Brent: And welcome back here, day two, Cloudways Prepathon 2024. Had a lot of fun with those activities, hopefully you met some other Prepathon attendees, got this chat, got to hang out, got to work on a little bit of a project. But let’s get ready for our next session. So I’m really excited to be welcoming Chloe Thomas to our Prepathon stage. She’s going to be presenting a keynote here on preparing your e-commerce store for the Holiday Rush. Chloe is a globally recognized e-commerce marketing problem solver, she’s the author of several best-selling books, she’s a well-known keynote speaker, podcast host, hosts both the award-winning eCommerce MasterPlan podcast and the Keep Optimising marketing podcast, plus she’s recently taken over eCommerce Tech. So Chloe, stage is yours. I am excited to be just a learner today and just sponge all this up, I’m sure you’re going to drop lots of gold nuggets on us, so welcome to Cloudways Prepathon 2024 and you have the stage.

Chloe Thomas: Thank you, Brent, really awesome to be here, and I hope I will drop plenty of value bombs for all of you out there. So super pleased to get to talk to you about this topic because it’s a big topic this time of year, especially the summer’s over, you’re starting to think about Christmas, how are you going to get that e-commerce store really delivering for you? So that’s what I’m going to be taking you through.

The super important thing I also want to say is, it’s really exciting to be part of Prepathon because I too am a Cloudways customer. All our WordPress sites are hosted with Cloudways, yeah, go Cloudways. So it’s very cool to get to be part of an event run by a tech company who I actually use, which is very awesome. So thank you very much, Cloudways, for the intro. Anyway, enough of that gushing, let’s get on with this.

As Brent said, my name is Chloe Thomas, I am an e-commerce expert, I’ve been in the industry for 20 years now, can you believe it. I started off working client side, looking after e-commerce sites, doing the e-commerce marketing 20 years ago when it was all so new in the space. Now then I ran a marketing agency for 10 years, and now I kind of run a media company, so I’ve got websites, books, podcasts, all about helping e-commerce brands, e-commerce founders, e-commerce marketers to answer those difficult decisions in e-commerce. We try and give you the insight, the inspiration and the guidance to enable you to do that.

I’ve just dropped a link in the chat, which is the same link that’s on the slide deck, so if you follow that you can do it anytime you like. You will go to a page that’s not behind an email sign up, that just gives you loads of content resources to help you with the things I’m going to be taking you through today, and you can also download the slide deck from there as well, no email address required. You can just go there and grab that stuff, and I’ll repeat that a few times during the session for you.

And what you’ve got up on screen right now, on the left hand side, my most recent book, eCommerce Marketing: How to Get Traffic That BUYS to Your Website, packed full of marketing stuff, lots of great marketing advice in there for you. And then over on the far right hand side you’ve got my eCommerce MasterPlan podcast, which is where every week I interview a different e-commerce business owner about what they’re doing to grow their e-commerce business. And then in the middle there’s eCommerce Tech, which as Brent said, I’ve recently taken over, pending a website rebuild at the moment, so please don’t judge me for any errors you find on that site at the moment, but it is an amazing resource of technology you can use for your e-commerce store.

Okay, so how are you going to go about making sure your e-commerce store is ready for that peak season? I was involved in a debate yesterday about when you should start prepping for this. Arguably September’s too late, but September is better than not getting the prep done. So I’ve tried to focus my session in on things you can still get done and still get sorted out ready for Christmas.

So what I’m going to take you through is four key elements, which I’ve put into this table to give you an idea of where they fit. So we’re going to start off talking about ways in which we can remove the blockages to purchase, so how can we make sure the customer checks out when they want to check out and doesn’t get stuck on something. And we’re going to start that by looking at the once-and-done checklist, which is on the website stuff. Then we’re going to look at the marketing side of things, about how you go about building connection and trust, those softer elements that stop people if they don’t feel them when they want to check out. Then, because it’s not just about making sure they can buy on the site, it’s also about making sure you drive the traffic and you drive the sales, we’re going to look more at the stuff that happens off your website, going into the stacking of your marketing, don’t worry I will explain that later. And we’re also going to look at then promotion strategy, as not actually the last thing, because I’ve slid in a bonus bit at the end that’s all about helping you do more with less, which seems to be the biggest challenge that e-commerce people I’ve been speaking to this year have, which is, suddenly we’ve got to get more profits, we’ve got smaller budgets, we’ve got frozen head count, so how do you cope with all of that and still make sure you deliver.

