The E-Comm Show
The E-Comm Show
Human-Obsessed CRO: Enavi’s Framework for Shopify Growth | EP. 219
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Most Shopify brands blame ads when revenue dips, but the real leak is usually on-site.
In this 219th episode of The E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff talks with Sheldon Adams, Head of Strategy at Enavi, about Human-Obsessed CRO and the Intra-Site Funnel framework that pinpoints exactly where customers drop off. Learn how to use benchmarks, multi-signal research, and disciplined testing sprints to drive repeatable conversion growth without gimmicks.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why CRO tactics fail without customer insight
- How Intra-Site Funnel metrics reveal the true bottleneck
- CRO testing sprints that compound over time
- How better on-site performance improves paid results
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Connect with the Guest
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🌐 Website: https://www.enavi.co/
We design it so it's not just like, hey, we're going to come jam a bunch of gimmicky spin to win and announcement bars in there and then totally ruin your brand esthetic. So we can be a little more nuanced than that.
Narrator:Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I am your host, Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!
Andrew Maff:Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Ecomm Show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Sheldon Adams, who is the head of strategy over at Enavi. Sheldon, how you doing, buddy? Ready for good show?
Sheldon Adams:Yeah, I'm fired up to do this. These are always fun. So ready to get going!
Andrew Maff:Super excited to have you on the show. I love, love, love, love, talking about CRO because it always It bothers me how little brands actually take it into account. So I know we're going to get super deep into that, but first I like to do, kind of do the stereotypical thing, kind of give you the floor, tell us a little bit about your background, how you gotten started with a Enavi, and we'll take them there.
Sheldon Adams:Yeah. So I guess, of short version, my entire professional career with CRO happened accidentally, like pretty much everyone didn't really set out to do this was working in sports, working in E commerce, covid happened. That was a very bad place to be all of a sudden. And so, with a little bit of serendipity, met up with Anthony, founder of Enavi, joined there, and we spent the last four years trying to blow this thing up and be as big of a voice in the E commerce, CRO community as we possibly can and do stuff like this, just so we can kind of evangelize and share what we think are good ideas that people can profit from.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, nice. Well, glad we can help. So Tell, tell me about some of these good ideas that people can profit from. Well, tell me a little about, like, the approach, and, you know, kind of what, what it looks like working with Enavi.
Sheldon Adams:Yeah, so I guess I could, we could be here for a very long time. Short version is we, we center our approach in the language of human obsessed like anyone who spends any time in the ecomm space. Do something about CRO it's really superficial. Like, it's really like, hey, add this bit of urgency. Add social proof. Do this little tactical thing, and that will generate some growth. And like, yeah, there's some truth on that, especially if you've never done any of that before. But there's really short runway for any of that to stay successful, to drive an impact. So we increasingly care less and less about like an individual test or an individual concept. It is much more about getting to a truth of like the hell makes customers act like, what are they? What are they motivated by? What else are they considering? What gives them anxiety, like, what what stops them when they're on the doorstep? And the better answers we get to that process or to those questions makes our process go so much better, like, every idea we put forward is suddenly just so much more successful, more likely to hit. And then you can also take it and apply it like in ads, in email, and influencer your content like it's all. It creates an actual like ecosystem you can profit from. Versus like the site is this isolated thing that you can use to try to juice up AOV in small quantities. So that's the way too broad and expansive overview. But anyone who works with us, they should feel that pretty much immediately, if not, I need to have some conversations with my team.
Andrew Maff:Yeah. So tell me a little bit about the conversation you have with brands, right? Because so conversion rate optimization to me, the mean to me, like, obnoxiously required like, and it blows my mind how many brands don't focus on it. They spend an arm and a leg plowing away at paid advertising, and then, you know, either the messaging on the ads alone is not aligned, or to your point once they get to the website, it's just a horrible experience. And they're like, oh, ads don't work. When, in the reality is, actually it's your website that doesn't work. What's the how do you you know? And then in some scenarios, you can show them like, Hey, if you can improve your conversion rate even, or even just on these micro conversions, if you can improve this and that by x percent, you know that that makes a world of a difference. Sometimes it's the difference of millions of dollars a year. How do you have that conversation with brands and actually get them to act on essentially, what is asset building, as opposed to direct ROI?
