Welcome to the e commerce podcast with me, your host. Matt Edmundson. This is a show all about delivering e commerce well, but we're going to be doing it just a little bit differently here in August. Oh, yes we are, because August is just one of those funny months where, well, we're all on holiday, aren't we, really? At least some of us will be, uh, including me.
So, we're going to do, uh, some shorter cut down versions in August, uh, and it's going to be myself and the show's producer, Sadaf Beynon, who doesn't normally get to be on camera, but is going to be on camera for the next video. Five episodes, uh, and a microphone as well. it has to be said, uh, as we're going to be talking about some of the things that's been going on here at EP and also some of the things that's going on behind the scenes. Thought it'd be a good catch up series to do.
So I'm excited about this, uh, as we're going to be going through a whole bunch of stuff. Now, uh, I'm just going to turn and I'm going to turn it back down again as a nice little break. Uh, so. E commerce podcast is sponsored by e commerce cohort. com. So I thought it would be good Well, I actually set up, I think you thought it would be good, to explain a little bit about what Cohort is.
Um, we're going to dig into that a little bit and then we're going to talk about some of the lessons we have learned from Cohort and why this matters. So we're going to get into that. So Cohort is, has been the sponsor of EP for a little while. And in case you've not figured it out, Cohort is part of our company. It's part of what we do. It's the best way to describe Cohort.
Uh, it's like a monthly mastermind group, an online mastermind group where at the start of every month, we have like an expert workshop, uh, delivered by amazing people. They deliver this workshop. You then go through the workshop, uh, online and you then spend the next few weeks figuring out how this sort of impacts your business really and what it means for your e commerce business, how it's going to work.
We then, um, do like a live Q& A, uh, and during the cohort where you get to ask your questions. and so on and so forth. And so the idea is that every month you come away with like three or four key things that you can implement from that workshop in your e commerce business to make it better. That's the plan and that's usually how it works. Have I missed anything out Miss Sadaf? No, we haven't. Thanks for that.
So we're kickstarting our August series with a focus on customer experience and, um, Vance. Morris, you might, some of you might remember the name he, um, we'll, we'll be taking his, um, Um, his sprint that he did on cohort and be talking about, um, some of the things that he talked about and the lessons that we've learned, the key takeaways from that. So should we jump in? Yeah, I think we should jump in. So Vance Morris, what a legend that fella is. Uh, yes. So the episode that he did.
Uh, was the podcast episode I'm thinking was called how did Disney fight your business? Something like that. Yes. Yes. Something like that. Maybe the magic of, uh, something. Something about magic and Disney. to your business or something. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah, and I remember that episode because we recorded that with Vance and I, it was great to talk to somebody from Disney.
So Vance is ex Disney and he has taken the whole Disney thing to a whole extreme in terms of applying the rules of Disney to your business. And so we thought it would be great to get him on. Cohort to come and share his insight and he delivered this workshop Which we actually did together as a so when we tell other companies do it We do it ourselves with our own e commerce business.
We get the team around we watch the workshops and we talk about how um, The lessons that we can learn from that and how it impacts our business and we still have on our board Because we, I talk about this a little bit in cohort, but we have a board up in our office which shows all the things that we need to get done and the projects and the priority and so on and so forth. We have on there things from Vance Morris from this cohort workshop, don't we? Yeah, we do. We do.
And, uh, sorry, you were gonna, were you gonna say something? No, no, no. I was going to say they're all on high tech post it notes. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's how we roll in our digital business. Yeah. Um, one of the things that he talks about and that we've got on the board is line attainment. Yeah. Which was a new concept brought to us by Vance. We never heard of that before.
Um, so maybe Matt if you can talk about that and also how um, Like how businesses can use that concept to, um, breathe life into their own businesses. Yeah. Line attainment was a great thing, isn't it? And uh, it was this word that we put on a post it note on our board, which just reminds us of this concept of this idea. And this is what Cohort's all about.
