In this episode of The Ecommerce Podcast, host Matt Edmundson interviews Matt Stafford, CEO of Build Grow Scale, about revenue optimisation strategies for e-commerce websites. Stafford shares valuable insights on improving conversion rates, including optimising checkout processes, using effective button colours and text, and leveraging customer feedback. The conversation covers practical tips for enhancing website performance and increasing sales without necessarily increasing traffic.

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Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction and guest background

3:24 - Matthew's journey into ecommerce

6:13 - The importance of Google Analytics

12:38 - Starting optimisation from the back of the store

19:49 - The hierarchy of focus principle

24:20 - Button text and colour optimisation

30:38 - The power of website optimisation over increasing ad spend

32:45 - Mobile vs desktop conversion rates

36:50 - The one question that can transform your business

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Key Takeaways:

1. Start with Cart and Checkout Optimisation

Matthew Stafford emphasises the importance of beginning with the cart and checkout process when optimising your ecommerce site. By enhancing these areas first, you ensure that any improvements made elsewhere on the site directly contribute to increased revenue. This approach prioritises revenue optimisation over mere conversion rate improvements.

2. Use Unique Colours for Call-to-Action Buttons

Stafford advises using a distinct colour for call-to-action buttons that stands out from the rest of the site's theme. This makes it clear to customers what the next step is, thereby improving the user experience and boosting conversions. The focus should be on clarity and visibility rather than adhering to a specific colour scheme.

3. Leverage Customer Feedback on the Thank You Page

Implement a pop-up on the thank you page asking customers, "What was the one thing that almost made you not buy?" This feedback is invaluable for identifying and addressing potential issues in the purchasing process. Stafford notes that some of their top improvements have come from insights gained through this simple question.

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Matt Edmundson [0:00 - 2:32]: Welcome to the Ecommerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. This is a show all about helping you deliver ecommerce. Wow. And to help us do just that, I am chatting with my very special guest, Matt Stafford from Build Grow Scale about how to get your website to rocket in growth. Now, it's no exaggeration to say that this episode has probably been the longest episode in terms of getting in the calendar. So you know it's going to be worth it. You're going to want to grab your notebooks, you are going to want to grab your pens or whatever, your note taking devices because there's going to be some great stuff to help you grow your ecommerce business and to be honest with you, to help me grow mine as well. If you don't know if you're new with us, then yes, I am. Like you, I'm an ecommerce entrepreneur. I love ecommerce. I love the fact that whenever I wake up in the morning, somebody in the world has bought something from one of my websites. It's a beautiful thing. So I do this show just so I can connect with amazing people and learn about ecommerce and hopefully give you guys some value as well. So if it's your first time with us, a very warm welcome to you. And of course, if you're a regular, thanks for coming back. Really appreciate you being with us on this part of our journey. If you haven't done so already, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter because every week we send out the newsletter, it's actually changing. Actually. The new one coming out is called the ecommercer. It's getting developed, it's getting upgraded, we've moved it to Beehive. We're throwing in some extra stuff as well as all the usual show notes and links and all that sort of stuff from the guest. We throw in more tips, more strategies, more helpful stuff. It's all in there. So you're going to want to find out more about it. You can do that at ecommercepodcast.net now let's talk about Mr. Matthew Stafford. It's always good to talk to a fellow Matt. Yes, it is. He is CEO and mastermind behind Build Grow Scale's revenue optimisation system. With 27 years of business experience, he's a pro at spotting hidden opportunities and optimising the customer journey. Known as one of the top Shopify optimisation experts, he's analyzed nearly a billion dollars in data to perfect his approach. That's a lot of data, Matt, I'm not going to lie. How did that work out well, it's.

Matthew Stafford [2:32 - 3:10]: Been cumulative over the last several years. I think we stopped counting just going through our own shopping carts around 400 million several years ago. Because if you think about it, it's someone that's running their store, whether it's 10 million, 400 million or a billion dollars, like, it's really hard to even fathom that amount. And so the only reason the bigger numbers is maybe just to stroke our ego a little bit. But I think realistically, we have enough data that we have a set of best practices that we know will help anyone.

Matt Edmundson [3:11 - 3:24]: Fantastic. Well, it sounds great. That sounds absolutely wonderful. So I'm curious, how did it all start for you? I mean, it obviously didn't start. One day you woke up and thought, I know what I'm doing. I'm gonna go through a billion dollars worth of data. No, no, no, no. Hopefully there's something a bit more interesting.

Matthew Stafford [3:24 - 3:56]: Yeah. Well, I actually started out in the brick and mortar businesses. So I had commercial concrete and a couple of brick and mortar salons. And in that process, I realized when I opened up the brick and mortar stores, I had to get traffic. It wasn't quite like the service business that we had with concrete. And so I learned how to do some online, you know, website or not. Actually, back then, it wasn't. Website optimisation is really like how to get the people to the website.

