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229: “Homer Simpson” your Website with Matt Stafford

Matthew Stafford, CEO of Build Grow Scale, is passionate about empowering business owners to succeed. His expertise lies in e-commerce and conversion rate optimization, emphasizing on “Homer Simpson” your website for effective conversion, not just traffic.

Matt’s Quick Wins Framework focuses on maximizing existing traffic by enhancing search functionality and optimizing filter pages. He highlights the importance of clear navigation and customer-centric design in boosting conversion rates for both product and service-based websites. He also advocates for simplicity and understanding customer needs to build trust and drive sales.

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“Homer Simpson” your Website with Matt Stafford

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Matthew Stafford, CEO of Build Grow Scale, a community where e-commerce entrepreneurs and physical product sellers come to learn how to take their businesses to the next level. Matt, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

So, Matt, let’s start with the first question is what is your personal why? So why do you do what you do and how is your business connected to your personal why?

Yeah, I would say that I get a lot of fulfillment out of helping business owners win. I understand, you know, that’s been the way that I’ve accomplished the things that I want to do. And by helping others win, I get a lot of energy from that. And I just realized how hard it is. And so I commend business owners for being in the trenches and doing that. I know me personally, I got a lot of fulfillment out of it because it was the one area of my life that I got a lot of praise. And now that I can actually help other people succeed at it, I enjoy that.

Okay, what you do is the conversion rate optimization, I think it’s called. And what I read on your website, it really struck me, you saying that it’s not that you don’t have enough traffic, but you’re not converting enough. So that really got my attention. So tell us a little bit about what that means. Is this really true that people already have enough traffic and why are they not converting?

Yeah, so the average on e-commerce, and we’ll use that one to start with, the average conversion rate is just over 2%. So that means for every 100 visitors, about 2 people buy on average. So that means you had 98 people that clicked on an ad or searched for you, found your website, and then when they got there, it didn’t close the sale. And most people think, okay, then I need to go get another a hundred visitors so that I can make two more sales. And my thought process was how about the 98 people that left? How about we convert a couple more of them two, three more of them that already raised their hand and said that they were interested in what we do, or we’re looking for a solution rather than buy more traffic. And if we do that, then we’ve already doubled the business. So why not the traffic that we’re already getting, close more of them. And then once we do that, if we’re getting four or five out of a hundred and our competitors are only getting two or a little over two, we’re actually a lot more profitable and we can go dominate our market. And so that was really why I thought, hey, let’s make the website work better because we have our own websites too and physical products. And when we did that, the profit was so much more and so much more exponentially because we were already at our break even. So now capturing more from the same traffic made it easy for us to go out and buy more.

Yeah, I guess if you’re selling specimen products with the same ad spend, then your ads become much more profitable and then you can spend more on ads and then you outspend other people and then you can dominate.

Yeah.

Makes perfect sense. So you did share with me, and it was very timely because I was just about to launch our new website and you shared me what we call the Quick Wins Framework for someone to just up-level their website. We actually implemented what you said as well already. So please share with us, our listeners, what this Quick Wins Framework and what are the easy and low-hanging fruits that someone can pick when trying to make their website better.

Yes, I’ll give you two. The most valuable traffic that you have, and I’ll give you all four, but I’ll give you the two quick wins to start with. Search traffic. So, search traffic normally converts more than twice what an average visitor, and their value is almost four times. So, if your average order value is $50, the person that uses search, and your conversion rate is 2%, you’re going to convert, the person that types in search is going to spend on average about $150 and convert at more than 4%. If your average order value or your search is 4%, then they’re going to convert closer to 8%. And so we know that the people that use search convert much higher and spend more money. And so what we want is as many people as possible to use search. And after we discovered that, in fact, we have some sites where the most traffic that we’ve ever got through is about 7% of their traffic, but it accounts for more than 30% of their revenue. So if you think about that, you really want to direct people to search, but why, after a while, we’re like, okay, why does search work so much better? It’s because the people are able to find what they’re looking for, which to us was another big aha. Why is this converting so much better? What makes it so good? It’s because they’re finding what they look for and then now they convert at a much higher level. And so we’re like, okay, if we make the site much clearer, easy navigation, all the CRO principles, that’s going to increase. The other thing that we realized is because we track what people type in that search bar, people would actually type in their problems or what they were looking for a solution to. And so then we would actually use that to come up with new products or to change the language or descriptions in our products. And by doing that, we had a site that had basically it was a stuffed animal and the kids could unfold it and it would become a hoodie. Well their number one searched item, actually number one and number two, was unicorn and then unicorn spelled wrong. Well they didn’t have a unicorn hoodie and so when they released one and we emailed everybody out in their list, we did just under a half a million dollars in 48 hours.

