Scaling paid ads isn’t just about better creatives or media buying tweaks.

Often, the real unlock is what happens after the click.

In this episode of eCommerce Evolution, Brett sits down with Paddy McLarnon, founder of PM Digital Designs, to break down full funnel CRO; from advertorial landing pages to value stacking to subscription optimization.

If your CAC is creeping up, your conversion rate feels capped, or your subscription churn is eating margin, this episode is packed with practical insights to help you scale profitably.

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

—

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction

(05:01) The Biggest CRO Mistakes Brands Make

(07:42) Ad-to-Lander Congruency

(09:36) Advertorials & Listicles: Real Examples

(16:56) Offer Stacking & Value Perception

(19:55) Using Customer Surveys to Build Better Copy

(25:13) Why Conversion Rate Can Mislead You

(29:27) How to Hit a 72% Subscription Take Rate

(36:48) Subscription Offer Breakdown: Real Examples

(46:10) Buy Box Optimization & Pricing Psychology

(50:13) Email, SMS & Follow-Up Flows

—

Connect With Brett:

1. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
2. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
3. Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
4. Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact

Relevant Links:

1. Paddy’s LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/paddy-mclarnon-cro-for-shopify-brands-2055ba124

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

You know, brands always say like, "Oh,

the conversion rate's the

problem." It's like, "Well,

we could just drop the price if you

want to fix that. " Or as you said,

just turn off all top of

funnel ads or whatever.

But it is all about adjusting for

what the business metrics are.

Well, hello and welcome to another edition

of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast.

I'm your host, Brett

Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce.

And today we're talking

about full funnel CRO,

how to optimize for

full funnel experiences.

We're going to talk about

subscription brands.

We're going to talk about CRO for

non-subscription brands. With takeaways,

it's going to be a lot of fun as well.

And so my guest is Patty McLaren,

and I met him,

got to hang with him a couple times

actually at the D2C Growth Summit.

Once in New York City, recently in Miami.

Dude's presentation was killer, just

chock full of good ideas. He's also Irish.

So his accent is amazing.

You're going to love listening

to him for a variety of reasons.

And so he is the founder

of PM Digital Designs,

and we are going to get after it. So

with that, Patty, how's it going, man,

and welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Brett. Thank

you for having me. I am amazing.

Cannot complain.

Love it, man. I love this

topic. And as you know,

more of an ad guy and we focus

a lot on YouTube and Google,

but we certainly love Meta

and lean into Meta as well.

So I love the excitement of getting more

traffic and closing more deals and more

new customers and things like that.

But often the greatest to unlock,

the greatest unlock for

the next level of spend,

the greatest unlock for the next level

of growth isn't with ad tweaks, right?

It's not. With media buying or creative,

although those things

are extremely important,

could be the next level of growth can be

unlocked by CRO and better landing page

experience,

better full funnel CRO so that

you can do more with the people

visiting your site.

And so you want to kind of just

briefly explain to people what you do,

and then we're going to dig into

all kinds of tips and ideas.

Yeah. So pretty good intro there from you,

but we are a full funnel

CRO agency and we work with

all types of seven, eight, some

nine figure e-commerce brands.

And I guess the whole goal for

us is just to, as you mentioned,

kind of make sure we have that ad

to post-click or as people call it,

landed page congruency. I think

it's definitely a neglected area.

And there's a lot of, I suppose,

focus coming into it now as people

have realized that Meta and all the ad

platforms, especially Google as well,

are just getting more and more expensive.

So how do we actually optimize for

that and how do we drive the cost as

physically those possible? And we can do

that through the post-click experience.

So we focus on the entire thing and yeah,

I'm excited to kind of chat on that

and give away some of the secret sauce

as they say.

Love it. Love it. Yeah. Because

I mean, really getting the click,

getting someone to stop, pay

attention, getting the click,

that's really only half the battle, right?

What do you do with that visitor

after they visit your site?

I'll give you kind of just a physical

world example because I think this is a

good illustration and maybe

will help us reframe and say,

"I'm probably not putting enough time

and energy and attention into CRO." Have

you ever done trade shows, Pat?

You ever had a booth at a trade show

or I'm sure you've been to trade shows,

but have you ever had a booth?

We've done small ones,

but probably nothing really to

the extent of a proper trade show,

but I get where you're going

with this. I've been to plenty.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so we've done trade

shows and depending on what

B2B trade show you're going

to, maybe you're dropping 15 to 30 grand,

maybe you're dropping a

hundred grand to be there.

And it's always a really

interesting contrast.

I see some booths where the booths are

beautiful, good messaging, everything,

but the people in the booth are just

kind of sitting and they're not engaging

with people that are passing by. Or worse,

they're on their phone or not paying

attention or maybe the booth is empty and

they're like, "Man,

you just spent a whole lot of money to

be in front of this traffic and you're

doing nothing with it.

" Then you see other booths where the

people at the booth are engaged and

they're talking to people, they're

stopping people as they walk by,

they may be handing things out.

Maybe they got some people from the booth

that are out milling in the crowd and

then they've got a good follow-up system.

And some trade show booths,

people collect the names and

then they do nothing with it.

And so it's just one of those things

where we've got to think about this

holistically, right?

The biggest expense we have is our

paid media and often the creative that

supports it. We're dropping, a

lot of us dropping six figures,

some high six figures, some seven figures,

mid seven figures on ads each month.

But then what do we do with those

people once they visit the site?

And so maybe let's break this down,

patting something this could be helpful.

What are some of the biggest

mistakes you see brands making?

So you're auditing a

brand for full funnel CRO.

What are they missing most of the time?

Yeah, I mean, you've nailed it perfectly

there. I think that's a really,

really unique example. But I think

the biggest mistake we see is, I mean,

first of all, as people know, there's

cold, warm, hot traffic, as you could say.

