– Agencies should not brag about gains when they are simply helping businesses with basic tasks that they should be able to do on their own.
– The real challenge for agencies is optimizing and testing well-run stores, rather than making massive improvements.
– Businesses should screen agencies carefully and ask for a strategy that goes beyond quick wins.Screen agencies carefully and ask for evidence of their ability to provide strategic solutions beyond quick wins.If you’re an agency and you’re moving a company from sending traffic to product and collection pages to landing pages, stop bragging about your gains. If you’re an email agency that goes from someone not having flows to having flows or not running campaigns to running campaigns, stop bragging about your gains. If you’re an SMS agency going from someone not running SMS to running SMS, stop bragging about your gains. In the ecommerce world, it’s amazingly easy to take someone from 0-100 on things that stores missed or aren’t doing. These are all the big claims you’re reading in your feeds. Most of these value adds aren’t complicated; there are tons of free resources that provide advice around these. If a business owner can’t do the basics on their own, it’s likely they won’t succeed long term. It’s much harder taking a brand from 100-120 when someone has a well-optimized store and all their pieces in line with a good process. In the world of real CRO, gains are small and most experiments fail. Agencies love auditing your current setup; they are looking for easy-to-fix gaps that will move the needle and make them look good because in most cases something is better than nothing. Let an agency look at a well-run store though, it becomes harder for them to make suggestions. It becomes optimization and testing rather than massive improvements. 90% of what agencies do is all the same. Screen hard for the ones that do things differently. Ask them for the easy wins they’ve spotted off the bat. Challenge them to put together a strategy that’s larger than a few quick wins. #marketing #ecommerce #strategyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco