The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

Secrets for E-Commerce Growth With Paul Boag (Episode 72)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 72

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🗣In this episode of the Dropship Unlocked Podcast, hosts Lewis Smith and James Eardley are joined by Paul Boag, a renowned expert in customer experience optimisation, digital leadership, and UX design thinking. 

With over 27 years of experience and a wealth of knowledge working with top clients, Paul shares invaluable insights into the secrets for e-commerce growth.

👉 Prefer to watch this on Youtube? Check it out here  ➡️ https://youtu.be/dIX7nndDQ44

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Topics Discussed:

★ The Importance of Customer Experience: Paul emphasises the fundamental role of customer experience in driving e-commerce success, highlighting its impact on conversion rates and customer retention.

★ UX Best Practices for E-commerce Sites: Delving into user experience on e-commerce platforms, Paul discusses design principles that drive user engagement, navigation, usability, and accessibility tips, along with tools for continuous UX improvement.

★ Enhancing Brand Awareness: Paul explores how e-commerce businesses can effectively increase brand awareness through UX enhancements, focusing on integrating brand identity into user experience and storytelling.

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Links and Resources Mentioned:

Pick up a copy of Lewis’ book: https://htabook.com 

Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/shopify 

Get a free trial with a professional phone line: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/circle 

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Key Takeaways:

★ User Experience: Practical UX best practices for e-commerce sites are shared to empower listeners in creating engaging digital experiences.

★ Brand Awareness Through UX: Strategies for enhancing brand awareness through UX enhancements are explored, emphasising the role of UX in brand communication and perception.

★ Leveraging UX for Customer Lifetime Value: Paul discusses the nexus between UX and customer lifetime value, offering actionable insights for designing experiences that foster customer loyalty and long-term relationships.

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★★★Dropship Unlocked - Lewis Smith★★★

🌏Watch Our Free Training ➽ https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/training?el=podcast-72-secrets-for-growth-paul-boag