We're doing these episodes to show you what Cohort is about a little bit So you get some idea of it and you know, sort of behind the scenes working And so this concept of line attainment was where Vance was talking about how, um, at Disney They came to realize that they can't make the queues any quicker, right? So if there's a queue for an hour, there's a queue for an hour. How do you make that queue quicker?
Well, you get a load of people out of the queue, I suppose, but they all want to go on the ride. You can give people the ability to buy a more expensive pass so they can jump the queue, but it still doesn't change the queue. So if you go to Disney World and you spend five, six hours of the day in queues, that is, uh, gonna be a very dull, boring time. Right. So we were just talking to Keoni before we recorded these, didn't we? Keoni is part of the production team.
She's working on the episodes and stuff behind the scenes. And she normally would be working tomorrow, but she isn't because she's going to Alton Towers. Right, so she's going to suffer this same thing. She's going to go Alton Towers and stand in a queue because, you know, we all know the British like to queue, right? So it's just a standard thing, we just like to stand in a queue. There's a queue, let's go, let's go stand in it and get bored.
And so, um, and so this idea of line attainment was very much a case of how do you entertain people in the queues? So Disney came to the realization we can't make the queues any shorter, but what we can do is we can make them more enjoyable. And the reason why this stuck out to us as a team is we're like, well, how does that work for us? Where are the queues that we can't necessarily reduce?
And the obvious queue in e commerce is the gap between placing the order and the order arriving at your door. Even in England, with the best will in the world, where everything's on next day delivery, because it's such a tiny country. Um, you know, you've still got several hours. There's still this queue that people have to. So how can you engage people, uh, entertain people might not be the right word for your business, but you get the concept.
What can you do that makes the waiting a more enjoyable experience rather than a negative experience, which waiting inevitably is by default. And so that was what we. We took away from that, wasn't it? And then we, we had a whole bunch of things, which we wrote upon our board. Um, uh, you know, just from email sequences that we were using, how can we better use those to help people, uh, engage people while they're waiting? So that's line attainment in a nutshell. That was a concept.
And how does that work for our business? Thank you. Yeah, definitely. I think, um, making, making those experiences more memorable for customers really helps, like, as you say, entertaining them in some, in some capacity. Um, even though it's the boring waiting, they're doing something that makes it memorable. Um, I think another thing that he talked about was, um, different touch points to reduce friction. Yeah, this was another great point, wasn't it?
And this is something actually, uh, not to toot my own horn too much, but, you know, I like to take every opportunity I can get. Um, we do this, we've always done this exercise with people and we've done consulting work and coaching work and Vance touched on this. And it's interesting because whilst I've done it with other companies, we'd never really done it for our own company. Which is obviously stupid. Now this concept is again, really straightforward.
This lesson was write down every single touch point that a customer has with your business, right? So this includes everything from your Google ads, your Facebook ads, your email marketing, your homepage, um, the box that you send out to them with the goods in. Follow up emails, customer service, you write down every single touch point, the checkout, all of these things.
Uh, and then again, the very Disney thing, you look at those touch points and you ask one question and you, your, your, you drive yourself to answer that one question, which is how can I reduce friction at this point? And so the obvious Place here is checkout. This is a key touch point for everybody on your website. How can you do that quicker, easier and with less friction? And you spend some time designing and thinking around that, don't you?
And, um, so yeah, touch the touch point map is what we call it internally. Create in this touchpoint map, and you just literally map out all the touchpoints, um, and you ask yourself, how can you reduce friction? The checkout being the most obvious one, I think, uh, because that's where you'll probably see the most conversion when you reduce the, the friction. So yeah, that was another great thing that came out from, from Vance's, uh, thing about Disney.
They looked at touchpoints, where the customers interact with you, how can you reduce that friction? So if people want to pay you, um, to get entrance to the park. How can we reduce that friction? All of these things, you know, how do we, the Disney dollars reduces friction buying in stores and all that sort of stuff, especially because there's so many people coming up from all over the world with different currencies and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So there's a lot of things that you can do to reduce friction, but you, to reduce friction, you have to understand your touch points, which are the points where customers or potential customers interact with. Your business and then just looking at that objectively going, how do I reduce friction? And I guarantee you there's going to be a whole bunch of things that you can do to reduce friction without any doubt.