Sheldon Adams:Boy, that that can go a lot of ways. I wish I could say, we always knock that one in the park. Truth be told, I think it requires a certain kind of mindset with a team, and a certain level of maturity and within a brand. But to be honest, I the best thing we found and the best conversations and relationships we've had. It's always like, Hey, we're coming from the data like we you touched on like, we don't really look at conversion or like, we use what we call an interest site funnel, which is basically a conversion rate chopped up to individual parts. And we can provide like sub conversion level metrics that we have, like this huge meta analysis with like, hundreds of stores in there, so we can have a really strong way of saying, like, hey, add to cart rate should be 12 to 18% from people viewing your product, doing a product page. If you're below that, we got some work to do if you're above that, that is fantastic, but it gives us some truth and kind of objectivity. And over time, we can say, like, hey, generally, we want to see your paid performance up here or not. Like, I use a really good example I use all the time, paid social product view to add to carts, like going from the get to a product page and then add it as a cart. Like, looking at that particular behavior, if that is below 5% for paid social that is when everyone's like, man, these campaigns are just not really working. We can't efficiently do this. We had no kidding, like 3% of users add to cart. Clearly something is off there. Like we need to dive in and get that up. And if we do suddenly everything in ads manager, they call it now, is going to look so much better, and it's going to be more cheaper. You can push budgets harder, like all of that works better, but you're focusing on entirely the wrong thing. So if you can get it, get some bit of those truths and those kernels, and especially up front, like on our audit process, on the before we even work with them, we can identify that give them like, Hey, if you go from 12% better on this, that gets an extra 75k of incremental revenue growth in a month. And that usually is enough to get the antenna up and like, Oh, damn. All right, maybe we should really strongly consider this, and then we can drill down and pair that, like, super data heavy approach with all of the qualitative things I mentioned before, like really understanding why a customer works, and that, like, when we do suddenly everything is we look like geniuses, and it's just a nice, repeatable process that we're really happy with.
Andrew Maff:So tell me about the process, right? Like, obviously you have, like those heat maps, scroll tracking platforms, like the hot jars of VWs, things like that of the world, the Microsoft clarities. So are you leveraging that just to see user behavior, or is it a different approach that kind of evaluates messaging and esthetic, or kind of a mix?
Sheldon Adams:I'll give you the cop out answer and say it's kind of a mix. But ideally, when we're the best scenarios we have is when, like the analytics data suggests there's a problem on a PDP, for instance, the heat map data is also kind of speaking that same language. And then we're looking at like, customer support logs, like, hey, we have no idea how to select the right variant of this product. There's a lot of confusion there. It all kind of points comes to a head in the same spot. That's when we're like, All right, we really need to test a solution to solve this problem. So process wise, like, yeah, we're doing a lot of like the stereotypical key maps, click maps, post purchase surveys, those sorts of things, but then just combining them together. So it's never, or very rarely, a single data point or single insight that is pushing us forward. Usually we can get two or three, and then we're like, Oh, damn Yeah, this is entirely the right path. Let's really try to move forward here.
Andrew Maff:Yeah. Is there a platform you prefer to do kind of your heat map, scroll tracking, AB testing with, or do you just use whatever the brand is leveraging?
Sheldon Adams:For the most part, we're pretty tool agnostic, like we go we've worked with everything. At this point. We have our I love working with convert, just to give them a shout out, like they're they've been responsible for us for years, but like we've done intelligence, like we've done shoplift, like I've explored visually, and on the heat map side, we've used everything. So it's kind of, we have our tools, but I'm pretty well the opinion, like it's, it's rarely the tool that unlocks it. At this point, there's enough parody. It's entirely like our thought processes.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, interesting. Couple minutes ago. So you mentioned, like, add to cart rates things like that. So those would be kind of your standard benchmarks to look at, right? How do you, how do you have these conversations with brands around benchmarks? Because an apparel brands Add to Cart rate versus a replacement water filter is going to be wildly different. So what's the how do you kind of evaluate benchmarks on a on a per industry basis?