All of our listeners who have ecommerce stores that should definitely be considering seriously, I know I. So Paul is a leader in conversion optimization, digital leadership and UX design thinking. Check that there's a market for it before you go to the effort of building it. If you understand the intricacies of a customer journey and their user experience, it has a direct impact on customer lifetime value. And I don't think that's ever been more critical. That kind of thing. A larger companies can't compete with that is your competitive advantage. He shared on how foundational customer experience can be not only for increasing immediate sales, which is something we all want to do, but also for building those long term customer relationships, building your brand. Welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Louis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked and with me is our Client Success Coach James Eardley. Now, when we're not recording the podcast episodes, we're running our own e commerce businesses and helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket drop shipping businesses, keen to build your own six or even seven figure business. My book the home turf advantage is your blueprint for launching a profitable online store. Grab your copy at HTA books.com To date, and let's get you started. Now sit back, relax, and let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked podcast. Welcome to today's episode, where we are joined by Paul BOAC, a maestro of digital conversion and user experience. Now Paul's got over 27 years of shaping the online landscapes for giants like humor, and doctors without borders. So Paul brings a treasure trove of insights into enhancing e commerce businesses to today's episode. Yes, Louis. This was a very enjoyable conversation to have with Paul. He really breaks down user design principles and actionable strategies that we can take away. And we got into a great conversation about designing a customer experience that wows your customers and will elevate you beyond any competition that you have. We'll explore how that customer experience really makes a huge difference. And it's not just about the website, it's a holistic view that he takes to improving your business. And that's crucial for capturing and retaining customers in today's digital marketplace. Yet it certainly is Get ready to dive deep into the world of customer experience and optimization. Paul's going to reveal how minor tweaks to your website's user experience can lead to major leaps in customer satisfaction, and more importantly, business growth for you. And Paul's got some experience in quite an interesting industry that might surprise you. I won't mention any more, but keep listening to find out more. So let's gear up for some golden nuggets for making your e commerce Store. Not just functional, but fantastic. Today, we're thrilled to be joined on the dropship unlock podcast with Paul Bomag. So Paul is a leader in conversion optimization, digital leadership and UX design thinking. He has over 27 years of experience working with clients such as doctors without borders, and Kuma. He is the author of six books, and a well respected presenter. So it really is an honor to have you with us today. Paul, thank you for sharing your insights with us today. Well, that's alright, honor. I think he's maybe a bit of a strong word, but we'll go with it anyway. No, absolutely. Probably you've got lots of insights you can share with us today about customer experience. But let's start with the basics initially, why do you think customer experience is a fundamental part for E commerce success, I mean, if you want to kind of strip it back to its its absolute minimum, what it ultimately comes down to is the cost of acquiring a new customer is a lot higher than the cost of maintaining an existing customer. So if you provide a good customer experience, those people will come back to you again and again. And again. And that means that you have to spend less on marketing and acquiring those new customers. Also, if you do a really good job, those existing customers turn into advocates, and they will be encouraging others to buy. So that reduces your marketing costs still further. So from a purely commercial point of view, it's extremely worthwhile. And then there is another factor that a lot of people, especially when they're new to e commerce overlooked, which is customer lifetime value, which is how much a customer is worth to your business over their entire engagement with you. And if you can get that number by get When people to come back again and again and again, you're going to end up with a much more profitable business. So from a purely, you know, kind of cold hard cash point of view, that's, that's the benefit of it. But there are lots of other benefits as well. building a good reputation amongst people means that you get lots of positive reviews, and those reviews in turn, turn into more business. So just a nice thing to do to treat other people well, and to give them a good service. And so there's all that aspect to it as well. Fantastic. Yeah, there's so much to dig into there. So we talked about customer experience, when you look at a business and work with it with a company, when you think about how to improve their customer experience, are you purely focused on the website? Or do you take a more sort of holistic view at the business model itself? Yeah, you've you've got to look at the the, the, the experience in its entirety, because often times, one part of the journey can fall down, so you can have the best website in the world. But if your products are delivered, the you know, thrown through the door, like Amazon seem to do these days where they get vaguely close to your house, and then just throw the park parcel at you, that undermines the experience, you know, or, equally, if you know, the emails you receive are confusing, you're not sure when it's going to be delivered or, or whether the order has gone through properly, or when something goes wrong. And that's often a situation that that people really