Yeah

Joseph Liu 25:16
So then when people when they create this is that they don’t create it. And that’s it. You know, if you even do 50%, you’re out, you outperform that anybody else in the market? And if you do it right, if you do it like 100%, incorrectly, boy, you got some orders to fulfill. Right? So yeah, that’s the number one thing, maybe using something else? Yeah, no, I

Tanner Larsson 25:38
agree. I mean, we it’s, it’s amazing to us, not only the beginner side, but also in our amplified partners, and our established stores that we work with, how many people don’t have an avatar, or when you ask them who your who their avatar is, or who they’re to describe their avatar. It’s like two sentences. You know, it’s women who women who drive BMWs or women who do yoga, you know, or something like that. And that’s, that is not an avatar. Or even worse, they’re like, everybody’s my customer. Like,

Joseph Liu 26:10
yeah, that means you’re selling to nobody.

Tanner Larsson 26:12
Yeah, you’re something nobody. The only there’s, there’s very few businesses where everybody’s your customer. And there’s really only one that I would say, can actually take that that name of saying, Yeah, everybody’s my customer. And that’s Amazon. Okay, and even then, not everybody’s their customer, there’s people that absolutely hate Amazon, there’s people who don’t like to shop online will never give Amazon their money, think Amazon’s a conspiracy, you know, all this stuff. So even then, it’s not everybody. So there is no such thing. And so unless you’re Amazon, everybody is not your customer.

Joseph Liu 26:44
Yeah, definitely. And I just one thing I want to touch on his people who are listening to this show like if you for spending, you know, like with the time listen to our show, chances are you have a business already. So a quick way to do all of this is actually talk to your customer. So look through your Excel spreadsheet and look at your customers and just call them up. And, you know, obviously, you know, don’t call him up without any emailing or something. Let them know you’re you’re you want to talk to them, incentivize them to talk to you. And I guess a short way that we’ve been doing this and easy way of us been doing this is setting up the post purchase survey, because we do ask them to talk about a lot of this stuff, you know, in a condensed way. But actually talking to your customer, talk to your customer rep, right? People who are doing the customer service, talk to them. And because they get a lot of these, you know, day to day, talking to actual customers, they they hear the language they’ve used, they hear the situations there, they’ve been in using your product, you know, so talk to all of them and gather gather as much information as you can. And you have a leg up compared to those who don’t have customers yet who are starting a business. If you have his business ready, you know, you have make sales with people talk to them, chances are they’re willing to talk to you because they know you’re ready. Yeah,

Tanner Larsson 28:10
absolutely. And you can do you don’t have to go to all your customers. Just look, do a sort and find out who your your top who your whales are, who are your best customers that have that buy the most have the most repeat purchases are the best to deal with. Look at those customers and go, Okay, I’m going to talk to these 20 customers. And then I’m going to ask them all the same questions. And I’m going to, you know, assimilate all the data from those people. And boom, you’ve got a very, very, very good look at your avatar. Mm hmm.

Joseph Liu 28:36
Yeah. One way, quick, quick way to do it. You have all those CRM software’s, but if you have your Google Analytics set up correctly, you can look at what come into your site, and you know, geographical locations. And you can look at affinity you can look at the shows they follow people they follow on YouTube people they follow on Instagram, with follow on, on Facebook, all kinds of stuff, if you have your GA setup correctly, and something we do at BGS as well. We try to help people get the GA set up correctly get the data right so they can go in and dig all kinds of information.

Tanner Larsson 29:10
Totally. So we’ve kind of covered that we know the mistakes which is don’t people don’t do it, or they shortcut it right. So what’s the next piece is okay, we’ve got all this information. I’ve written out my avatar, I know what it is. What do I do with it?

Joseph Liu 29:25
Right? Yeah, you kind of touched on this a little bit. Just now is you actually print it out. And and you look at your customer avatar, and whenever you’re about to create an Ad and you look at Okay, is Gary gonna like this this post? What does Gary like about it? What does Gary potentially won’t like about it? Does this Gary’s answer questions are as essential being, ah sorry are his questions being answered? are his objections being handled right? And okay, if that check all the boxes, then you look at your landing page. Look at Okay, does Gary like this this Gary like that. What does Gary hate about this? What? What does Gary hate about that. And you do that for every single page, every single process, not just acquisition, but your emails, not just, you know, pre purchase, but post post purchase. And you do that with everything in your business in a way that everything that you do is align with this North Star of your business, which is your customer avatar.

