In this episode, you’re going to learn about why you should be helping users rather than selling to them. It’s a terrific episode that you do not want to miss.

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Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. The 2X eCommerce podcast show is dedicated to digital commerce insights for retail and eCommerce teams. Each week, on this podcast, we interview a commerce expert, a founder of a direct-to-consumer eCommerce business or a digital native commerce brand, or a representative from a best-in-class commerce SaaS product. Each with a tight remedy to give you ideas, you can test right away on your brand so you can improve conversion, growth metrics such as your average order value, your repeat purchase customers, your audience size, and ultimately, your sales and conversions in general. We’re here to help you sell more sustainably. Welcome.

This episode is an interview that I was looking forward to having. I remember the early days of 2X eCommerce. I was reached out by this gentleman, his name is Csaba Zajdó. He is the Cofounder of OptiMonk. Back in the day, they labeled themselves as an exit-intense platform. They were kind enough to work with me, my clients, and 2X eCommerce. If you landed on 2X eCommerce, you’d have a pop-up from their company. Over the years, they evolved from serving content sites and the like. They’ve always had that commerce orientation and they were data-driven anyway so they could understand segments through your website. They still do it but now they’re offering is significantly expanded.

We were talking and now they’re doing pop-ups, side messages, sticky bars, full-screen surveys, and gamification. Also, they have email and SMS capture now, abandoned carts use cases, visitor guide use cases, recommended products use cases, offer use cases with the pop-ups, and collecting customer feedback so quizzes and feedback. They have evolved. Let’s put it that way.

The conversation I had with Csaba was more around their perspective on conversions. How do you view conversions now in 2022 with issues on data or data privacy? How do you deal with all that’s happening now in 2022 with customer data and conversions? He is a great proponent like myself on the importance of micro-conversions and then the importance of nurturing, emails and using SMS as a conversion channel, as a VIP list. I liked his take on that.

We go through the customer journey in eCommerce and how you can add value at every step in the customer journey. This in itself is a concept called customer value optimization. We go in-depth in the need for surveys, understanding segments, and having that philosophy rather than looking for conversions. They look at how you can add value at every step of the customer journey, whether they’re on a category page, a product page. They have different motivations. Even the traffic sources all have different motivations.

We go through all of that and he breaks down how to look at traffic, how to view traffic coming through to your site, and knowing that it is nuanced. Not everybody’s in buy mode. The fact that your conversions are 2%, 3%, 4%, or 5% if you’re lucky does not mean that the 90%, 95%, or 98% is lost. It means that they may not necessarily be ready or you’re not answering their concerns, their questions, their objections on your site. It gives you that philosophy or methodology for addressing the customer journey, addressing steps of hurdles that naturally come all through the customer journey. It’s a terrific episode. I enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to catching you on the other side. Enjoy this interview. Cheers

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Csaba, it’s a pleasure to have you on the 2X eCommerce podcast show. It’s been years since I’ve been wanting you to be here. A warm welcome.

It’s great to be here.

Can we go back because we’ve been incommunicado since 2015? If I think about that, that was when I started the podcast and 2X eCommerce. You guys supported me a lot. We would exchange lots of emails. We’ve jumped into conversations but this first time we’re seeing each other. Do you want to give people a bit of your background? Before OptiMonk, what did you do? Why OptiMonk? What are you guys up to?

It was 2015 when I started OptiMonk so it was a start for both of us but I’ve been in eCommerce for about more than years even before then. In 2006, I started my first company. It was an eCommerce agency I would call it. It became one of the biggest eCommerce agencies in Central and Eastern Europe. We’ve created thousands of eCommerce sites. Since then, this company grew into one of the top eCommerce powerhouses in Hungary. This is the country where I’m living right now.

Since we’ve been working with hundreds of clients in close contact, there were always quite the same problems and needs appearing. They were spending a lot of money on marketing but they were having suboptimal conversions and conversion rates so we started looking around what solutions existed on the market and we realized that there are no good solutions for these problems. That’s when we started OptiMonk, realizing that the average small and medium business lacks the necessary to compete against the Amazons of the world.

As an eCommerce agency, were you on the CRO side? Were you on web design acquisition retention? What services did you join?

We are mostly focusing on the design, setup, and creation of the eCommerce Store. We also did some marketing but to be honest with you, we were focused on the conversion sites in most cases. Rather we worked with other marketing-focused agencies.