Wow.

So not only does it help people find what they’re looking for, it also tells us what they’re looking for, and it tells us how they describe what they’re looking for. So there’s all kinds of benefits to your search, the search function on your website.

That is very powerful. So it’s like when I come out with a new book, I always go on Amazon and look for the terms that they are searching for so that I’ve got the right keywords to advertise. So that’s basically putting this on steroids because it’s actually on your website. So you’re the Amazon, you’re the platform, using your website as a platform and see what people are looking for and then you can essentially develop products to fulfill those unmet needs.

100%, yeah.

That’s pretty awesome. Okay, so that’s number one. So you have three more similar and powerful ideas?

Yes, the second one is your filter page. So if you have more than 10 or 15 products, what most people do, or more than 10 or 15 SKUs, then your filter page becomes very valuable. And I know in our pre-interview, you and I talked about that. And we have multiple sites that when the people use the filter page, that increases their conversion by three to five hundred percent. So three to five times if they use that filter page to narrow down their selection. Well again, why would that be? It’s because if there’s a whole bunch of variations instead of them scrolling on mobile traffic, which is you know typically what people are on now, that’s about 80-85 percent of traffic, they’re looking through items two at a time. Well if they can go, I’m interested in a blue shirt. Now all of a sudden, instead of all the other items, it just shows the blue shirts. They scroll through that, and it makes it a lot easier to find. And so it doesn’t have to be these big monumental changes. A lot of times, like I told you, we just say Homer Simpson it. Is this so simple that Homer Simpson could figure it out? And so if you could literally go to the filter and say, I wanted to just see the blue shirts and it shows you all the blue shirts and you scroll through those, then you’re going to be a lot more likely to find what you’re looking for instead of new arrivals and you go through 1,200 products. And so making sure that your product search and filter works really, really well, and there’s some very good ones out there nowadays, that would be the second thing that I would do on my site right off the bat.

Yeah, and it makes sense. So whenever I shop on, Johnston Murphy is one of the sites where I buy my shoes and shirts and other stuff. And yeah, I definitely do that because there’s so much, what’s such a wide selection. And I know I don’t want to spend my time trying to figure out all of those. I just put in, okay, this is my size, this is the color, or this is the pattern, and then it just shows me the ones that they actually have and it’s a good time. I love it, love it.

It sounds super obvious once we say it and you hear it, but then now that I said it, you actually can go, oh yeah, that’s actually how I shop. But a lot of times, the store owner who owns the site doesn’t think like that. They’re like, oh, I want them to see everything I have so that they’ll find what they’re looking for. And it actually makes it hard for them to find what they’re looking for. And so those two are by far the most valuable things that you’ll do to increase conversions and your average order value.

Is this because people buy less on impulse nowadays than before, perhaps? Because when impulse buying is very strong, then maybe you want to show them a lot of things.

I think that there’s still even though there is an impulse buy, they’re still going to look for what speaks to them. So, yeah, this is a principle that like over the last nine years, we’ve never been able to beat it, like no matter what. And we’ve seen all different things go through the economy in the last eight, nine years. I really think it’s more of a function of how people think and browse a website in general than maybe just a tactic during this particular period.

Yeah, and I guess people are curious and even if they like something, they do check, oh, is there something else that I like even better? And then they get too many options and then you confuse them and then they might not even make a decision.

Yeah, so definitely, that is another thing. We narrowed down options. So we have a lot of print on demand and different suppliers. And we always try to get them down to three, maybe four max. And we’ve checked the conversions on that. They go, yeah, but if I offer them 10 colors, they can pick one that they like. And what ends up happening, and we call it the paradox of choice, they like more than one, and so they can’t make up their minds, so they decide they’ll just come back later. And so every single time we narrow down the selections to three to four instead of seven to 10 to 12, you’d be shocked what people put on there. Conversions go up, and they go up drastically. Many times, like two, three times.

Yeah, I get it. I can relate to this. All right, so let’s move on to the next one. So what is your suggestion number three?