Sheldon Adams:We have some rules of thumb. I would love to get to a spot where I'd really trust like they like, have some real sharp industry verticals. Generally, it's like a proxy of some like, known quirks, like fashion apparel Add to Cart means comparatively very little there relative to other industries. People tend to use it as a almost like a wish list feature, and then they'll have really high card payment once they're there relative to other industries. So we kind of have some graduated like, Hey, if you're in this space, yeah, we expect, expect PDP to cart. It's going to be high. There's probably going to be underperformance at the next step. Similarly, we have a couple of clients we work with that have a really high AOV, like, 500 to 1000 bucks. Yeah? Like, yeah. We're probably not going to be hitting the high end of the target range. We're just going to try to get you to claw your way to the bottom. And that should be enough to be really effective. And like we've seen that where brands come to us with like a three and a half 4% Add to Cart rate, after a year and a half of working with us, they're suddenly not the doors of a 10, and it's just fundamentally different game, but usually it's a proxy of some industry stuff, and then price point really calibrates expectations there. And when we do that, people like, okay, yeah, they just like the safety of we've looked at a lot of stuff, they're feel like they're kind of winging it, or don't know what to compare themselves to. So we can give them a little bit of insider knowledge they can't generally get elsewhere.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, what's the what's the process? So do you, basically, you know, you're using the heat map scroll tracking, you're kind of doing your own evaluations through analytics and things like that, and then do you just develop, like, a test schedule of like, okay, here's the things we're going to test because, correct me, I'm wrong, but you typically don't want to have overlapping tests, because then you mess up, you end up with kind of muddy data.
Sheldon Adams:Yep, yeah, that is the way you described it, as broadly active. We generally work on, I won't get super technical on this, but we basically do quarterly sprints of like a testing plan built around one of those. We call them metrics on fire. It's basically one step in your purchase journey that is most underperforming. Say it's PDP to card or cart to checkout. We're going to throw as much testing as possible at that generally, rams that are sufficiently large to be talking with us and for it to make sense, they have the capacity to where, like, we can run three to four tests that are independent of each other, not conflicting results, and get, like, conclusive answers to those things in a month. So, yeah, you know, throw nine to 12 tests at it in a quarter, trust the results, and then be like, we try not to get too far in advance. Some people are like, hey, we'll schedule out a whole year of AB testing. I don't like doing that. It just it's, you get too opinionated, as opposed to, like, Okay, we need to react based on this finding. Like, yeah, this is new. This surprised us. Let's take and run with it, versus just like, Oh, that's not the agenda. We'll get to it eventually. So yeah, that's, that's the general gist of, like, how we would approach it. And it really tends to get a couple winning tests a quarter that alone could be 20 grand in incremental revenue that just kind of get compounded as they get implemented into the live experience.
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Andrew Maff:And so with working with you guys, you do this on like, per test basis you do on an hourly basis, like, what's, what's the kind of you don't have to get too deep into it if you don't. But, like, general pricing concept, if someone were to work with you.
Sheldon Adams:Yeah, for us, it's, it's an ongoing, like, monthly, fixed fee that covers everything. Like is, there's some things where we. We can kind of bolt on different aspects for more like on the dev implementation side resources, but for the most part, it's monthly, monthly arrangements that we just stretch out. It's like, generally, six to 12 months to get started. And then, to be honest, most of our clients that work with us, it's like, year and a half, two years at least. And like, we're very diligent on driving the ROI throughout that, so we're progressively going to, like, really higher order things. So it's we design it. So it's not just like, hey, we're going to come jam a bunch of gimmicky spin to win and announcement bars in there, and then totally ruin your brand esthetic. So we can be a little more nuanced than that.