Matt Edmundson [3:56 - 3:57]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [3:57 - 3:59]: And that's about all you had to do back then.

Matt Edmundson [4:00 - 4:04]: Yeah. And I remember those days well very fondly, too.

Matthew Stafford [4:05 - 4:25]: Once that happened, I realized, like, oh, this is kind of fun. Like, it's my job or my livelihood's not dependent on the weather. And so it made me want to look into that a lot more. And I went to a Tony Robbins event, and he was selling a DVD series called Money Masters.

Matt Edmundson [4:25 - 4:26]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [4:26 - 6:12]: And it was all about online marketing. And I thought, wow, in five years, I'm going to be 100% online and get rid of this other stuff that I have. And it was almost five years to the month that that became true for me. And I was like, wow, maybe I should have said three years or two years. But in that process, what I had done is I learned how to run Facebook ads to marketing pages and sell things and was pretty good at it through that process. Eventually, Shopify was pretty new at the time. I opened a Shopify site, and we started selling kitchen products and did really well right off the bat. And I thought, oh, wow, this is going to be really easy. And I started adding all kinds of apps and different things to my Shopify site. And what happened in about a six month period is we went from selling three or four hundred sales a day down to three or four hundred sales a week. And it was a lot harder to make money. And I was just super frustrated. And so I paid a guy, I saw a guy online, was advertising for a thousand dollars. He would give you six calls and teach you Google Analytics. I thought, okay, I'll do that. So I paid him the thousand dollars. And after the first week I was like, oh my goodness, there's so much data in here to figure out how to make my website work better that I'm gonna do that. And every time I made changes, my ads worked better. And so within, within the end of that six weeks, we were back to the 3, 400 sales a day, very profitable, and started scaling it up from there.

Matt Edmundson [6:13 - 6:15]: That says worth a thousand dollars then.

Matthew Stafford [6:15 - 6:17]: Oh man, it's crazy.

Matt Edmundson [6:17 - 6:22]: He took a better return on investment. That sounds like that was one of the best things I'd spent a grand on.

Matthew Stafford [6:23 - 6:33]: Yeah, there was the, the scarier part of that story is because of the first three or four months, we had done really good. We had been out, got a loan and.

Matt Edmundson [6:33 - 6:34]: Right.

Matthew Stafford [6:35 - 7:08]: Borrowed a bunch of money and private labeled the stuff from China. So we had about 400 grand worth of kitchen supplies sitting in a warehouse. And it kept getting worse and worse and worse. And we had more coming on the, on the boat. And so I was, you know, we were not in a good position and I was like, I have to. It was almost. I had to figure it out or I was going to be hurting. And yeah, so, yeah, it was, it was literally that thousand dollars saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Matt Edmundson [7:08 - 7:56]: Wow. Wow. Well, what a fascinating story. It's interesting. It started with Tony Robbins. I, I have another podcast called Push to Me More where we. It's a leadership podcast, talk to business leaders. And I picked that brain about how to run a business. Great podcast. Really enjoy. It's really good fun. One of the questions I asked them at the start of the interview is if you could interview anybody know, in your own podcast. Pastor presence had a big influence on your life. Who would it be and why? And by far one of the most popular answers, I mean, you've got your, you know, most popular answers that have come through are my dad, Jesus and Tony Robbins. And it's quite fascinating how, how many people mention Tony Robbins, especially from, you know, your side of the pond. He seems to be quite an influential character.

Matthew Stafford [7:56 - 9:47]: Yeah, for sure. I, I would say, yeah. So interesting. You Bring that up. I didn't think we were going to go there with this, but I. I'd love to for a second. I dealt with a lot of trauma growing up, and going through his programs helped me realize that a lot of it has, you know, we can reframe a lot of that and to be supportive. And the more that I've talked about that part of my journey with other entrepreneurs, the more I realized that it's pretty common. And so I started studying that similar to how I studied a website and thought like, wow, why is it so common amongst entrepreneurs that, you know, they have this in their background? And the definition of trauma is just a feeling of loss of control. And so I thought, like, well, in business, how often do you feel like you're really in control? You're constantly doing things. And so it made sense to me that the majority of us that are entrepreneurs have dealt with that feeling of loss of control. And we have a coping mechanism to handle. It doesn't mean it's healthy, but we have a coping mechanism that allows us to be in an environment that is constant chaos and for us to be able to make order from that and then move forward. Because the normal employees look at what we do and they're like, no way. I don't want anything to do with that. And so I think that has a lot to do with, you know, why people resonate with him or why, you know, entrepreneurs in general really get a lot from talking to each other because, like, we. We have a unique set of circumstances that we went through growing up that give us the ability to do that.