Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. It’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast. Today on the show you have just me. I know we’ve been enjoying some fantastic guests on the show recently, but today I’m bringing another mini training to you. And really what we’re going to be talking about is how to kind of overcome roadblocks that might be preventing your customers from buying things on your website. I think over the last kind of 18 months with the rapid expansion of e-commerce as a business model, as consumers, this has been amazing, because oftentimes we haven’t been able to get to the shops, and as business owners, it’s been amazing of course, because it’s allowed many businesses to really pivot to selling more online or just even starting to sell online if you haven’t before as a way to you continue to run and grow your business.
Catherine Langman:
So e-commerce is definitely here to stay and it is continuing to grow at a pretty frantic rate, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always easy for customers to buy your product online. Hands up if you’ve ever had a customer say to you, I want to try it before I buy it. Or maybe you felt like that yourself when you’ve been in a shopping situation. There are definitely products that are more difficult to choose online or to really, I guess make a product selection and choose the right thing. I’ll give you some examples so you know what I’m getting at here. Some examples, including maybe furniture or interior decor. It’s pretty hard to kind of judge, is that dining table going to be the right size for my dining space? Or is it going to look good? Are those furnishings going to look good? What about those curtains?
Catherine Langman:
I was a couple of years back, working with a client who sells curtains and blinds, and they had selections of designs, and finishing styles, and fixtures, and fabrics, and textures, and patterns and all that kind of stuff. And you could kind of, you needed to be able to choose which one was going to suit your space. And it’s not just about design and style, it’s also function, and what’s going to suit the size of the window, and the location and yada, yada, yada. Anyway. So you can imagine for a customer, that’s really hard to be able to imagine, what is that going to look like that’s on my screen, what’s it actually going to look like in my room? And I was faced with that quite recently, as we moved house over the Halloween weekend last year, and yeah, kind of needed to choose a few finishings and pieces of furniture to go into the new place.
Catherine Langman:
Anyhow, so that’s one example. Another example is fashion. Obviously fashion and clothing, that would be probably one of the product categories that’s an early adopter of e-commerce. It’s probably not unusual for many of us to have purchased online, but there is still that difficulty of feeling like you need to try it before you buy it. And I guess many of us, once we have purchased from a website, we tend to stick to it because we know that the sizes, and the styles, and what’s going to fit us, and suit us and all that kind of stuff. It is pretty hard if you’re going to a new website or a new brand that you’ve never bought from before to know how is it going to fit and all of that kind of jazz.
Catherine Langman:
And same goes with fashion accessories as well, that can be like that. And footwear definitely. Shoes. So things like sunglasses, shoes, all of that kind of stuff, they are sorts of things that we typically want to be able to try it on before we buy it, because it is so difficult to try and project what does that item that I can see on my screen look like on me? Or is it going to be comfortable? Is it going to fit? And that sort of thing. Some other examples, skincare and makeup. Fragrance as well. These are pretty difficult to figure out what’s going to work on our skin and is it going to be the right color? Is it going to make my skin worse or better? Or all of that sort of stuff. Even kayaks.
Catherine Langman:
So I’m sure there’d be other similar sorts of products as well. But we work with a client who sells inflatable kayaks, and she has a really large range. And they’re all kind of different and they work in different sorts of waterways, and it can be pretty difficult for a customer to figure out what’s the right thing and make a decision. And of course they’re expensive products as well, so that can also give people pause before they are going to jump in and buy. And then the other scenario that can make it difficult to sell online, to sell a product online is if it’s just really new and different, and people just don’t really know. They’ve got the problem and they want the solution, but they don’t really know what it is or how it works. And that was certainly my situation when I started my first business back in 2006, 2007, in the Modern Cloth Nappy space.