They send all three of them to the same

type of page or the exact same page as

that. And when you say that

out loud, it's just like,

why are you not making that funnel a

lot more aligned to where they are in

terms of maybe their mental state,

but also like how aware are they of your

brand or the problem they have and also

are they ready to buy? And in most cases,

the ad gets the click as you've mentioned,

but most of the time they're

not just ready to buy just yet.

They've maybe seen your brand

once, maybe with the ad two,

three times. They've got, let's educate

them, let's handle those objections.

So that's probably one big mistake we see.

But as well then- You're treating all.

Traffic the same. It doesn't make sense.

If you're in a restaurant and

you had regulars coming in,

you'd probably speak to them differently

than you would a first time customer,

but yet with our landing pages, we

say the same thing to everybody.

Yeah, exactly.

And then the next thing is probably the

fact that people actually don't build

out landing pages in general. So of

course this is very niche specific.

With fashion brands, it's a bit

of a harder kind of sell. I mean,

how much do we really need to go into

detail in terms of someone going to buy a

pair of jeans or some pants or whatever

it is that we're trying to sell.

But I mean, there is

still brands that do it.

You have the most renowned

one maybe in Hollowsox,

they are very deep into

landing pages and funnels.

But I think the key thing in all of this

is it's brands that can solve a problem

or brands that can go against maybe

the norm or can provide a solution to

someone's issues. So yeah,

that's probably some of the biggest

issues we see in terms of just that

congruency,

as you mentioned as well. There's just

none of it from ad to the post click.

So it's a big focus for us as always.

Yeah. It's so good.

And I remember reading this retail book

called Why We Buy by a guy named Paco

Underhill, and he's talking about

retail brick and mortar experiences,

which is a phenomenal read.

I think there's a lot of

applications online as well.

But he talks about how when

people walk into a retail store,

a lot of times they're asking, "Am I

in the right place? Should I be here?

Is this my type of place,

my type of product?

Should I be shopping here?" And people

are saying the same thing when they visit

your landing page, right?

There's something about your ad and your

targeting that got someone to click,

but then the first thing they're

asking when they get there is,

"Should I be here or should I bail?"

And so can you talk a little bit about

that? How do we

make that transition from ad to lander?

What should that look like in an

optimal way?

Yeah. So I mean, the way we try

and do it is it depends, as I said,

kind of on where they are on

your sort of funnel level,

as in if they just met you,

the main thing we're trying to push now

really is like you've got the average

page of a listicle, a product page,

you've got collection page, homepages,

they're all just a landing

page at the end of the day,

but it's the style and the angle

of copy in which you have to take.

And I think people neglect that

part of it. It's like, "Oh,

what page should I do? " It's like, well,

what's the main issues you're trying to

solve and where is your audience within

that level of the funnel? So we try

and kind of spread it across, well,

we try and go avatar

specific or persona specific.

So if a brand comes to us and they

have no landing page whatsoever,

we'll maybe aim for a

listical and advertorial,

optimizing their product page.

The areas that people actually buy and the

areas that we can kind of

move the needle the most,

as I said on stage when you were there

was trying to get close to revenue.

So we always look at the copy

they're doing, so what's the angle?

And also then what's the offer?

Because they're the two things alone,

as well as having a good product.

They're the two key things that you need

or you need to optimize in order to get

scale.

So the page is kind of just a mechanism

in which we get someone to that next

stage, whether it be to add to cart,

go to the product page or checkout.

So it really depends per brand,

but one of my favorites

is advertorials. I mean,

if you get someone who is

maybe solving some sort of ...

I always say if they put it in

you or if they put it on you,

as in you can apply it to

yourself or you can consume it,

then you're able to run advertorials

because you can get really deep into that

consumer's pain point that they're

suffering with at that time,

provide the product as your solution,

the standard copywriting frameworks,

except we've got a few secret sauce,

little areas that we add to them that

kind of improve the conversions overall.

But yeah, they're probably some of

my go- tos when it comes to pages.

So we're looking at potentially

advertorials or listicles,

and if it's something you consume or

put on your body, perfect fit for that.

And then on those pages, we can go into

problem solution or reason why copy,

things like that. Give us an example.

Give us an example of something that you

guys have built or been a part of just

so this kind of comes to life.

Yeah. So we have so many

that we do every single week.

So one that we've kind of done that is

a bit of a favorite of mine was, I

always call it campaign specific ones.

So we built one for KXBody,

which is a women's product and

they're- What's the name of that again?

Cakes. So C-A-K-E-S. So cakes. Yeah.

Or you might not be able to understand

it in my accent. So it's called Casebody.

So it's called Cakes Body and we built

a campaign specific one for them.

Now we actually put a mini listicle

within that landing page itself and

it was like a four reasons why,

but you could slide across.

So it was only one section of the

page, loved something like that.

But one thing that we've actually done

with a subscription brand we started with

about two,

three months ago was they were

very sales heavy on their pages,

but what we decided to do was

we went through their reviews,

their survey answers.

And what I always say is,

"What are the customers telling you?

" And we scraped all that together and

produced what we found was one of the key

reasons, which was blood pressure.

So they sell a tablet or a supplement

that helps with blood pressure,

kind of controlling that. So we went

into an advertorial of controlling it,

why should you be doing it,

the warning signs and just really educated

the consumer because they're a higher

age demographic. Something

like that worked really well.

And we actually seen a subscription intake

increase from them going from that to

the buy box.

And that's like a huge win that we always

try and try and incorporate nice and

early into the relationship. So

that was a cool one for sure.

So going from ad to advertorial

then to PDP versus add

straight to PDP.

Yeah.

And with that advertorial are

you kind of taking in some cases,

taking like a problem, agitate,

solution type of thing where it's like,

here's the problem you

probably want to solve,

let's define that and

agitate that a little bit,

make sure the pain is really the top of

mind and front and center and then we

provide the solution?