And the other thing I’ve done pulling all this together for you today is, we’re in a more challenging peak season than we’ve had for a few years. There’s more of an economic crisis on the go, there’s more of the cost of living thing where customers are less likely to buy, we’ve got to work that little bit harder. For us as marketers that means we need to get everything right, we need to tick every box, cross every I, dot every T, turn over every stone, whichever random simile or metaphor, whatever it is, we need to do all those things. So I’ve tried to put this together to help you make sure you’re ticking all those boxes to make sure you’re getting the right customers to come and buy from you this season.

So let’s get stuck in, my once-and-done checklist. Now hopefully most of you are already on top of this, but I think most of these are based on my own history of things that have gone wrong for people I’m working with, people I’m working for, people I’m advising. Okay, so these are worth, even if you’re thinking all my URL renewals are set to auto renewal, it’s going to be fine, please go and check them before your busy season.

So let’s quickly run through these for you, and you can download the slide deck and print this off, that’s completely cool if you want to do that. Check server capacity. There is nothing worse than an email or some marketing going really really well but the site being so slow that people can’t check out. So make sure you’ve got that sorted before you get into peak. How busy do you think you’re going to get, is there enough bandwidth on your servers? I’m not someone who does a lot of setting up of servers, because I’m probably using the wrong words, but make sure you’ve got all those things in place ready to make sure nothing goes wrong. And ideally, you know, variable amounts and all those kind of good things that are now possible with servers, speak to Cloudways about that.

Secondly, double check your renewals. URLs, address lookups, you know, when you put in the post code and then the address comes up, security certificates, those SSLs. I’ve had sites go down at the wrong time due to all three of those things, please learn from my mistakes and don’t let it happen to you. Make sure you’ve got the credits up, make sure you’ve got the right credit card in place on those things, make sure they are definitely going to renew.

Thirdly, automate the error reporting. This is something which I think is so cool and so much more of a thing that people are doing these days. There’s so many things you can set up with Google Analytics, with your website, that will let you know when customers are having problems with a promo code, when a 404 page is being fired a lot, to give you that warning of, oh, something’s going wrong, I better go and fix it. So work out what of those you should get set up and get that automatically feeding through to you. Yes, it’s probably going to be a bit annoying as it comes in, but it could save you a huge lot of embarrassment and lost sales if it flags up a problem with a promo code before 20 customers have given up on the process, and you can fix it first.

Number four, check your promo code setups. So do you have all your promo codes, are they all set up correctly, have you turned off ones you don’t want people to be using anymore? Just a quick look through what you’ve got set up and make sure that’s all working correctly could save you a lot of margin and a lot of problems further down the line.

Check payment mechanisms are working. Sometimes, you know, these days we tend to have quite a lot of different payment mechanisms, and sometimes one of them may have fallen over without you realizing it, so go and double check those are all sorted and you’re up to date with all the updates and upgrades on those.

Number six, check in with the customer service team for any common problems. Now in my experience, one of the brilliant things about your customer service team is that they will pride themselves on finding workarounds to the problems you’ve created for them without telling you about the problem. You know, they’ll tell customers ways of getting around things that, if they told you about it, you could quickly fix and eliminate all together as being a problem. So go and have a chat with them, say, you know, what are customers stumbling over, what problems are they having? Could be about products, could be about delivery, could be about your website, could be about your marketing. Find out what those are and make sure you’re getting those fixed.

Then number seven, column number two, double check your integrations. Product data especially, if you’re selling on multiple platforms, if you’re also selling on Amazon, or on eBay, or on any of those other platforms, you’ve got data moving around, make sure all the data flows and the data integrations are working correctly, especially when it comes to stock availability, that can be a real pain at this time of year. Make sure any marketing integrations you’ve got are working, when people sign up on the website do they actually get fed into your email system. Make sure your backend integrations, so where your order processing goes, finance integrations, those kind of things. And of course reviews and UGC, we’re going to talk about trust shortly, but it’s really important you’re making sure that people are getting those requests to give you the reviews and the user generated content, but also that you’re then using those and deploying them in the right places on the website.

