Scaling paid ads isn’t just about better creatives or media buying tweaks.
Often, the real unlock is what happens after the click.
In this episode of eCommerce Evolution, Brett sits down with Paddy McLarnon, founder of PM Digital Designs, to break down full funnel CRO; from advertorial landing pages to value stacking to subscription optimization.
If your CAC is creeping up, your conversion rate feels capped, or your subscription churn is eating margin, this episode is packed with practical insights to help you scale profitably.
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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(05:01) The Biggest CRO Mistakes Brands Make
(07:42) Ad-to-Lander Congruency
(09:36) Advertorials & Listicles: Real Examples
(16:56) Offer Stacking & Value Perception
(19:55) Using Customer Surveys to Build Better Copy
(25:13) Why Conversion Rate Can Mislead You
(29:27) How to Hit a 72% Subscription Take Rate
(36:48) Subscription Offer Breakdown: Real Examples
(46:10) Buy Box Optimization & Pricing Psychology
(50:13) Email, SMS & Follow-Up Flows
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Relevant Links:
Transcript:
Paddy McLarnon:
You know, brands always say like, "Oh, the conversion rate's the problem." It's like, "Well, we could just drop the price if you want to fix that. " Or as you said, just turn off all top of funnel ads or whatever. But it is all about adjusting for what the business metrics are.
Brett Curry:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about full funnel CRO, how to optimize for full funnel experiences. We're going to talk about subscription brands. We're going to talk about CRO for non-subscription brands. With takeaways, it's going to be a lot of fun as well. And so my guest is Patty McLaren, and I met him, got to hang with him a couple times actually at the D2C Growth Summit. Once in New York City, recently in Miami. Dude's presentation was killer, just chock full of good ideas. He's also Irish. So his accent is amazing. You're going to love listening to him for a variety of reasons. And so he is the founder of PM Digital Designs, and we are going to get after it. So with that, Patty, how's it going, man, and welcome to the show.
Paddy McLarnon:
Thank you so much, Brett. Thank you for having me. I am amazing. Cannot complain.
Brett Curry:
Love it, man. I love this topic. And as you know, more of an ad guy and we focus a lot on YouTube and Google, but we certainly love Meta and lean into Meta as well. So I love the excitement of getting more traffic and closing more deals and more new customers and things like that. But often the greatest to unlock, the greatest unlock for the next level of spend, the greatest unlock for the next level of growth isn't with ad tweaks, right? It's not. With media buying or creative, although those things are extremely important, could be the next level of growth can be unlocked by CRO and better landing page experience, better full funnel CRO so that you can do more with the people visiting your site. And so you want to kind of just briefly explain to people what you do, and then we're going to dig into all kinds of tips and ideas.
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah. So pretty good intro there from you, but we are a full funnel CRO agency and we work with all types of seven, eight, some nine figure e-commerce brands. And I guess the whole goal for us is just to, as you mentioned, kind of make sure we have that ad to post-click or as people call it, landed page congruency. I think it's definitely a neglected area. And there's a lot of, I suppose, focus coming into it now as people have realized that Meta and all the ad platforms, especially Google as well, are just getting more and more expensive. So how do we actually optimize for that and how do we drive the cost as physically those possible? And we can do that through the post-click experience. So we focus on the entire thing and yeah, I'm excited to kind of chat on that and give away some of the secret sauce as they say.
Brett Curry:
Love it. Love it. Yeah. Because I mean, really getting the click, getting someone to stop, pay attention, getting the click, that's really only half the battle, right? What do you do with that visitor after they visit your site? I'll give you kind of just a physical world example because I think this is a good illustration and maybe will help us reframe and say, "I'm probably not putting enough time and energy and attention into CRO." Have you ever done trade shows, Pat? You ever had a booth at a trade show or I'm sure you've been to trade shows, but have you ever had a booth?
Paddy McLarnon:
We've done small ones, but probably nothing really to the extent of a proper trade show, but I get where you're going with this. I've been to plenty.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. Yeah. And so we've done trade shows and depending on what B2B trade show you're going to, maybe you're dropping 15 to 30 grand, maybe you're dropping a hundred grand to be there. And it's always a really interesting contrast. I see some booths where the booths are beautiful, good messaging, everything, but the people in the booth are just kind of sitting and they're not engaging with people that are passing by. Or worse, they're on their phone or not paying attention or maybe the booth is empty and they're like, "Man, you just spent a whole lot of money to be in front of this traffic and you're doing nothing with it. " Then you see other booths where the people at the booth are engaged and they're talking to people, they're stopping people as they walk by, they may be handing things out. Maybe they got some people from the booth that are out milling in the crowd and then they've got a good follow-up system.
And some trade show booths, people collect the names and then they do nothing with it. And so it's just one of those things where we've got to think about this holistically, right? The biggest expense we have is our paid media and often the creative that supports it. We're dropping, a lot of us dropping six figures, some high six figures, some seven figures, mid seven figures on ads each month. But then what do we do with those people once they visit the site? And so maybe let's break this down, patting something this could be helpful. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see brands making? So you're auditing a brand for full funnel CRO. What are they missing most of the time?
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah, I mean, you've nailed it perfectly there. I think that's a really, really unique example. But I think the biggest mistake we see is, I mean, first of all, as people know, there's cold, warm, hot traffic, as you could say. They send all three of them to the same type of page or the exact same page as that. And when you say that out loud, it's just like, why are you not making that funnel a lot more aligned to where they are in terms of maybe their mental state, but also like how aware are they of your brand or the problem they have and also are they ready to buy? And in most cases, the ad gets the click as you've mentioned, but most of the time they're not just ready to buy just yet. They've maybe seen your brand once, maybe with the ad two, three times.