Or what are some of the insider

secrets that you're doing there?

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty

much it in a shortened context.

We like to kind of do it as well where

the solution and the agitation is kind of

within the transformation.

So if someone started somewhere and we

actually try and use a real good review

from the brand, so usually, and this

is what I say to brands all the time,

your consumers have told you already why

they bought, what it's done for them,

why someone else should buy, what

were they dealing with before?

So we reuse those really,

really long reviews and technically

the older the demographic,

the better your reviews will

probably be because they love typing,

they love talking, the longer the page,

the more they love it. Again, it's just

an interesting mindset

they're in. But yeah,

we utilize something like that and

that becomes the transformation.

And then you obviously go into the offer

and then you try and give them that

last final special piece where you're

kind of trying to get them back into that

offer to maybe click onto the

product page. Or to be fair,

this is kind of something

we get asked all the time.

"Do I put my product page on

the landing page or, sorry,

do I put my offer on the landing page?

Do I try and push them to a product page?

Do I just educate them

here and then push them on?

"My answer is you test it and that's

why split testing is so important

across brands because

there's no one size fits all.

And if you have that question right now,

I would just advise you to test it because

nobody actually knows the answer to

that one.

Yeah. It's a really good insight, right?

It depends on your product, your offer,

who's landing on that page,

lots of factors there.

And so you do have to test it. For

Boom Beauty or Boom by Cindy Joseph,

my buddy Ezra Firestone,

we helped them scale on YouTube

maybe eight or 10 years ago,

still work with them. But for a long time,

their top performer was add to a,

as we called it a

pre-sell engagement page,

very much like advertorial type of thing,

and then that sends to an offer page.

He did actually put pricing and kind of

the offer on that pre-sale engagement

page. They tested it both ways.

For them, for that beauty brand,

it made sense to put it there, but you

do have to test it 100% agree with that.

And I love that you call.

Out.

What are those good stories, those good

use cases and just bring those to life?

If think about B2B marketing and what

I'm asking you and what your prospective

clients ask you is like, " Hey, Patty,

what have you done? Who have you helped?

Tell me what you did for cake.

"It's the same when you're

selling consumer products

to a certain degree, right?

Who has this worked for? Tell me a

little bit of a story about that.

Lead me through so I can see how it

might be able to work for me. And yeah,

bonus if you're reaching a slightly

older audience because they love to tell

stories. If you ask your

grandma, how did this thing work?

She's probably not going to say just

good or great. She's going to be like,

" Well,

I first started noticing some pain in

my hips about three years ago. "I was

like, " Okay, buckle up. We

got a story going on here.

"Exactly.

I love that you said that though in

terms of actually telling the pricing as

well, because

you've still got to dip the offering

as you're educating or handling

objections or whatever it is that

you're trying to do with that page,

because it can't become

this big surprise either.

You kind of have to softly let them

know what the offer and the pricing is.

And then when they're ready to buy,

they might click a CTA or they might

just get to the buy box and then that's

when you can hit them with the

really good value stacked offer,

which is something we

can go into soon as well.

Yeah. I love that. And I think just

to kind of underscore this point,

we're always trying to find the

winning combination of ad angle and

positioning to a particular audience

landing on a particular page.

And that combination is going to be

different if you've got a different ad and

you're reaching a different audience,

then the lander's going to be

potentially different as well.

And so we've seen this

a lot to your point,

a lot of supplement brands that

we work with, the consumables,

it's almost always a

lander that works well.

We've had a number of beauty

brands, boom, being an exception,

a number of beauty brands where sending

people to the homepage from YouTube

works pretty well, right?

And sometimes it's the same lander

that's crushing that will also crush on

YouTube and sometimes it's very different.

So you do absolutely have to test.

Exactly.

I would love to ... Yeah, let's get

into, you call it offer stacking.

What does that look like?

Break that down for.

Us. Yeah. So just to touch on

what you were saying there,

when it comes to different

page destinations,

I think that's something that's kind

of untouched in the e-commerce industry

where people just presume collection's

the best, product page is the best.

But the higher the IOV, sometimes actually

a homepage or collection can work.

And obviously that depends on

the traffic source you know.

But even just what you

mentioned on value stack.

So this is kind of something that I

see brands just don't fully grasp.

And it's really, really simple

when you think about it logically.

And I always use something that's

just like lying about here,

like let's call it these AirPods,

okay? So buy these AirPods $200.

So if I had that offer in front of me,

or I had buy these brand

new generation for AirPods,

you get two free Airbuds with it.

You get connection to your iPhone,

you get USB portability, you get location,

tracking, you get bang, bang, bang,

bang, bang, like 10 value

stacks, maybe not that much,

but value stacks that

actually have a cost to it.

And when I was speaking on stage in

Miami when we were there together,

I mentioned a couple of brands and one

of them is the famous IM8 that was kind

of mega scaling at the minute,

but they are nailing e-commerce

for supplements or anything to do

with that industry incredibly well.

And one of the things they do,

which a lot of brands do very well is the

value stack in terms of the supplement

costs $60,

but if you actually broke down all of

the individual supplements or ingredients

that are in it, that will cost you $250

a month to actually buy individually,

but your subscription of just our product

is $60 and we encapsulate it all into

one capsule that you take daily. So it's

trying to just incentivize the value

for a consumer that they are also,

by the way, saving time, effort,

and you get all of these things

in one tablet or one supplement.

And I think that goes

unnoticed for a lot of brands.

Yeah.

It's a really interesting way to

break that down or to create the

perception of value because

most brands I don't think have a

price problem per se if they're not

getting the conversions they want.

It's more of a value problem or

a value understanding problem.

And so you can compare to the competition

to do the side-by-side comparison

of your AirPods versus your Airbuds

versus AirPods versus others.

