Ep 559: 3 High‑Leverage CRO Moves Before Black Friday – with Jordan Gordon

0:00The highest leverage insights that we could impart on our audience today in the world of CRO with what do we have like three weeks before Black Friday?

0:09Jordan Gordon:It's just some last minute things you can do to get the best results. This is something we can do to just really get results fast. You can like increase your AOV by 8 % with Rebuy very easily. So let's just say you were a$12 million brand or whatever, right? Well, that's an extra million dollars a year for no ad spend. We use this to take clients from here to here really fast. Like within a month, you can have results. Technically speaking, it's the seventh. If you said, I got to have this for Black Friday. And I mean, Christmas is still after that, right? And you said, I got to have this. You could get set up with that in time and get some results.

0:41Jordan Gordon:You can get results within a month.

0:50It's all killer, no filler. And the prodigal son has returneth to the nest. Welcome back to the DDC podcast. Mr. Jordan Gordon, host. of Twoburp, the world's best email and retention podcast.

1:01Jordan Gordon:Hello. It's been a while since we've been on the DTC. So yeah, nice to see you on the plot, although we have certainly been in touch behind the scenes. Yes. And we have been in touch. We have been cross-publishing your episodes, have been listening to them and enjoying them. Also recently in the Pilot House organization, you've been brought in to lead and you have been leading email retention. And now CRO has also nested under you in this revenue driving position you find yourself in. Yes. And we are one team, one dream now. It's kind of a post-click customer journey service we're putting together and integrating the two.

1:34Jordan Gordon:Although we don't yet have a flashy name for it. So, you know, we're just email retention and CRO. With a podcast name like Twaburp, we know that naming is a strong suit, although I came up with it. But let's talk about what we're here to talk about today, which are the highest leverage insights that we could impart on our audience today in the world of CRO with what do we have like three weeks before Black Friday. Yeah, totally. Like just some last stuff, things you can do, last minute things you can do to drive the best results. Gut checks too. Like, what do you look at? What do you got to look at to make sure you have in order?

2:07I'm sure most of our listeners do have their ducks in a row, but let's see if we can help a few.

2:12Jordan Gordon:First of all, we can just toss a couple of numbers around, right? It's an honor for me to step in and lead the CRO team. What do I bring to the table? Well, I have been working in e-commerce for 25 years. There's always been a website there. I've always been working on a site in one way or another. and although you know certainly this team has grinded more in very specific ways that I haven't so a lot of you know my work is just you know learning what they're doing and what's working right now you know I can have an idea of something that worked five six years ago because I was doing it but you know maybe hey what's working right now so that's where I'm fitting into this is you know obviously bringing in general high level knowledge and also kind of merging that with current stuff off the bat I did immediately just start building some benchmarks the first thing I want to do is like figure, Hey, what's good.

2:57Jordan Gordon:What's bad in Shopify, right? Before I wasn't even, I wasn't even on Shopify sites before I came to pilot house. I was doing, you know, enterprise stuff. So I first wanted to just build some benchmarks. And so we, we do look at a right away, add to cart, total conversion, direct conversion and direct conversion. You can find if you poke around on Shopify and that's kind of like conversion after all the noise of different channels. So we, we, if you add a bunch of unqualified traffic, cause you're really doing reach marketing is going to drive your conversion rate down. So the headline conversion is kind of really volatile.

3:27Jordan Gordon:The direct is not. And so for some numbers, look, you know, you want to be doing like certainly at least five, but probably around seven on add to cart. Right. And you want to be doing little over two on, um, these are percents from clicks percent. That's right. From session, from session, okay. Save for sure. Five, but definitely like, you know, 7 % on add to cart. These are medians for us. Yeah, a little over two on conversion. And on Direct, it's like what Direct is showing in Shopify is maybe 1.25, around about that, 1.25%. So the Direct does come in structurally lower. It's just good to run those two.

4:06Jordan Gordon:It's good to run those two against each other. So first of all - What's the difference about Direct? Like Direct just is what? What to what? Well, okay. In theory, when someone just types you into the browser, that's direct traffic. And so that would have a different conversion profile than someone who was doom scrolling and clicked on something. There's more intent in the former. Yeah. Although that's in theory. I mean, in reality, there's so much weird attribution logic that's going on there. I've definitely grinded this more on GA4 back in the old days, figuring out, hey, what's – You know, when something is not set, you know, it's getting pulled out of this and put into direct.