Number eight, once you’ve done all of that, mystery shop your own website on mobile as well as desktop. You can’t get away with only doing this on desktop. Have a go, see where it’s falling over, go and get someone who would be your ideal customer to have a go, find out where they find the problems, and then fix them.

Then once you’ve done all of that, it’s time to implement a development freeze until January. Some companies will have done that in September, some companies will do it the week before Black Friday, work out when the right time for you is to go, right, we’re not changing anything else on the website until we get through peak. Really important to do that, so you’re ready to fix errors rather than creating errors basically. And then finally, my bonus one, is there anything you can automate, anything you can make happen automatically and save you time? We’ll be coming back to that at the end of this session. So that’s my once-and-done checklist, step one to help you remove those blockages to purchase and key things to be doing with your website.

The next thing you need to be doing, which is also about removing those blockages to purchase, is getting into how you can improve connection and trust with your customers. This is something which has been of growing importance, I suppose, within our industry over the last couple of years, ever more so, something you really need to get to grips with. And there’s lots of different ways of doing it. Some of what I’m going to go through with you now is probably not feasible to get done before Christmas, but a lot of it is.

So let’s start off with some stats. This is from a report produced by Mailchimp earlier this year, they released this one, and they spoke to an insane number of customers in the UK and in the US, so there’s US stats in the report as well, about what it is that keeps them engaged with an e-commerce brand, what is it that leads to them engaging with the website and making those purchases and those repeat purchases. 47%, the biggest number, so connection and trust with the brand, is what leads to them purchasing. 43%, it was discounts and rewards. Then we get into the Evergreen one that’s been top three for the whole of my career, which is free delivery. Then, proven record of customer service, which I would say feeds into trust. And then free returns, which fits very closely with that free delivery.

Now, we are later on in this session going to be talking about promotions, we’ll cover off those, but in this part we’re going to dive deeper into that connection and trust piece. The other critical thing about these numbers you’ve got in front of you right now is that none of these are standout, if I can master that one I’ll be fine. So you’ve got to be working on improving your connection and trust, building your discounts and rewards strategies, your free delivery, your customer service, you’ve got to improve all of these to keep the customers involved. Because they’re not just going, as long as you’ve got the trust I’ll do whatever I like, it’s, there’s very little to pick between these ones from the customer’s perspective.

So how do you go about doing all of this? Let’s get practical. First off, you get the basics on the site and in your marketing to prove trust. This is a company called Vine House Farm, they sell bird food in the UK, but they have a homepage that is absolutely packed with social proof and reasons for a customer to believe in them, to trust them, to connect with them, and to feel good for buying from them. So they’ve got the star scores, number scores up in the header there, they’ve got the fact they’ve got over four and a half thousand Google customer reviews, they’ve got a phone number big and central to go, hey, here we are, you can talk to us, they’ve got free delivery messages, they’ve got partnerships with Wildlife Trust, they shout about the fact that they’ve got premium ingredients. They have all this stuff, partnerships, social proof, review scores, and all of this just jammed into that homepage to really reassure the customer they’re in the right place. This stuff is super easy for any of you to do and to get in place in the next couple of weeks, so it’s there as you go through peak. And not just on your homepage, throughout the website, in the checkout, and in your marketing, you need these kind of trust signals.

Now the next one I wanted to show you is slightly more difficult to do in the way that this company have done it. So this is a business called Grove Collaborative, who sell home cleaning products that are more eco than others. They’re based in the US, hugely successful company, I was lucky enough to interview their head of marketing for the podcast, really fascinating lady who talked about how they’ve built the growth of the business. Now one of their big things is they’re all about helping the customer, as it says there, we take the guesswork out of going green. They’ve got lots of content to help you work out how to go for the right, which soap to choose, how to make the change of habits to greener cleaning products, how to get used to refills, how to do this, how to make these decisions. They’re there with all the content, but then they’ve also got their team there, as it says, the Grove Guides are here to talk, chat or text seven days a week, we are here to help you on this journey to more sustainable cleaning habits. And the interesting thing is, their target market are people who are already quite a long way down the green and eco journey, but they know, and they’ve realized as they’ve built the business, that that helpful element is critical to their sales growth and to their customer retention.