Or you could take the supplement

approach and say, "Hey,

we get ingredients and no one else or

the quality of ingredients that nobody

else gets." And if you were to go and

buy these individually, separately,

try to make your own as an example, it

costs you five times what we're charging.

And so yeah, lots of different ways to

stack the value. How do you guys think

about that? How do you approach it?

Are you thinking about, "Hey,

what objections am I

trying to overcome here?

Do I need to create some pricing

anchors for someone as they're

considering this product?" How

do you approach this so you

understand how to stack value for

a particular product? And again,

if you want to give an

example, that'd be great.

Yeah. I mean, you kind of touched

on it again there as well,

just as you were asking that,

which is like price anchoring.

Do you know that is

technically what it is,

but I think if you encapsulate it at all,

the main thing that we're trying to

do is always handle an objection.

And a key objection, no matter,

you could have a $20 product,

a $2,000 product, everyone will say,

or most people will say on the surveys,

"The price is too expensive."

No matter how cheap,

no matter- It doesn't matter how cheap

they want it. It doesn't matter. Okay,

it doesn't matter. So you're

always trying to combat that.

And I think when you

have that top of mind,

nobody really wants to pay for anything.

They just need to see the value

in it first, and then they'll pay.

It's kind of like a B2B, as you

mentioned, like you said this, but a B2B,

a brand isn't going to invest in the

service unless they see value or what they

might get from it. So it's the exact

same when it comes to B2C and actually

selling your product.

We always try to do it where a key

objection that we'll take is we'll look at

the surveys. So we'll set up

the post-purchase surveys.

If any brand's not running

that, incredible value.

So post-purchase surveys,

you can even see what traffic

source they're coming from

if you do it correctly,

but you can literally

find out why they bought,

what is it that you're buying this for?

Why us and not a competitor? As well,

you can email your own customer

list and just ask them questions,

especially subscribers.

And you can find out the real reasons

that they're trying to buy this for.

Yes, so important. Exactly.

And why are they trying to really get

behind something or what is it they're

trying to fix or maybe

have a solution for?

So we always keep that in mind.

And again,

if we look at the client I broke down of

ours on stage was selling a mineral and

it was a supplement, but he kind

of described it as 100 minerals,

one supplement. And we

didn't list all 100 minerals,

but we listed the key ones

like vitamin C, vitamin D,

calcium, magnesium, all the

mean products that people know,

and we listed the price of them and

tried to kind of handle that as a

$250, let's just put it as

an example, price point,

but the actual subscription is

$60 a month and it's one pill.

And I think that kind of is the

best way to think about it. So yes,

you're trying to handle

objections, but all of this,

every single thing we're talking about

has to be brand specific and you've got

to do that research from your

customer. And our model is literally,

what do they say, what do they see,

what do they click? And if you can

figure out what they're saying simply in

reviews, in surveys,

in all of the kind of ways you

can encapsulate data from them,

then you will see exactly what their

main problems are before they buy.

So should always be having that top

of mind. Customer is king always.

Yeah.

It goes back to that classic marketing

principle of we're trying to enter the

conversation taking place

in our prospect's minds.

And so the more insight we can

get there on what they're seeing,

what they're thinking, that allows us

then to speak directly to that. Hey,

this episode is brought

to you by OMG Commerce.

That's the agency that I get

the privilege of running.

You ever feel like it's Groundhog Day

when it comes to your marketing where

every day's the same, you're still

relying on the same channels,

got the same ads you're leaning

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My guess is if you're like most brands,

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but you're probably missing YouTube ads.

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and we'd love to help you

dominate with YouTube ads.

We'd love to kind of understand

that. So with this men's supplement,

it's taking all 100

minerals, have to pay 250,

use that as an example to do it all

separately or one pill 60 bucks a month.

Nobody wants to pay 250 a month.

Nobody really wants to pay 60 a month

either. They do want the benefit and if

they can get the benefit which they're

really after and feel like they're saving

190 bucks in this case,

now they're getting the benefit they

want and they feel like they're saving,

which is a real win there.

Can you kind of talk through like what

kind of shift did you see in performance

when you went to that angle and that

type of land or that type of value

stack? What'd you see in terms of results?

Yeah. So he already had quite a

few really high performance pages,

or actually just this one high

performance page, really unique angle,

really unique page. I've never

actually seen anything like it before,

but we built out about eight to 12

different variations across like a two

month to three month period

and seen cost per acquisition

or cost to acquire a customer,

whatever way you want to call it,

actually hovered the same or stayed lower,

but it increased the amount of spend

you could put behind the campaigns.

And I think people sometimes,

there's all these conversations of

what metrics are you tracking at the ad

level? What really matters?

Our goal, to be honest,

is and what we can affect.

You might be able to look through like

click through rate at the landing page

and all these mad things. But at the

end of the day, cost per acquisition,

spend,

they're two things that we just try to

affect. And how we can do that is by most

brands will try and just put the

key performing ads and utilize the

page that we give them and actually

test it at the landing ... Or sorry,

at the ad level. And if brands do that,

you'll get a real return on has

this page made a difference.

So we weren't necessarily

split testing just one section.

That was one section within a page,

but even with another client, we done,

I think it was four advertorials

for a baby like BAM.

So something that they put on the

baby's skin to help them sleep like a

magnesium sort of lotion.

And we really went into statistics

and problems and everything like this.

And you could tap into more of

the mother's problems there.

So you could tap more into she's

not sleeping, neither are they.

And just a lot of other things and the

value then becomes, as you mentioned,

benefits over features.

That's always the way it has to be.

And we tapped into that for her as

well, or them, sorry, and it performed.

With the exact same results,

it's always cost per acquisition

drops slowly as spend,

as Meta then allows you to spend

or Google. But with this client,

it dropped first and then it rose back

up to be on average the same cost per

acquisition as they had before,

but their spend increased.

So there's many ways in

which brands can scale.