4:48Jordan Gordon:Point being, of course, it's not simply everybody who's typing it into the browser. Of course, Shopify is going in and saying, hey, this, let's pull this out. Let's pull this out. Let's pull this out. Let's pull this out. And what's left is direct. Point being is it's less volatile. It is less volatile. So if you want to trend something over time, you want to look at that direct as well, because a lot of that noise from different, If you just change your channel mix overnight, your headline conversion is going to just change all over the place. But the direct one will be less volatile. Does that make sense?

5:18Yes, it does.

5:19Jordan Gordon:So those are some benchmarks people can look at right away to be like, hey, are we even in the right ballpark? If your numbers are significantly lower than that, you're not sailing with the same wind as some kind of really established brands. Now give me the leverage. What are these high leverage CRO moves that brands can make? a lot of the way that we design our service is to get brands from here to here quickly, right? Because people come to Pilot House, they sign up, they're going to spend, you know, a hundred thousand bucks a month on advertising or whatever it's going to be, right? You know, some people are spending a million bucks a month on advertising.

5:54Jordan Gordon:So it's like, okay, well, we better get that bottom of funnel. We better get some wins right off the bat. So here's some things that maybe you could even maybe get done in time for Black Friday. The first thing we do is we make specific pages in the site really, really fast. We use an external tool called Niche. By the way, if anybody uses Niche through us, they get 50 % off on their Niche fees. But anyway, it doesn't even need to be Niche, although we use them as a partner. We love them. So feel free to use that partner. But the point is a page tool that will just load killer, killer fast. Because let's just say you've got 25 PDPs.

6:32Jordan Gordon:I'm just picking a number, 25 PDPs. And probably four or five of those are like just, it's probably a Pareto distribution. You got five that are doing tons, right? Probably the majority of your revenue goes through those five pages because it's a choke point to get something in the cart. You got to add it to your cart, right? So you got to go to that PDP. So we find that choke point, which is your top five PDPs and make them load really, really, really, really fast because we know, and Google publishes these numbers, you can go find them. Like if the, if something's taking more than three, three seconds to load, people are bouncing, right?

7:09Jordan Gordon:And so, and three, three seconds, isn't this magic number. If it's taken more than one second, a bunch of people are bouncing, right? And it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse. So by just using a tool to make that page load really fast, what niche does, by the way, is pulls out a lot of the kind of stuff that's running for regular Shopify. It doesn't, it doesn't need that. It just pulls out a bunch of the crap that runs in the background, but it's integrated with Shopify. It's in the same domain. So I should have Richard at Niche on the World's Best Film Retention podcast. He can describe all this better than me, of course.

7:41Jordan Gordon:But anyway, it's on the same domain, so you don't lose all your tracking. You can pull over an add to cart button. You can pull over a checkout start button to go right to checkout. It's just a cool type page. Get it loading fast, and you get a conversion boost. On one client, the Niche page is running twice as many conversions as the incumbent. So you can get like quite a crazy boost on that. That's the first thing we can do. Yeah? I'm with you. I love that one. I know Richard too. I went out for dinner with him when I was in Toronto. Great guy. And you had him on the DTC pod? I haven't had him on the DTC podcast.

8:13No, we'll have to look at that. Get him on the pod and talk about it. So niche. Niche down with your pages. And these are PDPs. These are product pages that go right to Shopify checkout. out?

8:24Jordan Gordon:Well, we do it on PDP because it's, again, we're talking about like, it's the 7th of November, right? What could you possibly do right now? Well - You take speed bumps off the runway, is what you're saying. Take speed bumps off the runway. Yeah, it's very good. Hey, good one. And like, if you've got like a listicle or whatever, you've got another landing page in between, you can build any landing page you want on niche, but it's going to have to go through that PDP. It's a choke point. I've got a recent episode on the World's Best in Home Retention podcast where I talk about eight critical choke points on a website and the add to cart button on the PDP is a critical choke point.

8:57Jordan Gordon:Everything must go through that. So just make that thing better and your whole site is better, right? Yeah. Laser focused. Yeah. The other was bundling. What are we doing to maximize the value of each of these sessions? Yeah. And, uh, and again, this is something we can do. We do do, uh, to just really, uh, get results fast. By the way, if anybody wants to get an idea for what we do, um, rebuy has a case study for pilot house for what we've done with a brand cam tools. So you can go to rebuy, check out that case study to get a better idea of what we're like a really deep idea of what we're doing.