They've got, let's educate them, let's handle those objections. So that's probably one big mistake we see. But as well then- You're treating all
Brett Curry:
Traffic the same. It doesn't make sense. If you're in a restaurant and you had regulars coming in, you'd probably speak to them differently than you would a first time customer, but yet with our landing pages, we say the same thing to everybody.
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah, exactly. And then the next thing is probably the fact that people actually don't build out landing pages in general. So of course this is very niche specific. With fashion brands, it's a bit of a harder kind of sell. I mean, how much do we really need to go into detail in terms of someone going to buy a pair of jeans or some pants or whatever it is that we're trying to sell. But I mean, there is still brands that do it. You have the most renowned one maybe in Hollowsox, they are very deep into landing pages and funnels. But I think the key thing in all of this is it's brands that can solve a problem or brands that can go against maybe the norm or can provide a solution to someone's issues. So yeah, that's probably some of the biggest issues we see in terms of just that congruency, as you mentioned as well.
There's just none of it from ad to the post click. So it's a big focus for us as always.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. It's so good. And I remember reading this retail book called Why We Buy by a guy named Paco Underhill, and he's talking about retail brick and mortar experiences, which is a phenomenal read. I think there's a lot of applications online as well. But he talks about how when people walk into a retail store, a lot of times they're asking, "Am I in the right place? Should I be here? Is this my type of place, my type of product? Should I be shopping here?" And people are saying the same thing when they visit your landing page, right? There's something about your ad and your targeting that got someone to click, but then the first thing they're asking when they get there is, "Should I be here or should I bail?" And so can you talk a little bit about that? How do we make that transition from ad to lander?
What should that look like in an optimal way?
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah. So I mean, the way we try and do it is it depends, as I said, kind of on where they are on your sort of funnel level, as in if they just met you, the main thing we're trying to push now really is like you've got the average page of a listicle, a product page, you've got collection page, homepages, they're all just a landing page at the end of the day, but it's the style and the angle of copy in which you have to take. And I think people neglect that part of it. It's like, "Oh, what page should I do? " It's like, well, what's the main issues you're trying to solve and where is your audience within that level of the funnel? So we try and kind of spread it across, well, we try and go avatar specific or persona specific. So if a brand comes to us and they have no landing page whatsoever, we'll maybe aim for a listical and advertorial, optimizing their product page.
The areas that people actually buy and the areas that we can kind of move the needle the most, as I said on stage when you were there was trying to get close to revenue. So we always look at the copy they're doing, so what's the angle? And also then what's the offer? Because they're the two things alone, as well as having a good product. They're the two key things that you need or you need to optimize in order to get scale. So the page is kind of just a mechanism in which we get someone to that next stage, whether it be to add to cart, go to the product page or checkout. So it really depends per brand, but one of my favorites is advertorials. I mean, if you get someone who is maybe solving some sort of ... I always say if they put it in you or if they put it on you, as in you can apply it to yourself or you can consume it, then you're able to run advertorials because you can get really deep into that consumer's pain point that they're suffering with at that time, provide the product as your solution, the standard copywriting frameworks, except we've got a few secret sauce, little areas that we add to them that kind of improve the conversions overall.
But yeah, they're probably some of my go- tos when it comes to pages.
Brett Curry:
So we're looking at potentially advertorials or listicles, and if it's something you consume or put on your body, perfect fit for that. And then on those pages, we can go into problem solution or reason why copy, things like that. Give us an example. Give us an example of something that you guys have built or been a part of just so this kind of comes to life.
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah. So we have so many that we do every single week. So one that we've kind of done that is a bit of a favorite of mine was, I always call it campaign specific ones. So we built one for KXBody, which is a women's product and they're- What's the name of that again? Cakes. So C-A-K-E-S. So cakes. Yeah. Or you might not be able to understand it in my accent. So it's called Casebody. So it's called Cakes Body and we built a campaign specific one for them. Now we actually put a mini listicle within that landing page itself and it was like a four reasons why, but you could slide across. So it was only one section of the page, loved something like that. But one thing that we've actually done with a subscription brand we started with about two, three months ago was they were very sales heavy on their pages, but what we decided to do was we went through their reviews, their survey answers.
And what I always say is, "What are the customers telling you? " And we scraped all that together and produced what we found was one of the key reasons, which was blood pressure. So they sell a tablet or a supplement that helps with blood pressure, kind of controlling that. So we went into an advertorial of controlling it, why should you be doing it, the warning signs and just really educated the consumer because they're a higher age demographic. Something like that worked really well. And we actually seen a subscription intake increase from them going from that to the buy box. And that's like a huge win that we always try and try and incorporate nice and early into the relationship. So that was a cool one for sure.
Brett Curry:
So going from ad to advertorial then to PDP versus add straight to PDP.
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah.
Brett Curry:
And with that advertorial are you kind of taking in some cases, taking like a problem, agitate, solution type of thing where it's like, here's the problem you probably want to solve, let's define that and agitate that a little bit, make sure the pain is really the top of mind and front and center and then we provide the solution? Or what are some of the insider secrets that you're doing there?
