[SPEAKER_08]: It's here, the episode you've all been waiting for, prepare for episode 300.
[SPEAKER_13]: Hello and welcome.
[SPEAKER_13]: I'm Chloe Thomas the host of this e-commerce marketing focus podcast.
[SPEAKER_13]: If you're not familiar with our format, we release five episode mini series that dive deep into one e-commerce marketing topic.
[SPEAKER_13]: It could be channels like email or SEO or Facebook ads or a big topic like acquisition, retention or analytics.
[SPEAKER_13]: In each episode, new ones released on Wednesdays I enter a different expert to explore the latest advice on making it work for you.
[SPEAKER_13]: and then after each 5 episode mini series we take a week off to give you time to take action on what you've learned.
[SPEAKER_13]: At the moment we are deep in our growth series five episodes about how e-commerce growth has changed and what it now takes to grow your e-commerce store and within this we have our very super exciting episode it's episode 300 we are 300 episodes old here on the
[SPEAKER_13]: So, instead of bringing you one guest, we're bringing you many guests, and we've asked each of them a hot, hot question, what's your top tip for Ecommerce growth?
[SPEAKER_13]: We've got many of our tip giveers who are past guests, so we've added links to their full episodes in the show notes for you on the website, and all our guests are experts in the Ecommerce marketing.
[SPEAKER_13]: We've also packed in as I mentioned lots of guests, well there's 13 of them.
[SPEAKER_13]: 13 guests.
[SPEAKER_13]: So with my tip as well that makes this a 14 tip episode.
[SPEAKER_13]: So whilst most of this growth series is about big shifts and grasping one idea, this episode is fast and furious with lots of ideas for you.
[SPEAKER_13]: Huge thank you to all our guests for giving us their best advice and huge thanks to all of you Listening to this show whether it's the first time you're tuning in or whether you've been listening to all 300 episodes We're equally happy to have you here tuning in for this one.
[SPEAKER_13]: So thank you for being here and let's get stuck in
[SPEAKER_13]: Who shall we hear from first?
[SPEAKER_13]: Well, we've had such a fascinating range of responses to this question.
[SPEAKER_13]: What's your top tip that you come as growth?
[SPEAKER_13]: And it really is somewhat hard to know where to start.
[SPEAKER_13]: We've got everything from the super duper practical and tactical to the very focused, to the massively strategic.
[SPEAKER_13]: So I think we're gonna start big picture.
[SPEAKER_13]: This one will get you thinking.
[SPEAKER_09]: Hi, I'm Dan Coleman from Colman Marketing, and my top tip is to ask yourself this one magic question and answer it with brutal honesty.
[SPEAKER_09]: What right do I have to expect consumers to spend their money with me?
[SPEAKER_09]: The answer to this question can inform your entire marketing strategy.
[SPEAKER_09]: Is it because with the cheapest, then your strategy is maximum reach for minimal cost?
[SPEAKER_09]: Is it how we make people feel, then invest in brand building before Bob on the funnel?
[SPEAKER_09]: Or is it because we're the best or we sell the problem in a unique way?
[SPEAKER_09]: Then you need to educate your audience who has that problem.
[SPEAKER_09]: Where are they?
[SPEAKER_09]: How do you speak to them on their own terms?
[SPEAKER_09]: So once again ask yourself, what right do I have to expect consumers to spend their money with me and then assess whether your current marketing approach matches up to that answer?
[SPEAKER_13]: What right do I have to expect consumers to spend their money with me?
[SPEAKER_13]: Can you answer it?
[SPEAKER_13]: I hope so.
[SPEAKER_13]: If you know the answer, you can get to start building all that important brand recognition with your customers and target customers.
[SPEAKER_13]: So here's a fascinating take on that side of Ecommerce growth.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hi, I'm Amy Bud from Launch.
[SPEAKER_06]: And my top tip is shifting our mindset from capturing clicks to building brand memory.
[SPEAKER_06]: Google has shared recently how today's consumers move fluidly between four key behavior states, streaming, scrolling, searching, and shop.
[SPEAKER_06]: And most brands that we see focus heavily on those last two, searching and shopping, capturing demand when someone is actively looking to buy.
[SPEAKER_06]: But real growth comes from showing up earlier in that journey.
[SPEAKER_06]: When people are still streaming and scrolling, building your brand memory with the 95% of people who aren't yet ready to buy.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because when you're a brand that is anchored in the mind, before a consumer even hits such, you've already won.