underestimate that if something goes wrong, and people need to complain to you, that is actually one of the best opportunities to turn, what is a disgruntled customer into an advocate for your brand. And I can give you a real example recently that I will do as sleep Maskey thing that, that, that I wanted. So So I got that through, tried it on, I didn't find it particularly comfortable, I wasn't really quite sure about it. They said they had a return policy, you know, a 30 day return policy or whatever it was. And you always go into those situations. So the natural kind of we're really, where am I going to have a problem here? Is it going to be a battle? I contacted them? And they said, absolutely fine. We've already issued your refund, but you can keep it because they knew that the cost of actually returning it and restocking it was so high, they might as well just give it to me. And of course that's turned me into a massive advocate for them would amazing customer service look great people are now promoting them on this podcast, you know, so so you can actually even a bad experience can turn somebody into a huge advocate for your brand, which is is what you want. And present it Yeah, they obviously made a lasting impression on you. And I've had similar experiences where you're never quite sure I with returns processes. But it is a big opportunity for that company to actually turn in the detractors, the possible detractors from the website to actually become your biggest fans, because I think they're the ones that you actually can turn around and they can actually end up being they're your biggest fans. Would you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. Let me tell you a story of the best, the best customer experience story that I ever came across with in my work. And it's a bit of an interesting example. So bear with me, because it's about a company called love honey. Now, you might be familiar with love honey living in the UK, or they'll obviously your to, you'll see why it's a sex toy manufacturer, right. So it's not the best example in some ways to be using on the podcast. But from a customer experience point of view, they absolutely nailed it. They became the biggest retailer in the world of sex toys, right. And the one of the ways that they did it, and I was working with them in this very early period is that they, they recognized would they wanted to target a different market that sex toys had traditionally been targeted at men, and they wanted to target women, and so that they had to chose the branding and all of the other stuff. But they also recognize that for many people, this was the last the first time they'd ever purchase something like this. So they went into excruciating detail to reassure their audience about all the potential pain points in that experience. So I'm worried that it's going to start vibrating when the postman delivers it right. Or that the the package might be torn or that it might have loved honey written on it. Or I'm worried that I won't like it because I've never bought a sex toy before and they systematically addressed all of those everything is triple wrapped. The batteries are never in the item when he gets delivered You can return it. And this is the killer for 365 days, unconditional return policy. And by the way, in case you're wondering, they didn't resell the items after that they recycled. And so they really cared about that level of detail. And it's interesting, right? Because you might think, well, that's a very specific story for a very specific customer. But the guy that I worked with at love honey, we previously worked together at a company called Wiltshire farm foods. Now, will should farm foods sell frozen ready meals to old people? Okay, so, so you're totally different audience, but things that could be the same principle. So if you're in your 80s, and you're getting frozen ready meals delivered, you you're scared about this guy turning up at your door, right? Because you're, you know, who is he? They can't carry though, you know, there's big things the supermarket's give you the big trays, and you've got to carry them in the house and unpack, they can't do any of that. They don't really are a bit scared of E commerce. So they would prefer to pay cash on delivery. So what will should farm food, same guy, right, I was working with them together, we worked this out, we did police check every driver, you got the same driver every time, unlike Tescos, they would come into your house and unpack stuff directly into your freezer for you. And you could pay cash on the door and even older with that driver for your next time. That's the power of good customer service. And that allowed love honey to become the biggest in their sector. It allowed Wiltshire farm foods to compete with the likes of Tescos, even though you could only buy frozen ready meals to them. And and you paid a premium for it. But they could do that because of their level of customer service. Fantastic. I mean, you can learn so much there because they're across completely different industries, and different audiences. But the rules remain the same. So we can apply this across our E commerce businesses, everyone listening today, no matter what niche we're in, there's, there's things you can pick up on. So if you were to work with with a business, and when you work with love honey, or Welsh or fallen foods, how do you go about finding out what's really important to customers straightaway? That's does a really good question. So that's where you need to do user research. And there are typically two types of research I do. One is qualitative, and the other is quantitative. So in quantitative research, you're looking at speaking to a large number of people. And that is typically done through some form of survey, right. So sometimes you might use something like pull fish, poke fish.com is a survey tool. And you could put your survey on there. And then they'll do recruitment for you for like $1 a person that you want to get, you know, responses from. And I'll ask them about their pain points and their objections