You have a CRO background. How did the idea for OptiMonk come? At the time, email capture was quite novel and I know you do more than email capture now but how did you ideate OptiMonk? How did you go to the market?

To be honest, I wrote my first eBooks about eCommerce conversion rate optimization years ago. It was such a long time ago. Since then, we’ve been running thousands of experiments on topics so we monitor the market and work closely with the best eCommerce brands. Whenever we see a new option, we test it out. We always had our assumptions, of course. In retrospect, most of them turn out to be wrong or not valid but the only way to figure it out is to test them.

We become experts on A/B testing a lot of stuff. We also have a lot of in-house technology on how to do A/B testing and A/B testing these different types of technologies. Whenever we feel that someone is working and we see great numbers with one client, we try to pilot it with some other clients as well. If all these early results are promising, then we usually go in and create a solution for it. The goal is to test it first with a lot of manual work and if it’s working, then make it a solution, which could be set up by the average merchant with a few clicks, and make it as easy as possible.

In OptiMonk, what are you guys up to? Give us an update on OptiMonk. I want to talk about conversions in general in this course. Where are you guys now in OptiMonk? Please give us an update.

We started in 2015 and since then we have grown quite a lot. It’s a long journey. We have more than 4,000 customer domain websites, eCommerce merchants using OptiMonk around the world. The majority of them are in English-speaking countries, the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK, but we also have quite a lot of European customers as well. We have customers or websites from every country in the world.

The need for conversion rate optimization and to get the maximum out of your traffic and your marketing hasn’t gone away so it’s still an important problem and we are still trying to always find the best and newest solutions for this problem. The market is always changing. There are new trends like mobile, data privacy, and all kinds of different changes in this niche. We always try to experiment with the best solutions that always fit the current trends.

You have your G2 Leader winner of 2022, 4.9 out of 5 400-star reviews. Shopify has taken all over the world, especially in the SME space for eCommerce. Is that the focus now on OptiMonk, direct-to-consumer eCommerce?

Yes. Shopify is our main market but OptiMonk works with most eCommerce systems like WooCommerce Magento and all the rest is compatible with OptiMonk. There are some special features, which work with Shopify but 90% of our features also work with uniquely developed eCommerce sites too. Those who try OptiMonk can see the results and they usually understand why they need such a solution. Probably our biggest problem is that most merchants don’t even realize that they have the need for such a solution. They see that they have some conversion rate problems. They have some issues here and their Facebook Ads otherwise suck. They don’t go deep and try to figure out why and they don’t try to address all these issues with the right solutions.

This brings us to our next topic, which is the need. I’ve preached it in the past for micro-conversions and locking it down. It’s a chain at the end of the day. Your conversion rate might be 2% or your purchase conversion rate might be 2%. Are you measuring your Add to Cart conversion rate, your initiate checkouts conversion rates, and even your email capture conversion rates? Are you even capturing emails?

In today’s world, from your perspective, how should eCommerce operators look at conversion rate optimization? It’s gotten a lot of flak over the years and we’ve seen it move a lot up to enterprise, where there are a lot of numbers to crunch. There’s the critical mass to this statistical significance to crunch those numbers. It gets proper results off the back of split testing. What is your philosophy on conversion rate optimization in 2022?

The 2% conversion rate is the macro conversion rate. That’s the leg metrics. That’s an indicator of the whole process, the whole website. When a visitor comes to your website, it’s a journey. It’s a series of steps, it’s a series of micro-conversions. To get to the end result, to get to the sale to the big micro-conversion, you have to work through the customer through a series of micro-steps and let go of the end site, and try to help the user at the page where they arrived. It’s not trying to push them towards the purchase right away, but rather having them will result in much better results.

One of the biggest mistakes we see with marketers is they are focused on closing the sale too much. They try to close everyone right away, while the big majority of the visitors of your traffic are simply not ready to buy right away when they arrive at your site. We’ve known since the 1970s that all users go through a series of steps, awareness stages.

To truly become paying customers and to push that buy button in the very end, they first have to be aware of everything. They have to dissolve their uncertainties and understand how your product solves the problem. First, they have to become problem aware. Problem-aware users who are in the earlier stage of the user journey, it’s helping them first find the right solutions to their problems instead of, “Buy right,” will result in much better results.

After problem-aware users, what are the steps in the context of eCommerce that come from that step?