[SPEAKER_06]: You're setting yourself up for long-term sustainable growth, enabling your brand to scale over time.
[SPEAKER_13]: and Amy was the guest in episode 299, the one immediately before this.
[SPEAKER_13]: So if you want more Amy, you can grab that right now really super easily.
[SPEAKER_13]: But long-term sustainable growth.
[SPEAKER_13]: I mean, yes, please, isn't that all we're trying to build?
[SPEAKER_13]: But if you're struggling to get the boss to agree to shift budget from boss amount funnel to top of funnel, you're not alone.
[SPEAKER_13]: Here's some advice on how to overcome that tricky little problem.
[SPEAKER_05]: Hey, I'm Jay from Launch, the Performance Marketing Agency for Scaling Brands, and my top tip is that if you are struggling to unlock brand awareness budgets from your CFO in particular, perhaps stop calling it brand.
[SPEAKER_05]: Call it reputation instead.
[SPEAKER_05]: Brand is a word that makes a lot of business leaders switch off.
[SPEAKER_05]: It feels, perhaps, soft, fluffy, the opposite of the ROI conversations that they're used to having.
[SPEAKER_05]: John Hegety once suggested very sensibly that we rebrand brand as reputation.
[SPEAKER_05]: Reputation is something every business leader understands, and they do care about it.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's how people talk about you when you're not in the room.
[SPEAKER_05]: And when you frame the conversation that way, the long-term investment in awareness, trust, and among creation, it stops feeling like a nice to have and starts feeling like a strategic priority.
[SPEAKER_05]: it also drives pricing power.
[SPEAKER_05]: If you're relying solely on performance tactics to compete, you will have one discount war away from a margin problem.
[SPEAKER_05]: Reputation protects you from that.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, if you're struggling to get by and for anything beyond bottom of the funnel spend, perhaps try changing the language, drop brand, use reputation, and see how the conversation shifts.
[SPEAKER_13]: You can't talk about brand, sorry, reputation.
[SPEAKER_13]: It'd be to see without talking about founder brands.
[SPEAKER_13]: So here's Lucy Bloomfield from Magic Market with a super practical strategy to make the most of your founder brand.
[SPEAKER_14]: These single or biggest growth lever, I've seen the e-commerce and DDC brands, and the most consistently underused one is the personal brand of the founder.
[SPEAKER_14]: Not the company Instagram, not the product ads, not the email suite sequence, but you showing up consistently as a real person, who built a real thing and has a genuine point of view about the industry that you're in.
[SPEAKER_14]: And here's why it works specifically for e-commerce.
[SPEAKER_14]: People don't just buy products anymore, they buy founders, and I hate to say if they buy vibes.
[SPEAKER_14]: They buy the story behind the thing.
[SPEAKER_14]: They buy the person they trust, and in a market where every product has a juke, and every ad looks identical, the one thing your competitors cannot copy is you.
[SPEAKER_14]: The founders I've watched grow fastest aren't the ones with the big ad budgets, they're the ones who build their professional presence every single day, particularly focusing on LinkedIn.
[SPEAKER_14]: And you don't even need to be a writer or content person and you also don't need to make it your entire job or your life.
[SPEAKER_14]: Five minutes a day and the compounding effect to five minutes a day every day on LinkedIn, it shows up in revenue and inbound opportunity.
[SPEAKER_14]: Consistency beats brilliance every single time.
[SPEAKER_13]: Probably one of the most important things any e-commerce brand can do this year is to get their product data sorted out and we've got two of our guests advocating you do just this.
[SPEAKER_11]: I, this is Stephen from the LMI-780C, and my top tip is not sexy, but it matters.
[SPEAKER_11]: Sort your product data out.
[SPEAKER_11]: Complete all the key attributes, keep your catalog clean, and do not mix up bar codes.
[SPEAKER_11]: I can only recommend what it can properly understand.
[SPEAKER_11]: These basics, which often went overlooked in the past, and our 10X is important.
[SPEAKER_11]: Good luck.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi everyone, my name is Sam Wright, and I'm the founder of Blink, where a specialist, technical marketing agency for large catalog Shopify stores.
[SPEAKER_00]: My talk tip is that the biggest growth lever for the kind of stores that we work with as in large catalog Shopify stores is taxonomy.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of brands out there treat things like categorization and product data as like a bit of a chore, a housekeeping job that is held by the merchandising team or distant from marketing performance.