why they might not buy from a company, that kind of thing. Alternatively, sometimes I just run a single one question survey on my E commerce sites. In fact, most of the E commerce sites that I'm helping with has a one question survey that only appears on exit intent. So as somebody goes to leave the website, so we're not interrupting their buying experience, because there's nothing more annoying than an overlay saying, hey, sign up for our newsletter, or did you have a good experience today, and you haven't even interacted with the site yet? So only appears on exit? And he asked one question, if you decided not to buy today, it would be great to know why. And then I list a whole load of different reasons and allow another field as well. And that is the most powerful tool possible for understanding what you know what users are doing. So that's the quantitative side. On the quality side, I like to do some user interviews. Now my favorite type of user interviews, which I actually did with wheelchair farmfoods is when I went to the people's homes, right and met with them. But if you can't do that, that's absolutely fine. But when you chat with these people, like with Wiltshire FOB foods, I've went and visited one lady, you know, typical, really old lady with with hundreds of cats everywhere. And you know, she was running off of what was effectively a Windows 95 computer. And, you know, there was all these, you get all of these insights that help you to understand their struggles and their pains and their frustrations with the situation. And that's how you learn those kinds of pain points and those objections and the issues that you can help with. Fantastic and that's the foundation then for everything else. Start with love honey or wheelchair foreign fears. It's all about what is the actual most simple Certain things to the customer, before you start designing a business that actually doesn't sue anyone, because you haven't done that foundational piece first, for our E commerce sites, we can easily set up that survey for exit intent to find out what's stopping people. And we can get surveys in place. I think for that qualitative data piece, I would interpret that as maybe just in the caveat, email flow, after abandoned carts or welcome series, you email them automated and you ask them if they can provide a phone number. So you can give them a phone call, to get in touch with people to ask them those sort of questions. And when you're speaking with people, customers to understand their pain points, what are the sorts of questions that you ask them in that in that qualitative research piece that you do? So I often ask them? So let's say you're selling glasses? I don't know. That doesn't really matter, whatever. Okay. You want to sell glasses, right? So you say, Well, where do you where do you currently buy your glasses? Right? So you find out that first, and then you say, Okay, what do you hate about that experience? What makes it hard? What makes it challenging? So then you could, you know, they might go, Oh, they're often I'm talking about drinking glasses. By the way, I should have said that, rather than these glasses. Oh, I've had several that have arrived, cracked and damaged. Right? Okay, so now I need to make sure that I address that on the website that we triple wrap things or whatever else. Or it might be, I never sure whether they're dishwasher friendly. Okay, so that needs to go on the website. And you just basically unpack what their concerns and their feelings are, you know, just in quite an informal chatty way. And, you know, and people love to have a mode or perhaps is a British thing. Now, it might be might be very specifically British, but we love emotion. We love to say what's wrong with an experience. And you know, and I know Americans are the same, you know, if they get bad customer service, they will, they will let you know. So getting people in a role of moaning about the little things that that frustrated them is often a good way of identifying where you can have a competitive advantage. Yeah, a good way I found to find that out is actually scraping some reviews of like competitor websites in the same industry. And picking out the common themes that people are getting annoyed at, or reasons why they were looking for products in the first place is another is another way. So for our E commerce sites, we don't have the we don't have the luxury or we don't have the control over the product itself or the packaging. Because we're often drop shipping from suppliers. So we can't directly influence necessarily the products or the packaging. So I wonder if you were to work with it with our type of website, the biggest impact we can make is on the communications to the customers, the ads and the website, in terms of everything that communications to a customer. What sort of changes like best practices, I guess, would you be making with that data that we've picked up? How would you apply that to a website to make a difference to that customer experience? Yeah, a lot of it comes down. If somebody has got as far as visiting your website, they've already expressed a desire for the product, right? Because they've clicked on an ad or search results or whatever else. So they want the product. And on on websites, we spend a lot of time convincing people they want the product, when that's not the primary problem here. The primary problem is, is objection handling, it's understanding why they might decide not to act, right. And so that's why I I've run that survey that I mentioned about if you decided not to buy today would be great to know why? Because you want to get to the heart of what what that is. And it can be a variety of different reasons. It might be that they don't trust you. It might be that they don't know whether the product, your particular version of the product will fulfill their need. Or it might be that you don't answer some specific questions about the product, maybe the price is too high, could be a lot of things. Some of those things we can influence and some we can. So let's take for example, that delivery