Tanner Larsson 30:31
And this goes beyond just you like, if you’re listening to this, you’re more than likely you’re the, you know, either the owner, director, you know, C level executive of your company. It’s not just you who needs this, the like, if you have an ad agency, the ad agency should have copies of your avatar so that they know because otherwise, if you don’t give it to them, they’re not going to know, and guaranteed, they’re not going to do that level of research. So if you hand them the avatar, say, Hey, this is who our ads are talking to, if you have a copywriter on staff, they need to know the avatar, your customer service rep say, hey, these are the kind of people we’re working with, you know, your team. In general, if you have a product design team, if you have a, you know, packaging team, or anybody who handles you know, maybe it’s an outsourced company, a lot of these could be VA’s, or, you know, companies that you just hire contractually when you need them. Hey, we’re gonna design new packaging for our new logo scale water bottle, cool. Well, here’s our build grow scale avatar, as we design, the packaging, the packaging, we design has to fit this person. Okay? And the more people who are in touch with your business that have that the better off it’s going to be. And then the thing is, it’s what it does is it gives you a it’s a sounding board. It’s like an instant feedback loop on if you’re going to, you have an idea for a new ad creative. Well, before you go out and create the ad creative. Look at your avatar and run your ad creative idea through the avatar. And if the avatar like, yeah, you know, Gary wouldn’t like that. Okay, well, what would what? Why wouldn’t Gary like it? Can we adjust it? Cool. Now let’s go create it. So it saves you from just throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks, because you have a sounding board to look at and go like this. Now, another way we use this, and that we’ve done very successfully is when we have a scrum meeting in the office or whatever, or it’s a little bit different now, because our team is all virtual. But when we used to have everybody in the office, we would actually have a meeting about something and we would have picked one person at the meeting. And their job is to become the avatar. And so they have they become Gary, whether they’re a girl or a guy or whatever they become Gary, and the entire meeting. Their job is to be Gary and either say I like that I don’t like that or just basically be the person and we have to feed, we have to get Gary’s approval to move something forward. And it works out incredibly well, especially when you’re designing new marketing campaigns, new creatives, trying to figure out what what making your site convert or not convert. And guys, when we when we talk about this, it sounds like a lot of work. But it’s what we do, okay. And it’s why it’s part of the reason that we’re able to get stores to convert so well, because we understand the traffic and the people coming to those stores so well, that we can pave the way by smoothing out that buyers journey for them. Now, the thing is when we say, you know, streamline or smooth out the buyers journey, it’s for the audience, it’s contextual for that site, the buyer, what’s smooth for this site may be choppy and jumpy as hell for another site. It’s not like you copy each site and they’re all the same. You have to do this all the way through, but you can’t optimize your store, if you don’t know who your avatar is. Because the optimization you make may actually trigger your your avatar and cause your conversions to go down. Even though you watched a video where you’re like, oh, Tanner said, Do this on my store. And you say, Well, why doesn’t it work? Well, because your audience is 55 year old women. And the audience at the store we were talking about was 25 year old men, you know, and it was a knitting store versus a testosterone store. Totally different. Right? Yeah.

Joseph Liu 34:04
So that, yeah, I resonated with that a lot. Because I have friends who, you know, ecom store owners and they go up, CRO doesn’t work. And I was like, What if it doesn’t work? It’s my full time job. And they just go, oh, I’ve tried all these stuff from you know, these blog posts, like, you know, 72 ways to boost your conversion in 2020. And try all of them. They don’t they don’t work for me. So I think that’s bullshit. And you answered exactly that. You can’t take what works for others, and think you know, 100% work for you. Because sometimes what they what works for their audience is trigger for your audience, and they just, you know, plummet your conversion rate. So you have to do this work. This is so important.