9:38Jordan Gordon:but importantly, you can increase your AOV by 8 % with rebuy very easily. We find that very common and that's 8 % more revenue. So let's just say you were a$12 million brand or whatever, right? Well, that's an extra million dollars a year for no ad spend. Yeah. Incremental. No ad spend. That's the kind of thing that if you're in one of those spots, I've been there, where you're like, I've got these huge targets. If you've got these huge targets, what you're looking for is, what's the one thing I can do this year? Especially, I mean, we're talking Black Friday, but let's just think about 2026. You're like, oh my God, I got 2026.

10:15Jordan Gordon:What you want is, what's the one thing I could do to just make this number? Is there one thing I can do to make this number? Well, let's say you had this like 10 % number. I'm telling you, depending on your catalog, if you've got a big catalog, if it's appropriate, we use rebuy primarily. There are other tools that do it. But if you've got a catalog that's appropriate for onsite recommendations, bundling, and you got like a 10 % growth number, you could do your whole growth by just rolling that tool in. It's possible. Talk to me about what's different because I know we've bundled, like we've been talking about bundling on this podcast for years.

10:49What's different about the, I guess, hard-coded or manual bundling that we would do on a page versus what rebuy does?

10:56Jordan Gordon:So one, it's more flexible. It will interact in more touch points. We did just analyze this against another tool that a prospect was using and their tool didn't offer recommendations or bundling in as many places in the site. Right. I mean, we're told that Niche has higher quality recommendations. I mean, I've never analyzed their machine learning, so I don't know that. But it's working. It's working great. It's working, yeah. We use this to take clients from here to here really fast. Like within a month, you can have results. Technically speaking, it's the seventh. If you said, I got to have this for Black Friday.

11:35Jordan Gordon:And I mean, Christmas is still after that, right? And you said, I got to have this. You could get set up with that in time and get some results. You can get results within a month. And yeah, again, someone can go check out on the World's Best Email Rentension podcast. I go through Urban Outfitters and their kind of recommendation system. They're a complete the look system. If anybody wants some ideas of how you might use that. but realistically just at every stage of the purchase journey saying why not add this how about this look add this to this right and add if you if you do three of these you get this discount if at every single point and the the way to think about this is if you walk into an apparel store you're browsing around okay you're browsing around maybe you're gonna buy something And then someone comes up and goes, hey, you know what?

12:25Jordan Gordon:Actually, I had a customer just like you who bought this and it looked great with his look. What is that? That's a recommendation. That's other people like you bought. So stores, in real life, stores do this because they know it increases sales. Why wouldn't you do it on your site as well? You mentioned choke points, and I thought that was interesting. Let's walk through a scenario where I've clicked from an ad onto the page. Talk to me about the critical choke points that have to be optimized for that person. Yeah, very good. Look, I'll just give you the eight choke points, but then I think we did talk about PDP, so we can talk about homepage after that.

13:02Jordan Gordon:But if we just think about home, category, PDP, and let's just say cart checkout, put them together because sometimes the cart slides around. you know what I mean? To just theoretical. So homepage, category page, PDP, cart checkout. At every stage, you've got theoretically two choke points. The one choke point is where you must click to progress. On the PDP, you must click add to cart to get it into your cart. Everything goes through that button. That's a critical choke point. Of course, there are systems that sometimes you can go right to checkout, but let's just keep it simple, right? You must click on add to cart to progress.

13:41Jordan Gordon:That's a choke point. Also, if you do heat mapping on a page, the place where the people focus their most attention, where they stop scrolling, where there's lots of clicks, right? That area is a choke point as well because it is actually, I mean, you don't know, it's either stopping people from progressing or it's helping people progress. You know, you got to look at it, you know, you got to look at each case individually, but it is a choke point. So if you put attention on that, you've got high leverage for your time. And if you put attention, that's the secondary choke point. And the primary, of course, is what they must click to progress.