Catherine Langman:
And back then, that kind of product was really new and people just didn’t know what it was or how it worked. And there was a lot of, what’s the word? People were just really tainted, even unsure. So it definitely made it hard for people to make a decision. And as you can imagine, if you have people coming to your website and they can’t easily make a decision of what to buy or whether to buy, then that is going to negatively impact your conversion rate on your website. And there’s a lot of things that you can do to improve your conversion rate. It might be things like speeding up the page load speed of your site, or making the navigation a little bit more easy to navigate and intuitive, or a bunch of other things, like adding reviews, all of that kind of stuff. There’s so many kind of tactics and strategies that can you can use.
Catherine Langman:
But one thing that I would really love to see a lot more of and that I have personally found work really, really well is to really try and find ways to overcome these sorts of roadblocks. These roadblocks where your customers are worried about choosing the wrong thing, or worried about the product not fitting, or looking good, or basically they want to try it on before they buy. How can you answer that? And this is where you can really make some big gains in your conversion rate. And of course, the more of your website visitors that you convert into customers, the more money you are making off the same volume of traffic, and that is only going to give you higher returns on your ad spend and all of that good stuff.
Catherine Langman:
The other thing that happens when you do have products that are hard to choose and people do really want to try on before they buy, is that you end up with much higher volumes of customer service inquiries, and you also end up with much higher order return rates. And of course, those things are costly in a business. They take up time and they cost you money in postage and in sending out more products, and then ending up with items that you can’t necessarily resell because they’ve been tried on. And so there really are a number of different ways that we can overcome these. So I’m going to go through them with you today, and give you a few examples and just give you a few ideas, I guess, to help you try and mitigate the impact of these sorts of roadblocks in your own business.
Catherine Langman:
Because I would warrant that many of you have products in categories where there are these reactions from your visitors, and there are ways that you might be able to kind of encourage people to get past that and make a good decision and be happy with it. So the first thing is a pretty simple one, and that is a downloadable resource. So what do I mean by that? So this comes from a shoe client that we worked with in the past, a shoe brand. And obviously being able to choose the right shoe is pretty hard if you can’t try it on. I know I have definitely struggled in the past. I’ve found situations where even if I’ve bought something from that brand before, that different ranges in the same brand even can sort of differ in terms of, is a size 40 the same as the other size 40, and so on?
Catherine Langman:
So what we did with that particular client was create a printable shoe size guide. So literally it was a one page thing, you could print it out on your home A4 printer, and you could literally work out what size you were going to be. And then additional information was available on the product pages. And also, there was a really, really awesome product filter to help people kind of choose or really just search and select the sorts of shoe products that were going to fit them. So that really, really helped and it made it so much easier. There’s still going to be returns in products like shoes, of course, but as much as you can reduce something like that in that kind of a product where sending the orders out can be expensive because it’s quite a bulky product, you want to be able to try and help people get the right one more often than not.
Catherine Langman:
And then of course, hopefully once they’ve got their size and they know which types of shoes in your range fit, then they’re more likely to come back to you again and again, because it’s much easier for them to know, okay, I’m good with that one. I can buy that and it’s going to fit. So that can work there. And there’ll be varieties along the theme there of downloadable resources that you might be able to use in your particular product. Another idea, this one comes from not a brand that I’ve worked with personally, but one that I’ve shopped from a lot, some of you listeners and clients of ours will recognize this, of course, but there’s a website, a fashion website in Australia, birdsnest.com.au.
Catherine Langman:
Truthfully, actually don’t know if they still have this on their website, I think they do though, is a customizable style guide. And this will require a little bit of interactivity, functionality on your website. But basically coming up with, it’s basically like a questionnaire, really. How can you ask a few questions to help customers work out, what are the styles and items from your range, the types of items from your range that are going to .. and colorways and all of that kind of stuff, what’s going to really suit their personality, their preferences, their shape and so on? When it comes to clothing, to me, I think one of the biggest things that helps you to feel really good in the outfits that you wear is that they actually are sized to suit your shape.