So how can you help your customers make the right buying decisions? It might be, you know, a small text change on the site to make it clear that you’re there to help them find the perfect gift, or you’re there to help them find the right clothing sizes, or you’re there to help them with something else. Or you may go, actually, we should be investing more in this because our customers are often confused about our products. So being helpful can be a great way of building connection with your customer base.

Let’s go for another example now. This is the world’s highest rated fashion B Corp, and B Corp is the best mechanism we’ve got in the world for scoring businesses on their sustainability criteria, and Y.O.U Underwear are the highest rated fashion company in the world. And I wanted to show you this one for two reasons. First off, a great way of building connection with a customer is to put yourself, the founder, on your website. This is the founder of the business, they’re on the website going, hi, we sell underwear, but it creates that human connection for the business, super easy one to do. And I’m going to give you a great example of an about us page shortly that you can have a look at to help you fix that one.

But the other reason I wanted to show you Y.O.U Underwear is because I had a fascinating conversation with this lady earlier this year, also on the podcast, about how they’re switching their USP. So their USP until now, they’ve shouted about the fact they’re more sustainable underwear, that’s what they mainly talked about, it’s the greener choice in underwear is what we’re creating. But that’s no longer a USP anymore, that’s no longer a way of building a unique connection with their customers, because there’s so many sustainable underwear brands out there now. So they’re now pivoting their USP to be about period poverty, which is what she originally founded the business to help solve, and they’re changing everything about the business to be that. So I guess it’s a bit of a warning, before you go deep deep deep into how you’re going to connect with your customers, make sure it’s the right connection message.

Next thing I want to talk to you about is a neuro marketing tactic called homophily. Homophily is our tendency to like people who are similar to us. So if you’re a woman with long brown hair with a fringe with a streak of gray through it, you’re more likely to connect with me than someone who isn’t on this call. We take advantage of this in the e-commerce space mainly through things like your about us page and through reflecting the values of your business. So this is that brilliant about us page I said I’d show earlier, this is a business called Farm Toys Online, and it’s how they have on their about us page, it’s all about the owner of the business saying, I have all the problems that you have trying to find the right farm toys for your children, so I created this business to solve it. Brilliant way of connecting with the target customer. You can download and have a good look at that on the slide deck, so I won’t dive into it now, but think about how you can add more to your about us page to create that feeling of connection.

When you see those websites that have all the different team members and their hobbies, that is an attempt at homophily. There’s a question about, like, so, like customer pain points, this is one way of doing it, saying I felt your pain, I understand your pain, that’s a way of connecting. Another way of connecting is going, hey, we love hiking, we love this, we love various things, and that’s a way of just revealing a bit more about yourself and your business, so as you, the customer, then goes, oh okay, I’m like you too, therefore I’m going to trust you more.

Then this is another way of doing it, this is a company called Slow Denim who sell jeans, and they are bringing customers together with them by going, we are anti fast fashion, we’re on a mission. There are, you know, you’re not signing up to our email list, you’re joining 105,000 revolutionaries. There’s also the mission based thing, this is our mission, are you on this mission too, come and join us, feel that sense of trust. So listen to the customers.

Okay, we’ve talked about how we can remove the blockages to purchase, next we need to look at how we’re actually going to actively drive some of those profitable sales. So I’m going to take you through two ways we’re going to do this. The first is to stack your marketing, and then we’re going to get into that promotion strategy I mentioned a couple of times.

And the reason why I’m going to be talking to you about stacking your marketing is because one of the other challenges we’ve got at the moment, so we’ve got the economic challenge, customers with less money to spend, we’ve also got the noise challenge. There is so much more noise in all our marketing channels now, so many more emails coming through, so many more SMSes, so much more stuff on TikTok, ads on Facebook, so much more noise everywhere that the customer is trying to filter and you are trying to get seen through. And one of the ways of making sure you get seen is not just to send lots more emails, it’s about stacking your marketing across different channels, and I have a model to help you do that.