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it in a shortened context. We like to kind of do it as well where the solution and the agitation is kind of within the transformation. So if someone started somewhere and we actually try and use a real good review from the brand, so usually, and this is what I say to brands all the time, your consumers have told you already why they bought, what it's done for them, why someone else should buy, what were they dealing with before? So we reuse those really, really long reviews and technically the older the demographic, the better your reviews will probably be because they love typing, they love talking, the longer the page, the more they love it. Again, it's just an interesting mindset they're in. But yeah, we utilize something like that and that becomes the transformation. And then you obviously go into the offer and then you try and give them that last final special piece where you're kind of trying to get them back into that offer to maybe click onto the product page.
Or to be fair, this is kind of something we get asked all the time. "Do I put my product page on the landing page or, sorry, do I put my offer on the landing page? Do I try and push them to a product page? Do I just educate them here and then push them on? "My answer is you test it and that's why split testing is so important across brands because there's no one size fits all. And if you have that question right now, I would just advise you to test it because nobody actually knows the answer to that one.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. It's a really good insight, right? It depends on your product, your offer, who's landing on that page, lots of factors there. And so you do have to test it. For Boom Beauty or Boom by Cindy Joseph, my buddy Ezra Firestone, we helped them scale on YouTube maybe eight or 10 years ago, still work with them. But for a long time, their top performer was add to a, as we called it a pre-sell engagement page, very much like advertorial type of thing, and then that sends to an offer page. He did actually put pricing and kind of the offer on that pre-sale engagement page. They tested it both ways. For them, for that beauty brand, it made sense to put it there, but you do have to test it 100% agree with that. And I love that you call
Paddy McLarnon:
Out,
Brett Curry:
What are those good stories, those good use cases and just bring those to life? If think about B2B marketing and what I'm asking you and what your prospective clients ask you is like, " Hey, Patty, what have you done? Who have you helped? Tell me what you did for cake. "It's the same when you're selling consumer products to a certain degree, right? Who has this worked for? Tell me a little bit of a story about that. Lead me through so I can see how it might be able to work for me. And yeah, bonus if you're reaching a slightly older audience because they love to tell stories. If you ask your grandma, how did this thing work? She's probably not going to say just good or great. She's going to be like, " Well, I first started noticing some pain in my hips about three years ago.
"I was like, " Okay, buckle up. We got a story going on here.
Paddy McLarnon:
"Exactly. I love that you said that though in terms of actually telling the pricing as well, because you've still got to dip the offering as you're educating or handling objections or whatever it is that you're trying to do with that page, because it can't become this big surprise either. You kind of have to softly let them know what the offer and the pricing is. And then when they're ready to buy, they might click a CTA or they might just get to the buy box and then that's when you can hit them with the really good value stacked offer, which is something we can go into soon as well.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. I love that. And I think just to kind of underscore this point, we're always trying to find the winning combination of ad angle and positioning to a particular audience landing on a particular page. And that combination is going to be different if you've got a different ad and you're reaching a different audience, then the lander's going to be potentially different as well. And so we've seen this a lot to your point, a lot of supplement brands that we work with, the consumables, it's almost always a lander that works well. We've had a number of beauty brands, boom, being an exception, a number of beauty brands where sending people to the homepage from YouTube works pretty well, right? And sometimes it's the same lander that's crushing that will also crush on YouTube and sometimes it's very different. So you do absolutely have to test.
Paddy McLarnon:
Exactly.
Brett Curry:
I would love to ... Yeah, let's get into, you call it offer stacking. What does that look like? Break that down for
Paddy McLarnon:
Us. Yeah. So just to touch on what you were saying there, when it comes to different page destinations, I think that's something that's kind of untouched in the e-commerce industry where people just presume collection's the best, product page is the best. But the higher the IOV, sometimes actually a homepage or collection can work. And obviously that depends on the traffic source you know. But even just what you mentioned on value stack. So this is kind of something that I see brands just don't fully grasp. And it's really, really simple when you think about it logically. And I always use something that's just like lying about here, like let's call it these AirPods, okay? So buy these AirPods $200. So if I had that offer in front of me, or I had buy these brand new generation for AirPods, you get two free Airbuds with it.
You get connection to your iPhone, you get USB portability, you get location, tracking, you get bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like 10 value stacks, maybe not that much, but value stacks that actually have a cost to it. And when I was speaking on stage in Miami when we were there together, I mentioned a couple of brands and one of them is the famous IM8 that was kind of mega scaling at the minute, but they are nailing e-commerce for supplements or anything to do with that industry incredibly well. And one of the things they do, which a lot of brands do very well is the value stack in terms of the supplement costs $60, but if you actually broke down all of the individual supplements or ingredients that are in it, that will cost you $250 a month to actually buy individually, but your subscription of just our product is $60 and we encapsulate it all into one capsule that you take daily.
So it's trying to just incentivize the value for a consumer that they are also, by the way, saving time, effort, and you get all of these things in one tablet or one supplement. And I think that goes unnoticed for a lot of brands.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. It's a really interesting way to break that down or to create the perception of value because most brands I don't think have a price problem per se if they're not getting the conversions they want. It's more of a value problem or a value understanding problem. And so you can compare to the competition to do the side-by-side comparison of your AirPods versus your Airbuds versus AirPods versus others. Or you could take the supplement approach and say, "Hey, we get ingredients and no one else or the quality of ingredients that nobody else gets." And if you were to go and buy these individually, separately, try to make your own as an example, it costs you five times what we're charging. And so yeah, lots of different ways to stack the value. How do you guys think about that? How do you approach it? Are you thinking about, "Hey, what objections am I trying to overcome here?