Catherine Langman:
We are all very different shapes, and what suits one person and fits comfortably on them is not going to be the right thing for the next person. Maybe you’re a bit more top heavy than bottom heavy, and it’s the opposite for the other person. So the same items of clothing may not really be comfortable for everybody. So a customizable style guide can then really work. And what Bird’s Nest have always done so, so, well, I thought, I think, is that on the product page, they have a couple of tabs on the product pages where you can see, will this item fit me and will this item suit me? And so, it’ll give you all of the dimensions for the sizes and it shows sizes as well. And then you can match it back to the style guide as well, to see if it’s likely to suit your preferred style.
Catherine Langman:
And then the other cool thing that Bird’s Nest do as well now, showing the items on models of very different sizes and shapes. And so you can actually get a visual as well to see, oh, okay, I look like that person. I’m about her size and shape. And so I can see that that’s going to really look good, and look comfortable and all of that sort of stuff. So a customizable style guide, but then also feeding that kind of information back onto the product pages as well. So that’s right at that point of purchase, and you’re really making things very easy for your customers. Another idea, so this is a very different one. The idea here are video tutorials. This actually comes a little bit before the point of purchase. So this is something that I actually used in my business a few years back now, but one of the roadblocks in my business was that people just really didn’t know how the product worked or whether they would find it easy enough to use it.
Catherine Langman:
And so I created some video tutorials to answer those questions and show them how easy it was to use the products and what they needed to do to use them. But we’ve used this strategy in a variety of other product categories as well. So for instance, there’s one interior kind of craft product that we’ve worked with in the past, and a lot of their customers were coming to the site, and they really wanted to be able to use the products and to achieve the outcome that they’ve seen other people do, but they just didn’t know how to do it and they didn’t know what products to select to create whatever it was they were trying to create. And because of that response from the audience, it was quite easy to go, right, well, we need to come up with some video tutorials to show them and teach them, how do you create this? How do you use the products? What products do you need to use to create this look or that look or whatever?
Catherine Langman:
And additionally, then creating some bundles so that you could just make it really easy. Okay, I want to make that. So I want to make that look, so this is what I need to buy. It’s all in one kit and here’s the instruction video. So super awesome, powerful strategy to really help there. It’s all about giving people confidence, I guess. The next one I want to talk about is quite a favorite of mine, and you’ll hear why in just a second. So the next suggestion is to use product selection quizzes. Now, why do I love this so much? And so there’s a really awesome reason why I love product selection quizzes. So I mean, as you can probably imagine, and you’ve probably been through these sorts of quizzes on websites yourself, hopefully you know what I’m talking about, I’ll give you an example to go and have a look at it in a minute.
Catherine Langman:
But basically you’re asking a series of questions so that you can then diagnose what the main issue is and recommend the right product or products for that customer’s specific needs. And this sort of a strategy is really useful in products like, well, it actually works very well for kayaks, I can say that. But it definitely works very well for things like makeup and skincare, and even perfume. So fragrances. So essentially, you just asking, you need to figure out, okay, what is one or two questions that are going to give me the information to be able to make the best recommendation, but then also what are some supportive questions that also might A, give you a little bit more information, but B, make the customer feel like they’re really giving you as much detail as necessary to get something that is a personalized recommendation out the other end?
Catherine Langman:
You can automate this. There are some great apps now to use for this sort of a strategy. Try Interactive is one, and you can go and check out an example of a quiz on Try Interactive on our client Green and Bare. And so that’s a skincare brand. There’s a variety of other apps as well, just search on the Shopify app store, for instance. Another example that you might want to go and take a look at is on morganannie.com.au. So that’s a makeup brand. And what is so cool about it? Is obviously you’re going to have a number of different scenarios of product recommendations that come out the other end. This is the bit that’s difficult, because you need to be able to work out what questions lead to what answers or outcomes, and not everybody is going to get the same recommendation out the other end. So you’re going to have, it’s what we call a segmentation funnel.
