Tanner Larsson 0:06
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the Optimized Ecommerce Podcast. I’m Tanner Larsson. And today we are joined by one of our Build Grow Scale team members, one of our revenue optimization experts. He’s a repeat guest, Mr. Daniel Escobar. And Daniel is going to be wowing us with his knowledge again. Daniel, again, if you don’t remember him from previous episodes, he’s been with the team for a few years now. And he works on some of our biggest amplified partner stores. Or he is actually the revenue optimization expert that’s in the trenches every day figuring out different things to test, improve, tweak, optimize, fix on these stores. Now, the crazy thing is that these stores have been with us for a while, they’re highly optimized, but yet, Daniel is able to continually find new and bigger wins all the time. Now, not every win is a huge win. But we do find quite a lot of wins. And one of the ways that Daniel is really good at and a lot of our other RO’s as well, because it’s standard practice across all our stores. But one of the things that he excels at is leveraging information from the customer, to then improve the sales process on the front end for new customers and repeat customers. So today, we’re going to talk about how you can leverage your thank you page correctly, to collect customer information without pissing them off in a way that allows you to collect good information, provides value to them, and allows you to really get nitty-gritty on what your actual customers have to say about your order and buying process. So Daniel, thanks for joining us today.
Daniel Escobar 1:41
Thank you for having a Tanner.
Tanner Larsson 1:44
So you’re back home now. Right?
Daniel Escobar 1:47
Yeah, I’m in Colombia,
Tanner Larsson 1:49
In Colombia. Yeah. And then you just came back to the US for a little bit. You got to go to an emotional intelligence class and then hung out with Matt in LA for a while, right?
Daniel Escobar 2:00
Yeah, I stayed there for around 10 days, it was great. was great visiting Matt.
Tanner Larsson 2:06
Yep. And then got to go to Vegas, see Jimmy and some of the other team, and then go back home. Right?
Daniel Escobar 2:12
And then I flew back home. It was great. It was great. Vegas was a bit more fun than California. Everything was a bit more open. I could go into a restaurant and sit and eat. But it was great. Overall, it was a great experience.
Tanner Larsson 2:30
Good deal. Awesome. All right, why don’t we go ahead and jump into this? So we’re basically talking about how to ask questions on the thank you page in a specific way to your customers after they’ve completed their purchase, in order to collect the data that we want and really make some stuff. So why don’t we start with the first thing, which is? Why? Why should you be asking your customers these questions and get to what the questions are, but why is it important to ask them questions?
Daniel Escobar 2:59
It’s very important, because first of all, you’ve got blind spots, you’ve got blind spots, you think you know it all. But if you really think you know it all, and you change nothing, then you’re never going to get better results. Right? You’ve got a blind spot. The truth is, you’ve got blind spots, there are things you don’t know that is not working. And by asking them questions, you’re able to get a perspective from someone else, right? Because you browse your website every single day, you’ve seen it 1000 times. So when you tried to think about, hey, what’s missing? What might be wrong? If you could find it so easily, you would have fixed it by now.
Tanner Larsson 3:46
You want to fix it. Right?
Daniel Escobar 3:48
Exactly. But you’re missing it because you’re so used to your website, right? So asking your actual customers questions is a great way to have, an outside perspective and new feedback on your website.
Tanner Larsson 4:02
And it’s similar to user testing, which we’ve talked about in other videos, except for the fact that user testing is not actual customers that chose your store on their own. So you get a little bit of a different perspective from your actual customers than from user testing people right?
Daniel Escobar 4:18
Exactly, user testing is more about functionality. You’re really seeing if people can go through the process if they have any walls or any obstacles to get through the process to the product page and add to cart and checkout. Right? The difference is people most of the time the user testers are not your actual demographic. You just got them somewhere, maybe on a website, or maybe they were friends of yours. On you ask them hey, please go through this process with me. Let me check the website, through your eyes. But in this case, when you’re asking questions to your real customers, Then they are the real deal they’re buying from you. They have that motivation, and they’re spending the real money with you. So, it’s different, but it’s very, very important.
Tanner Larsson 5:08
So what kind of questions should you be asking your customers on the thank you page?