Do I need to create some pricing anchors for someone as they're considering this product?" How do you approach this so you understand how to stack value for a particular product? And again, if you want to give an example, that'd be great.
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah. I mean, you kind of touched on it again there as well, just as you were asking that, which is like price anchoring. Do you know that is technically what it is, but I think if you encapsulate it at all, the main thing that we're trying to do is always handle an objection. And a key objection, no matter, you could have a $20 product, a $2,000 product, everyone will say, or most people will say on the surveys, "The price is too expensive." No matter how cheap, no matter- It doesn't matter how cheap they want it. It doesn't matter. Okay, it doesn't matter. So you're always trying to combat that. And I think when you have that top of mind, nobody really wants to pay for anything. They just need to see the value in it first, and then they'll pay. It's kind of like a B2B, as you mentioned, like you said this, but a B2B, a brand isn't going to invest in the service unless they see value or what they might get from it.
So it's the exact same when it comes to B2C and actually selling your product. We always try to do it where a key objection that we'll take is we'll look at the surveys. So we'll set up the post-purchase surveys. If any brand's not running that, incredible value. So post-purchase surveys, you can even see what traffic source they're coming from if you do it correctly, but you can literally find out why they bought, what is it that you're buying this for? Why us and not a competitor? As well, you can email your own customer list and just ask them questions, especially subscribers. And you can find out the real reasons that they're trying to buy this for. Yes, so important. Exactly. And why are they trying to really get behind something or what is it they're trying to fix or maybe have a solution for? So we always keep that in mind.
And again, if we look at the client I broke down of ours on stage was selling a mineral and it was a supplement, but he kind of described it as 100 minerals, one supplement. And we didn't list all 100 minerals, but we listed the key ones like vitamin C, vitamin D, calcium, magnesium, all the mean products that people know, and we listed the price of them and tried to kind of handle that as a $250, let's just put it as an example, price point, but the actual subscription is $60 a month and it's one pill. And I think that kind of is the best way to think about it. So yes, you're trying to handle objections, but all of this, every single thing we're talking about has to be brand specific and you've got to do that research from your customer. And our model is literally, what do they say, what do they see, what do they click?
And if you can figure out what they're saying simply in reviews, in surveys, in all of the kind of ways you can encapsulate data from them, then you will see exactly what their main problems are before they buy. So should always be having that top of mind. Customer is king always.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. It goes back to that classic marketing principle of we're trying to enter the conversation taking place in our prospect's minds. And so the more insight we can get there on what they're seeing, what they're thinking, that allows us then to speak directly to that. Hey, this episode is brought to you by OMG Commerce. That's the agency that I get the privilege of running. You ever feel like it's Groundhog Day when it comes to your marketing where every day's the same, you're still relying on the same channels, got the same ads you're leaning into. Maybe it's time to diversify, maybe it's time to unlock new growth. That's what we specialize in. My guess is if you're like most brands, you're probably leaning heavily into Meta ads and long live Meta. We love it, but you're probably missing YouTube ads. And my guess is maybe Google is underleveraged as well.
We've helped multiple brands go from zero to five, 10, 15, even $25,000. A day we helped Karen Eka hear regrowth product go from zero to $1 million in YouTube ad spend in 90 days while hitting their CAC target. And we'd love to see if we could do the same for you. So we'd love to chat, talk about what it takes to scale on YouTube and how ready you are right now. So let's chat and go to omgcommerce.com, click the let's talk button, and we'd love to help you dominate with YouTube ads. We'd love to kind of understand that. So with this men's supplement, it's taking all 100 minerals, have to pay 250, use that as an example to do it all separately or one pill 60 bucks a month. Nobody wants to pay 250 a month. Nobody really wants to pay 60 a month either.
They do want the benefit and if they can get the benefit which they're really after and feel like they're saving 190 bucks in this case, now they're getting the benefit they want and they feel like they're saving, which is a real win there. Can you kind of talk through like what kind of shift did you see in performance when you went to that angle and that type of land or that type of value stack? What'd you see in terms of results?
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah. So he already had quite a few really high performance pages, or actually just this one high performance page, really unique angle, really unique page. I've never actually seen anything like it before, but we built out about eight to 12 different variations across like a two month to three month period and seen cost per acquisition or cost to acquire a customer, whatever way you want to call it, actually hovered the same or stayed lower, but it increased the amount of spend you could put behind the campaigns. And I think people sometimes, there's all these conversations of what metrics are you tracking at the ad level? What really matters? Our goal, to be honest, is and what we can affect. You might be able to look through like click through rate at the landing page and all these mad things. But at the end of the day, cost per acquisition, spend, they're two things that we just try to affect.
And how we can do that is by most brands will try and just put the key performing ads and utilize the page that we give them and actually test it at the landing ... Or sorry, at the ad level. And if brands do that, you'll get a real return on has this page made a difference. So we weren't necessarily split testing just one section. That was one section within a page, but even with another client, we done, I think it was four advertorials for a baby like BAM. So something that they put on the baby's skin to help them sleep like a magnesium sort of lotion. And we really went into statistics and problems and everything like this. And you could tap into more of the mother's problems there. So you could tap more into she's not sleeping, neither are they. And just a lot of other things and the value then becomes, as you mentioned, benefits over features.