Forum fields. So I’m going to give you this one. Every single person can do it. They all have form fields. They need their customers to fill them out in order to give them information. On the information page, everybody asks for the e-mail. And so you can put text in there, and what we say is, e-mail required for order confirmation. So the thought process behind it was in the book Persuasion, people do not mind giving you the information as long as you give them a reason why. And so if someone’s going to cut in line and they come up to you and they go, hey, do you mind if I cut in line? Two out of 10 people will say, yes, that’s okay. Go ahead. As soon as they say, hey, do you mind if I cut in line? My kids, they’re going to be late for school. It switches from two in 10 to eight in 10. So it’s almost exact opposite. And so we thought like, oh, we tracked foreign field errors. We have tons of errors there. And when we did that, we reduced the errors drastically. And what we did was we realized our abandoned recovery, that went up too. Not only did we close more sales, but our abandonment recovery went up. Why? Because the order confirmation emails opened 85% of the time. And so we knew that they give you their good email because everybody opens their order confirmation email. You gave them a reason why. And so you’ll get better abandoned recovery, better lead gen, everything from putting the reason why you’re asking for the email in that form field. The second one that we do is under phone, we say required for shipping notification. And the reason we do that is because everybody wants to know when they’re going to get their item or when it’s going to be shipped. And when we do that, our SMS recovery also goes through the roof. So people want to be notified when it’s going to ship. And so they give you their phone number rather than just a junk number.

And so that is the third thing that we do that we know works all the time, like every single time, it never fails. Share on X

Yeah, I love it. That makes a lot of sense. And I’m just thinking, I just launched a new book and it’s a free download, but I didn’t actually say why I’m asking for the email, which is actually, this is where we send the book. And I think we’re missing an opportunity there. So, thank you for that. All right, so I think you already over delivered here, but since you offered or promised four ideas, what is number four?

Okay, so the number four is a thank you page question. And so we asked this on all of our sites. We ask after someone’s bought on the thank you page, we put a little pop-up that says, what was the one thing that almost made you not buy? And so what will they do? They just gave you their money. They want to help you out. They want to tell you what was difficult, what created friction, any of those things. And so now they’re going to go tell you the places on your website that they didn’t understand or were confusing. And so now what you do is you go back into the website and you clear those up, fix those friction points, and you make more sales. We’ve done that now on every site that we go to. We know for a fact we’ve tracked it on one site that we’ve been on for the last eight years. The wins from the thank you page question are over $10 million now.

Wow. Okay, fantastic. So I don’t think we implemented this one. I think I misunderstood. So definitely a good one to implement. So let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about something that you mentioned in passing, you know, pre-interview and it really started the gears for me. And you said that only sustainable things matter. What do you mean sustainable in terms of website conversion improvement?

Yeah, so most of entrepreneurs are very busy and they don’t have a huge team. And so for me, I understand if I give you 30 things to do, maybe 5, 6 of them are going to get done. And so you’re not going to end up, if I say, hey, you really got to get better at running email promos. Well that requires you to do something every single week over and over and over and that never ends. Until you have a team, the things that really need to win for you need to be, hey, if I do this thing or hey, if I get good at this and get it implemented, it’s going to make a difference over and over and over and I can just go back and maintain it rather than have to do it all the time. And so if you look at the wins that I gave you, each one of those is something that once you set it up, it continues to win over and over and over or it’s always providing you good information on how to make things better rather than be something that you have to do all the time. And so you can do all the things that are very sustainable to start with and eventually then you’ll be able to have a team and do the things that require constant never-ending work.

Yeah, I love it. So it’s set it and forget it.

Not necessarily forget it, but go in and check on it once a month. Because some of them, that’s how we figured out the wins for what were people typing in, what were they misspelling, and then also we want to take the answers from those questions, what was the one thing that almost made you not buy, and we put them all on a sheet, and the ones that are consistent over and over, those are the way we go back and fix.

Love it, that’s great. So Matt, you spoke a lot about product companies, you know, shirts and other products. And obviously that’s really important for e-commerce businesses to improve their conversion, but there are a lot of businesses that are not e-commerce in the sense that they don’t sell products, but they have productized services or they sell custom services. So what is the difference in terms of a website conversion optimization between a product company and a service company?

There is a few, but in general, people are people. And so they’re still looking for information or answers to their questions. And we always say to people, the reason why someone came to your site and didn’t buy is typically one, they don’t trust you, or two, they have an unanswered question. And so that means that things on your website aren’t clear, aren’t simple enough for them to find what they’re looking for. Or it’s a mess and so they don’t trust that you’re going to have a good solution for their answer. And so for me, those are the questions that I look at. Is it easy to navigate? Is it really crystal clear? Can I describe their problem better than they can? Because the moment I can do that, I now become their default answer because they’re like, oh, he actually understands me. For sure he has the problem or he has a solution to my problem.

Yeah, that makes sense. So then there are different things that you would focus on when it’s a service company, it’s not so much maybe the search, maybe these technical elements, but more copy would be more important.