Daniel Escobar 5:19
I like to ask kind of two types of questions. Basically, you have multiple ways to improve the conversion rate of a store and the revenue overall, one of them is to reduce the friction, right? By friction, I mean, people who may have fears or questions or doubts, we call those thoughts, at BGS. So it starts with fears, uncertainty, and doubt. So you want to find those out and fix it. So you want to ask questions that undercover those. So basically, that undercover the friction, the reasons why they are not buying? That’s one kind of question I like to ask. And the other one is, hey, why did you buy from me? So that it’s kind of the complete opposite? And that one’s it’s like, they already bought from you. Why would you want to know that? The answer is, it’s quite funny, because sometimes you don’t know what your value proposition is, or your customers know, better than you what your value proposition is.
Tanner Larsson 6:28
Well, maybe you have a value proposition that’s not actually in alignment with what your customers saying, and you can find a better one.
Daniel Escobar 6:35
Exactly. So you can trick it and improve it that way. So those are the two main kinds of questions I like to ask. So for example, if you wanted to figure out what their fears or doubts of the customers were, you can just ask them, Hey, what was your biggest fear when buying from us? Or did you have any questions in the process? Right? That’s something you can ask, and you’ll get super good data on it. super valuable data. And then for the other type of questions, you can just literally ask, Hey, why did you pick us over the competition? And just let them answer in their own words.
Tanner Larsson 7:24
And another one that we’ve used on that first set is why did you almost not buy from us? We’ve used that question before a lot as well. And obviously, they bought, but now you’re asking like, hey, what made you hesitate? What made you almost not make the purchase? Obviously, you did, but what made almost not sometimes asking that question, you get blown away like, Oh, well, you didn’t have this information. But I took a chance or I didn’t trust your reviews or you know, something along those lines that you’re like, Whoa, okay, well, I know I can go in and address that. So It’s not about asking lots of questions, right? It’s just smart questions.
Daniel Escobar 8:00
Ans on to that point, that one is super good. Because you’re asking, what was that thing that almost stopped you from buying? And you’re asking it at the perfect moment because they just bought and there is the thank you page they bought seconds ago. Sometimes companies send out these surveys 10 days later, 20 days later, asking, Hey, how was your experience? Well, chances are 10 or 20 days later, the quality of that feedback is going to be much lower. Because people forget they buy something they get the product on Yeah, in 10 days, they’ll tell you a lot about the product, right? Because they haven’t they’ve been using it. But they won’t be able to tell you much about the buying process on your website.
Tanner Larsson 8:49
So okay, we got the questions. So what’s the best format and way to basically ask these questions on the thank you page, because we obviously don’t want to irritate the customer, but we want to collect the data. So what’s the best way to do that?
Daniel Escobar 9:01
Exactly. We like to be very, very subtle. So just ask one question. We just like to ask one question. It’s like a poll. It’s a poll on the thank you page. So this is a small square that pops up on the lower part of your screen that asks a question. So it’s a short question, one or two lines. Why did you buy from us one line, and then one box that has paid for the comments? Well, our recommendation would be most of these questions. You want them to be open answers so people can actually type their answers. Don’t give them options. Don’t give them options. Don’t put them in a box, and they won’t be able to express what they’re feeling. So let them write whatever they want to write an open-ended question. Hey, Why did you buy from us? or What almost stopped you from buying from us? And then just have a box for the answer. We’ve used a couple of tools, Lucky Orange is one of them. It’s very, very easy to set up, a poll on Lucky Orange. It takes probably five minutes.
Tanner Larsson 10:25
All right, so that that’s cool. So now let’s move into the next thing. I want to pick your brain a little bit. I know, we’ve got some weird ones over the time. But what are some of the unexpected or interesting answers? You’ve got two questions that you’ve asked in the past? Like, I’m sure some of them have been really valuable. Some of them have been out there. But let’s talk about some actual examples.
Daniel Escobar 10:46
Yeah, so some unexpected answers we’ve gotten is, sometimes people will tell you exactly why you’re better than the competition. When you ask them, Hey, why did you buy from us, they’ll tell you, Hey, I didn’t buy from the other guy. And they’ll mention the brand. Because XYZ, for example. We used to have, a cleaning company. They used to produce, cleaning products. And when we ask them, Hey, why did you buy from us instead of the other guys. They said it’s because you had all the ingredients listed. And we didn’t know that was a strong value proposition, we just had them listed just because. And when we started sowing, that trend that people really valued the ingredients, then we gave them an important part in the product page to the ingredients. And that helped us with the conversion rate that was a nice lift there. So that was an unexpected answer. And then on another company we work with, we actually found out that people were buying, specifically because of a YouTube video, we didn’t know about it. So it was this belt. And it was so strong that this guy on the video could lift an entire truck with a belt only it using the belt. So it was like a real truck. And he was just using the belt to lift the truck. That’s how strong the belt was. We didn’t know that many people were buying because of that video. So we took that video out, we made it part of the website. And that also gave us a great win in terms of conversion rate.
