Good Conversion or Motivated Customers?
This post originally appeared in my weekly newsletter, BL&T (Borrowed, Learned, & Thought). Subscribe
Big love to all the mommas out there, hope you enjoyed the weekend <3
I don't think anyone expects parenthood to be easy, but what no one really tells you is that you learn to be tired every day while being more productive than ever. Especially as working parents.
Tired can also mean low patience and irritability in the relationships closest to you. A recipe for disaster with kids in the mix.
All to say, the right partner in this crazy and beautiful parenthood thing makes all the difference. Grateful to have that in Dana. She's the glue in our house in more ways than one.
A couple years ago I illustrated our family and engraved it a Yeti mug. Then we had another kid. Yesterday I gave her the updated Simple Modern version. We spent the day in Longwood Gardens, a vast botanical garden in PA. Grateful for a beautiful day. (We didn't mean to match btw but we were totally dressed for cooler weather and shed our layers.)
Borrowed
"Having a purpose simply means knowing why you're gathering and doing your participants the honor of being convened for a reason. And once you have that purpose in mind, you will suddenly find it easier to make all the decisions that a gathering requires."
From "The Art of Gathering" by Priya Parker [Book]
Learned
A marketing media agency in our network recently connected us with a supplement brand they took on as a client. They're a month or so out from a large media spend, and the site has issues. It's slow, the user experience is challenging, brand storytelling is lacking, and the aesthetic is a far cry from the premium position it holds in the market.
As a short-term fix, we recommended landing pages to absorb the ad traffic and start planning a real rebuild for later. They were immediately on board with the plan, but the redesign will require executive leadership approval.
What's fascinating about this one is that if the conversion rate were your case to leadership, it would mostly give you a case for doing nothing. Setting aside some recent bot traffic that's skewed the numbers, their conversion rate is historically on par with or above the industry average.
But that's the thing: in a case like this, the conversion rate has nothing to do with the site experience and everything to do with customers' motivations for visiting.
Some context: the brand is very well known overseas, and the US business has been carried almost entirely by people who knew the brand long before they ever saw it here. They aren't shopping; they're price-checking, going from Amazon to the website to find the best deal. According to the client, when the brand stopped funding a subscribe-and-save promo on Amazon, site traffic spiked that same week. As they put it, "when we run a discount, people go crazy."
These customers are motivated enough to push through whatever friction the site throws their way. Ever bought event tickets on a website you hated, or filed a tax extension on a portal that looks like it was built in 2003? Same deal. The outcome is non-negotiable, so the experience doesn't really matter.
The challenge isn't conversion, not yet. The challenge is maintaining conversion when they start spending real money to reach people who have never heard of the brand. The minute paid kicks in, the site has to do work it has never had to do before. Sell, not transact.
& Thought
Where am I settling for a good metric?