Andrew Maff:So fantastic segue, because that was literally my next question. Of like, there's you come across these websites where you could tell whoever's running it is either working with a horrendous CRO agency, or they have Googled a lot of CRO stuff and did arguably no research around it, and so they loaded up with the spin to win stuff, the countdown timers, the exclusivity, the thing that drives me crazy, the one that I've always hated since they were ever released, is the little social proof pop ups like, So and so purchased this in like, Tempe, Arizona. I hate those things. So, like, the what of those ridiculously, like kitschy CRO things, which ones are, like, your least favorite, where you're like, just don't use that.
Sheldon Adams:I honestly like the so and so from Albuquerque New Mexico just bought this thing. Like, did they really like, come on? Like, I that's the sort of stuff that I really don't like to go in for. I mean, there's a lot of I have seen so many little like apps or widgets or whatever that generally, it's like on the product page that get layered in there that all they do is like, frankly, break the experience and then claim credit if they somehow manage to purchase that, pretty much anything in there. I loathe. I try to bring data with it to be like, hey, I can prove this didn't work, but all of that stuff really drives me nuts. And I think there's a short term win for a very long term, like it just feels icky. And I know brand is kind of like a it's supposed to be a secondary concern for CRO people. I'm very sensitive on it, like I want anyone who cares about that and works with us to be they feel like we can still provide that, like, glossy, high dollar experience, and we're not degrading that. So yeah, like, I'm very sensitive to it and generally, like, I want the least invasive version of any of this possible. So when I find those that are like, yeah, it gets the whole spectrum. Like, am I like, a casino right now? This is terrible.
Andrew Maff:Yeah. I mean, there's a huge difference between, like, let's say, like, a premium, like high end fashion brand, versus, you know, your supplement brand that has a sale every hour. So it's like, those approaches are obviously very different, and they can crush brands if it just comes off like, now it's cheap sort of thing. Where do you how do you figure out drawing the line of like, all right, there's just too much stuff going on. We don't need to incorporate all these things. Like, at what point do you say like? All right, this is in a semi decent spot. And now we're, you know, more AB testing, structural changes or things like that?
Sheldon Adams:Yeah, it's a nuanced answer. I think the story point, as always, it gets it's data centric for us. Like, if we see a weakness in a part of the funnel that clues us in from there, like we can start to get surgical and, like, get some real precise event tracking. And like, heat maps, click maps, what's actually interacted with that's in a high, highly visible spot, if something's above the fold on a PDP, and no one's interacting with it. Like, the hell's it doing there? Like, why? Why is it taking a valuable real estate? So we can start to hypothesize there, but to be honest, it is usually a ticket. Reductive approach, I would probably eight times out of 10 prefer to remove something on a page versus an add it, because most sites are somehow still never designed for mobile. They're still very much like they look great on desktop. You look at it on a 390, by 844, resolution, and it is like this is so JAM PACKED I can't really see what's important versus what's not. And I would rather just clear the junk out of there and do so in a smart way, but a way that just gives us either. Breathing space, or the ability to put more important things there.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, that brings me back to those stupid social proof pop ups on mobile. They're horrendous. I'm like, they're it's taking up like 25% of your screen. Yeah, I digress, clearly not sponsored by them. The one of the things I was interested in so is there like, a minimum amount of traffic that you recommend in order to do true AB testing. Because, like, you know if, if you don't have enough traffic coming in, you'd have to run a test forever to actually get some valuable data behind it. So is there kind of a lay of the land that you usually try to set?
