Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

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Let’s say you’re working with a store owner. Its conversion rate is, by everyone’s estimation, “bad.” So you want to improve it. What do you do?

You could read some blogs, find a roundup or two, and see what others are doing. You could find a list of “best practices.” You could rip off a competitor. You could take the advice of a trusted friend. You could look at Amazon. Amazon is full of smart people, right?

These are disastrous ways to think about conversion.

Conversion isn’t about guessing correctly at “what works.” In fact, doing so usually hurts conversion.

What would it be like to act with clarity & intention on your store?

For one, you’ll de-risk your stores’ business operations. By grounding your decisions in evidence and measuring their impact, you act with significantly lower risk – which saves the business money and captures additional profit.

But you also frustrate customers less. How? By listening to their needs, responding to what they value, and doing what you can to meet them halfway. The only way to accomplish this is through qualitative research.

There is a better way. It’s easier to execute. It’s easier to gain clarity. And it’s easier to reliably profit from.

Introducing Draft Workshop, a two-day intensive

Building off our best-selling book Value-Based Design and our proven successful methodology, we’re introducing a new two-day workshop that will teach you how to shift your team’s mindset towards listening to your customers, understanding your audience, and giving customers what they need to succeed – so you too can capture outsize profit.

In it, you’ll learn:

• How to research your customers for any DTC business
• How to prioritize one-off fixes & experiments to ensure maximum impact
• Under what circumstances you should make a one-off change versus run an experiment
• How to measure one-off changes
• The biggest blind spots when analyzing tests
• How to incorporate optimization into your existing offerings
• And we’ll do live teardowns of a few stores

You’ll also get all of our books for free, as well as a one-year membership to deepen your education.

As the old saying goes, give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day, teach someone to fish and they’ll eat for a lifetime. Stop ripping off Amazon and start taking responsibility for your clients’ futures.

You scrolled to this part

In the next few weeks, we’re going to be launching a two-day, hands-on masterclass for Shopify agencies that want to get started with the Draft Method.

This is our first run. We’re hoping to make it a quarterly thing. A few things are worth noting:

• It’s going to be online only to start. Yes, you’ll get lifetime access to the recording, even if you aren’t able to show up in person.
• Our fees will never be this low again. Ever. Ever-ever. We’re serious.
• In exchange for it never costing this little again, we’re going to send you a survey that asks for your brutal, unflinching, detailed feedback – so we can make it as amazing as possible in the future.
• In the future, we want to run similar masterclasses one-on-one. Ping me if you’re interested and we can send along pricing.
• To keep this as focused on your specific needs as possible, attendance will be limited to 10 participants.

If you’re interested in hearing more about this, just hit reply to this email and send a thumbs up. Thanks!

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This week, for paid members

• We’ve been cleaning up a lot of our tutorials & guides, and letting paid members know first. Optimization is evergreen work!
• Our monthly lesson is all about a fun thing we’ve done with a client lately, which is to track all of their upsell events in Google Analytics.
• And our design of the week covers an interesting term in a store’s header nav.
• Our next monthly office hours is coming up, scheduled for March 15 at 1p CDT.

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

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Links & analysis

• Just as optimization maturity matters for an organization, so does their ability to research properly – and act on it. This nice post defines UX maturity as a practice, and explains that not all organizations may be ready to embrace UX wholeheartedly. I’d add that maturity is a spectrum, and the real challenge is in increasing an organization’s maturity, no matter what level they may happen to start at.
• Related: how to build a culture of experimentation, at Harvard Business Review.
• Yes, you can run more than one experiment at a time. I’d avoid running more than one on the same page, though.

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This week’s paid lesson: How do you track upsell take rate in Google Analytics?

This week’s lesson is for paid members. Sign into our community to read it, or join us today to get access.

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Thanks for the sponsorship, Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.