That's always the way it has to be. And we tapped into that for her as well, or them, sorry, and it performed. With the exact same results, it's always cost per acquisition drops slowly as spend, as Meta then allows you to spend or Google. But with this client, it dropped first and then it rose back up to be on average the same cost per acquisition as they had before, but their spend increased. So there's many ways in which brands can scale. And I think it's so subjective because on the back end of both of those brands, you have subscriptions. So you're not even getting into the conversation of what happened the subscription take rate, how many people actually went and opted into subscriptions instead of one time purchase because then the brand's profitable over time in terms of customer lifetime value. So a lot to look at, but hopefully that kind of gives you a sense as to what worked and how it worked.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. Just a great reminder, Patty, that sometimes we optimize for the wrong metrics or think about the wrong metrics. I do like looking at conversion rate. I think it can be valuable, but in some ways it's like ROAS, right? Where if I want to double my conversion rate or triple my conversion rate, I'll just shut off all top of funnel traffic and go branded search only and conversion rate goes through the roof. I've done nothing meaningful. I've actually probably severely damaged my business. So maybe you want an increase in conversion rate, maybe not, but really all you want is more new customers at an acceptable CAC, right? Or I want to grow my number of customers at an acceptable CAC and increase my LTV. That's the real win, right? Not going from some arbitrary conversion rate number of 1.5 now. I really need to hit a 3.5 conversion rate.
Yeah, maybe, but really, are you driving new customers at an acceptable cost? Are they spending more over time? That's where you win. And yeah, some pages will just hit your number, but they'll cap out and spend, especially on Meta. And so you've got to have a different lander if you want to break through. I think that's such a good call out and a reminder, optimize for the right thing. You don't call Patty, you don't go on this full funnel approach just to improve conversion rate. You're trying to unlock new growth potential while
Paddy McLarnon:
Maintaining
Brett Curry:
Costs, while maintaining
Paddy McLarnon:
Profitability. I mean, the problem we see as well, even just to touch one last bit on that is brands always say like, "Oh, the conversion rate's a problem." It's like, "Well, we could just drop the price if you want to fix that. " Or as you said, just turn off all top of funnel ads or whatever, but it is all about adjusting for what the business metrics are. And that's why we are doubling down on brands that run subscription models because we've got a brand up to 72% take rate With everything to do with genuinely no Black hat, as they say, no opting into funnels that they don't want to. It's genuine, good product backed by a good funnel. And actually everything talking about the routine and optimizing for that deal intake. So you perfectly worded it there in terms of just track for the right metrics.
Don't always look at what everyone's saying online.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, let's talk about subscriptions really quickly. I love working with subscription brands. I've invested in a number of subscription brands. The model's just brilliant. And I've seen some, in fact, one that I'm an investor in, right now they're testing landers that all you can do is subscribe. It is a product you should take daily, but this particular option is subscribe or don't buy. And that can work. But talk through, if I'm a subscription brand, what are ways that I can go from my current take rate of subscription up to 70% take rate like you're talking about with that recent example?
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah. I mean, first of all, it all starts with the offer. I think people get really lost in, and I spoke on this as well, they get lost in this like, here's 35% off, here's like 40 extra product all in month one. And it's like, okay, well, I'm going to take that and then cancel tomorrow. So people, subscriptions are in this kind of finite situation where they have to get a higher take rate without increasing churn substantially. Churn is going to be there. Yeah. I mean, churn can happen with, they don't like the product anymore. They don't need the product anymore. Which I mean, if the product is good enough, should probably get to that stage at some level. But they also then, which I spoke on is like they just get too much product. And I think when you're a brand running subscriptions, you've really got to be careful on the offer and the first time order.
And stuff we look at is things like this. So you've obviously got month one offer, that's got to get them in. But people then neglect months two, three, four, five. If you look at your churn and you see that your LTV, customer lifetime value is only three months, what can we do in month three that just maybe gets them in an extra month or two? Can we give them a low cost free gift? So something that's really low cogs, so cost of goods sold, something that is really light that doesn't affect shipping, something that we can give them which can just increase that level of LTV. And if we get your brand from three months to five months, that's two months extra profitability. It's amazing. That you're not having to buy again. Remember that. So I think it's trying to find that balance then of, and I showed this as well, where people are optimizing for one time purchase as well.
And it's like buy 30 day pack, buy a 60 day pack, buy a 90 day pack on one time purchase, but yet they then offer a subscription on that and slap another discount on top. And I think if brands actually just loaded their website now as they're listening to this and actually, if they have subscriptions and looked at it, they probably don't realize that they're giving away way too much margin at the start and trying to incentivize higher AOV and higher take rating, all the metrics they can. So that's kind of like trying to find that balance is definitely one of them. I would say another way in which you could do this is all around your wording and landing pages or even just across your entire website, homepage, collections, product page, it's all about daily intake, consistent use, getting into a routine, tapping into that habit, really trying to showcase that if this product actually produces a benefit or an outcome, link that to the problem that they have or the pain point that you've done with all of your research that you know that they suffer with and actually put that into the product age with a lander.
And you touched there on subscription only funnels, they crushed. You will maybe see a bit of fluctuation at the ad level because of course if you make it clear enough, not everyone wants to subscribe. So you've got to kind of take that. There has to be that fine balance of subscription and admetrics and all the other mad stuff that goes on. But I think the key thing is just trying to see what is this offer? Does someone who has this problem actually want this offer? We see a lot of free gifts. So maybe if you subscribe monthly, you get a free gift with, or two free gifts with month one order, then you get a free gift a month two. You maybe get an extra discount or an extra gift a month three. But the key thing in all of that is people then end up giving the free gift could be, oh, here's extra.
