Hey 👋🏿 – Anthony here.

Happy Saturday to all of my Stupid Simple eCommerce learners.

If my content resonates with you, please share this email and send this link for folks to join 😊.

Here's one tip on how to conduct a survey and the questions you need to ask.

Today's issue takes about 5 minutes to read.

Peep the scenario

You just spun up your new website, fresh from your design and development team.

A few months go by and your start to realize that revenue isn't the same as it was when you started.

A few more months go by and the revenue and conversions aren't auto-correcting themselves back to when you first started.

When you first started, the numbers were great for a good 5 weeks. High conversions, customers are happy, and you gave your design and development team a raving review.

But now 10 months later the site isn't performing like it used to.

This is a scenario that a lot of brands go through in the beginning.

I've talked to a bunch of companies at this stage of the game and then is when the real stress of owning an eCommerce DTC brand starts to come to life.

Every day isn't the same. There are new fires to take care of, and the website starts to lag.

What's worse is that because this is the beginning of the brand, there usually isn't a ton of traffic being run to the website.

Definitely not enough to justify A/B testing with significant results.

So what do you do?

How does one optimize their website?

My 3-part process to optimize your website with little to no traffic

👉🏿 First, gather research to understand your customer and your problems better. 

This is key to anything you do with your online business.

Before you start running ads, sending emails, or anything in between: you need to do some research.

This is what most businesses do wrong. They think they know everything and they go all in with little to no research and expect big results.

Growing a business isn't going to happen by running Facebook ads. That's just one part.

To grow a real business you need people and processes.

I can talk about this ad nauseam, but my point is: do the damn research lol.

Things will go so much smoother when you're 10 months in.

Here are some research approaches that can help you understand your customers better...

Customer interviews - This is a great way to understand your customers directly. In my opinion, there's no better research that you can get. We spoke about how to conduct customer interviews in a past email.

Conduct a customer survey - If you have enough customers, a customer survey could be very insightful. It's another way to get amazing information about your customers and we love it for our voice-of-customer research. If you want to learn how to conduct a customer survey click here.

Remote user tests - To get a better understanding of how your customers are engaging with your website, you're going to want to run a remote user test. We love to use the service TryMyUI because they're quick, reliable, and valuable. We'll be learning about how to conduct a remote user test in our next email!

Run HotJar on your website - If you want to know where people are clicking, scrolling, and generally using your website, then you're going to want HotJar (or a HotJar equivalent app) installed. It's our go-to usability app and it integrates nicely with Google Analytics and Google Optimize. You can click here to read more about how to run HotJar on your website.

Customer Journey Map - This is how you can gather everyone on your team and talk about where the gaps lie in the user experience of the website. I would do this last after you've conducted all of your research. I talked about how to create a customer journey map in a past email.

👉🏿 Next, you're going to want to create a prioritization framework just like in SSE #008.

Convert all of your learnings into tasks for your team, and prioritize each of those tasks based on the PXL framework by CXL.

👉🏿 Lastly, it's time to be like Nike and Just Do It.

Everyone should be working through your prioritization list efficiently and diligently to get the work done.

Because you've done all of the research you can confident that the changes you make will have a positive impact.

While the team is in 'Nike' mode, it's best to pick a day to implement new code to the website, and to make annotations in your analytics app about the features that you've implemented.

We like to do code updates on Tuesdays because if anything goes wrong we have 3 more days to make the fix before the weekend.

Aaaand that’s a wrap, folks!


See you again next week.

When you're ready there are 3 ways I can help you:

Work directly with my team to help transform your business into a high-growth brand.

Take my free 3-Day Conversion Breakthrough Challenge to further beef up your messaging.

Follow me on LinkedIn to hear me ramble about all things eCommerce.