And I think it's so subjective

because on the back end of both of

those brands, you have subscriptions.

So you're not even getting into the

conversation of what happened the

subscription take rate,

how many people actually went and opted

into subscriptions instead of one time

purchase because then the brand's

profitable over time in terms of customer

lifetime value. So a lot to look at,

but hopefully that kind of gives you

a sense as to what worked and how it

worked.

Yeah. Just a great reminder, Patty,

that sometimes we optimize for the

wrong metrics or think about the wrong

metrics. I do like looking at conversion

rate. I think it can be valuable,

but in some ways it's like ROAS, right?

Where if I want to double my conversion

rate or triple my conversion rate,

I'll just shut off all top of funnel

traffic and go branded search only and

conversion rate goes through the

roof. I've done nothing meaningful.

I've actually probably

severely damaged my business.

So maybe you want an increase

in conversion rate, maybe not,

but really all you want is more

new customers at an acceptable

CAC, right?

Or I want to grow my number of

customers at an acceptable CAC

and increase my LTV.

That's the real win, right?

Not going from some arbitrary

conversion rate number of 1.5 now.

I really need to hit a 3.5 conversion

rate. Yeah, maybe, but really,

are you driving new customers

at an acceptable cost?

Are they spending more over time?

That's where you win. And yeah,

some pages will just hit your number,

but they'll cap out and spend,

especially on Meta.

And so you've got to have a different

lander if you want to break through.

I think that's such a good

call out and a reminder,

optimize for the right

thing. You don't call Patty,

you don't go on this full funnel

approach just to improve conversion rate.

You're trying to unlock

new growth potential while.

Maintaining.

Costs, while maintaining.

Profitability. I mean, the

problem we see as well,

even just to touch one last bit

on that is brands always say like,

"Oh, the conversion rate's a

problem." It's like, "Well,

we could just drop the price if you

want to fix that. " Or as you said,

just turn off all top of

funnel ads or whatever,

but it is all about adjusting for

what the business metrics are.

And that's why we are doubling down

on brands that run subscription models

because we've got a

brand up to 72% take rate

With everything to do with

genuinely no Black hat, as they say,

no opting into funnels that they

don't want to. It's genuine,

good product backed by a good funnel.

And actually everything talking about

the routine and optimizing for that deal

intake. So

you perfectly worded it there in terms

of just track for the right metrics.

Don't always look at what

everyone's saying online.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well,

let's talk about

subscriptions really quickly.

I love working with subscription brands.

I've invested in a number of subscription

brands. The model's just brilliant.

And I've seen some, in fact,

one that I'm an investor in,

right now they're testing landers

that all you can do is subscribe.

It is a product you should take daily,

but this particular option

is subscribe or don't buy.

And that can work. But talk through,

if I'm a subscription brand,

what are ways that I can go

from my current take rate

of subscription up to 70%

take rate like you're talking

about with that recent example?

Yeah. I mean, first of all,

it all starts with the offer.

I think people get really lost

in, and I spoke on this as well,

they get lost in this

like, here's 35% off,

here's like 40 extra product all in

month one. And it's like, okay, well,

I'm going to take that and then

cancel tomorrow. So people,

subscriptions are in this kind of finite

situation where they have to get a

higher take rate without

increasing churn substantially.

Churn is going to be there. Yeah. I mean,

churn can happen with, they

don't like the product anymore.

They don't need the product

anymore. Which I mean,

if the product is good enough, should

probably get to that stage at some level.

But they also then,

which I spoke on is like they

just get too much product.

And I think when you're a

brand running subscriptions,

you've really got to be careful on the

offer and the first time order. And stuff

we look at is things like this. So

you've obviously got month one offer,

that's got to get them in. But people

then neglect months two, three, four,

five. If you look at your churn

and you see that your LTV,

customer lifetime value

is only three months,

what can we do in month three that just

maybe gets them in an extra month or

two? Can we give them a low cost free

gift? So something that's really low cogs,

so cost of goods sold,

something that is really light

that doesn't affect shipping,

something that we can give them which

can just increase that level of LTV.

And if we get your brand from

three months to five months,

that's two months extra

profitability. It's amazing.

That you're not having to

buy again. Remember that.

So I think it's trying to

find that balance then of,

and I showed this as well,

where people are optimizing for one time

purchase as well. And it's like buy 30

day pack, buy a 60 day pack, buy a

90 day pack on one time purchase,

but yet they then offer a subscription

on that and slap another discount on top.

And I think if brands actually just

loaded their website now as they're

listening to this and actually, if they

have subscriptions and looked at it,

they probably don't realize that they're

giving away way too much margin at the

start and trying to incentivize

higher AOV and higher take rating,

all the metrics they can.

So that's kind of like trying to find

that balance is definitely one of them.

I would say another way in which you

could do this is all around your wording

and landing pages or even just

across your entire website, homepage,

collections, product page, it's all

about daily intake, consistent use,

getting into a routine,

tapping into that habit,

really trying to showcase that

if this product actually produces

a benefit or an outcome,

link that to the problem that they have

or the pain point that you've done with

all of your research that you know that

they suffer with and actually put that

into the product age with a lander.

And you touched there on subscription only

funnels, they crushed.

You will maybe see a bit of fluctuation

at the ad level because of course

if you make it clear enough,

not everyone wants to subscribe.

So you've got to kind of take that.

There has to be that fine balance of

subscription and admetrics and all

the other mad stuff that goes on.

But I think the key thing is just

trying to see what is this offer?

Does someone who has this

problem actually want this offer?

We see a lot of free gifts. So

maybe if you subscribe monthly,

you get a free gift with, or two

free gifts with month one order,

then you get a free gift a month two.

You maybe get an extra discount

or an extra gift a month three.

But the key thing in all of that is

people then end up giving the free gift

could be, oh, here's extra. Let's say we

sell sachets and there's 30 per month.