Let's say we sell sachets and there's 30 per month. Here's an extra five sashes or here's an extra month on top. But what did I say at the start? It was all around churn when they have too much product. So we've got to find that nice balance of can we give them some sort of merch? Can we give them a water bottle that works with the sashes? Can we give them a shaker? Can we give them a digital product that genuinely helps them? Maybe we work with an electrolyte brand at the minute, very well known one in Cadence, and they are starting to look at marathons and runners as a big cohort of customers. So what they're actually giving out is you get a running cap, at some stage you get a free water bottle, but then you get this like 30 to 50 page doc from their head scientist on cramping and fatiguing and actually supplementing four big races.
So I think that's a key way in which you can actually tie back the product and how you can actually make that experience much better by giving something for free away. And it's a digital download. So all it takes is you to have the knowledge behind it, which still costs, but it's not something that you're having to slip into an order. It's not something that costs an extra $5 every single order. So thing is trying to find that use case behind everything that you're giving away when they go to subscribe, but it's got to be the most incentivized way.
Brett Curry:
Yeah, you're really trying to optimize a number of things. You're trying to look at what is the right amount of perceived value and how can I increase that perceived value and give more benefit to my customer? Also, how can I line up that benefit or the value stack in a way that leads to more consumption, not less consumption, or that leads to a better stick rate versus potentially encourages a churn rail. I'll give you a couple examples, one good, one bad. I love cereal, right? And so as I've tried to eat healthy, I've switched to healthy cereals, grain-free cereals and stuff like that, which for the most part I think are good. There's a number of brands that I like, but I subscribed to one brand and I think I actually made a mistake. I ordered too much product and there were some discounts. And there's one month where I got three giant boxes and my wife is like, "What are you doing?
Are we starting a food pantry and I didn't know? Is there a cereal party, like a block party where buying the neighbors over to Easter? What is this? " So I churned. So I stopped. I'm like, "Hey, too much product." I actually ended up buying from another brand next, right? So I churned from that cereal brand and ended up buying from another brand later and I kind of liked the other brand better. But if I had the right amount, I may not have churned, right? So that's example one. And I don't work with that brand. I just like the product. Example two, there's a brand called PerfectAmino Body Health. I'm not sure if you've seen them. Gary Brecka is an influencer. He promotes their product, but I don't love protein powders. I like the benefit because I work out and stuff, but usually upset my stomach and I like the calorie.
I just don't like protein shakes. So I got an ad for perfect aminos. And the whole thing is like, "Hey, perfect aminos. It's like you're consuming 30 grams of protein, but there's no caloric impact. It's just the aminos that your body needs because your body breaks down protein to get the aminos. We're just giving you the aminos." They're like, "This is brilliant." So they also gave a guide on how much amino acid should you be consuming and when and how to do this with your workouts. That was an absolutely, it was a free article, but as I read it, I'm like, "I get it. I get it now. I get it why I can do this for me. I can do this instead of protein powder and it's going to work." And so yeah, how are you stacking the value? How are you increasing the perceived value, but doing it in a way that leads to consumption and leads to stick rate rather than something that leads to just lost margin and potentially churn.
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah. No, I love that. That's a really interesting one. And I think the thing you can take away from that is it was all about the product and backing up why you should be taking that product. And I think that's exactly what I said with the other brand as well. We have some brands that actually then don't offer discounts, which is a really interesting kind of take as well. But I guess you have to provide value in other ways. And something that we actually see as well, which is quite interesting is we had a brand and they had a subscription and their product didn't taste amazing, but it had unbelievable sleep benefits and they knew their product didn't taste that good. But I guess if you're taking it to sleep, doesn't really need to taste good if there's benefits maybe, but it actually showed a higher churn rate.
So it's like no matter how good your benefit is or the outcome or whatever it is you're solving, if it doesn't taste great, people will probably just rent. So it's quite an interesting one. You've also got ... The last thing on that is what a lot of brands do if they have different flavors, and this is like a really key insight is test your subscribers to get maybe a free sample of that new flavor or that new product. And it's basically a way in which you can nearly get more subscriptions to your other products or they might switch, who knows? But again, actually showcasing different flavor options to people and letting them try them is a good way to increase your customer lifetime value. It could actually improve your average order value if they want to buy it as well and update and upgrade your subscriptions.
And I actually want to add one last point to this. The subscription portal, I think this is something that brands forget is something that customers actually click into. And what I'm talking about there in terms of flavors, you have to showcase these flavors, you have to upgrade them, you have to upsell them, sorry, is what I meant to say. And if you do, or a cross-sell, you could maybe argue they actually might swap it if you allow them to do that easily, or they might add it to their subscription. So I spoke to a brand yesterday, that's why this is a top of mind. And they stopped working with us for about four or five months, and they've launched a new offers. They're actually like a digital offer, which is interesting, but their subscription portal and everything is a bit messy now, and that's actually leading to churn.
And so is the offer and so is the emails they're getting hit with. And I think it just talks about our whole scenario here of how do you increase subscriptions? There's a lot of layers to it, but I think if you start with the offer, the experience has to be good and there has to be an outcome that they're actually getting from your product in order to actually want to stay with it.
Brett Curry:
Yeah. It's really good, man. Well, maybe have you give just on the fly some thoughts on how you might approach different subscription products, thinking about quantity offers and thinking about the way you'd present this. So let's take a few of the examples we've just talked about. So let's take healthy cereal option. Let's take this protein alternative or amino acid product and let's take hydration. I'm a huge hydration fan as well as, but a huge unlock for me and my personal health is getting enough electrolytes game changer. How might you approach those differently in terms of how might you stack the offer or stack the value and structure the offer? How would you think about quantities and quantity offers and things like that to get kind of the right amount of consumption, the right amount of product for a given consumer?