So let’s meet the model. The model is called the traffic that buys model, it’s one I’m still kind of developing, but if you go to the link I shared earlier you can go to a video where I explain it in a lot more detail than I’m going to do right now. But I’m going to give you the basics, then on the next slide I’m going to give you a cheat sheet you can use to make quick improvements for this Christmas season.

So this model is all about stacking your marketing. At the bottom we’ve got the messaging elements, connection, that we’ve just been talking about, the promotions that we’re going to talk about shortly. Then at the top, those three blue boxes, three, Chloe can’t even count this evening, those three blue boxes are then the different ways in which we get traffic to our website. I know a lot of you aren’t e-commerce, this also works for any type of business, not just the e-commerce business, but you would probably end up with a slightly different mix if you’re not in e-commerce than if you are in e-commerce.

So at the top we’ve got three different types of marketing. We’ve got the paid marketing, so that’s your ads, your affiliate channels, influencers, those kind of things. We’ve then got the free, which I put in inverted commas because we’re still paying for our email software, we are paying for our SEO work, but the content comes through free, or the traffic rather comes through free. And then automated, which is where we’re able to set up automated email sequences and that kind of activity which works in the background without us having to proactively do it all the time. Okay, so we’ve got three different types of traffic, and the reason I split them out like that is because if you are doing all three, if you are stacking them, you will get a bigger impact than if you were just doing them individually. So the more different channels you can be talking to your customers by, the more sales you’re going to get to your business. It’s a bit like when you think about a sales funnel and hitting them at different levels, but this is all about hitting them on different channels.

And talking about funnels, we’ve got the circles and the arrows through the middle. So on the far left hand side we’ve got the world, and on the far right hand side we’ve got regular buyers, and our job as e-commerce marketers is to get as many people as possible from the left hand side to the right hand side as quickly as possible. That’s how we make profit, that’s how we grow our business, and the work we do is on the arrows in between, so the stages. So we work to get people from the world to become visitors, to get people from the visitor level to become inquirers, to get people from inquirers to first-time buyers, and so on up through.

And the whole point of this model is to remind you that in each of those stages you should know exactly what your activity should be in each of the five things. So in stage two, what is your automated activity, what’s your free activity, what’s your paid, what’s the right promotion to be running at that time, and what’s the connection message you’re giving them? For some businesses we talked about help as a connection method earlier, for some businesses help comes at the beginning of the process, for other businesses help comes at the end, and for some it comes the whole way through. If you’re selling tents to go camping in, really important you help people work out how to actually put that tent up once they’ve gone past purchase, but also you need a certain amount of that earlier on in the process. So how this mix exists changes from business to business.

But I did say I was going to give you a nice little template to help you get going with this. So the easiest way to start implementing this in your business, and making sure you’ve got all those bits covered so you’re getting people from the left hand side to the right hand side as simply and as quickly and as easily as possible, is to turn it into a grid like this one. So you’ve got a row for automated, free, paid, promotions and connections, you’ve got a column for stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four, stage five. First thing you do is you write down what you’re already doing. What is our promotional message to get people to the website, what’s our promotional message to turn first-time buyers into repeat buyers, what’s the connection message to turn inquirers into first-time buyers, what is our free marketing that happens in stage five, what’s our free marketing that happens in stage one? In some of those you’re going to have loads of stuff, in some of those you’re not going to have much.

And one last thing to say on this before we go on to look at promotions is, just to write Facebook ads is not enough, just to write email marketing is not enough. Say which bit is it, is it your newsletter, is it your welcome sequence, is it your post-purchase sequence, is it a trigger when someone abandons a browse on your website? Get granular. Once you’ve done that, work out where the gaps are, and start filling in those gaps to build that consistency across your whole marketing plan. If you take it box by box, you’ll find it’s an awful lot easier to do, and if you fill in those gaps, that’s the key thing to get done before Christmas.

Okay, where do we go next? Well, we go to promotions. How do we drive profitable sales? We get our promotions right. I think this is the year of the profit rush, not the gold rush but the profit rush. So how can we make sure we are putting together promotions that actually deliver the right results for our business, they appeal to the right customers, they bring the right sales in at the right profit level, and they do all that good stuff we want them to do for our business?