Is there any, um, is there anything that you could, that you can talk about as far as an e commerce business goes? I know we were just talking about Disney and what that means when you're standing in line and The Disney dollars and stuff, but like for an e commerce business, an example of friction other than waiting for your parcel to arrive. Is there something else that is maybe not as obvious that people don't necessarily see as a friction point, but it is?
I think the, the, the most obvious one, like I say, is checkout. And usually the thing that causes friction is asking way too many questions. Like, what's your inside leg measurement, you know, when did Neil Armstrong land on the moon and all that sort of stuff. You just don't need to know the answer to half the questions that you ask. Um, the reality of it is you want them to get through the checkout as quickly as possible.
A great way to solve that, you know, you've seen things like the advent of Apple Pay or Google Pay where you can go onto a website, you can click Apple Pay and all that. They don't have to even put any of that information in. Um, the advent of things like GDPR has made things a bit more friction full. So, uh, which would be an interesting one, wouldn't it? So a sign up to a newsletter would be an interesting one. So do you have it on your website that when people sign up to a newsletter?
You do the double opt in, by what I, you know, what I mean by that is, they sign up to the newsletter, you send them an email saying, please confirm that you actually want this email, and you want the newsletters, which they then hit another button. So now I've taken something as simple as putting your name and email address in, and bearing in mind, when you ask people to sign up to a newsletter, that's all you really need is their name and email. You probably don't even need that name.
You could probably just get away with that email. Again, reducing friction. But I'm introducing fiction because of legislation. Now we can argue, Uh, do the rules of GDPR mean that I have to do the double opt in or not? That's, you know, I'm not, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not going to give my interpretation of that law. Uh, you need to figure that out for yourself, but if you do follow the double opt in, um, that's going to cause friction, right?
So how can I reduce that friction or at least make it more enjoyable? Things like using recapture forms, you know, like pick all the pictures where there's a bridge, just frustrates everybody. But is that, is that something that I really need on this page? Or not? Am I doing it just because I'm, I think for some reason someone's gonna hack my little website at this point? I don't know. These are all kind of things that you need to figure out. So do you really need recapture on an email signup?
Do you want to do the double opt in? How can you reduce that friction? So these would be some of the less obvious ones. Yeah. Um, but I think. It's one of those things that will have the big, you know, we'll have a big impact ultimately. Cool. Thanks, Matt. Is there anything else that that That you felt was a key takeaway from that particular workshop with Vance? Yeah with Vance Yeah, there's a couple of things that we took. So I always encourage people to take four key takeaways, right?
Or four key actions that you want to do as a result of watching the workshop. And the reason I say four is anything more than four is too many. Um, you know, with Vance, it was like 20 and we then had to distill it down for four. And so for me, the four things were the line attainment. How does that work for us? Um, the touch point map, reducing friction. The third one was clear USP. So, um, Vance talked about this. Disney is very good at it.
Having a clear USP, a unique selling proposition, um, a reason to buy from you. What is your clear USP? And are you communicating that in a way that your staff and your customers Understand what your USP is. Is it communicated in everything that you do? And so being super clear about those USPs. So one of the things that we did, um, so I don't know if you remember this, actually, we have a website called Vegetology. Uh, which sells, um, health supplements, right?
I'll show the list, uh, there you go, it's on the screen if you're watching the video. Actually, it's not on the screen because it's very blurred because my face is on the screen. There we go, that's better. So we sell the, um, we sell the capsules, uh, the health supplements. And one of the, we sell is this Omega 3. And Omega 3, um, is a great, great supplement, right? But traditionally it's come from fish. We assume that fish create Omega 3.