Tanner Larsson 34:48
Yep. And the thing is, with optimizations, like just saying, like, there’s a lot of optimizations, that we if we give you 100 optimizations, without fail, you know, 30 40 of them will not work at all, another 20 or 30 of them will work a little bit and then about 20 of them, maybe 30 of them will be by and be amazing for you. And then from that little that amazing subset, there’ll be one or two, that just takes you to the moon. That’s the normal thing. It’s like the 80, 20 rule, everything kind of falls into that. The thing is, when we do share our optimizations, we share CRO, it doesn’t mean they don’t work, they do work, what we’re saying is, hey, if you don’t know what to test, test this, try this. But what you can also do is you can take that optimization and look at your avatar and go, does this fit my avatar, and you can save yourself even trying to implement it, okay? But you’re better off testing optimizations, don’t just take them at face value and say, oh, yep, I’m going to put that on here. Because the blog post said it works. That’s not the case, you have to take your control, which is what what you were doing before, track all your metrics, add the new optimization, let it go for a period of time, you know, to reach hopefully, statistical significance, but many stores don’t have enough traffic, enough traffic to get that. But you pick a period of time if you’re going to do that. And you look okay, during this period of time, we got the roughly the same amount of traffic. Here’s our numbers before, here’s the numbers afterwards did this work. But the problem is like what Joe’s talking about, most of these people go through these blog posts, whether they’re ours or anybody else’s, and they put 10 optimizations in place at once. How do you know which ones making the impact? You may have one that skyrocketing, but the other nine are pulling it back down. So it looks like there’s no there’s a wash. So you have to test in iterations and you know, one at a time, you can’t test everything at once, or optimize everything at once.

Joseph Liu 36:38
That’s something we go through pretty extensively in one of our free blog posts. So you can just literally read it and implement seven things to do with your site. If you don’t have enough traffic to AV tests. look that up on our build grow scale dot com and go through it. I’m sure you guys will love it. We go through stuff like this on a weekly basis. So yeah,

Tanner Larsson 37:00
absolutely. Yeah, guys, there’s a lot of stuff on the blog at Build Grow Scale dot com forward slash blog, where you can see our processes and how we go through all that. You know, definitely resources if you like the podcast, you’ll love the blog. Okay, so check that out. Yeah,

Joseph Liu 37:15
Just just on that, like, what, uh, so people who are one of our friends, Richard, who’s helping us with podcast production, their team is, you know, was was dealing with an e commerce store, they’re actually doing an experiment, basically following our free blog post content and optimizing their store. And they’re seeing what, like a huge conversion rate increase?

Tanner Larsson 37:37
Yeah, they’ve only they’ve only basically work followed one, one part of a six part blog series that they’re going to go through in detail. They’re like, let’s just try your free stuff. And, you know, put it on the store, and they’ve done one part of part one, and their store is already doing really, really well. So we’re actually going to do a case study on that and have Richard on the podcast as well to talk about that and other things. But, guys, what we’re putting out whether it’s YouTube videos, podcasts, blog articles, third party articles on Forbes, or, you know, wherever, you know, entrepreneur, things like that. It’s all tried and true from the trenches from what our team which is, you know, almost 60 people strong, does full time for massive stores, medium stores, we also teach it to our students, we get their data, the amount of data that Build Grow Scale collects from e commerce ventures at sales, data, traffic, all that stuff, conversions. There’s no other company on the planet that collects that much data from that many variety of different niches, and then assimilates, it, analyzes it and figures out how to leverage it across the network of stores we have and then once we have all that, then we share it with you guys. So everything we’re saying is literally backed by data, and it’s from the trenches information so you can know it’s good. And with that, guys, we covered a lot today. I hope you enjoyed the show. We’ll have Joe back on for another episode soon in the future. And make sure right now if you’re on YouTube, you subscribe if you’re on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever else, you subscribe there and leave us a review or a comment wherever you are. And, you know, just share the word like if you enjoyed it, share it with a friend. We’d love to get more people watching this and listen to the show. And we do this for you guys. So hopefully you like it. If you have ideas for future shows or you know, guests or whatever else. Let us know we’re always open to that kind of stuff. With that, guys. We will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for being here. See ya.