Wes on Building a Brand, Subscription Prescription podcast

00:01 Matthew [Music] Welcome to Subscription Prescription, the podcast where you get the information you need to scale your subscription program. [Music] Hello everyone and welcome to another dose of subscription prescription, the podcast where we help you figure out everything related to DTOC subscriptions. I’m your host Matthew Holman and today I’m honored to be joined by Wes Buckwalter, the founder and CEO of Sea Monster Studios. Wes, thanks for coming on the show. Wes Yeah, thanks a ton for having me. Matthew So first, I’d love to hear a little bit

00:44 Matthew more about what is Sea Monster and a little bit of your background. For those of you who don’t know, Wes is an incredibly talented developer who does a ton of work on Recharge Shopify across the entire ecosystem. I would love to hear a little bit more about the kind of work Sea Monster is doing and how you kind of got into this space. Wes Awesome. Well, SeaMonster Studios is an old agency in regards to agencies. We’re now 19 years old or we’re in our 19th year, so been at it for quite a while now. Hopefully I

01:10 Wes look young enough that people don’t think I’m super old, but I’ll take it either way. Old usually means experienced. We’re a full service agency, so outside of e-commerce or outside of websites, we deal with branding and brand strategy, naming companies, creating logos, extending brands visually or philosophically depending on what your brand needs. We’ve dealt with things like product packaging or interior design for stores, things like that when you have a retail presence. A lot of it’s relevant to graphic

01:39 design or decoration, but we’ve worked with architects to sort of build novel things and make stores look interesting and things like that. By demand and especially these days since covid came around, almost all of the demand we have is somewhere in the digital space. Even if that’s branding, it involves something that touches the web somewhere along the way, even if it’s just a logo that’s being implemented into a new iteration of a website or for a startup. We’ve embedded ourselves pretty heavily with the Shopify ecosystem. We’re

02:05 a Shopify Plus agency. We’ve been a Shopify expert and partner for many many years now. I’d say probably since 2013, 2014 since the partner program came about. We have seen it evolve and seen a little bit of everything along the way. We tend to enjoy the weird stuff and we’re not afraid of it. We’ve got data scientists on our team, WCAG compliance specialists, a really skilled engineering and design team. From a sort of soup to nuts implementation of a website, we can deal

02:38 with the strategy, deal with the sales, deal with its design and making it look beautiful or its strategy to a selling process. Occasionally we deal with things like acquisition SEO, but we’re primarily focused on what happens when the user gets to the site and what happens after that. We tend to work with partners that are acquisition agencies for some of the magical things that happen on the acquisition side. Matthew Oh, that makes a lot of sense and quite a lot in there actually that I

03:04 Matthew didn’t know about what you guys get into. I’m kind of curious. I wasn’t necessarily planning on asking this question, but as you’re talking since you’ve been in the space for so long and seen a lot of both offline and online, how do you see the ecosystem kind of shaping up? I mean obviously you’ve put a lot of chips down on Shopify Plus as being a partner. Is that where you see the future going? Is that where you’re seeing a lot of like cannibalizing Salesforce commerce cloud and Magento and continuing that process?

03:29 Wes I think Shopify in my perception I guess is the fastest moving player right now meaning I think they innovate a lot faster than others they’ve got a different sort of corporate structure and company philosophy on innovation that I think allows them to excel in those areas i think they’ve still got a lot of growing up to do to compete with some of the biggest of the big or you know when we’re talking to super enterprized

03:57 customers a lot of what they find affinity for in things like commerce cloud or, even Woo Commerce or Magento is I can build whatever I want, which of course comes with a total cost of ownership difference you know and I think where Shopify really provides some accelerated growth capabilities even for the biggest companies is in things like you don’t have to pay 15 internal engineers to maintain your website you can work with hosting hosting provider and all that stuff yeah sure it really is the cost of infrastructure i think

04:27 people do not understand when you’re small you get sold on Woo Commerce being like you know cheaper in the sense but over time it’s actually a lot more expensive to manage right well and something that I guess as a nerdy engineer that always troubled me with Shopify in the beginning was it has guardrails it only lets you do certain things and they have specific methodologies for things and as I’ve sort of grown up as a company and as a developer I’ve actually found to really cherish those guard rails it lets you do