Sheldon Adams:Yeah, it's. It can vary again, as always, give the crap answer if it's most of our tests we've run for like, call it 50,000 session or 50,000 users, however, many sessions across couple variants. So once you get into the 150k to 200k users a month. That's when it really starts to make sense. Once you get above that, it is a no brainer. I mean, like, we work with clients are doing, like, millions and millions of users a month. Yeah, and it's really, I'm not, like, we are probably not the right agency, flat out, if someone's like, Hey, we're doing 100 grand a month, and we're really trying to figure this thing out. But I also understand, like, there is value in CRO at that point, or at least research that is CRO adjacent. Most people it's like, Hey, you just got to like, add traffic until you get to that point. And I think that advice might have worked, like, five years ago, and now it's really hard to scale traffic in that way if you don't know your customer. So it is. It's tougher to do. It's tougher justifiable program. But I'm always like, whenever anyone in that ecosystem hits me up as a brand, like, hey, we may not be able to help. I will spoon feed you all of our stuff and make it so that you can try to, like, be self service and, like, just feast in the meantime, versus like, Nope, can't touch it because the app there's, yeah, there's definitely, like, a threshold where it makes sense where it doesn't. But the work knowing more about your customer is kind of foundationally, just like good marketing that people forgot as everything got so siloed. But yeah, you can do that up front. There's still a huge benefit, even if you're not able to read your rigorously AB test everything.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, oh, I just blanked and was gonna ask you said something. I was like, Oh, that's a very interesting point the Oh, so we were talking about the amount of traffic coming to a site. Oh, the traffic side. So sorry. So the, at what point do you kind of evaluate the quality of the traffic being driven to the website? Because, you know, your sem team could turn on a Google ads at max clicks, and you're getting a ton of crap, or you're getting your social ads teams just doing link clicks and landing page views, and it's like they're not there to convert so it just tanks your conversion rate, and at that point, it's obviously affecting the work you're doing and affecting the data you're getting. So like, how do you kind of evaluate that the traffic coming in is that of a quality for you to get true, tested data?
Sheldon Adams:Yes, that's great point. I've seen that many a time, suddenly, usually the scenario is like someone floods traffic somehow, because they're optimized on a single KPI, the global store conversion rate tanks, and then we get the Slack message of, like, what the hell happened? Like, what, what we do? What, what broke so like, for that reason, like we tend to maintain, usually in GA for some custom dashboards, we'll go by source and medium and try to map that out so we have, similarly to how we have like expected ranges for all those funnel metrics globally, we'll do the same thing by channel, and we'll expect like, email or SMS to be really freaking high for most of those, whereas paid social, we expect it to be a little bit lower. And then we can kind of see, like, hey, if something is deviating, it's really easy to say, okay, suddenly PDP to cart rate for paid social is rock bottom. What changed? And it's more of just finding the deviation from it, and then we can go have that conversation. Practically be like, hey, it's not the whole site. Direct users, email users, high intent users are getting through it is specifically isolated to this segment of people, and that leads to more productive conversations with a with a client or whoever is in charge of that, like, oh, okay, nothing's broken. We just need to figure out what the hell happened there.
Andrew Maff:Yeah. It makes sense. Sheldon, thank you so much for your time, buddy. I appreciate it. Learned a lot today. Thank you so much. I'd love to give the floor tell everyone where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Enavi.
Sheldon Adams:Yeah. So anyone who wants to really dive deep on this, hit me up on LinkedIn, like that's our biggest social platform. We love to do our deep dives there. Anthony and I post probably daily at this point. So love, love interacting, love chatting. There, beyond that, like we have, we call our Shopify CRO upgrade kit, where a lot of the stuff that I tangentially touched on today is compiled so you can really dive deep. Steal our like, SOPs, some of our reports and things that if you're like a growing e comm brand, it's not quite at that stage for CRO, it's a great spot to like, hey, steal our stuff. Use it, ask us questions. I don't care. I'd rather people do that and start making smarter decisions than just so I'll get you the link to them, because I don't remember the exact one off top of my head, but we have that otherwise. I mean, yeah, you know, Enavi, we're pretty much everywhere, but we are phenomenally receptive to anyone who just wants to do this well, even if it doesn't make sense, like we have our audit process that is robust as hell, and we are just always down to help, like as anyone who's doing it in good faith and really wants to learn and grow, hit us up. Someone will be happy to chat with you and try to make their life a little bit easier.
Andrew Maff:Beautiful. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you again. Everyone who tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do usual, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff, whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the E commshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us. See you all next time, have a good one!
Narrator:Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to Ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by bluetusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to Blue tusker.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show you.