Well, you start with my golden promotional rule. It is, a promotion exists to get the customer to do what you want them to do as cheaply as possible. You want to break this down for every promotion you offer, you’ve got to get these various parts right. Let’s talk about the parts. First off, what is it you want the customer to do, do you want them to clear your, so, I’ve just seen Sebastian’s lovely comment about me in the chat and it’s properly thrown me, sorry Sebastian, we’ll get back to the point. Sorry everybody. Right, and thank you Sebastian, I should say, shouldn’t I. Right, back to the point.

You need to know what you want the customer to do as cheaply as possible. Okay, so what is it you actually want the customer to do? Do you want them to clear out your warehouse of Overstock, do you want them to increase their average order value, do you want them to sign up for your email list, do you want them to sign up early for Black Friday? What is it you actually want them to do? Then you’re going to work at how you get them to do that as cheaply as possible. So if you want to raise their average order value, what’s the cheapest thing you can offer them to get that average order value increased? If you’ve got loads of stock you need to clear out of your warehouse, are you better off doing a three for two, or a bundle, or a mystery box, where you can manage to hold on to more margin and get that going in a, you know, multiple items per order rather than one, rather than doing a 20% off everything discount? So you need to take a look at how can you do that, and you’ll have some ideas initially, and then you’ll have to do testing, and you’ll learn over time, but how can you hold on to as much margin as possible whilst getting them to do the thing you want them to do?

And then finally, which customer, you know, which customer you’re trying to get to do this activity, which customer do you want to give this offer to? So whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, these are the three things you need to get really clear on for every promotion you run, if you want to make sure you’re retaining as much profit as possible but also doing the best that you can to incentivize the customer to take action in the way that you want them to. So that’s why, and actually let’s flip back up a couple of slides, that’s why it’s important to know what your promotion is at each of these stages. What is it we want that segment of customers to do, and how much are we willing to pay to encourage them to do it?

Now I wanted to show you an example of this. This is a relatively good example, but one of the things which I don’t like about this mailing piece is, I don’t think the copy is good enough. I think the copy is a little confusing, and I think they could have done better copy that would have enabled them to lower the discount rate. Because that’s one of the things with these promotions, if you get the graphics right, the copy right, and you create a really strong piece, whether it’s an email, a banner on your website, or a mailing piece, physical mailing piece like this one is, you can hold on to more margin because you’ve created a more compelling piece of marketing.

But this does demonstrate quite a few of the things I wanted to show you. So first off, the point of this piece of mailing campaign is basically, we’ve selected everybody who’s buying our probiotic and we want them to buy our multivitamin, so we’re going to send them a postcard, that’s personalized, it’s got my name on there, saying you’re missing out, you’re only buying one of our products, get another one. So that’s what the message of this is. So they’ve segmented, they’ve gone, we’re going to try and increase the amount we get from our existing customers by persuading them to buy our other product, which is a multivitamin rather than a probiotic. They’ve then, and I really hope they’ve tested to see how much discount they need to do to persuade us to do that, so they’ve done a discount offer, they’ve got a code there as well so they know, we’re tracking it, and it feels a little bit more personal when there’s a code, it’s not just, and it’s a unique code, it’s not just 15 off, it’s something a bit more than that. And then they’ve got all those trust signals, so across the bottom there they’ve got their B Corp, the vegan, they’ve got all sorts of different things across the bottom to make you think, oh, they know what they’re talking about.

So they’ve thought about who the customer is, they’ve thought about how they can maximize their margins, they’ve thought about what they actually want them to do, and they’ve created this piece to do it. Now what I hope, in the world of stackable marketing, they’ve done is, that if I decided to go to the website and enter that code, it would recognize the fact I’ve got this mailing piece, that they’d follow it up with email marketing to me about the same offer, that they would use their integrations with Facebook ads and Google ads to be showing me an advert with the same offer on other platforms, and that’s when the stacking of the marketing really starts to add up and really starts to deliver. So it does kind of bring everything together, but I think their copy could have been better, if I’m being completely honest. But they may have tested it and it may work brilliantly, I haven’t seen the results, just to flag that one up.

Okay, so I said I was going to, oh yes, and the other thing I wanted to say is, changing this promotions thing is a really big mindset shift. Rather than just, you know, whacking 20% off everything, you’ve really got to think about, how do we think about getting this promotion right, how do we take a step back from what we’ve always done before and make that step change. It’s tough, but it really is that mindset shift that you’ve got to get into, as is this whole stacking of the marketing piece.