04:52 things very well and it doesn’t let you build things that don’t work I guess in a lot of ways and maybe that’s an overly simplistic way to describe it but I really like the guard rails that it puts up in the sense that it keeps my website safe and it keeps them functional it doesn’t let me do ridiculously poor things that I think inhibit user experience and stuff and so in a lot of ways I’ve grown up to appreciate those things more so than find them a limitation, but I think a lot of clients that are coming into Shopify

05:20 from another system find those to be an intimidating barrier of entry more so than its cost or its its capabilities Matthew I think, it’s so it’s so interesting your description reminded me of a quote, it’s called, the tyranny of rhyme that forces men to write their finest lines meaning actual restrictions allow people to become more creative but I’d like to ask you about that question of people coming on to Shopify and facing these restrictions because I think it’s a really good idea like how

05:47 Matthew much time do you spend as an agency in in from a consultative standpoint helping people understand that the tech they’re trying to build versus the business outcome they’re shooting for right because I know in our space we’ve seen so many times a strange request and then you try to figure out you try to get into the why behind that request and it turns out because they’re just used to doing something a certain way because so and so back office wanted it this way when in reality like there’s a tech

06:12 solution that gets them from A to Z a lot faster and easier they just didn’t know about it Wes Yeah and I think a lot of it plays into a couple of analogies I use is sort of you know my primary function I see is the driver right and so the company’s the navigator in this case tell me what your destination is maybe tell me the points that we need to stop along the way but it’s my job to get you there and so a lot of times maybe I have a better map or I have more experience. You know you’ve run one rodeo

06:40 Wes really well maybe we’ve done it a hundred times and so there’s some life experience that comes along with building sites for different agencies or different companies that potentially lends to the thing that you might need or the efficiency that you might gain from that experience. I think the other side of it is just because you’ve always done something some way doesn’t mean that we should keep doing it that way and a lot of times with large companies it’s a question of person power. What does it

07:06 cost you to do these things what does your routine look like from an effort or a clarity standpoint, data integrity, things like that and I think a lot of the things that we focus on in moving from a large scale platform to Shopify Plus for example is what are the outcomes that you need from the data that it outputs for you and how do we create some connective tissue between the tools that we’re implementing to share that data in a way that makes it more efficient and more valuable. And I think a lot of folks understand the

07:34 value of data but they don’t understand the cost of the data meaning if I’ve got 12 systems and I’m working with pivot tables and crystal reports and things of yester year just to try to make my marketing data make sense to me, what are the tools that we can evolve into that don’t force me to do those routines? So a lot of times especially when talking with a suite full of e-commerce managers and marketers they start to hear this concept and say like well I’m about to be out of a job

08:01 or whatever and really what it means is you’re about to be allowed to do the job that you’ve always wanted to do instead of crunching numbers you can do marketing, and those numbers are there for you already and it just becomes a utility in your toolbox as opposed to you having to build the toolbox every time you need a new tool. Well it’s such a waste of time where you spend so much time trying to collect information so that you know what’s happening as opposed to knowing what’s happening and

08:24 going building new solutions for in response whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing right? I think a lot of the things I love about some of the bolt-on solutions as well for things like data are that when you consider the top of the food chain the CEO or CTO needs to know what’s going on right now there’s tools available for that that allows you as a marketer or you as an e-commerce manager to produce that report quickly and easily satisfy the needs of your boss’s boss’s boss or whatever, and

08:51 produce the answers that you need to give in a much faster way and so oftentimes it allows you not to have to give them so you can focus on the job that you really want to do rather than just reporting. But it also makes sure that you have the integrity of the data where you can be positive that the answers that you’re supplying are correct, and I think it benefits everybody in the ecosystem for a company you’ve you’ve got logistics and supply you’ve got fulfillment customer service and support and all these systems can be

09:16 connected in a really elegant way that makes everyone’s life a little easier and creates some visibility to your customer or the situations that are occurring inside of your your process so you don’t have nearly as much synchronous communication going on you can have a bunch of data moving around in a way that makes everyone’s life a little easier and more efficient and I think it’s a quality of life improvement that a lot of people don’t really account for in the – like if we just try harder we can have whatever we want and

09:42 it’s like well what if you could have ever everything you want without putting a master to it… Matthew Well that’s such a good point I mean even a much oversimplified use case like we had this recently with one of our clients where we were pulling we just we just pulled their data and put it in a centralized location so we can track it a little bit easier for ourselves and we saw a trend for one of our clients and and then were able to respond immediately and make a change to the cancellation flow and saw