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah. Well, if we start with the first one, maybe slightly heavier than the other products potentially because it's cereal, it's in a box, there's maybe 500 grams.
Brett Curry:
Dimensionally, it's much bigger for sure.
Paddy McLarnon:
Much bigger. So you've got packaging to put into that. So I think even just to touch on all three, by the way, I think what people don't do enough is test the pricing and that alone could potentially take away some of the costs that you have to deal with when you have a heavier or bigger product. Now, the other thing I would say then is when it comes to shipping, so if we just talk about all three here, the higher quantity should technically achieve free shipping. But I would test this and a lot of people immediately just go, "Here's free shipping. That's our unique selling point." And it's like, whoa, you could be generating 25% of your revenue through shipping, so charge it. And we've actually seen some really weird tests where we've offered free shipping and we've charged for shipping and the charge for shipping's conversion rate is higher.
I genuinely don't understand it. It does. It's as if they feel skeptical. Yeah. They feel skeptical that you're giving me this free ... I'm not really sure. You're trying to,
Brett Curry:
You're really going to try hard if you're giving me free shipping. Maybe that's a perception or something.
Paddy McLarnon:
It's so strange, but that is something that all of these brands should be testing. Now, if we go to the cereal one, what is cereal? What does every age group beats it, doesn't it? So potentially you can do a household type of offer where ... And the big guys in the industry grooms do this. They do it really well, really cool offer that they do. But you could look at household types of offers, which might actually incentivize a higher threshold monthly of subscriptions, or you could tap into that. But again, I think it depends on what are your customers in that niche of cereal actually telling you? Are they saying that they're buying for more people? Is it just themselves? Do they want to buy ... I think an interesting part of where I'm going with this is, if you're selling a 500 gram box of cereal, it would be interesting to know how long that actually takes to get through.
That would be the interesting part as well. So if people could just get through a box in one month, I could definitely get through a box probably in two weeks or a week.
Brett Curry:
I'm going a week over here.
Paddy McLarnon:
We're smashing that. So again, I think you need to tell them that and say, "Hey, this will last you a month or a week." And that's where you could maybe incentivize a two week subscription and a four week and a six week and an eight week, or maybe you do a weekly frequency and people neglect that a lot. See, for all of these brands that we're talking about, the frequency level is something that you should be testing, just genuinely offering more customization with the frequency is something that's really- The frequency of the
Brett Curry:
Delivery, how often are you getting the product coming to you?
Paddy McLarnon:
Exactly. Exactly. And then if you go into the quantity levels then, so if you don't want to give them too much selection. So if they come on and it's like, buy one, buy two, buy three, buy four, buy five, and then they have to subscribe and save, and then they have to add the cart. You don't want to give them too many options. So potentially you have the law of twos and threes. You could potentially just offer a buy one or a second option of getting two boxes. Now, this is where we could go into a bit more detail in terms of, is it buy one, get one free? Is it buy one, get one 20% off? And really trying to stack that value. But again, test all of these. And if we're going then onto the second one, which was your Amino product, if I'm writing saying-
Brett Curry:
Yep, yep. Correct.
Paddy McLarnon:
It also depends on how long it takes you usually to give you 30 servings. Usually it's either in a smaller tub, big tub, large tub. So it's trying to really see which one could potentially have the best subscription metrics. Which one is also the price comparison? Do we auto select the middle offer? So if we have, let's say a, let's just call it for toxic, a 250 gram tub, which is nice and small, 500 is a bit bigger, and then you have a kilo. If we're going for the 500 gram tub in the middle, that's probably price anchored between the two, and that's probably the most selected, the best selling. So we want to have those little notes around that selector that actually gets people to want to buy the middle one. And the more expensive one might actually make it seem cheaper than it is.
And the less expensive one might seem like you're not really getting enough value for that size. So there's a lot of psychology things here. And I think everything me and you have talked about today is just everything is psychology.
Brett Curry:
It is. It is.
Paddy McLarnon:
Humans are just psychologically based with every scenario and decision that they make. So you've got to really understand that we don't want to overload them. We don't want to give them too many options, but we want to give them just enough that we can incentivize a higher spend so that we're profitable enough as a brand. And that's a key thing for all of these. And I think then if you're going to the last product, this is one that we are working on for like three or four brands, to be honest, which is quite interesting. So we have a lot of information on this one. But the key thing I would say is trying to actually just give them the 30 pack sashes. So something that lasts monthly is usually the best scenario. Interesting. Because the more you stack on, we have loads of bundles for these brands as well.
We have a daily product and we have a sleek product and then we have cans. So there's loads of bundles you can do. People do love them, but we've noticed that the churn is way higher on the bundles because people will probably just subscribe to get the extra discount. So I think it's trying to just give them the Hero product, the one that's got a good enough cost per acquisition, a high enough LTV, and our goal is to just increase the subscription take rate. But also then we've been working on the offers, which is, back to my point, free products, free gifts, how do we incentivize them without giving away too much product? So you give away other products, caps, bottles to take with the drinks. You've got free shipping on the subscription offer, loads of other things. We could talk about this for days, but I think the key thing in all of these brands is it's all about the value, the time saved, and do you just give enough sort of breakdown of the product and what it does for them?