Here's an extra five sashes or

here's an extra month on top.

But what did I say at the start?

It was all around churn when

they have too much product.

So we've got to find that nice balance

of can we give them some sort of merch?

Can we give them a water bottle

that works with the sashes?

Can we give them a shaker?

Can we give them a digital

product that genuinely helps them?

Maybe we work with an

electrolyte brand at the minute,

very well known one in Cadence,

and they are starting to look at marathons

and runners as a big cohort of customers.

So what they're actually giving

out is you get a running cap,

at some stage you get a free water bottle,

but then you get this like

30 to 50 page doc from their

head scientist on

cramping and fatiguing and

actually supplementing four big races.

So I think

that's a key way in which you can actually

tie back the product and how you can

actually make that experience much

better by giving something for free

away. And it's a digital download.

So all it takes is you to have the

knowledge behind it, which still costs,

but it's not something that you're

having to slip into an order.

It's not something that costs

an extra $5 every single order.

So thing is trying to find that use case

behind everything that you're giving

away when they go to subscribe, but it's

got to be the most incentivized way.

Yeah, you're really trying to

optimize a number of things.

You're trying to look at what is the right

amount of perceived value and how can

I increase that perceived

value and give more benefit

to my customer? Also,

how can I line up that benefit

or the value stack in a way that

leads to more consumption,

not less consumption,

or that leads to a better stick

rate versus potentially encourages

a churn rail. I'll give you

a couple examples, one good,

one bad. I love cereal,

right? And so as I've tried to eat

healthy, I've switched to healthy cereals,

grain-free cereals and stuff like that,

which for the most part I think are good.

There's a number of brands that I like,

but I subscribed to one brand and

I think I actually made a mistake.

I ordered too much product

and there were some discounts.

And there's one month where I got

three giant boxes and my wife is

like, "What are you doing? Are we

starting a food pantry and I didn't know?

Is there a cereal party,

like a block party where buying the

neighbors over to Easter? What is this?

" So I churned. So I

stopped. I'm like, "Hey,

too much product." I actually ended up

buying from another brand next, right?

So I churned from that cereal brand and

ended up buying from another brand later

and I kind of liked the other brand

better. But if I had the right amount,

I may not have churned,

right? So that's example one.

And I don't work with that brand. I

just like the product. Example two,

there's a brand called

PerfectAmino Body Health.

I'm not sure if you've seen them.

Gary Brecka is an influencer.

He promotes their product, but

I don't love protein powders.

I like the benefit because

I work out and stuff,

but usually upset my stomach and I like

the calorie. I just don't like protein

shakes. So I got an ad for perfect

aminos. And the whole thing is like, "Hey,

perfect aminos. It's like you're

consuming 30 grams of protein,

but there's no caloric impact.

It's just the aminos that your body needs

because your body breaks down protein

to get the aminos. We're just giving

you the aminos." They're like,

"This is brilliant." So they also

gave a guide on how much amino acid

should you be consuming and when and

how to do this with your workouts.

That was an absolutely, it was a free

article, but as I read it, I'm like,

"I get it. I get it now. I get

it why I can do this for me.

I can do this instead of protein powder

and it's going to work." And so yeah,

how are you stacking the value? How

are you increasing the perceived value,

but doing it in a way that leads to

consumption and leads to stick rate rather

than something that leads to just

lost margin and potentially churn.

Yeah. No, I love that. That's

a really interesting one.

And I think the thing you can take

away from that is it was all about the

product and backing up why you

should be taking that product.

And I think that's exactly what I

said with the other brand as well.

We have some brands that actually

then don't offer discounts,

which is a really interesting

kind of take as well.

But I guess you have to

provide value in other ways.

And something that we

actually see as well,

which is quite interesting is

we had a brand and they had a

subscription and their

product didn't taste amazing,

but it had unbelievable sleep benefits

and they knew their product

didn't taste that good.

But I guess if you're taking it to sleep,

doesn't really need to taste

good if there's benefits maybe,

but it actually showed a higher churn

rate. So it's like no matter how good your

benefit is or the outcome or

whatever it is you're solving,

if it doesn't taste great,

people will probably just rent.

So it's quite an interesting

one. You've also got ...

The last thing on that is what a lot

of brands do if they have different

flavors,

and this is like a really key

insight is test your subscribers to

get maybe a free sample of that

new flavor or that new product.

And it's basically a way in which you

can nearly get more subscriptions to your

other products or they might

switch, who knows? But again,

actually showcasing different

flavor options to people

and letting them try them

is a good way to increase

your customer lifetime value.

It could actually improve your average

order value if they want to buy it as

well and update and upgrade

your subscriptions. And I

actually want to add one

last point to this. The

subscription portal,

I think this is something that brands

forget is something that customers

actually click into.

And what I'm talking about

there in terms of flavors,

you have to showcase these

flavors, you have to upgrade them,

you have to upsell them, sorry, is

what I meant to say. And if you do,

or a cross-sell,

you could maybe argue they actually might

swap it if you allow them to do that

easily, or they might add

it to their subscription.

So I spoke to a brand yesterday,

that's why this is a top of mind.

And they stopped working with us

for about four or five months,

and they've launched a new offers.

They're actually like a digital offer,

which is interesting,

but their subscription portal and

everything is a bit messy now,

and that's actually leading to churn.

And so is the offer and so is the emails

they're getting hit with.

And I think it just talks about our whole

scenario here of how do you increase

subscriptions? There's

a lot of layers to it,

but I think if you start with the offer,

the experience has to be good and

there has to be an outcome that they're

actually getting from your product in

order to actually want to stay with it.

Yeah. It's really good, man. Well,

maybe have you give just on the fly

some thoughts on how you might approach

different subscription products,

thinking about quantity offers and

thinking about the way you'd present this.

So let's take a few of the

examples we've just talked about.

So let's take healthy cereal option.