10:05 Matthew an improvement and I think without just that simple process of having the data in front of us we wouldn’t… I don’t know how much how much time it would have been before we actually went and saw that or went and checked on that kind of thing so that’s just a a simpler way of having the information at your fingertips and then you can respond accordingly. I really like the the metaphor you use of like the SeaMonster being the driver and the brand being the navigator in that instance because I

10:31 think that makes a great point of like you’re trying to take them from point A to point B right so they know the destination but you probably know how to get there better than they do what are some ways that you’ve seen both from a success standpoint and maybe like a friction or failure standpoint for brands working with either Sea Monster or agencies in general in your experience? Wes Well I think the biggest point of friction really is the agency ecosystem right I mean you’re engaging with somebody who wants to charge you

11:00 Wes probably as much as your attorney does to build something that’s a temporary solution you know if you think about the lifespan of an enterprise website it might be 12 months, 18 months, maybe 24 months but it it’s sort of a let’s build this thing that by tomorrow we’ll need new information for and new data for and new content for, and I think it’s an intimidation factor is kind of the primary hurdle to get over meaning somebody’s always had a bad experience with another agency and a lot of times I

11:29 find if you really dig in without ego and and sort of try to understand the client a lot of times the thing that caused friction with another agency was the client themselves, you know, not letting go of something insisting upon something that the agency thought would be a different way to go and then likewise I think the agency approaching the same response with ego of I have always done it this way and this is the way I should do it and you know sort of our technology changes day to day and there’s growth that always has to happen

11:56 and that’s I think what makes the agency life so challenging is that it’s my job to be on point with not only the things that are great for today but what’s going to happen tomorrow and in the best predictive way possible make sure that we’re making decisions today that don’t prohibit tomorrow from being valid, or that cost the company we’re working for a bunch of money to worry about what tomorrow actually holds, and so I see that as always the most difficult part of the conversation is sort of just

12:20 gaining trust doing sort of business 101 things I think are often missed out on in the initial conversations and then really after that it’s a question of can we find a way to work copocetically in a temporary format with the team that we’re just getting to know that we haven’t quite got to the point where we can nod at each other and understand what that means you know those kind of things and so how rapidly can we evolve this relationship to both create trust and know who’s good at what so each

12:46 person can work to the best asset that they’ve got available to them and I think every company’s got a different set of people for that purpose. Matthew Right and I was going to say every every merchant or brand is a little bit different in how they approach like changes like I think it’s just kind of like a classic human thing where somebody says you know I’m really low maintenance but low maintenance for them is actually incredibly high maintenance for somebody else right so like understanding like hey like yeah it’s like hey like we’re

13:11 Matthew not going to make too many design changes but too many design changes might be two weeks of like reviews and stuff so it it’s is interesting just for everyone listening home like we work with SeaMonster and like we actually were going through some of this just recently with a client where it’s it was just such a great experience to be able to say like hey the initial scope was we’re just going to replicate what you’d be doing and we’re actually no no we think what we had is crap we want you guys to lead the way a little bit with

13:35 what looks good and you have our creative license to do that and know that you’re going to be able to do that well but I know on your side it’s like okay well if they’re saying we have creative license is that real or is that like we’re still going to come back with 50 changes but you know that’s what contracts and stuff for so I really do appreciate that consultative approach making it work. Wes Well, that’s a challenge for any agency right? I mean it’s music to my ears to be told do what you do best you know I think I think

14:00 Wes that’s the perfect scenario for any agency it’s never really exactly that meaning it’s “do what you do best until I don’t like what you’re doing or do what you do best until I have a different idea” and the unique challenge there as the somebody who might be a creative director type role is figuring out am I interpreting things effectively and am I really listening to the client and and sort of are we chasing the same goal or do I just think that we are and at what point is the right point to

14:27 pivot away from a thing like when you get a read that the client’s not picking up what you’re laying down whatever that means and so it could be a design problem it could be a functional problem it could be a misunderstanding that client thought something would work one way and it you thought that they understood what you were talking about and and they don’t and so finding out in the right way where to sort of pivot or explain to the client this is how it works and this is why it works this way

14:52 and I think the why part is is always forgotten in a lot of conversations it’s sometimes it’s why it works because it has to work this way versus why it works because I’ve chosen to make it work this way. And I think presenting options but not only that but showing maybe what the outcome of those options potentially could be from your experience is just as important we can do it this way but the unique challenges here are these things that will either be a future implication for your staff or for challenges in