14:21So if we thought about it, we've got, let's say you've

14:24Jordan Gordon:got homepage and you've got a button to a category page, right? Category page, you don't necessarily have a button, but you would have some recommendations. And also you would hopefully have your category ordered, like automatically ordered with products that are going to appeal to that person based on their browsing history and similar users' browsing history, which you can kind of do with Rebuy. That's that choke point. And then there's wherever they're focusing on the hot jar or whatever, right? And then PDP, you've got the button, they must click on the button. And then you've got wherever they're focusing their attention, which might be the slider with all the videos.

15:02Jordan Gordon:It might be some, some guarantee warranty information, right? And then same deal with, with cart checkout. So that's your choke points, the primary and the secondary based on progression and heat mapping. Makes sense. It does. I think the other thing we talked about, I was, I did this podcast with Nate Lagos, who was talking about the biggest levers for helping him forex his revenue at his previous company, Original Grain, was really like the text on the page was just so, so important. And who the text spoke to, how it compelled them to do the action. What are you seeing about text optimization on pages and how important it is?

15:41Jordan Gordon:The text that works is the text that you would want to focus around those choke points, right, to fit it into that model. But if you guys check out on the recent pod where I had Sean from the founder of Alia on, he confirmed what I've been saying on the pod for years, it was nice to have him come on the pod and just basically say exactly what I say. It doesn't happen all the time, but it's nice when it does, was that it's the text, it's the copy that optimizes their pop-up. So a pop-up is just, let's just call it a page. They do a full takeover, so it's a page. In my mind, the design, the quality of the design, the imagery, that justifies the price point.

16:18Jordan Gordon:But what actually puts the idea into someone's mind, you know click on this buy this you have to use language you require words that's why it's called a call to action hey check this out right shop now so um learn more i fully agree and uh and if we thought about where we would apply that again we would generally think about applying it around around a button where someone has to progress but also to flip that on its head like we were talking about we talked about pdp which is this way down funnel choke point with really high quality traffic. Everything must go through it. Now, not everybody has to go through the homepage, but a lot of people go through the homepage.

16:59Jordan Gordon:You're probably going to find your best two pages are best two pages for visits, for traffic, for page views, are your homepage and your top category page. That's going to be where you get your most eyes, unless you've got some like just crazy blog post. You know, then it just went crazy viral, unless you got that, right? So because of that, getting people to progress properly from your homepage is where you can get a lot of leverage. And so, of course, one, go to mobile, make sure that the whole product is visible, right? Make sure the homepage looks good, the product's visible, maybe someone using the product, whatever, right?

17:37Jordan Gordon:But then that banger headline and a button. That button should progress either to a product if you've got a small catalog, or it should progress to a category page if you've got a large catalog. That way it does the whole thing. We did talk about what about below the fold, but the fact is we do know not everybody scrolls below the fold. So you want to have your above the fold homepage make people progress. And so, yeah, sure, one, add a button. Make sure you're going to a good place like category. Make sure the product is not covered over. And then everything should be focused on that one headline.

18:12Jordan Gordon:And here's the trick. You don't know on the homepage. Like if you knew, for instance, that they were problem aware, you'd be sending them to a problem aware landing page, right? If you knew they were problem unaware, you'd be sending them to a problem unaware landing page. On the homepage, you've got just seriously this headline. And this headline, this one line has to really spell it out. I was talking to a brand that did organic cotton pants. And the line was, feel organic again. Seed Pants, client of ours. Yeah, I know Seed Pants. He came to our event. Blake. So yeah, they're great. You guys should check out the pants.

18:50Jordan Gordon:Actually, you know what? I watched their video on one of our landing pages. And they've been our client for a while. And I used to do a bunch of rock climbing and yoga and stuff before I had kids. Now I'm just doing jujitsu. And so anyway, I kind of had a feeling for their product and their whole space. But after watching the video, I love the power of marketing. After watching the video, I went to my wife. I'm like, this is the kind of stuff we need to buy for our kids. The whole thing about it being organic and none of the plastics and stuff like that. And it's like, it's amazing the power of marketing.

19:21So he says, feel organic again.

19:24Jordan Gordon:And the thing is, there's two things going on there. One, it's feel the organic clothing. Then also you yourself. Feel real. Don't feel fake. Don't feel the office. And it's asking you to feel. And another thing that came up with the podcast recently with Seth Waite, the CPG buying expert, was like often people think of their founder story as just being like, here's my story with the product and why I made it. But there's also like if you can reflect in your marketing how it will make another – the customer feel rather than how you felt in building it. It's more about the customer. So that headline really speaks to that.