We have five awareness stages. The first is unaware. When the user doesn’t even know that he or she has a problem, they become problem-aware, “I’m losing sleep. I have insomnia.” He or she starts looking for solutions, “How can I sleep better?” They find your product and they’re like, “They have these supplements. It’s interesting.” He or she becomes problem-aware. when all these uncertainties are gone and there are no other doubts, “This is right for me. This will ship in time. This is what I will exactly get.” All these crucial questions get answered, which might stop him or her from buying, that’s when the order will be placed. That’s when he or she will become fully aware.

Understanding where your users are in their own buying journey based on their behavior on your website will make a huge difference in your capability to have them. We’re on a solution page, for example, which is usually a category page. The category page or listing page is usually about picking the right product, “Which of these options will best serve my needs?” Most marketers put out a list of products there with some pictures and maybe the name, the price and that’s all. They assume that customers know how to pick from these products but most merchants usually don’t know. They see a lot of similar products. They look for them about the same but they need guidance. They need help, recommendations, and education about which of these products are the best for you.

For example, on a category page, giving them 10% off is not super helpful rather it’s offering them a quiz, “Answer a few questions and I will help you,” or, “This is the buying guide.” “These are the top three products.” I’m giving some personalized recommendations. These can all be much more helpful in making them. The next step is micro conversion and picking the right product. They’re on the product page then you can start giving a lot of promises about that product. Before that, your goal is to have them pick the right product from your category.

They get into a products page. In your opinion, what should a product page do? What’s the function of a high-performing product page?

My best advice from a product page perspective is to assume that your visitors will not meet any other page on your website. Assume that if it was the only page your visitor ever sees. Would they be comfortable buying your product? If not, then you still need to upgrade this product page. Marketers assume that your customers have the same domain knowledge as you do and that they can translate all this information and all these features of your product into values into benefits but they usually cannot.

Your goal is to have them understand all the benefits and values your product has. Also, to answer all the questions which might appear in their heads. An example of that is customer tickets, questions, and feedback surveys can be super helpful to understand what problems or issues are stopping users from buying this product.

Apple as a brand, if you look at any product page of Apple, they are experts. They nail how you can present super boring, super technical stuff because they have zooms, resolutions, processing times, and whatever. How could all this boring stuff be presented in a super customer-oriented way, emphasizing the benefits and the values or what these features create for the customers? If you feel that the customer is interested in the product and they have to spend maybe a minute on your page, then it’s time to start nudging them towards the purchase. You can offer them a 10% discount, for example, if you order right now, but not before that. Before that, your goal is to educate them and dissolve the uncertainties.

My assumption is with the unaware stage, the problem-aware stage, would those typically happen outside with your advertising with your influences, the content you’re putting up on YouTube, for instance, on search. The website experience starts with a solution finding where they’re now problem aware and they’re looking for a solution. Do you want to clarify that little bit of detail?

A lot of D2C brands nowadays do content marketing. When you do content marketing, especially for SEO purposes but also for Facebook Ads, you often create problem-based articles. Five Solutions to Have Better Sleep, for example. That article is specifically for problem-aware users. In that article, you are building solution awareness. You are also building some product awareness and introducing your product as the best solution.

In this case, at the beginning of your own funnel, there will be a huge amount of problem-aware users. Pushing them to the checkout button right away when they have just started reading the problem is not working too well. By making them join your club, your community, and offering them an education, or giving them some maybe some gamified message of, “Sign up to our join our club and you will get the opportunity to win this super awesome product,” for example, works much better. It works much better than again offering discounts.

This is an off-field question. Is it still important to build a list or an email list or a mobile phone list? Which would you do? Email, mobile, or would you do both? What’s the relationship now, especially with privacy coming from Apple, particularly with email collection, cell phone collection, and mobile phone collection?

This playbook of getting visitors and then remarketing them as long as it takes is going away. this world is changing. All this privacy makes the skills and the strategy and it’s going worse. Having your own data, your own list, and your own channel to reach these customers and nurture the relationship with them is more important than ever. Email is better for lead nurturing to send content and educate them on lots of different topics.

SMS, on the other hand, is better at doing sales and special offers and discounts. We usually say that you should handle your SMS list as some kind of VIP list of yours and whenever you have some special efforts, it makes sense to do SMS-specific offers. The good news is you don’t have to pick either/or but you can build both at the same time. There are already quite some use cases we have and some coming out, which makes building email and SMS lists at the same time totally possible and even recommended. Those users which get the education nurturing an email from you, and regularly see your brand in email. Every once in a while, get some special offers and special discounts in SMS. Usually, that’s working the best in terms of optimizing the cost.