example that I gave you, right? Like you say you can't control the packaging, you can't control whether that glass is going to turn up cracked or not. But what you can do is very clearly say on the website, you know, if if you are unhappy with the product in any way you are welcome to return it on I would encourage you to give an outrageous return period right? You're out you could return it for up to a year you can return it yet even if you just fell in a in a snotty mood and you decided you wanted to annoy me and return it right make outrageous claims. claims to that because not everybody freaks out a little bit about this and goes yeah, but But you know, it's gonna cost me a fortune. People very rarely abused This kind of stuff, that the increase you will see in sales due to that way offset the additional costs that you have that comes from, you know, having a return a few more things that maybe you previously would have done. So don't worry too much about that. But then a lot of it is about surreally was about is clear communication on the website is saying, We've got this outrageous return policy, yellow is saying that you can easily contact us, we will respond quickly. That's another really important one is the speed of response to emails that you receive and those kinds of things. So in love is about objection handling, a lot of it is about communication, and back and forth, letting people know what's going on with their order, when they've placed it is a big one as well. So when it's been dispatched, where it is, at any particular time when it's going to arrive, you know, all of that kind of information, often times if it's a reasonably valuable product, it's worth having end to end tracking, so people can actually see where it is at any particular time. So it's about paying attention to that level of details. Not that let me just think about yourself when you're out buying things online. Right, what annoys you? What do you worry about? Because that will be the same with other people? Yeah. And by doing that research as well, qualitative, quantitative, you've got those lists. So I'm going through this process in my mind, I've got the list of objections. And then we need to then translate that onto the website to approach those. And I love the way you mentioned their call about not just talking about selling the product, actually, what we're doing is overcoming objections, and answering the difficulties that they're having in their lives that brought them to the website, in the first place, I think is a new way of looking at things really. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying you know, some of those objections or questions that people have, are things like, why is your product better than somebody else's? Right? So you are selling in that regards? Absolutely. Of course you are. But it's still an objection. It's still, you know, why should I give you my money to you rather than to somebody else, but all of that, really, you've got to think of, you're not trying to basically tell someone that they need a glass, they know they need a glass, that they're on that website, because they want the glass, you're telling them why your glass is better than somebody else's class. You know, why pick glasses? It's such a terrible example. But there you go, it works. It still works at get illustrates the point, doesn't it have, you know, the glass is a means to an end, isn't it? And we've got to talk about the end that people are trying to get to, and I love the point about the the outrageous guarantee or the outrageous returns policy as well, because of the influx of sales and how that outweighs and we can we can facilitate that even if our suppliers won't take the return beyond like 14 days, but we suggest that we have like a 90 day returns policy or a year returns policy, we can still get those back to our freight forwarding, warehouse, sell them quickly on Gumtree and eBay to retain the sales cost that you sold that that product for. And so you don't lose out. But the actual influx in sales, I guess, do you have to like put a threshold in mind before you were to test like be warranty? Or a big guarantee? Would you have to like know the numbers up front as to what the increase would need to be? Yeah, I mean, yes, that's the sensible way of doing it, isn't it and you know, if you're doing it in a grown up way, you would sit down and you would work all of that kind of stuff out. I'm a little bit more fly by my pants, if I'm honest with you, I like to try things in the real world and work out what happens, right? So for me, I would would probably run a trial of that for a length of time and just tag customers that have got the longer returns policy, either using a be testing if you've got adequate levels of traffic, or alternatively, to do do it for a limited time. The other thing that I've done before is I've set a separate landing page and a separate campaign built around just that thing. And that as a selling point, hey, you know, sign up now and you'll get a 365 day return policy, that kind of thing could work well, I tend to use a lot of landing pages. I mean, that's a whole nother subject where I tailor specific messaging and specific campaigns and specific approaches to different people, even like for example, you know, if you've got a product, well, let's go back to our glasses. I've committed myself we might as well follow through. So you know, there will be certain features that would make your glasses stand out. There will be one where maybe it's dishwasher friendly, another where it's super tough and durable, another might be its design aesthetic. So you know, what, what I often do is I will create an ad hoc page for each of those key benefits, run ads driving people to those different landing pages to find out which converts the better so that I can learn about what's the thing people most care about. See could do things like that Bill added pages. Well, sorry, I've gone off on landing pages now. I apologize. No, no, no, that's super interesting. It all ties into that, that testing what's most important