15:21 growth and things like that and I think trying my best to sort of say I can build whatever you want I have no problem figuring something out but should we or shouldn’t we and is that the responsible thing to do as a as a designer or developer or even as a you know thinking about your customers, and I think a lot of times especially when you’re talking to the bosses of a company they think that they’re their customer and they may have been many years ago when they started the company which is why they started the company

15:48 but they’ve grown up and they know only so much about their customers until the data can be related that shows them well actually your customers behave this way and like we’re working with a really big customer right now, who’s got, what I would call is a very simple audience meaning they’re low-quality internet users from a perspective of a high techsavvy user meaning what does add to cart mean why do I push this button and the thing goes in and then I give you money and like every time you message me

16:18 I think something is wrong and you know things things that you wouldn’t necessarily expect in a digital world, and they’ve chosen to make their website extremely simple as a result there’s a singular pathway to get to everything their customer service is a little more hightouch customer service because they’ve chosen to understand their audience very well and they know that that type of audience is their primary customer and so because they’ve made those choices they’ve built systems that surround those choices that allows them

16:46 to be most efficient and most effective and whereas like the Amazons of the world or something would look at this and go “No no no there’s a chatbot.” you know the customer needs to talk to a robot or Matthew everything goes into AI to help them with product discovery Wes like what was really challenging for me with this customer initially was being willing to accept that idea you know going like “No no these are internet users they all use the internet the same way and whatever.” And really this particular customer has

17:14 Wes narrowed down to 5% of the internet’s use cases which happen to be one of the more difficult type of use cases and so they’ve found methods to compensate for that and as a result reap the benefits of doing so, and the savviest users can use anything anyway and so we don’t really have to care about them nearly as much as the ones that have challenges using the website or that might need some coaching on how to put a credit card into a checkout process like things like that, but what we found is they

17:41 have you know well above industry standard conversion rates massive amounts of retention and people who treat their website like a brick-and-mortar business and I think they’ve niched themselves into an audience that appreciates that and you know every time I talk to them they’re ah we gained 5,000 more customers and oh we gained 7,000 more customers and all these and it’s like phenomenal numbers that are their acquisition process is just appealing to the right audience versus say just ads or just you know

18:11 Facebook or just social or whatever, and it’s a really interesting thing to see and had I not been willing to sort of step back and take a breath and kind of go why are you doing these things and how does how has it benefited you and what have you tried that would be more likely to be a 95% of the internet use customers methodologies, and they had answers to those questions and had I maybe not chosen to listen or been willing to understand I think we would have sort of would have been a lot more

18:37 executed poorly right and I think, I think that’s a big hurdle oftentimes as well is just setting your own ego aside as an agency owner who’s run the track a bunch of times like I’m not just repeating this process for everybody my goal is to make a unique experience even if I am having similarities amongst sites or pathways or processes of some sort Matthew Well it it’s so interesting too because I think on the outside we often like will do tearowns or look at websites and you and you ask wonder why somebody’s doing it this way in fact I

19:07 Matthew remember one of the very first websites I ever worked for was years ago it was the most it was built on a like Zen cart and it was like the most basic thing crappiest design and we all as like interns came in wanted to overhaul it and when then we saw the numbers and we’re like no that’s actually the user people want it to look like a catalog they’re expecting it to look like an online catalog not like a typical purchase experience that’s really interesting and then I think too with I think from our side from a

19:36 consultancy standpoint we sometimes I sometimes struggle with recognizing early on the type of client I have somebody who’s looking for me to tell them what to do somebody who’s looking for me to do what they want to do or somebody that’s in between because when I have people telling me what they want to do all the time I feel like they’re I’m working with one hand time behind my back because it’s only stuff that they think is going to work and then I can’t use any of my experience or knowledge so

20:02 I’m curious like how how do you manage some of that where somebody is just saying like, I love the example you just gave they obviously knew what they were talking about but in other instances when somebody’s saying “Hey we want you to go do XYZ.” And you’re like “Hey XYZ isn’t going to work or there’s a lot of reasons why XYZ tomorrow is going to be completely obsolete and you’re going to waste a ton of money.” Like how do you deal with a client who comes to you saying something like that? Wes Yeah, I mean, I guess if you can gain some

20:28 Wes courage and sort of ask, “Is this really what you want are you do you are you telling me what to do or are you telling me what’s worked?” and, sort of try to decipher that in a plain conversation that doesn’t involve intimidation or you know my way would be better or whatever sometimes works. Other times it it’s human nature right somebody’s hard-headed they have a specific pathway that they’ve already preconceived and it’s up to you as an agency or a consultant to sort of change their mind and the other option I think