Let's take this protein

alternative or amino acid product

and let's take hydration. I'm a

huge hydration fan as well as,

but a huge unlock for me and my personal

health is getting enough electrolytes

game changer. How might you approach those

differently in terms of how might you

stack the offer or stack the

value and structure the offer?

How would you think about quantities and

quantity offers and things like that to

get kind of the right

amount of consumption,

the right amount of product

for a given consumer?

Yeah. Well, if we start

with the first one,

maybe slightly heavier than the

other products potentially because

it's cereal, it's in a box,

there's maybe 500 grams.

Dimensionally, it's much bigger for sure.

Much bigger. So you've got

packaging to put into that.

So I think even just to touch

on all three, by the way,

I think what people don't do

enough is test the pricing and

that alone could potentially take away

some of the costs that you have to deal

with when you have a heavier

or bigger product. Now,

the other thing I would say then

is when it comes to shipping,

so if we just talk about all three here,

the higher quantity should

technically achieve free shipping.

But I would test this and a lot

of people immediately just go,

"Here's free shipping. That's our unique

selling point." And it's like, whoa,

you could be generating 25% of your

revenue through shipping, so charge it.

And we've actually seen some really

weird tests where we've offered free

shipping and we've charged for shipping

and the charge for shipping's conversion

rate is higher.

I genuinely don't understand it. It does.

It's as if they feel skeptical. Yeah.

They feel skeptical that you're giving

me this free ... I'm not really sure.

You're trying to.

You're really going to try hard

if you're giving me free shipping.

Maybe that's a perception or something.

It's so strange,

but that is something that all of

these brands should be testing. Now,

if we go to the cereal

one, what is cereal?

What does every age group

beats it, doesn't it?

So potentially you can do a

household type of offer where ...

And the big guys in the

industry grooms do this.

They do it really well, really

cool offer that they do.

But you could look at

household types of offers,

which might actually incentivize a higher

threshold monthly of subscriptions,

or you could tap into that. But again,

I think it depends on what are your

customers in that niche of cereal

actually telling you? Are they saying

that they're buying for more people?

Is it just themselves?

Do they want to buy ...

I think an interesting part of

where I'm going with this is,

if you're selling a

500 gram box of cereal,

it would be interesting to know how

long that actually takes to get through.

That would be the

interesting part as well.

So if people could just get

through a box in one month,

I could definitely get through a

box probably in two weeks or a week.

I'm going a week over here.

We're smashing that. So again, I think

you need to tell them that and say,

"Hey, this will last you a month or a

week." And that's where you could maybe

incentivize a two week subscription and

a four week and a six week and an eight

week, or maybe you do a weekly frequency

and people neglect that a lot. See,

for all of these brands

that we're talking about,

the frequency level is something

that you should be testing,

just genuinely offering more customization

with the frequency is something

that's really- The frequency of the.

Delivery, how often are you

getting the product coming to you?

Exactly. Exactly. And then if you

go into the quantity levels then,

so if you don't want to give

them too much selection.

So if they come on and it's like, buy

one, buy two, buy three, buy four,

buy five, and then they

have to subscribe and save,

and then they have to add the cart.

You don't want to give

them too many options.

So potentially you have

the law of twos and threes.

You could potentially just offer a buy

one or a second option of getting two

boxes. Now, this is where we could go

into a bit more detail in terms of,

is it buy one, get one free?

Is it buy one, get one 20% off?

And really trying to stack that

value. But again, test all of these.

And if we're going then onto the second

one, which was your Amino product,

if I'm writing saying-.

Yep, yep. Correct.

It also depends on how long it takes

you usually to give you 30 servings.

Usually it's either in a

smaller tub, big tub, large tub.

So it's trying to really see which

one could potentially have the best

subscription metrics. Which one

is also the price comparison?

Do we auto select the middle

offer? So if we have, let's say a,

let's just call it for toxic, a 250

gram tub, which is nice and small,

500 is a bit bigger, and

then you have a kilo.

If we're going for the 500

gram tub in the middle,

that's probably price

anchored between the two,

and that's probably the most

selected, the best selling.

So we want to have those little notes

around that selector that actually

gets people to want to buy the middle one.

And the more expensive one might actually

make it seem cheaper than it is. And

the less expensive one might seem like

you're not really getting enough value

for that size. So there's a

lot of psychology things here.

And I think everything me and you have

talked about today is just everything is

psychology.

It is. It is.

Humans are just psychologically based

with every scenario and decision that they

make. So you've got to really understand

that we don't want to overload them.

We don't want to give

them too many options,

but we want to give them just enough

that we can incentivize a higher spend so

that we're profitable enough as a brand.

And that's a key thing for all of these.

And I think then if you're

going to the last product,

this is one that we are working on for

like three or four brands, to be honest,

which is quite interesting. So we

have a lot of information on this one.

But the key thing I would say is

trying to actually just

give them the 30 pack

sashes. So something that lasts

monthly is usually the best scenario.

Interesting. Because

the more you stack on,

we have loads of bundles for these brands

as well. We have a daily product and

we have a sleek product

and then we have cans.

So there's loads of bundles you

can do. People do love them,

but we've noticed that the churn is way

higher on the bundles because people

will probably just subscribe

to get the extra discount.

So I think it's trying to just

give them the Hero product,

the one that's got a good enough cost

per acquisition, a high enough LTV,

and our goal is to just increase

the subscription take rate.

But also then we've been working on

the offers, which is, back to my point,

free products, free gifts,

how do we incentivize them without

giving away too much product?

So you give away other products, caps,

bottles to take with the drinks.

You've got free shipping on the

subscription offer, loads of other things.

We could talk about this for days,

but I think the key thing in all of

these brands is it's all about the

value, the time saved,

and do you just give enough sort of

breakdown of the product and what it does

for them? I think if you can nail them

three things and they really leave with

no questions to answer,

you've done your job and you'll probably

have a higher percentage of those

orders. But yeah, that's probably,

without going into way too much detail,

that's probably some of the

key things we would look for.