[SPEAKER_00]: But really, it's the point of truth for your entire marketing engine.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we mean by this is, if your taxonomy is structured correctly, everything downstream performs better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your Google ads work better, your SEO visibility improves typically by that 100% year on year.
[SPEAKER_00]: UX is better and more intuitive and you're kind of well prepared for the future of AI.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we mean by taxonomy is how your store is organized, how it's categorized, and the product data that allows that to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: So where your product sits in your collections, how many collections you've got, how deep you go with your attributes, all of this stuff, as I say has a direct impact on marketing performance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we move towards AI-powered search, all of this becomes more important.
[SPEAKER_00]: AI agents are not particularly looking for keywords that they base their reasoning on your product data.
[SPEAKER_00]: If your textonomy is unclear or things are incorrectly tagged or organised, the machine readings can't justify recommending it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So your data structure isn't just a kind of nice to have, it's incredibly important, it's foundational and it's how you make sure that your brand is machine readable and human navigable across every single channel.
[SPEAKER_13]: It may be fair to say that data foundations are a big theme in this episode.
[SPEAKER_13]: So let's talk about tracking data next, which we all know is critical for enabling the ad platforms to optimise us and for us to optimise ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi, I'm Charlie from Leaf Signal and my top tip for scaling an e-commerce business is to fix your conversion tracking to drive better, more profitable page media performance.
[SPEAKER_02]: The conversion tracking is the first and most important part of the performance marketing chain, but it's something that is far too often neglected, underappreciated, and crucially misunderstood by D to C brands, even those that invest in a huge amount of money in their paid media.
[SPEAKER_02]: When you're tracking is inaccurate or incomplete in some way, your ad platforms optimise against the wrong signals, which means you might end up targeting the wrong audiences and budget might be allocated towards campaigns that aren't actually successful.
[SPEAKER_02]: However, by enriching your tracking and crucially maintaining it, you can feed those platforms with the event, product and customer data that they need to optimise campaigns more intelligently,
[SPEAKER_02]: Improving your tracking infrastructure is key to unlocking paid media profitability and to making meaningful performance gains without even increasing your spend.
[SPEAKER_12]: Hi, my name is Roman Petrochenkov and I'm a head of growth in Media Analytics at Carau.
[SPEAKER_12]: And my top tip for you is to get your data in tracking foundations right.
[SPEAKER_12]: Make sure you track your user sources, conversions and product performance.
[SPEAKER_12]: Don't underestimate small mistakes or knowledge gaps.
[SPEAKER_12]: When you have the right data and you trust as data, only then business decisions can be based on it.
[SPEAKER_12]: Having right data is a fuel-free business growth, use of AI and you key to scale fast.
[SPEAKER_13]: Next, let's hear from Anna, who's going to be diving into probably the most important data of all in e-commerce, your unit economics.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hi, I'm Anna from Kia Sense, and my top tip is to understand your unit economics.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a great profit to be over time, is it vital you understand your unit economics?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you know how much a current cost you to acquire a new customer?
[SPEAKER_03]: How does this compare to how much you are prepared to spend?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you need them to break even on their first order?
[SPEAKER_03]: Or are you willing to wait a period of time for them to come back?
[SPEAKER_03]: What is your target new customer or us?
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you looking at a blended view or just on each individual platform to see if you have achieved this?
[SPEAKER_03]: If the latter, I urge you to look at a blend of view two to avoid double counting.
[SPEAKER_03]: Have you looked, see how this fluctuates by category, by channel, by time of year?
[SPEAKER_03]: How does it differ with a customer buy and with a discount or join sale periods?
[SPEAKER_03]: Most of the time, there isn't a one size fits all metric that works all year round.
[SPEAKER_03]: Be careful not to look too much at averages.
[SPEAKER_03]: If your average new customer asks is your target, then you are spending way too much to get some new customers through the door.
[SPEAKER_03]: Looking under the hood, will enable you to refine your chassis and focus on the efforts that drive in profit.
[SPEAKER_13]: Whilst all that data stuff settles in and I know that was quite a lot those last three tips, we are gonna hear from the sponsors and then I will be back with some more super practical pop-ups and offers advice.
[SPEAKER_13]: Okay, I promise we're going to get super practical after the ad break.
[SPEAKER_13]: So let's do this.
[SPEAKER_13]: You all know I love protecting profitability whilst growing a business.
[SPEAKER_13]: So let's get some tips on alternatives to discounting.