to customers to understand what's really going to move the needle for your business is ultimately giving customers what they they need. And yeah, you can test that through different landing pages, or Yeah, or different emails and see how all different ad copy and see which performs the best to get a feel for what's most important. And the surveys as well. If you ask that question to customers, what's most important, I guess, you get that info as well. I'll tell you another thing that you can, you can do if your cause, because I know that a lot of people that listening to this, this podcaster may be toying with this for the first time. And you might feel slightly intimidated by the whole thing. So one of the things you can do is even before you've got a dropship supplier, and everything set up to actually deliver, you can run test campaigns to a landing page. So you have a run an ad that drives people to a landing page that sells the product, except when you click the Buy button, it says this isn't currently available, would you like to join a waiting list. So when it comes back in stock, and that allows you to even test whether there is a valid market there for you before you go to all the hassle of, you know, sorting out suppliers and connecting to drop shipping and all of those other things are involved. And that really works, even if you've got an existing drop shipping business, and you're talking about adding a new product or a new, you know, something else alongside it. So that that's another use of landing pages I use lot you know, and I work with a lot of sass apps, people that want to develop a SAS app or sort of software as a service app. And then that costs takes a lot of time and a lot of money to build the product. And I'm saying well look, check that there's a market for it before you go to the effort of building it, you know? Yeah, absolutely. We're, we're on the subject of landing pages. So I mean, we use Shopify, the majority of our businesses that we were actually, that's the way that we that we teach is through Shopify. So how would you go about? And do you use Shopify? Or do you separate landing page providers to create separate landing pages if you're going to test different things? First of all, I love Shopify, I've worked with them a number of times over the years. And yeah, you is personal preference. Basically, if you're creating landing pages, with the primary intention of just moving people through to purchase and to buy, so you're not using it for a test campaign, for example, that it makes sense to create an additional page in in in Shopify, and you know, that doesn't need to be a part of the overall site in information architecture, it can be like a standard standalone page. But yeah, that absolutely can work. That said, I really liked some of the kind of landing page builders because it's so easy just to shove something up like quick and dirty. So things like Unbounce, for example, a lot of them have got integration into Shopify anyway. And then once you've created one of those, you can just copy and paste it for every other landing page that you do, and just tweak it as necessary. So there are lots of different ways of doing it. I mean, another way, of course, is that if you're already making small changes, like, for example, you're just changing headlines or copy or you know, that kind of thing, then a B testing is another good way to go. Unfortunately, that's a little bit trickier than it was it used to be, we could all use Google Optimize, and it was free and easy. These days, that has gone away, unfortunately, which is really mean of them and has ruined my life. But there are things like CrazyEgg that will enable you to do that kind of stuff as well. So you know, yeah, costs a bit, but it's not as crazy as that. I mean, some some like A B testing platforms are costing 345 $100 a month, which seems like a little overkill in my humble opinion. Yeah, well, that that just takes it away from sort of small business owners that we are when we first get started with this type of business. So it's just puts it into the hands of the Wii enterprises. Yeah, CrazyEgg is a lot cheaper, right? I think, you know, it's only 10s of dollars per month, if I remember correctly. So if you want to play around with a B test is probably the best place to start these days. Fantastic. And I wanted to tie back round to something you mentioned at the the top of the podcast, which was the importance of lifetime value for a business and not always been focused on new customers because obviously new customers are going to be the most expensive to acquire with him. marketing campaigns. So, yeah, how I guess how would you focus on improving the lifetime value of a business that you are working with? I mean, let's be honest, that suits some businesses more than others, right. So this is where my glasses analogy falls down, you know, you're not buying glasses regularly. So, as a result, you know, if you're just drop shipping a single product, lifetime, customer value probably isn't going to be as big a deal. If it's something that's bought just occasionally, If, however, you're selling something like pet food, absolutely, lifetime value is a huge issue. And when it comes to improving lifetime customer value, it is all about the customer experience, and the details of that customer experience. So it's identifying every friction point, everything that might slightly irritate people, and offering a level of service that they wouldn't find elsewhere. So that is where the kind of Wiltshire farm foods and love honey elements begin to really matter. You know, it, but it's also obviously, you might be struggling to think well, how does that interpret to my, my particular product, and it will be very niche for each different type of product. But what everybody can offer is a personalized, fast communication with clients, you know, there is this tendency to pretend to be bigger than you are, right? So we, you know, all the communications we send to our customers are all like, you know, we are really pleased you place the order, and