It's so good, man. It's so good.

Yeah, you're trying to balance them.

Am I getting a good enough take rate?

Am I giving people the right

amount of products so that they

consume it, love it, enjoy it?

Don't ever feel like they've got too

much or not enough so that they're likely

to churn because we want

to increase that take rate.

We want to increase that

stick rate so that our CACTLTV

ratio just improves over

time. Brilliant. I love it.

How important is, for these brands, how

important is your follow-up sequence,

so like abandoned cart

sequence and things like that,

how important is email and SMS and other

follow-up mechanisms to really truly go

full funnel here with CRO?

Yeah, so we would give advice on it.

Usually we pass that off to the email

and SMS partners because we focus on our

main things.

But I think the main thing is

making sure that you're actually

educating the customer

on what they're getting.

So I think that's something that people

that don't really actually hold onto

enough. So you've obviously

got, when they join,

they obviously get a welcome

email on the welcome flow.

We like to make sure that the

founder is writing that the founder.

So it's a plain text,

finder written email to basically

thank them on joining the subscription,

joining the sort of community.

You want to try and always

drive it towards a community,

but also then educating them on the

why they created the product and why

the brand.

And then I think it's about actually

educating the consumer on what the product

is going to do for them, why they

should continue to take the product,

asking them for feedback,

making sure that they're getting hit

with those welcome email flows. I think

that's one of the biggest

unlocks for any brand,

no matter what they're doing. You've

obviously got then win backflows,

which we all know about,

which is usually the people that

have maybe subscribed in the past

without going into too much detail,

that's another way in which you can

actually continue to increase your

subscription take rate. Let's say

if they unsubscribe in month five,

for example, can we hit them back on

month seven, month eight, month nine,

maybe trying to tap into, "Hey,

how have you been feeling without the

product?" Or trying to tap into that side

of things or maybe again,

always a clean plain text email from the

founder works super well for any email

you could be sending. But as well,

I think then you mentioned you've got

checkout abandonment, cart abandonment.

I think people actually neglect cart

abandonment usually and just go straight

for checkout.

You've got to kind of work all of these

in a way where you're not just giving

them an extra discount, an extra

discount, an extra discount.

Because some people will game that system.

Some people will know that if I just do

these things and unlock another level of

discount and that's

what they're going for.

I mean,

you're already giving them one with the

subscriptions or maybe a bundle and then

you're giving them another welcome

flow email discount or another, sorry,

checkout or cart abandonment

email sequence. So again,

I think brands just get so obsessed with

trying to win back customers through

discounts.

And we've seen some brands just get

absolutely annihilated that don't even

understand their numbers and then

they just add on, add on, add on.

And they think that that's a strategy

when the main part of the strategy is

offering copy and they've got to just

jump back from all of the craziness of

discounts to how do we provide

value and describe the value.

So I think brands actually give value,

but they don't describe it enough.

They don't actually tell them.

And that's probably what I would

say about all of that. Again,

not an email and SMS expert, so

just want to have that out there,

but we know the basis of it.

Yeah.

Absolutely. And that all rings true.

We've got a retention department and

Nick who runs my email and SMS team,

he would totally agree with what you

just said. And it's so funny. Yeah,

just a reminder that founder's story is

so powerful from big mattress brands to

supplement brands, everything in between.

Sometimes the founder's story

is the best performing ad.

I think telling a little bit of the

founder story plus maybe some customer

stories on the Lander, one of the

best ways to approach a Lander, right?

And then you're right on the

email follow-up card abandonment,

checkout abandonment, welcome flow.

Tell a little bit more of the founder's

story. Why did we create this?

Why do you need to consume this?

Why do you need this in your life?

Hitting people from multiple angles or

just telling the same story in slightly

different way makes a huge,

huge difference. And so Patty,

this has been brilliant,

man. Absolutely love this.

If people are consuming this and

they're like, "Man, I need to go deeper.

I know that I don't just need to increase

my ad spend or maybe the secret to

increase in my ad spend is working

with somebody like Patty." How can they

connect with you online? How can

they learn more about your services?

Yeah, so you can visit our website,

pmdigitaldesign.com. I'm also on LinkedIn.

I'm on Twitter. I'm on YouTube. LinkedIn's

probably the easiest one. But yeah,

listen, just book a call. I will have

a chat with you. It's always with me.

And again, we will just go through what

you're doing right now, audit that,

give you some free tips and also just

have a nice conversation if you're anyone

in the brand founder space

or your CMO or anyone in that

marketing sort of realm. You'll be

speaking to the founder. As Brett said,

founder story always wins.

So I think that's a good nice way to

kind of fill it out. This is the founder.

Story right here. The reason why you

should reach out to PM Digital Design.

Patty McLaren, ladies and gentlemen.

Patty, thank you so much, man.

This has been a ton of fun, immense

value. Appreciate it. Exactly, man.

And hey man,

ready to rock the stage again here

hopefully in the not too distant future.

Soon, soon. Thanks for having me.

Awesome, man. Thanks again. And also

thank you for tuning in. As always,

we'd love to hear from you.

If you like this episode,

please share it with somebody who

you think will find it valuable.

And with that, until next

time, thank you for listening.

That'll do it for this

week's episode. Hey,

if you're serious about profitable scale

for your brand, we would love to chat.

Over the last 15 years, we'll work

with some amazing brands like Native,

BoomBeauty, Arctic, Organify,

Crumble Cookie, True Earth,

and many, many more. We want to

help you unlock new channels,

find profitable scale, have

better creative, better campaign,

better measurement strategies,

and ultimately hope you have more fun and

grow in all of your relevant channels.

So take a look at omgcommerce.com

and we can't wait to help you

scale profitably.