[SPEAKER_04]: Hi, I'm Fiona from LowtyLine and my top tip is don't rely on discounts to secure repeat purchases.
[SPEAKER_04]: Instead, try offering alternatives that adjusts engaging but protect your profit margins too.
[SPEAKER_04]: You could start small with things like early access to sales or new products or priorities support.
[SPEAKER_04]: Then start expanding into things like virtual styling sessions or exclusive in-store event invitations.
[SPEAKER_04]: When you take the time to treat customers like VIPs and over the more than discounts, their lifetime value goes up exponentially.
[SPEAKER_04]: Then you can cover your ad spend and drive more profitable growth.
[SPEAKER_13]: And to build on that, here's some email sign-up advice.
[SPEAKER_10]: Hi, I'm Dan from Revlifter, and my top tip is to optimise your email sign-up.
[SPEAKER_10]: An unoptimised email sign-up is actually two problems in one.
[SPEAKER_10]: The first is performance.
[SPEAKER_10]: Is it even the right offer?
[SPEAKER_10]: Not everyone needs a discount to hand over their email address.
[SPEAKER_10]: Some visitors will subscribe for early access.
[SPEAKER_10]: Others for free delivery, some just want useful content.
[SPEAKER_10]: If you're giving everyone 10% off without testing anything else, you're probably overpaying for a chunk of your email list.
[SPEAKER_10]: test different incentives, look at sign up right yes, but also look at what they subscribe is actually do afterwards, do they buy, do they buy at full price, both numbers matter?
[SPEAKER_10]: The second problem is incrementality and this is the sneaky one.
[SPEAKER_10]: Even if you're off a looks like it's working, you need to know if it's actually doing anything.
[SPEAKER_10]: run a holdout group, a slice of visitors who see no offer at all.
[SPEAKER_10]: If they subscribe and converted a similar rate, your incentive isn't driving behavior, it's just making things cheaper.
[SPEAKER_10]: That's a very expensive email list.
[SPEAKER_10]: So, test what you offer and test whether offering anything at all is moving the needle.
[SPEAKER_10]: Find the version that performs and changes behavior.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the discount optimization angle in those pop-ups, but let's also hear from an email pop-up specialist on how you can make the most of your pop-ups.
[SPEAKER_01]: I spent the last 12 years marketing SaaS products globally, and more recently, I've been focused on red thinking popups as a real revenue growth lever for DTC brands.
[SPEAKER_01]: Popups do work anymore, they said, okay, challenge accepted.
[SPEAKER_01]: Many stores still use the same generic pop-up for all visitors, usually to capture emails with the 10% discount.
[SPEAKER_01]: This can teach shoppers to wait for this call.
[SPEAKER_01]: Herd profit merges and weakened brand perception.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not saying about better fatigue.
[SPEAKER_01]: A better approach is to match the pop-up to the shoppers' actual context.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think of them as a real world shop, first-time visitor, I'm just watching with their hesitation person and someone about to leave with or without the card as a matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are all in different moments, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They need different pop-up flows and different follow-up strategies.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the biggest missed opportunities is the first time visitors, especially from paid traffic, living without buying.
[SPEAKER_01]: In that moment, the goal is not just to collect contact details.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's to create a first connection between brand and shopper.
[SPEAKER_01]: Classical user, a DTC fashion brand, men's, so up to 10% revenue, I believe, from such kind of flow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead of using a static form, they build a multi-step interactive pop-up journey with a teaser, and brand-let microcommitment and gamified moment-of-chains, then step-by-step email and SMS capture, and preference choices.
[SPEAKER_01]: That approach feels more engaging, reduces friction and gives proper data for
[SPEAKER_01]: They also used Abitasting to keep improving performance and find the shoppers most likely to sign up.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've seen this kind of approach outperform generic proposed by white margin with octane rates reaching around 10% on average and then became stronger with Abitest and growing up to 26%.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the takeaway is simple build pop-ups around shopping intent, use gamification, create engagement, and think of the pop-up as a tool for building brand connection, not just collecting in the mail.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's show pop-ups become a real gross lever instead of just another
[SPEAKER_13]: Right, you've got your branding right, you've pushed your found into the limelight, you've got all the right data, you've improved your ads, email pop ups, promotions, all of that.
[SPEAKER_13]: Things not looking perfect though.
[SPEAKER_07]: Hi, my name is Eric Shiongup.
[SPEAKER_07]: I am the co-founder and CEO of the desire company, and my top tip is to not wait.