20:59 that’s always available to all of us is well why don’t we AB test it or ABC test these concepts. I could be right and you could be right and who cares who’s right it’s who makes the most money that’s who wins all the time exactly and really if if we’re talking about pure commerce the person who has the highest conversion rate and earns the largest amount of revenue or the largest amount of profit relevant to their revenue is the winner, and they always will be and so a million-doll website that makes a half a

21:26 million dollars of profit is just as good as a $10 million website that makes a half a million dollars of profit except that you had to spend $9.5 million to make that half million dollars instead of 500 grand and so a lot of times as a developer or a designer we can sort of say well I think my concept will work and if I really want to go big and and put my money where my mouth is I’ll do this AB test for you for free and if it works then you pay me for it, and I’m sometimes willing to take those chances maybe not

21:55 always but I think the proof is always in the pudding right? If I do know what I’m talking about or my team is capable of building this thing that I think will work better and it does very few people will argue with works better and works better generally means more revenue or more profit or some combination of those two things. If it works the same that’s really where we run into an impass most of the time of well it works the same so what should we do next time, because your idea was just as good as

22:21 mine or mine was just as good as yours and so what do we try now but I think a lot of times that also helps build the trust in the context of next time around let’s try it your way or next time around let’s make your test the A and my test the B or something like that, and I think that plays very nicely and I think a lot of times in these conversations the other thing that we often fail to recognize is the level of jargon and expertise that we bring to the table is often overly complex and if

22:50 it just gets simplified a little bit sometimes it’s a matter of understanding it’s not really it’s just good customer service right? not a matter of is my idea better or worse than yours what somebody might be hearing from me is a bunch of words I don’t understand and then more revenue versus I think these tactics of step one two and three are most essential to gaining the revenue that you’re looking for and so sometimes I have to ask does it even make sense what I’m saying or have I left you with

23:18 questions, is there anything that I can clarify you know that kind of stuff and I think as long as you ask those questions people will then surrender the answer but if you never ask they’ll just sort of move on oftentimes and go “I thought I understood but I guess I don’t.” And that’s really where an agency I think gets into problems because it’s like “Well you said you understood or you appeared to understand and we executed and now we’re at the tip of the spear of your project budget and we need to fix this thing but I want

23:45 more money from you if you want more work from me.” And then we get into an argument or we get into a you know trust question or something and so it’s always a matter of we’re trading our time for money and if we spend a bunch of time in a useless way we need more money and nobody likes that, right? No customer wants to pay more for an experiment that’s going to fail and so you know I think the challenge I always find is making sure that everybody’s really clear on the scope how long it’s going to take where things can sort of deviate

24:15 if we discover something new along the way and why that has additional cost you know those kind of things and so I think a lot of agencies work like we do which is billing for time and materials versus on a flat project basis because I think what I found along the way is that I can build you a website for X amount of dollars often turns into not the website that I imagined we were building for X amount of dollars and we would rather have gotten Y for it and so you know a lot of things that I struggle with too

24:44 and where my ego really gets in the way oftentimes is I never want an unsuccessful project whatever that means and even if it means chewing into my own profits to bring success whatever that means to the customer I would rather do that than leave a project unfinished or incomplete or unsatisfying and really a lot of times too I think as as that guy that gets to decide whether I light all my money on fire or you know whatever just to have a happy client sometimes that’s the right move and sometimes that’s ultimate failure right

25:16 I mean if if we’re not profitable we’re not profitable and that’s always a problem and so I think there’s a fine balance to strike in the conversation about we’re building something that evolves over time and maybe or maybe not we know exactly what the destination is or we’ll figure it out as we get there and understanding that the client knows what they’re really in for and why things cost more i think on the other side too what we’ve run into with let’s say wellunded startups is a lot of times

25:43 let’s say they have a million dollars to spend and they want to put it all against their website or whatever the question I always have to ask in the beginning is well what are you going to do about after the website launches where are you going to generate traffic does some of this money go towards acquisition or advertising or sales channels of other kinds or whatever and and you know have you chosen to invest wisely in our services as well as the other things that will make our services successful especially when it comes to

26:09 I’m a new company with a novel product that nobody knows about and I haven’t been on Shark Tank and I don’t have TV commercials or web commercials or I’m not on Rogan or whatever like people need to find out about you and that’s oftentimes more expensive than your website you know if you’re Matthew And people those instances they often want to build this like really complex like the the the metaphor I use is like people want to build the Tesla right away but they don’t even know if the skateboard will work right like they