Well, for us, if it’s like they need to speak to someone, then we’re going to do the things that are going to make them feel like we’re easy to talk to. So you’d be shocked how many people want their customers to call them and they don’t make their phone number easily accessible. It’s like buried third page in or three quarters of the way down the page or just a multiple of other things. You’d be shocked what you see. Most people, about 60%, never scroll. And so if you don’t have the most important information above the fold, those people literally don’t see it and they’ll go to the next option.

Wow, I never heard that. But it makes sense. When I go on websites, I don’t start scrolling necessarily immediately.

Yeah, especially if it’s laid out where the hero image takes up the whole screen and you can’t tell that something else is below it. So we will actually put an arrow on the page at the bottom, like scroll down, or we’ll make the hero image small enough so that you see the other items below it, knowing that there’s a reason to scroll and look for more. And what those are called is false bottoms, and a lot of sites still have them, because people’s hero image is so big it takes up the top of the screen, and then people literally think their options are only what they see above the screen.

Wow, and just keep making notes even though we already had a conversation before that, but lots of things to fix and now on my own website. So I’d like to change the topic before we actually wrap up because we’re close to the end and I’d like to ask you about your investments because you mentioned on your website that you’re not just obviously not just an expert, you don’t just run this community, the Build Grow Scale community, but you’re also an investor. So what are the type of companies that you like to invest in? What are the things that you look for?

Yeah, so we definitely obviously like e-commerce. That’s right in our zone of genius. And so we’re always looking for people that have a good product and good service, but their website doesn’t work very well, or they’re just haven’t really figured out the marketing. There’s a lot of good ideas that are marketed very poorly. And so for us, that's really what we're looking for is these opportunities where people have an amazing product. Share on X They’ve created it as a solution that they needed, but they’re not great at running the business or they’re not great at understanding what it takes to get other people to buy. And so that’s really what we’re looking for, because we know that we can go in and really leverage our skills to make a business work very well. And our goal isn't to go do a whole bunch of different things, but to stay within our zone of genius. Share on X

Love it. So the final question I have is that if I was an e-commerce entrepreneur, I had a good product idea that I came up with, I like to sell it. What is the one thing that you would suggest that I keep in mind when I’m building out my website? So as an overall kind of mindset or a mental approach thing, what should I be focusing on?

So I’m gonna say that there’s two. One is your unique value proposition. So the internet has made it available for anybody to be in business. We all have competitors. And so if you can articulate your unique value proposition, what makes you special, what makes you more valuable than your competitors, that is extremely important. In fact, we have an entire course literally just getting that right, your unique value proposition. And so once you get that, the second thing I would say is making things extremely simple. Like we make so many assumptions that everybody understands everything on the website because we understand it. And the truth of the matter is, before COVID, about 10% of sales were made online. During COVID, about 33%. Now it’s went back to closer to like 25 to 27%. So just because we’re online all day, every day, doesn’t mean everybody else is. And so if you can, Homer Simpson, like really say, hey, would Homer Simpson understand this? Would he understand this language? Am I trying to be flowery where I should just say exactly what I mean?

We never ever lose when we just simplify and make it so simple that anyone could understand it. Share on X

Okay, so after we hang up I’m going to read through my website through the glasses of Homer Simpson and try to see if he gets it.

You’ll be shocked at how many little things you’ll realize just are not simple and when you do that how often you’ll see a really nice uptick from that.

Yeah, I’m kind of scared of doing this now. All right. Awesome. Okay. So basically, it’s not the traffic. It’s not that you don’t have traffic, you don’t even have conversion, be twice as convergent, if it’s a word, than your competitors, and then you’re going to outspend them in marketing, you will dominate your market. The four quick ways we discussed, search function, a filter page, form fields that tell you why you asked the information, and then a thank you page question so people can give you some feedback and you can keep optimizing your website. That is really awesome. So Matt, if people would like to learn more and connect and maybe be part of the Build Grow Scale community, where should they go? Where can they find you?

Yeah, they could just go to buildgrowscale.com and we have a lot of free resources there. And then if they’re interested in talking with me, they can email me. My email is just matt@buildgrowscale.com and I’d love to talk to them.

Awesome. So Matt Stafford, CEO of Build Grow Scale and an investor in e-commerce companies. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your goodies with our audience and those who are listening, don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube and follow us on LinkedIn, and check out all the short videos we post on LinkedIn. So if you want to check out past episodes, past frameworks, you can just go on there and you can see one minute summaries of the frameworks there as well. So thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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