it's just you sitting in your back bedroom, actually leverage the fact that it's just you go in with them and go, you know, I'm so grateful that you bought from me, you know, if there's anything I could do to help word everything very personally, in such a way that you're there and you're giving them individual service, that kind of thing, a larger companies can't compete with that is your competitive advantage is the fact that you can be personable, you can be friendly, you can be you with them and build a relationship. So it's about speed, it's about being personal, and it's about going the extra mile, you know, that that's really, it's not rocket science. Yeah, it's about leaning into our strengths, which I agree, it's easy to see as weaknesses, you know, being a one man band when you first get started, but actually, that you can do things that large companies can't do, or struggle to do, because they haven't got like, the personalized aspect. And they even like giving your customer a call, and just saying, Yeah, how did you get on it, it means a lot that you've chosen us. And that can mean a lot to a customer to know that they're getting a call from the founder of the company because you really care about their experience. I think we can we can learn a lot from that call. hash rate, the sorry that the other little thing that I quite like is where things like little handwritten notes that go in with the product. Thanks. So buy in, it's obviously handwritten, rather than another one you get became this big trend on Etsy for a while, whenever I bought stuff from Etsy, they put a little thing of Haribo in, in in the box with you, you know, with the product now, okay, maybe, you know, if you're drop shipping that that's those kinds of things are not so easy to do. But yeah, like you say, you can call them, you can also maybe go the extra mile, if you've got someone that, say has bought five times from your 10 times from your whatever, you might want to send them a thank you card, right? Or a little free gift or something like that. So in psychology, there is this human characteristic that says, if I give you a gift, if I do something for you, whether I give you a gift, I helped you out or something like that, then you feel the desire to respond and balance the scales in our relationship, right? So if you send a customer a little out of the blue a free gift, then that they feel the need to then respond and often they'll share it. I'll give you a real example. Right? I use MailChimp for years, right? And then one day through the post, I got a little there Freddy character, I don't know whether you've ever seen it's like a little mascot they have. They sent me a little toy through thanking me for being a customer, right? So my immediate response to them was to post it to social media because I felt this need to balance the scale and publicly thanked them. And that is very different from an incentive, right? An incentive that it gets calculated into the price. So if you buy our glasses, you'll get a free whatever. That becomes a part of the transaction but giving them a little free gift Every now and again or sending them a card thanking them, that creates this sense of wanting to give back it creates a sense of loyalty to any opportunity to do anything like that is really worth the effort. And you can get outsize returns. I mean, the cost of our bag of Haribo especially if you're buying in bulk, you could probably get the 50 p per bag, you know, you send that along with your high ticket products. And you know, you're making average profits of like 300 pounds per order. They post that to their social media, get one friend, you know, from your 50 P investment in a Haribo bag, you know, 300 pound order comes from their family member, because you're the customer, you're the you're the place that they got a Haribo bag for free from because they just place an order with you. And it's just ways to differentiate yourself, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Simple as that. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Paul, I've really enjoyed our conversation on the podcast today. incredibly enlightening. Now for our listeners that want to learn more from you. Where would you recommend that they go? The main thing I'm doing these days is I have a mailing list where I send out weekly advice spec verse route optimization, user experience, customer experience, that kind of thing. So you can get that by going to my website, which is Bo ag world.com, bo ag world.com If you want to have a look at some previous newsletters, etc, by google.com, forward slash subscribe, and you can see the kind of thing that I send out, so that they're more than welcome to join that if they like to. Amazing, we'll make sure that is linked in the description, or the show notes of this episode. So definitely check it out. Paul has been enlightening loads of actionable steps, people can take away lots of fascinating insights from all different types of industries, which I particularly enjoyed getting involved into today. So thank you, Paul. Appreciate it. In welcome. That was a great session with Paul barog. Lewis, I think now we can see clearly that if you understand the intricacies of a customer journey and their user experience, it has a direct impact on customer lifetime value. And I don't think that's ever been more critical. Absolutely, yeah, his insights and the light that he shared on how foundational customer experience can be not only for increasing immediate sales, which is something we all want to do, but also for building those long term customer relationships, building your brand. I loved Paul's approach to weaving brand identity with that user centric user focused design is something that all of our listeners who have ecommerce stores should definitely be considering seriously. I know I exactly. And it's impressive. How actually will pause advices I'm sure it will get the cogs whirring in people's minds that are listening about how they can implement the lessons that we've learned today. And I think it's just a few simple