Okay, I’ve given you quite a lot to do arguably, which is definitely going to become a 2025 project, some of it, not a pre-Christmas project, but there will be elements of everything I’ve talked about that it’s totally feasible for you to get in place over the next couple of weeks to up your performance that little bit more. So I wanted to give you a bit of a bonus couple of minutes on how to do more with less, which as I said at the beginning is something I’m finding a lot of brands, a lot of businesses are struggling with, with head count freezes, budget freezes and all that kind of stuff going on, how do you manage to squeeze more performance out of what you’ve already got in your business?

So let’s tackle how you do more with less. The first thing is to get super clear on what you could do versus what you should do. Okay, so the could list, the list of things you could do in your business, in your job, is endless, absolutely endless. As I do this session, we’re about halfway through, I reckon, the Cloudways Prepathon, so you’ve got a whole load more things already in this day and a half on your could list. What you’ve got to be really really good at, if you want to achieve everything you can with the resources you’ve got, is narrowing it down to the things you actually should do. Personally, I do this by having a planning spreadsheet where one of the tabs is things for next quarter or things for next year, so two tabs, and when I have great ideas that just aren’t a now thing, I put them on essentially my could-in-the-future list, so I can focus on my should list. So get clear on what’s a should versus all those many many things that could be coulds.

Now let me give you a couple of other ways to help you drill into that. The first is to try and avoid the bright shiny objects. This is really really tough, especially when you’re doing the right thing and going out there and finding out about new stuff, like you’re doing this week at this event, but you’ve got to have a bit of a filter on, is this a bright shiny object. Now that filter might be sleeping on it and thinking about the following day, I’m a big fan of sleeping on an idea and seeing if it still feels like a good one tomorrow or next week or next month. It could be putting it on those different tabs, or maybe you’ve got a notepad for these things which you keep and then you review it once a week. I know people who take lots of screenshots and they review their screenshots once a week, or LinkedIn saves and then review them once a month. Lots of different ways to try and make sure you’re not just jumping on a bright shiny object because it’s bright and shiny and exciting, even though it’s not the right thing for you to be doing at the moment.

So think about those bright shiny objects. Then this is another way, which especially if you’ve got a team and you’re trying to keep the team focused on the right things is really really important to look at. This is a business called Mama Bamboo, they are on a mission to be the most referred eco bamboo nappy brand in the country. That’s their mission, is to be the most referred, not the greatest sales, not the greatest unit sold through big supermarkets, they are on a mission to be the most referred. So that clarifies for them a whole load of decisions. Where are we going to spend money in our marketing tech stack? On things that help us drive referrals. When we looked at that traffic that buys model where we had those different stages, they’re putting lots of effort into the referral piece, which would be around stages four and five more so than at the beginning of the process. And when you land on their website you don’t get an “and sign up to our email” message, you get a “refer a friend and get 500 points,” whether you’ve ever been there before or not, because their aim is to drive the referrals. Now if you’ve got a clear mission or goal within the business, it makes it so much easier to work out what should be on that should list rather than all those millions of things that are on the could list, and that level of focus really helps you do more with less.

We can’t really do this in 2024 without talking a little bit about AI and automation as well, which I mentioned earlier. So the other two things I’m finding businesses doing a lot at the moment, more than almost anything else in e-commerce, is finding ways that AI can help them save time. And one brilliant example, we had run a webinar a couple of months back about turning your customer services channel into a profit channel, and one of the examples somebody gave during that was that they found that using AI to automate the creation of the handover between one team of customer service people and the next was saving huge amounts of time every single day, every single handover, which meant their team had more time to spend with the customers. Which is not one of those things you hear in, you know, a list of top 50 things to do with your AI in e-commerce, it’s all about easy marketing and copy creating and various bits and pieces, but they found huge value from it, from automating those handover tasks to save the team time so they’ve got the time to spend on better things.