Catherine Langman:
So basically you’re getting everyone in at the start of the quiz, but out the other end of the quiz they’re going to land on a variety of outcomes of products that you’re going to be recommending to them. And out the other end, that means they can go into your Klayvio email account into different email flows, these are your automated email campaigns, and you can personalize and tailor the information, and the content, and the offers and the products that you show them, depending on which one of those flows they land into. So for instance, with skincare, say, for instance, you have one group of recommendations is products for oily skin, one is a group of products you recommend for really dry skin, and there might be something else for some other problem or situation going on with your skin. I don’t know, I have oily skin, so that’s always what I see.
Catherine Langman:
But basically what you can then talk about in the emails that are tailored for these people, so they go through the quiz, you give them an offer. I’ll tell you something else about that in just a second. But if they’re not ready to buy straight away, they go into this email flow and they start to receive information that’s personalized around that problem that they experience. And as a customer, that’s going to be so much more influential to receive personalized information, and tips, and education and product recommendations that are suited to your needs then something that’s generic that you’re trying to, a catch all that’s trying to be relevant to everybody. You can never be relevant to everybody, but you can be relevant to something specific, like oily skin.
Catherine Langman:
So anyway, so in-between, customer goes through the quiz, then you want them to be prompted with a email opt-in form, obviously, and then they get to their recommendation page. You want to make them a bit of an offer here. And if you are selling something, like skincare, or makeup, or fragrance, what I would recommend is that you offer them sample sizes or a trial pack at that point, so that it is not a expensive exercise for them to give it a go. Basically you want to get people to try it, and then you want to have strategies to upsell them to the full size pack later down the track. And again, because you’ve segmented these customers using the quiz and you can give them relevant, automated emails, depending on what their problem is and the products that relate to that problem, that means that you can have a much, much higher conversion rate from your ongoing marketing, because you can really tailor it to that specific customer. Hopefully that makes sense.
Catherine Langman:
And as many of you know, I am such a lover of email marketing, so I’m sure it’s an absolute no brainer as to why I love quizzes as a strategy here. Next thing I want to talk about is, and this one really should be on most websites, is some sort of risk reversal strategy. So this is definitely something that I used with the Modern Cloth Nappy brand. I’ve seen this used for other sorts of products where it’s really new or different, and people aren’t really sure if they going to be able to use it successfully and they just really want to have a go. So risk reversal strategies are things like a guarantee or a money back guarantee. And that’s what I used in my brand. So obviously I didn’t want people to go and use a thousand dollars worth of Modern Cloth Nappies and accessories, and then go, nah, I didn’t like it. I want my money back.
Catherine Langman:
So we had conditions on it. So basically if people bought a thousand dollars worth, which a full-time pack of the products was about that much, then the condition was they could try one, and if they didn’t like it, they could return all of the products, including the used one and get a full refund. But if they bought multiple products and they tried them all, that would not qualify for the guarantee conditions, if that makes sense. So what could you do that might offer some sort of a risk reversal, or really overcome those objections or the fears that are holding people back from giving it a go. Another brand, well, a common one that you see a lot, actually, especially with things like clothing and footwear, is the first return is free. So basically that means, if the customer is buying from you for the first time, which is the hardest conversion to make, then you’re making it very easy for them to trust that they can return it if it doesn’t fit or they really don’t like it.
Catherine Langman:
So I know Birds, I’m pretty sure Bird’s Nest do that, and I think a lot of stores are using that sort of strategy now. So see what you can do to try and mitigate any kind of perceived risk that is holding customers back from buying. Another really simple one that I think everyone should be able to do is to be showing lots of different product views on your product pages. Don’t just show the front of it, have some images that really show the sides, the back, the inside. I mean, obviously it depends what you’re selling, and also maybe even little videos or animated gifs so that you can see people can really get a bit of sense of how each looks, or fits, or how it works, or just obviously it’s hard because every product is different.