26:36 Matthew want to build these really complicated purchase experiences and how you’ve redeemed points and all this stuff but they actually have like zero sales or very little sales and so they have very little validation from their audience about what experience is going to work for them well and Wes I think it’s the like don’t put barriers between your customers and their wallet and yourself right and so the fastest a safe assumption often times to make is the fastest chance to check out is the highest acquisition or the highest

27:03 Wes conversion that you can make right if I can go from point A to cart to checkout to money oftentimes that’s more successful just because of its lack of complexity and it’s not always true but many times it is and so the real question there is then how long does that take somebody if we’ve get a 90-second decision-making process from an average customer can we assure that we’re educating the customer for the things they care about that increase their value understanding of the product or the service or whatever can we do it

27:35 in that amount of time and if so are we successful or not other times there’s a reason for complexity you know if you look at average companies that do things like meal plans or you know supplements that are for people with specific health issues or things that are like solving a unique problem for each of their audience members there isn’t just one solution for that customer just put this widget in your cart and you’ll be fine. A lot of times it’s do you have allergies or do you have a specific problem that

28:02 we should steer you towards a unique product or a a secondary service of some kind and then I think the other side of it is measuring well if we sell 10 products and we’re getting a customer to convert to one can we get them to convert to two or three and how much complexity is necessary to accomplish increasing our average order value along the way that takes away from that 90-second window of decision-making process and are we attempting to increase an order value at the sacrifice of conversion and those things play out

28:31 nicely or are we you know sacrificing total revenue because we want less customers who buy bigger amounts of stuff and and I think the answer is unique for any company but most companies are all about volume I want more customers with larger order values with smaller acquisition costs and higher conversion rates Matthew Right right yeah that’s that’s interesting I hadn’t really maybe thought of it that quite that way of it being I guess you think of it so often as just such a quick little thing like a cart fly out or a

29:00 Matthew quick popup to add this but it is actually a friction point and can drive down your overall like sales volume, so you might be getting higher AOV customers but you’re not actually making as much money as you would have potentially with that friction point Wes Something we’ve chosen to focus on as well, that’s kind of a non-glamorous point but I think also increases things like SEO quality and conversion rates is building accessible websites so meaning WCAG compliance is the website jargon ADA compliance would be the

29:34 Wes brick and mortar jargon making sure that folks with disabilities can use the site using whatever assistive tools that they’re using and so that could be navigating without a mouse like a keyboard it could be a screen reader reading information back to you, and the crazy thing about the United States anyway is that it’s a bit of the wild west right now every different circuit court has different rulings on how things should be accessible we don’t have a blanket law that covers everything we do have a standard that

30:00 covers everything but the application of that standard is then leveraged uniquely in latigious circumstances as well depending on whether you’re from Florida or California, right and so as an agency we started to encounter people who were being sued for accessibility or lack thereof, and as we started to look into the number of clients or whatever if you think about yourself – you wear glasses so you have a slight vision impairment, so do I, you might be hard of hearing or you might

30:28 have arthritis and those are simple problems to solve for make a website more visually capable of being consumed you know make a website navigable with a keyboard because that’s easier for your hands to use than a mouse but then we think about people with severe disabilities as well: blindness, deafness,, inability to use their hands at all and you know we have to make a site navigable in that way as well and so a lot of times what that does is it increases the semantic nature of the code but also applies things like closed

31:00 captioning to videos so the advantage I get there is when it’s midnight and I’m shopping for something I can actually listen to the audio without waking up my family you know there’s benefit for fully aabled users that I think gains you an advantage in small conversion factors and really the goal for most folks that approach us for these type of services is to prevent themselves from being sued, and there’s a lot of sort of commonality amongst the lawsuits these days I think the stat that my expert told me was like a lawsuit every

31:30 hour basically every day of the year is is coming about and they seem to move in waves like this month is jewelry next month is supplements the month after that’ll be coffee and so what ends up happening is these lawyers who have found a way to make a revenue stream on these type of lawsuits will hire disabled people to browse websites until they find flaws and then they’ll leverage a lawsuit where the lawyer gets the money the disabled person may or may not truly have been your customer but where that person comes from is a place

31:58 of reality something like 25% of Americans have some form of a disability whether it’s something as slight as like a stigmatism or something as extreme as not being able to use their hands and so if you just put that in greedy business terms why would we give up 25% of our revenue stream for a site that’s not accessible if you put that in we can make the internet a better place terms it’s I’ve now built a website that has its doors open to every single person who wants to use it whether I believe