And that I think is where we’re going to see real gains with AI in our industry, is enabling it to push things forwards. Yesterday I hosted a webinar all about Black Friday advice, and one of the points that came up in that was how the generative nature of AI means we can adapt more quickly than we could before. So if you’re, you know, two days into Black Friday and the results aren’t going quite so well and you’ve got an idea for how you could tweak it, now you don’t have to wait three days for the graphic designers to create it, you can now feed it into one of the generative AI pieces and they will come back with new ad creative, new ad copy and so forth, so we can make those changes more quickly. So I definitely, look about how you can enable your team and yourselves to use AI, but also to use automation, because it doesn’t have to be AI to save you time, there’s plenty of ways you can create those integrations between different machines to speed up your time and to automate things that otherwise you’d be doing manually, which is exactly why I mentioned that in our checklist earlier on. So yeah, take a bit of time to think about how you can automate things for your team.

So that is my four key things to help you prepare your e-commerce store for the Holiday Rush. One, the once-and-done checklist. Two, building connection and trust. Three, stacking your marketing. Four, the promotion strategy. And then there’s that bonus advice about how to do more with less, because I have given you quite a lot there, and I know it’s something a lot of you are challenged with at the moment. And you can get all the slides and lots of extra stuff for free at chloelink.com/cloudways.

Brent: Hello, welcome back. That was fantastic. Let’s give a quick virtual round of applause for Chloe and all of that. I mean, I’m blown away, I’m like, you have basically given people a road map for not just this holiday season but like the next 12 months to just have a bangout promotion season. So you might have quite possibly the most questions that I’ve seen in chat and the Q&A panel. Unfortunately, we are up on time, and so I had a little idea with the team backstage, maybe we could grab those questions and distribute something after Prepathon or something, just because there are a lot of very very specific questions. I’m not sure we’re going to have time for very many of them, if any, but we do have a lot, so maybe we can make a list and we can get some of those back out to our audience after the Prepathon. I think we would need literally like another two hours to get through all, maybe Chloe you can give us a solid and get us some answers to these things.

Chloe Thomas: Yeah, it’s never too soon, and yes, I will, I will, if someone can send me all those in a doc or something, I will do my best to get you an answer with all of them in the next couple of days so you can get that out to everybody.

Brent: So yeah, how soon do you start prepping?

Chloe Thomas: Well, it’s never too early, but it’s also never too late. And I think it partly depends on the size of the business. The big high street stores, they will have, they’re already looking at 2025, their merchandising and buying teams are already working out what products they want for peak next year. But the other side of it is, it’s never too late to start preparing. And I think, you know, with when there’s so many big movable things that we don’t have control over at the moment, in the economy, finances, in the US you’ve got the election which is like the biggest curve ball ever, why do they do that in November, it’s like the worst thing for an e-commerce marketer. But there’s all this stuff that’s out of your control, so I think for smaller businesses it makes sense to, you know, have a sketch over the summer, but to be really getting into the nitty-gritty now. And you definitely want to be trying to do what you can in September and October to drive results later. So the ad prices only go up, so can you test ad creative now so it’s ready to go when the prices go up, can you gain email signups now so you’ve got them for later, can you drive sales now so you’ve got people who are first-time buyers you can turn into repeat buyers later, which is easier than turning new people in. So there’s about 20 things in response to your question, but the answer basically would be, start now.

Brent: Okay, we’ll make sure that people start now. But I also love that takeaway of, it’s never too late, because sometimes people, I know for myself at least, you’re like, ah, I’ve missed out, like, you know, but it’s never too late, you can always jump in and make that happen. So real quick, before we go on to our next activity, how has your experience been as a Prepathon speaker at this year’s event?

Chloe Thomas: It’s been lovely, I love the tech, loving the audience. I would love a look at the pitches that came in early, I thought that was a brilliant piece too. So it’s been a real pleasure to be here, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, and I just hope this has helped the audience a lot.

Brent: Amazing. I’m seeing some emojis fly, let’s give it up for Chloe Thomas folks, amazing conversation today around preparing your e-commerce store for the Holiday Rush, tons of gold nuggets and takeaways there. When we come back, we’re going to be doing an activity called the crossword craze, so I hope you’re ready for that, you’re going to get to see how amazing my handwriting is for that. So if you’re excited for that, stick with us and we’ll be right back for our crossword craze. So stick with us here at Cloudways Prepathon 2024.