Email lead nurturing and your VIP SMS list is for those sales and getting those conversions. What are good opt-in rates now for email and mobile? Do you get any conversion drop if you ask for one bit of data? How does it compare with asking for two? You probably also asked for a name versus asking for one. What conversion rate should operators expect to get?

On a global scale, as we read the average conversion rate of these pop-ups it’s around 3% to 5%. With OptiMonk, our average is around 10%. We always tell customers that if your popup is converting below 10%, you have optimization potential there. There are a lot of customers with super nicely crafted pop-ups way above 20% even sometimes about 30% conversion rates, which is huge. When you are building both lists, the goal which you should aim for is that you could turn 12% to 20% of your visitors into email subscribers. For half of them, you could also get their phone numbers. Out of 100, you will get maybe 16 email subscribers and maybe 8 SMS subscribers.

That’s significant and innate. What about other use cases for pop-ups? What has transpired with the sensitivity of data and data protection? A lot of retailers are collecting zero-party data from customers. When you look at the Shopify ecosystem, you had some pop-up services that were purely doing pop-ups email collection, and then there were some that started out with a quiz first approach. How do you see all the use cases particularly quizzes and even cart abandonment or getting feedback? What do the use cases do to pop-ups or intent even models have in any eCommerce?

List building and getting you’re building your email list is the quite obvious first choice for most marketers to use pop-ups for. It’s no magic but works wonderfully. Pop-ups are the most effective way to build your list. It works because pop-ups and overlays in general are a super heavy way to get personalized secondary messages to your customers. What I mean by secondary is that the primary message is on the webpage. For example, someone arrived at your category page, your product page, and you are selling that product. That’s fine, but if, for some reason, they are not ready to buy, then you can have a lot of options to communicate secondary messages.

Based on whatever you believe in is the reason for not buying, you can present a lot of different messages. You can either ask them for their feedback like, “What stops you from buying?” You can use a simple survey or if they visited your product page and they try to leave in the first fifteen seconds, it means that they had some interest in the product but it was not a good fit. You could offer them similar products, or you can say, “Check out our most popular products within this category,” on the pop-up. It could also be on the side message or sticky bar. The format is whether you want it to be more aggressive or more user friendly but definitely, you can have them choose a better product in case they are not satisfied with the one they are browsing right now.

If they show deep interest in the product and stay, you can try to close the purchase and offer them a discount if they buy or subscribe. The quizzes come super nice if you don’t know what exactly they are interested in. If they are on the homepage, for example, and you sell a lot of different products, it’s often super hard to know which product or which offer would they be interested in. It’s trying to segment these users and get some personalized data. What problem are you trying to solve? Weight loss, better sleep, better skin, or whatever? It’s asking them this first question.

Problem-based questions are usually working the best and maybe even incentivize sometimes this question, “By the way, you will also get 10% off if you answer this question.” It can have an incentive but it starts with the question. They click on their problem, “I’m losing sleep.” You’re like, “I know your problem,” and you can make them sign up. Also, you can promote them with a personalized offer. You can communicate based on their needs. What’s even better and what pop-ups allow you are you can create these personalized messages for these users anywhere on this site.

Let me give you an example. You are running different Facebook Ads for better sleep and you are running a different ad for weight loss. When the user clicks on the ad, if you do the UTM parameters right, from the URL, you will see whether this user came from the better sleep or the weight loss ad version. Based on this parameter, whenever he or she tries to leave the site later, a few minutes later, you can still offer them a personalized message, “If you still want better sleep, here’s my offer for you.” “If you want weight loss, here’s my better offer for you.” You don’t have to push the same message to everyone but the right message to the right people. The superpower of pop-ups is that you can personalize your messages to every individual and you have a lot of data you can work with.

You talked about CVO which is Customer Value Optimization and the fact that it’s offering value at every stage of the customer journey. It sounds to me that when your systems and your site are more aware of each traffic, who is on the site, you’re able to offer more tailored solutions, which is the value to them. That boils down to personalization and segmentation, which leads to personalization which I find fascinating. You mentioned something important, UTM tagging. For data-savvy marketers reading, how would you recommend the segment customers, in order to get the best out of these customer engagement tools such as OptiMonk?

It depends on the product whether you are solving one big problem for different people, or there are a lot of different solutions, different categories, there are two main groups of data you can use. There’s what we call Zero Party Data, which they explicitly give you. They click on these conversational pop-ups of, “I am losing sleep.” “I need better skin,” or whatever. You can use their email. You can ask any number of questions and you can use all this zero-party data to personalize not your pop-ups but all kinds of messaging after they leave your site, your emails, your SMS, and your retargeting.