I think if you can nail them three things and they really leave with no questions to answer, you've done your job and you'll probably have a higher percentage of those orders. But yeah, that's probably, without going into way too much detail, that's probably some of the key things we would look for.
Brett Curry:
It's so good, man. It's so good. Yeah, you're trying to balance them. Am I getting a good enough take rate? Am I giving people the right amount of products so that they consume it, love it, enjoy it? Don't ever feel like they've got too much or not enough so that they're likely to churn because we want to increase that take rate. We want to increase that stick rate so that our CACTLTV ratio just improves over time. Brilliant. I love it. How important is, for these brands, how important is your follow-up sequence, so like abandoned cart sequence and things like that, how important is email and SMS and other follow-up mechanisms to really truly go full funnel here with CRO?
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah, so we would give advice on it. Usually we pass that off to the email and SMS partners because we focus on our main things. But I think the main thing is making sure that you're actually educating the customer on what they're getting. So I think that's something that people that don't really actually hold onto enough. So you've obviously got, when they join, they obviously get a welcome email on the welcome flow. We like to make sure that the founder is writing that the founder. So it's a plain text, finder written email to basically thank them on joining the subscription, joining the sort of community. You want to try and always drive it towards a community, but also then educating them on the why they created the product and why the brand. And then I think it's about actually educating the consumer on what the product is going to do for them, why they should continue to take the product, asking them for feedback, making sure that they're getting hit with those welcome email flows.
I think that's one of the biggest unlocks for any brand, no matter what they're doing. You've obviously got then win backflows, which we all know about, which is usually the people that have maybe subscribed in the past without going into too much detail, that's another way in which you can actually continue to increase your subscription take rate. Let's say if they unsubscribe in month five, for example, can we hit them back on month seven, month eight, month nine, maybe trying to tap into, "Hey, how have you been feeling without the product?" Or trying to tap into that side of things or maybe again, always a clean plain text email from the founder works super well for any email you could be sending. But as well, I think then you mentioned you've got checkout abandonment, cart abandonment. I think people actually neglect cart abandonment usually and just go straight for checkout.
You've got to kind of work all of these in a way where you're not just giving them an extra discount, an extra discount, an extra discount.
Brett Curry:
Because some people will game that system. Some people will know that if I just do these things and unlock another level of discount and that's what they're going for.
Paddy McLarnon:
I mean, you're already giving them one with the subscriptions or maybe a bundle and then you're giving them another welcome flow email discount or another, sorry, checkout or cart abandonment email sequence. So again, I think brands just get so obsessed with trying to win back customers through discounts. And we've seen some brands just get absolutely annihilated that don't even understand their numbers and then they just add on, add on, add on. And they think that that's a strategy when the main part of the strategy is offering copy and they've got to just jump back from all of the craziness of discounts to how do we provide value and describe the value. So I think brands actually give value, but they don't describe it enough. They don't actually tell them. And that's probably what I would say about all of that. Again, not an email and SMS expert, so just want to have that out there, but we know the basis of it.
Yeah,
Brett Curry:
Absolutely. And that all rings true. We've got a retention department and Nick who runs my email and SMS team, he would totally agree with what you just said. And it's so funny. Yeah, just a reminder that founder's story is so powerful from big mattress brands to supplement brands, everything in between. Sometimes the founder's story is the best performing ad. I think telling a little bit of the founder story plus maybe some customer stories on the Lander, one of the best ways to approach a Lander, right? And then you're right on the email follow-up card abandonment, checkout abandonment, welcome flow. Tell a little bit more of the founder's story. Why did we create this? Why do you need to consume this? Why do you need this in your life? Hitting people from multiple angles or just telling the same story in slightly different way makes a huge, huge difference.
And so Patty, this has been brilliant, man. Absolutely love this. If people are consuming this and they're like, "Man, I need to go deeper. I know that I don't just need to increase my ad spend or maybe the secret to increase in my ad spend is working with somebody like Patty." How can they connect with you online? How can they learn more about your services?
Paddy McLarnon:
Yeah, so you can visit our website, pmdigitaldesign.com. I'm also on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. I'm on YouTube. LinkedIn's probably the easiest one. But yeah, listen, just book a call. I will have a chat with you. It's always with me. And again, we will just go through what you're doing right now, audit that, give you some free tips and also just have a nice conversation if you're anyone in the brand founder space or your CMO or anyone in that marketing sort of realm. You'll be speaking to the founder. As Brett said, founder story always wins. So I think that's a good nice way to kind of fill it out. This is the founder
Brett Curry:
Story right here. The reason why you should reach out to PM Digital Design. Patty McLaren, ladies and gentlemen. Patty, thank you so much, man. This has been a ton of fun, immense value. Appreciate it. Exactly, man. And hey man, ready to rock the stage again here hopefully in the not too distant future.
Paddy McLarnon:
Soon, soon. Thanks for having me.
Brett Curry:
Awesome, man. Thanks again. And also thank you for tuning in. As always, we'd love to hear from you. If you like this episode, please share it with somebody who you think will find it valuable. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening. That'll do it for this week's episode. Hey, if you're serious about profitable scale for your brand, we would love to chat. Over the last 15 years, we'll work with some amazing brands like Native, BoomBeauty, Arctic, Organify, Crumble Cookie, True Earth, and many, many more. We want to help you unlock new channels, find profitable scale, have better creative, better campaign, better measurement strategies, and ultimately hope you have more fun and grow in all of your relevant channels. So take a look at omgcommerce.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.
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