Tanner Larsson 12:40
Awesome, very cool. All right. So we also we’ve used Lucky Orange, things like that. But I think you mentioned that only takes a few minutes. Why don’t you talk a little bit about how not hard it is to set up a poll and kind of the right ways to set one up?
Daniel Escobar 12:57
So this platform are user-friendly, they will basically tell you, Hey, you want to create a poll? Okay, let’s do this. First, figure out what the question is. Figure out how they want to answer it. Right? So do you want them to give them options? Or maybe just, open ended question, you only need the question. Kind of figure out how do you want to gather the responses, then make it match your website, because it’s like this box. So you want it to match, the general feeling of your website. For example, if your logo is red, then chances are you want your Poll to be red as well. So it matches the feeling of the website. Then the last thing is you need to figure out how to, what’s going to be the trigger to show that poll, because you can also show polls on the homepage, on the collection page, and the product page on the cart page. Depends on what you’re looking for. But in this case, you only want to show it on the thank you page. For this purpose, right. And the way you can set that up is it changes from platform to platform. But for example, in Shopify, all the thank you pages have a similar structure on the URL. And you can set up the poll to only trigger if there is, for example, thank you in the URL. And there are many ways to set it up that way. But that’s one way that has worked very well for us. It will take you literally five minutes to set it up. Is that easy?
Tanner Larsson 14:41
Awesome. So going off on that though, a little bit like, talk a little bit about how long you run one of these tests or these polls for because I know we don’t leave them on all the time. And there’s some logic behind that.
Daniel Escobar 14:57
Yeah, so you want to run it for, it depends on how many orders you’re getting correct. But you want to run it for, let’s say until you have at least 100 responses or so, of course, if you’re only going to get 20, then that’s better than nothing. But when you have a good amount of responses, then you can start seeing the trends in the responses. So we usually just leave them on for two weeks. And then we change the question we ask because we will start just getting the same answer over and over again. And if you don’t take action, on the feedback you’re getting and you just have the poll there just to collect feedback and you don’t act on it, then it’s not really useful. So probably two weeks is a good number if you have a decent amount of transactions a day. And then you can tweak the question to find out different kinds of improvement opportunities.
Tanner Larsson 16:01
And now we typically are running one question at a time versus putting two questions at a time or three questions at a time, right?
Daniel Escobar 16:08
Yeah, because it increases a lot of response rate. Like, we found out that if we have two or three people won’t answer, and people will get pissed off because they just bought from you. And you’re, right away, just hammering them with multiple questions. If it’s only one people don’t mind answering. And they’ll be super honest with the feedback, and they’ll take the time to give you the feedback. If it goes to two or three or four questions, then the quality of the responses of the second, third and fourth questions, just goes down. So if you want to ask many questions, just first ask one question for a couple of weeks. If you want to change it, then in a couple of weeks, just change the question to get different feedback. But don’t ask more than one question. Especially not on the thank you page.
Tanner Larsson 17:04
Makes sense, because that also keeps it consistent. But the other thing is, I just want to clarify, and we talked about it briefly, but I want to make it a point if you’re running a survey on your thank you page for your customers or a poll, you don’t also want to be running a poll in your product page or on your homepage. We do one at a time. You’re not trying to disrupt your store’s ability to earn and your performance. And having too many polls on there, it just actually degrades the customer experience and they don’t like it. So if you want to run one on your product page to ask a specific question there, that’s cool. Turn off your thank you page one for a little bit and just run one at a time. And then make sure you’re taking those answers out exporting them into a spreadsheet, and kind of matching them up to see where the commonalities lie.
Daniel Escobar 17:57
Exactly, we have a great article on that. In our blog, it explains how to classify those answers. And to get the most out of it. It basically walks you through, step by step, how to organize that data, how to find the patterns, how to implement the insights you find from there, how to find solutions for it, how to make sure you actually fix the issue you’re facing. That article is great, I highly recommend you go and read it.