32:25 they’re my customer or not, and the extrinsic benefits of that are better SEO slightly better user interfaces on the site a color model that’s interpretable by everybody that has better wayfinding and all of those things benefit conversion and acquisition along the way as well and have the benefit of preventing lawsuits that’s such an eloquent way to put Matthew I love how you laid that out I can as you’re saying that I’m like this is going to be an amazing clip of how you’re pushing for that for for that compliance, Wes I think as

32:53 Matthew we kind of wrap up I’d love to hear from you maybe like a simple thing that you’re seeing in the subscription space that brands are doing to either improve conversion or improve retention whether we’re talking something like an inportal experience or how they’re looking at you know positioning the buy box or technical experiences like anything you can pull from from your branding and design background just to kind of put on everybody’s radar that they should be thinking about or paying attention to

33:19 for this year to improve subscriptions Wes I think I could get into the weeds on that stuff all day long because I think in some cases it’s very industry specific but I think there’s a lot of blanket things that can apply to anybody that I think aren’t huge challenges either and so one of the platforms that we work with most heavily is Recharge subscriptions and they’re pretty focused on retention obviously as a subscription first style business model let’s say you’re a meal plan or a supplement

33:47 Wes retailer and you want repeat customers because you have a depletable product, or even a beer vendor or something you want somebody to buy your beer over and over again it’s making sure that, again getting into the cart where the user understands what they’re they’re buying and the frequency with which they’re buying it is is important so step one is you know you can buy a six-pack and your cost is $1 per bottle or you can buy a 12-pack and your cost is 80 cents per bottle so there’s value in gaining more, I guess and buying

34:17 less frequently I think a lot of subscription sellers as well are starting to realize that if I can ship somebody twice as much every other week the shipping cost that’s chewing up my margins is easy to deplete, it’s better for the world it’s better for the customer, and finding that right spot where the customer has enough shelf space in their home whatever that means, you know an affinity for the product, I think is a fine balance to strike because 12 beers versus two bottles of vitamins takes up two different amounts

34:49 of space or you can only sell so many mail order laundry detergents and there’s probably a shipping volume where you’ve passed the 50 pound mark and it becomes egregiously expensive to ship at that volume as well so there’s this balance between what’s the right frequency and what’s the right amount of product where a customer doesn’t get tired of it and then I think after that it’s all about the post-purchase experience so imposing things like SMS communication when a user would rather have that than email I think a lot of

35:15 people have flooded inboxes as well and so something like a simple short your order is about to ship change it if you need to, which is a functionality that recharge has, I’ve seen a very large uptick and I mean the the stats are crazy like an SMS is open 99% of the time where an email might be open 3% of the time so you can at least be assured you’ve got attention, and it also means that you can be more frequently communicating with your customer about things they can change things more easily, at a lower friction point and

35:47 then I think thinking about what are the steps you can do to retain a customer do you give them a benefit for being a subscriber like a discount do you offer things like loyalty points or cash back and I tend to like the cash back because it makes sense to most people it’s easier yeah it’s easy to understand spend $10 get a dollar of credit and we’ll automatically apply that for you so you never have to think about it and that’s the margin you were willing to give them anyway because it’s a frequent

36:10 order or whatever Matthew right Wes I think asking customers who are leaving your subscription if they know they can skip some time or delay it for a certain amount of time I think a lot of folks are still, ignorant to some of those things and so if you provide a little bit of hey I really don’t want you to leave but I can push this out for four months when you’re coming back from vacation or you’ve depleted what you’ve got is it really a question of do you like my product or is it that I have way too much of it or that I don’t want it

36:40 Wes right now because I want to try somebody else’s pretzels or whatever it is, I think a lot of folks don’t focus on that level of retention and then maybe the final step to that process is reacquiring the customer that’s always already given you their trust you know like a a winback-style campaign of how can I get you to come back is there is it a question of value or or price or is it a question of you had too much and so you stopped for a while and then forgot to come back and so finding a way to

37:08 sort of gently remind somebody without sort of being super annoying, I think is kind of brings it full circle and a lot of folks focus on the pre-purchase acquisition but not the post-purchase retention as much as they should, and again it’s the same thing like we’ve got what’s the fastest way to let a customer manipulate their order in a way that they feel satisfied with how can we allow them to add on special products can we surprise and delight them somewhere along the way for their loyalty whether that’s giving them a