adjustments and also some bigger changes to your customer journey. There's lots that people can take away from this episode to start make those improvements straightaway. Yeah, exactly. And for those looking to dive even deeper into this, remember, Paul has added some additional in depth training into our Premium Members area as well. So if you combine that, with the systematic approach outlined in my book that you can get at HTA book.com, you are well on your way to transforming your E commerce site to visit HTA book.com. To get started, and leverage the full potential for your online store. Enjoying the podcast, we'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review. And we might just feature it on an upcoming episode. Also, for detailed show notes and resources, head to dropship unlock.com forward slash podcast. If you found value from any episode of this podcast, please take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your podcast app of choice. It helps us more than you could imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments on the show. Thanks for being part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering a new episode every week. Now it's time to answer a question that we've had in from a listener of the podcast. And remember, if you want your questions answered, simply comment below the YouTube video version of this episode. So that's exactly what Mark Chapman for three double seven has done. And he is asked if a supplier does offer direct dispatch, aka drop shipping. Would you be discussing API integrated systems to manage stock levels? Great question mark. And the I like your thinking. I mean, whilst some suppliers provide those livestock feeds that, like you say, you can integrate directly with our systems and you can use tools to do it. Keeping our product listings updated in real time with their inventory isn't always quite the case. So it's important to understand that such a sophisticated API level integration that you talked about is more of an exception than the norm in the drop shipping industry. And certainly as things stand at the moment, not all suppliers are going to have those API connections. Some will some you might have to take a bit more of a manual approach. More often we'd adapt the suppliers existing systems that they have whether that's like a or tool, or even if it's just a website, or maybe it's a Monday PDF that comes through, you know, sometimes it's just as simple as that, that they send through. However they do it, there are ways that we can plug into make sure that it takes the data from what they send us in whichever format they do, and plugs that in directly into update our Shopify store on the back end, to instead of relying solely on API integrations, which, yes, there will be suppliers that have those that you'll find that some of the best suppliers Mark are the ones that are not as maybe set up for that kind of method. As as perhaps some suppliers aren't, you know, it's not necessarily the ones that have these huge great API systems, that will be your most profitable and highest selling products. Sometimes it's just the suppliers that focus all their attention on making incredible products, that you can then kind of help them with the stock extraction data method. So we go through all of this, how it's done, we employ a variety of different approaches to ensure that our stock levels are well managed and well synchronized. So this could include setting up periodic checks and balances, or using software and tools and Shopify apps that can just alert us to any stock changes. And then just making sure you have that open line of communication with suppliers. Again, that's one of the benefits of the home turf advantage model. You're dealing with UK suppliers, you could just pick up the phone to them if you wanted to, or your virtual assistant could just say, is the product in stock? So hopefully that explains how we go about it. Exactly. And there's plenty of different ways to keep your stock up to date, Mark, but it is a great question. And there's Yeah, all explained inside the master class, we actually have a member contributed module, and one of the members has created for us to share his method of keeping stock up to date. And so there's different ways and being part of a community, you can really get to the heart of how other people are keeping their stock up to date, because we all have to do as ecommerce business owners. So thank you for that question. We're now going to highlight a recent review that we've had in for the podcast as well. So a big thank you to Tracy Leary, who has left a YouTube comment. And she has simply said, listening to the podcast really inspires me. Thank you so much for your review, Tracy, and I'm glad to hear that it inspires you. That's definitely one of the aims of what we're trying to do with this podcast. Before we go, I have one question for you that I'd appreciate if you could help me with. Have you left us a review yet? If not, please, could you leave us a review? Wherever you're listening to the podcast, it should take you about 10 seconds. But it does wonders for us. And it's a really big part of what drives us and means we'll continue to be able to release new episodes to you. So if you'd like us to continue with the podcast, and you haven't left us a review, please just take a quick moment to do so now. And hopefully, we can read out for you on the next episode. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the dropship on lot podcast. We hope you're walking away with insights and inspiration. to kickstart your E commerce journey. Grab a copy of my book The home of turf advantage at HT A book.com is a distilled guide based on real experience to help you build your E commerce venture. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more strategies and success stories. If you like what you heard a five star review would mean the world to us and you might just get a shout out on an upcoming episode. And finally, thank you for deciding to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unwrapped podcast.