Catherine Langman:
So clothing makes sense. If you can show some images that are moving, people can kind of get a sense of how the fabric might feel, or flow, or just hang on your body, or that sort of thing. If you do sell clothing and you have the ability, I would highly recommend that you have some images showing each item on different sized bodies, because we’re not all a size six and it can be very exclusionary if you’re only showing it on one body shape. So see what you can do on the product page, that point of purchase, to really, again, overcome any perceived risks or roadblocks to people thinking, oh yeah, I could look good in that, or I could enjoy using that, or whatever the case may be. Samples and trial packs. Again, those are also great ways to get people to just give something a go without risking too much money.
Catherine Langman:
A lot of the time people just won’t make a decision because making a decision might lose them some money if it just doesn’t work. And so, if you’re able to, create some sample size. So obviously this is going to work for things like skincare, or makeup, or fragrances, or anything along those lines. And one thing, and I actually did this in the Modern Cloth Nappy brand as well, but I’ve seen, so after I sold out of that particular brand, I still was very enthusiastic about the industry and the product and stayed friends with a lot of the other brand owners in that industry. And I saw one brand in particular, Bubble Bubs, introduce a fantastic strategy where she, with every trial pack, you got a coupon or a gift voucher that you could use on the full-time pack.
Catherine Langman:
So basically, she was incentivizing you right from the outset to A, try the products, and B, buy more afterwards. I mean, she also did things like the money back guarantee as a risk reversal and things like that. So if you are selling things like makeup or skincare, actually I think Morgan Annie makeup do this as well, where if you buy the trial pack after the product quiz, then you also get a voucher that you can use for an next purchase. So there are ways that you can kind of put some steps in place to get people to give it a go the first time, and then come back to you and purchase again. So you’re trying to put yourself in a position where you can cross sell or upsell to your customers so that they don’t become one time buyers, they become multiple buyers. But obviously getting them over the line the first time is the hardest bit.
Catherine Langman:
Another really cool idea, which is something that I’m seeing a lot more now, is virtual reality apps. So VR apps. And of course, since we’ve got apps like Instagram and Snapchat with their filters and all of that stuff uses this VR technology, and you can do that with your products. So one of our clients that you guys would all have heard me talk about is Babiators Australia, so they’re kids sunglasses brand. And they’ve been working on this awesome VR app where the kids can actually kind of try on the sunglasses before they buy. And so essentially it’s an Instagram filter really, and it shows the four different styles on the kid’s face. And it’s a very fun little tool that the kids enjoy using, but it also obviously helps the parent who’s making the purchase decision to choose the one that’s probably going to fit and look the best on their child’s face.
Catherine Langman:
So VR apps is something that we can probably start using more of moving forward, and hopefully it makes that kind of technology more accessible to smaller businesses. And if you’re selling things that are maybe like furnishings, or interior decor, or anything like that, or fashion accessories or whatever, and you can use an app like that to help customers to essentially try it on virtually, then you’re going to increase your conversion rate and get more people over the line the first time. So there you go. That is my list of strategies for helping you to overcome any roadblocks and ultimately help increase your conversion rate, converting more first-time customers, and reduce things like customer service inquiries and order return rates, and all of the benefits of that is going to add up into a much more lucrative and profitable business longterm.
Catherine Langman:
So I hope you’ve enjoyed that episode. That is what I have for you today. And I’d love to hear from you in our Rockstar Productpreneur Facebook group. If you are not in there, you can get your bum in there. Just head to catherinelangman.com/rockstar. But I’d love to hear from you in there. Do you use any of these sorts of strategies to help overcome roadblocks to selling in your business? Or can you see that you do have some of these roadblocks to purchase, and that maybe if you can get some of these strategies in place, it might actually help you to convert more customers? So I’d love to hear from you in the group. Jump in there, give us a shout and let’s have a bit of a convo about it. All right, guys, that’s it for this week. And I look forward to being with you again on the show next week. Bye for now.