37:37 gift or cash back or just saying thank you, and being personal about it you know not like “Dear insert name here thank you for buying stuff.” You know making sure that your marketing’s on point when you’re talking to those customers and that you know you develop the best digital relationship that you can but I think a lot of these things are really simple to implement but it’s a stack of a whole bunch of stuff that looks intimidating when it’s stacked up it. Matthew It really, it really is but I think

38:03 Matthew I mean you I mean I feel like you just laid out like a lot of just subscription fundamentals but that the problem is is that people get you know we come a little myopic in what we’re focusing on and we forget some simple touch points i mean the only thing I would just add as like a cherry on top of what you said is like that becomes cyclical right like when you’re starting to collect cancellation reasons and testing win backs you can take learnings from why people leave and apply that to like how

38:27 you’re designing the upfront experience to improve that how you’re improving those customer engagements and stuff but but I do think that it’s really just comes down to focusing on fundamentals and especially with that example you gave of understanding your customer like earlier in the episode talking about a brand that just understood how their audience shops online like just simple things like that are just so profound within the experience but mastering them means that you could master subscriptions Wes Well and I think when you

38:54 Wes think about the ecosystem in Shopify anyway if you’re a Shopify user it’s figuring out with the connected systems that I’ve got my subscription platform my marketing platform or you know ESP, you know my Shopify customer base or whatever that’s stored in Shopify how can I segment those people into groups where I understand their behaviors not you know for the most part all of us do the same thing on the internet, you know we behave very similarly but we all have unique affinities unique use cases

39:23 for products it could be simply people who buy every six months and people who buy every 12 months it could be big and small spenders, it could be somebody who appears to be a family versus an individual, you know and some of that’s unique to your product line but a lot of it’s unique just to humans, right? Do we have a piece of demographic data that isn’t invasive to the customer to understand how we could better market to them and more importantly keep them satisfied as a customer, I mean, I think

39:49 the internet puts an interesting barrier in between us and other people in a way where we don’t think we need to get to know them, they can just be some anonymous number that’s worth some amount of money to me and their demographic data is something like spent a lot spent a little spent a lot is more valuable to me than spent a little and so I’ll market to the spent a lot people more frequently or needs a discount or doesn’t need a discount oftentimes people who only shop via discounts are happening because you’re only offering

40:15 them discounts and that’s the only touch point that you have with them and so finding ways to differentiate your audience beyond sort of the basic demographic of money or gender or something is important I think behavioral demographics are much more important today to a business that wants to differentiate itself amongst other businesses that probably all have similar products and then you know at the end of the day figuring out where does your product stack with the competition you know sort of again the

40:43 business 101 stuff am I good better or best compared to anybody else that can buy something similar to my thing and what’s the thing that differentiates me in the messaging that I’m giving to my customers, that convinces them that I’m the highest value for them for whatever reason and so I think it’s simple competitive analysis understanding your pricing model finding areas where you can sacrifice revenue without sacrificing profit you know increasing, reducing shipping frequencies or making bulk packs or

41:15 getting customers to buy in a different way potentially could be the thing that makes you the leader in the space versus just a competitor I guess, Matthew It’s fantastic stuff Wes, I feel like everything you say just makes me want to ask you five more questions we could keep talking for hours and hours but I think we’ll put a pin in it for now I want to thank you for coming on the show, for anybody interested, what’s a what’s the best place to find you and learn more about SeaMonster? Wes So you can

41:43 Wes always find me on LinkedIn, but seamonsterstudios.com is the best place to engage with us, we’ve also got a director of sales and partnerships Paul who is always at the fingertips of an email or a phone call, our numbers are on the site our contact form will get you right to us but, we try to respond within minutes of any time that somebody reaches out but, hit us up anytime we also participate in a lot of industry events so you’ll probably see us around somewhere along the way, you know Matt

42:11 as well so when you’re working with Matt and you want to work with an agency, I’m sure he’ll sometimes point you our way as well if we’re the right fit for the job so, you can always come to Matt and, he’ll find the best fit for you as well Matthew no you guys are fantastic just absolutely fantastic well thanks again for coming on the show and for everyone listening and watching thanks for tuning in to another dose of subscription prescription stay tuned for next week to get another dose to help

42:34 Matthew you grow your subscription [Music] program that’s it for today thank you for tuning in please subscribe so that you can get notified when new episodes come out each week on Tuesdays [Music]