But which they don't actually fish get omega 3 from the algae that they eat So we were like, well if we could just take omega 3 from the algae, then we have fish free omega 3 Yeah. Um, plus we don't have all the mercury poison in that goes with it, and we save, uh, the lives of many, many fish. And so we thought, how do we communicate this clearly? We just did something really super simple. We put a fish counter, a fish life save counter on our website. It's still on there.
You can go to Vegetology. com and see how many fish lives were saved by Vegetology customers buying, uh, this food supplement. Um, and I don't know when we started counting from. But there's an awful lot of fish on that counter because it's like, um, we know it takes at least 50 fish to make a pot of omega 3. So we can look at how many pots we've sold over the last few years and give you a number.
Um, and so just something as simple as that actually had a really good impact on the website, had a good impact on conversion, helped our customers understand what was unique about us, what the unique selling proposition was. Uh, we don't need fish to create omega 3. And it's mercury free, it's poison free, and it's like super, super strong, the strongest you can get. So there are all these sort of USPs. Just being super clear about that, I thought was, was really helpful.
We even rewrote our vision and mission statements, uh, for the website to be much clearer about what it is that we do, uh, on the site. So, um, that was a super helpful lesson. And then the fourth one, which I. I've heard a number of people mention this, um, over, over the years, but Vance really brought it out. He was like, every visitor to the Disney theme park is a micro influencer. Every visitor is posting on social media, their experiences of Disney.
Um, whether it's good or bad, they're usually putting pictures up. And so it's like your business needs to understand that everybody is a micro influencer, or at least has the potential to be a micro influencer. Now sure, not every customer is going to put a picture on Facebook every time they get a, you know, their Amiga 3 from one of our sites. It's less Instagram worthy, isn't it, I suppose, than walking through the gates at Disney.
Um, but the principle is still the same, and how do we influence our customers? Well, how do we give our customers such a great experience that they want to share a positive experience to their micro community? Um, and understanding the parallel I thought was super helpful. So, that would be my four points from Mr. Vance Morris. Oh, that's cool. And I agree, a well defined USP can really set your business apart, can't it? It can make all the difference. Yeah, it can, totally.
And it's worth investing the time to figure that out. And actually, with the advent of ChatGPT, you can just write a prompt saying, Dear ChatGPT, I want to craft a USP for my business. I want you to ask me, um, I want you to follow the following. I want you to ask me a question that's going to help you, help me craft a better, you know, USP and keep asking me questions until you've got enough information that you need to help me write it.
And so ChatGPT becomes like a consultant, it's just going to ask you a whole bunch of questions. You're going to answer it, it's going to ask you another question, answer it, ask another question until eventually you've got your USP document. So there's no reason, there's no reason not to have one right now. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Indeed. So is there anything else we want to talk about in this episode? I think that's probably about it, isn't it?
Oh, yeah, I think we should wrap it up. Let's wrap it up. So, uh, yes, this August we are going to be talking about lessons that we have learned from Cohort. We're going to take you behind the scenes, some of the key things that we have learned from some of the great conversation, great conversations, great workshops, uh, on Cohort. If you want to find out more, if you want to learn more about Cohort, just head over to ecommercecohort. com.
You will hear us talking a lot about Cohort over the coming months because it's going to be one of the key sponsors of the show, ladies and gentlemen, so you're not going to be able to escape it. But at least now you know. The kind of thing what's going on coming up in future episodes we have Oh who we're going to pick on oliver spark Uh, we're going to talk about neil hoyt from google.
We're going to talk about dan bedai about email marketing and of course We're going to be talking about lessons we learned in the AI sprint as well. So, all of that coming up, make sure you like and subscribe to what's going on. Let me play the, uh, music here. All that's left for me to say is thanks for joining us. And of course, you are awesome. Yes, you are. Created awesome. It's just a burden you have to bear. Sadaf has to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well.
Uh, do stick with us as we go through this little August miniseries. And we hope you enjoy it. But that's it from me. That's it from Sadaf. Bye for now.