You have this what we call first-party data which is based on the behavior. What pages are they visiting? What source did they arrive from? Do they arrive from Facebook Ads or Google Ads? It’s often different. People are searching for a specific product and coming from a product that is usually high intent. They’re usually much more productive. There are those who have seen a Facebook Ad, for example, they are usually in a much earlier stage of the user journey.

Based on the landing page, is it the category page, the product page, or the homepage? It’s a different awareness stage for the customers, which you can use to personalize this message. Even by running lots of different ads as the segmentation, classifying users into big groups, segments, depending on the total traffic and the resources which you have, you can find the right balance. You can find the right balance between segmenting these users into some subgroups and creating the most specialized messages or tailored messages for these subgroups.

What OptiMonk also offers is not only can you create specific messages, specific pop-ups for each segment but you can also personalize your message. You can often get one message or one pop-up and customize this pop-up based on this zero and third-party data if you know their name, for example. If you know they’re returning users and which products they’ve seen, you can use all these products dynamically in your pop-ups.

You don’t have to manually create a different scenario and a different message for each and every individual because it would be impossible but you can create a couple of nicely crafted and targeted messages and use the personalization features of OptiMonk. The end result from the user perspective is that everyone will see a personalized message at the right moment.

The versatility of the toolset you guys have, you have pop-ups, you have side messages, and you have sticky bars. You could do full screen now because I remember we couldn’t do full screen back in the days and you do surveys. Do you want to shed a bit more light on your gamification? How do best-in-class D2C commerce brands use your gamification tools as a competitive edge?

We have three different main solution types for gamification. One is this classic lucky wheel pop-up. You spin the wheel and then you can win something. It’s great to upgrade the outlook perspective of your offers or your discount. You can only offer a 10% discount on average but you want to make it look better than putting on 20% off and also a 5% off on the wheel. The average user will win an average of 10% but the perception of it will be much better. Having the chance to win is usually a big motivating factor for many users. For early-stage users, gamification messages usually convert with 12% to 18% so they have super high conversion rates.

Besides lucky wheels, you also have scratch cards. It’s less sexy but also works well. We are experimenting with mystery offers. It’s a simple offer where you are not disclosing your offer right away but using this mystery that you can win something well. One of our clients reached a more than 20% conversion rate with such a mystery offer. We were surprised when we saw this message.

Do mystery offers link to a product or your Add to Cart? How would you implement that in D2C, if you’re given a mystery offer?

The simplest version is, “Sign up for our newsletter and you will get a super mystery offer,” which will be super nice and on the thank you page, you show them what this offer was and continue browsing. That’s the simplest version. You can use this one to ask questions and that’s what we usually recommend. On the second page, you don’t have to disclose everything right away but you can ask a question, “Thank you for signing up. I will show you this mystery offer right away but first, tell me what you are interested in. What took you here? What’s your problem?”

Asking a few questions and making a user click on one of these options will usually not result in any churn but it will get you a lot of zero party data based on which you can show a personalized thank you page. For example, if they clicked on, “I’m losing sleep,” then on the thank you page, you can show them, “Here are our top solutions for better sleep. This is my special offer.” Later on, you can also use it to personalize your exit offers, recommendations, lead nurturing email series, or whatever based on the knowledge that, “I know that this guy has sleeping problems. I shouldn’t bombard him or her with weightless products and articles.”

I could go on and on with this conversation but I’m deeply appreciative of the tips you’ve shared and your philosophy of optimization, which is value-based. It’s got me thinking and I’m sure it’s got the audience thinking. For those who want to follow your work and OptiMonk, what social media are you most active on? For those who want to find out more about OptiMonk it’s OptiMonk.com but for you, Csaba, how do you people want to reach out to you?

I recommend using LinkedIn. I’m trying to be more active on LinkedIn right now. I also recommend reading my guide to customer value optimization. This is a summary of this whole principle of this whole methodology of rather trying to have the users instead of trying to sell them. If you want to read this guide it’s at OptiMonk.com/cvo. That’s a super easy link. That’s a good and easy introduction to CVO. That’s a good start.

Thanks, Csaba. It’s been an incredible session with you. We’re going to appreciate you for coming on to the 2X eCommerce podcast.

It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Cheers.

Cheers.