[SPEAKER_07]: Do not wait until everything is perfect.
[SPEAKER_07]: It will never be perfect before testing, launch and test simultaneously, put it out to hear what your customers actually think.
[SPEAKER_07]: and move from there.
[SPEAKER_07]: Even something as simple as showing different content and different segments of your site visitors will teach you more in two weeks than six months of planning wood.
[SPEAKER_07]: And there's never a silver bullet for this, but find what converts then go deeper at that.
[SPEAKER_07]: You could start small,
[SPEAKER_07]: pick one product page, run two versions of hero content.
[SPEAKER_07]: It could even be for two days, and you will get a ton of data.
[SPEAKER_07]: Ideally, 30 days, let the data tell you what your customer actually responds to, rather than what you think they will.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thanks for that, Eric.
[SPEAKER_13]: Now, you almost stole my own tip for this episode to keep optimizing.
[SPEAKER_13]: Keep optimizing was it's own mantra way before I came up with this podcast.
[SPEAKER_13]: It was something I came up with a long time ago to help me do better in my job and my life.
[SPEAKER_13]: And it's essentially what Eric just shared.
[SPEAKER_13]: First, put it out there.
[SPEAKER_13]: It's never going to be perfect, so you need to get it live, so you can gather the data and then improve it.
[SPEAKER_13]: Secondly, look at the data and improve it.
[SPEAKER_13]: Nothing is ever finished.
[SPEAKER_13]: There's always room for improvement.
[SPEAKER_13]: So don't drown in data, get the right data to make those optimizations.
[SPEAKER_13]: And don't sit on a good campaign idea until it's 100% perfect, put it live and see what happens.
[SPEAKER_13]: And then as you get more and more things in production and more and more things live, then you've got to keep coming back to that data to see where the best place to make the next improvement is.
[SPEAKER_13]: So that's my tip, keep optimizing.
[SPEAKER_13]: What a lineup.
[SPEAKER_13]: Huge, huge thanks to everyone involved with this episode.
[SPEAKER_13]: It really highlights the key themes was successful growth in 2026.
[SPEAKER_13]: I think over the next few years too, maybe even the next decade.
[SPEAKER_13]: One, build on solid foundations, product data, analytics, account, get them accurate, get it automated and democratize that data, send it where it needs to go.
[SPEAKER_13]: to invest in truly understanding your brand, as your customers see it, and use that to build all your marketing creative.
[SPEAKER_13]: Three, feed the algorithms.
[SPEAKER_13]: Four, have a discount or promotion strategy.
[SPEAKER_13]: Stop just working in a discount on it, people have a strategy, think it through.
[SPEAKER_13]: Do some testing.
[SPEAKER_13]: Five, and optimise, optimise, optimise.
[SPEAKER_13]: You get links to everything we discussed to full transcript of the episode, important notes, more at KeepOptimizing.com, including those links to where many of our guests have been on the podcast before, if you want more of any of them, and you can use our special direct episode short link that's KeepOpt.com forward slash 3000, put that new URL bar and you'll go straight to the correct page on the site immediately.
[SPEAKER_13]: When you get to the website, you can also add yourself to our email list.
[SPEAKER_13]: So you let me out on any of the other things I share to help you improve your business, including our upcoming e-book, 300 ways to grow your e-commerce store.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Keep Optimizing podcast.
[SPEAKER_13]: As part of the current growth series, this episode is you are surrounded at the moment by episodes to help you grow your business.
[SPEAKER_13]: So do scroll up your feed to hear the first episode in this series, which was this episode's Amy giving us a full episode.
[SPEAKER_13]: You can also find our full thread of growth content by scrolling up your feed or use the short link, keep opt.com forward slash growth.
[SPEAKER_13]: And please do tell your fellow marketers about the keypoptimizing podcast because we create it to help e-commerce marketers
[SPEAKER_13]: The more of you who listen, the more we will be happy, really, because we'll be helping more of you, we'll be helping more of you achieve the performance that you're, the company you're working for, can achieve or the company you own, can achieve.
[SPEAKER_13]: So please do tell other people about the keep optimizing podcast and this episode episode 300 is a great way to get started.
[SPEAKER_13]: Have a great week and make sure you listen to the next episode so I can help you to keep optimizing your marketing.
[SPEAKER_08]: Access everything, keep optimizing.
[SPEAKER_08]: At keepoptimizing.com, that's with an S, not a Z.