Tanner Larsson 18:28
You guys can get that at buildgrowscale.com forward slash blog. And then you can just use the search bar on the top to search for the thank you page polls and things like that and it’ll pull up. We’ve got multiple articles on topics like that, but the one Daniel, specifically referring to will come right up in the search results. And that’ll be very beneficial to kind of match what he’s talking about here with how do you leverage that data? So, one last question for you, buddy. What’s the biggest win that you’ve ever had? from using the Thank You page polls? What’s the most awesome thing you guys have figured out?
Daniel Escobar 19:05
The biggest one we’ve had is it was this body armor store. And we were asking people exactly what the question you said earlier what was the one thing that almost stopped you from buying? And we found out that probably 60 or 50% of the people said it is because I am not sure what’s my size? And I don’t want to mess it up. I don’t know if it’s easy to return. But it’s basically I’m not sure which size to get there are so many sizes. If you’ve ever bought body armor, there are probably 20 different sizes to pick from. And the fit is very important because if you buy the wrong one then it won’t protect you correctly. It needs to be the perfect fit, otherwise, it won’t work. against a bullet. So people were mentioning that a lot. So, again, we had those answers on the poll on the thank you page poll, we organized them, we found that around 50% of people, that was their biggest, biggest obstacle for buying.
Tanner Larsson 20:18
This is an obstacle they had, even though you guys already had a sizing guide on the website, right? Like, it wasn’t like you weren’t providing the information, but they were still having trouble with it. Right?
Daniel Escobar 20:28
Exactly, we had a simple fit chart that it said, If you weighed this much, and you’re this sold, and this is the size you should get. But people were still concerned about it. So we found this trend, we said, okay, almost 50% of the people that answer had this problem, or this concern, what can we do to improve it? How can we give them ease of mind, so they know, they can buy from us without any fear, and that their vest will fit. So we went to the drawing board. And we said, hey, let’s make something super simple. Let’s make a fit finder, where they just, select how tall they are, and how much they weigh. And they click and find my size. And that will give them a size, right. And then so for example, I’m this tall, I weighed this much, you should get an extra-large. But not only that, right below the size suggestion, we had an icon that said, free exchanges for 30 days, we pay for shipping, you don’t have to pay for anything. So we made the process super easy. We kind of reinforce the fact that, hey, this is the size we suggest. But even if it doesn’t fit, we’ll take it back for free. And we’ll ship you another one that fits you. And that gave us I don’t remember the numbers right now. But it’s been one of my biggest wins as an RO.
Tanner Larsson 22:06
That’s awesome. And yeah, that’s a perfect example of how the thank you page works. Like, this is a store guys that is optimized and was optimized. And everything from a store perspective, from an optimization perspective, was there like we addressed the sizing issue, we address this, we addressed that. And still, we thought it was sold. And then we asked the customer, they were still having an issue. So this is a case, a perfect example of how Daniel said you just don’t know what the customer is going to say that you have a blinder about like, Oh, of course, the sizing guys is there. How can they be having problems? But then I know we have another product that sizes we’re really important in a pet store. And they have the sizing information in five different ways on the page. And every time they’ve added more variations on the sizing organization. They got a lift. So great example dude. Really good example.
Daniel Escobar 23:01
Yeah, I find that to be the case in most apparel stores. They have the fit finder somewhere, but each time you add an extra one, you usually get wins. So that’s very, very interesting.
Tanner Larsson 23:14
Awesome, bro. Thank you so much for this today. I wanted to keep this episode a little shorter. Some of our other ones have been getting longer. But this was great. This was very actionable. Good stuff. Thank you so much guys right now. If you want to go check the blog out buildgrowscale.com forward slash blog, you can get the link to the article there. Just use the search bar and it’ll pull it right up for you. Also, make sure you’re subscribed to this podcast. It’s YouTube podcast and an iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify all that audio podcast so go to buildgrowscale.com forward slash podcast to get all the links including the show notes we do a show note after every show with links and other stuff you can get right there on the page and then also links to all the platforms where this is and if you like what you’re hearing you like it a lot. Leave us a review or comment let us know what you think. And with that, guys, we will see you in the next episode.
