Why CRO Is The Most Profitable Marketing Investment With Allen Burt

Allen Burt is the Founder and CEO of Blue Stout, a conversion rate optimization (CRO) platform helping eight-figure brands increase conversion rates, revenue, and profit through A/B testing and site optimization on Shopify Plus. In 12 months, Allen’s clients averaged a 25% increase in conversion rates, over $1 million in additional revenue, and more than 20 times ROI through his services. As a serial entrepreneur, he has co-founded several startups and e-commerce brands, including Executor.org and Offmap.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Allen Burt shares how he discovered his passion for CRO and created Blue Stout
The duality between data-driven and gut-driven decision making
Why is CRO the most profitable marketing investment?
Leveraging buyer psychology to prioritize testing strategies
How incremental wins through CRO testing increase conversion rates
Marrying a blue-collar work ethic with an indomitable will
How Allen’s regimented routine allows for phased growth in his personal life
Allen’s advice for brands implementing CRO strategies

In this episode…

Owning a business goes far beyond leadership ability and attention to detail. To grow your brand, you have to develop and optimize marketing strategies. Businesses can implement any marketing strategy at their leisure, but without conversion rate optimization (CRO), their efforts won’t reflect in their ROI. What should you know about CRO, and how can you implement this strategy to boost profits?

Unlike other marketing strategies where your budget is spent appealing to a new audience, CRO increases revenue by focusing on your current consumers. Allen Burt, a CRO expert, recommends businesses pull back on ad spending and transfer those marketing dollars to CRO strategies. By implementing CRO, brands will spend the same amount of money to understand their audience and increase overall profits.

On this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris welcomes Allen Burt, Founder and CEO of Blue Stout, to discuss leveraging CRO testing for maximum revenue increase. Allen details why CRO is the most profitable marketing investment, how to leverage buyer psychology in the testing stage, and the efficiency of prioritizing incremental wins using CRO strategies. He also explains how to balance gut-driven decision-making with data-driven methods and his philosophy on work ethic.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com
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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now, let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everybody, William Harris here founder and CEO of Elumynt, in the host of this podcast where I feature experts in the D2C space sharing strategies on how to scale your business and achieve your goals. Today, I'm excited to have Allen Burt, here he is the founder and CEO at Blue Stout. Blue Stout helps eight figure brands increase conversion rates, revenue and profit through AV testing, and site optimization on Shopify. Plus, in the last 12 months, Allen's eight-figure clients have averaged over 25% increase in conversion rates, 1 million plus in additional revenue, and over 20x ROI on his services. Those are some absolutely incredible numbers. Allen, I'm excited to have you here today. William, you got to start running our ads. Man, that was pretty good. I was trying to think about how we first got connected. And I think you and I kind of went back and forth on this. I don't know if we officially No, we were debating whether it was the Shopify Plus Facebook group, or even just kind of connecting on LinkedIn. But one of the fun strange worlds of how you connect with people just, you know, through engaging on social media.

Allen Burt 1:17

I think it was I think it was just engaging on social. And you know, I think, very quickly, we ended up having a couple a couple of clients that we shared. And I think that was sort of the start of it, but it was we've we've known each other for many years. Looking back, I was like 2016, maybe 1015 16. It's been a while. Yeah, yeah.

William Harris 1:34

Hey, before we get into the good stuff, I do want to take a quick moment to say our sponsorship message. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with the largest one selling for nearly 800 million. And we were ranked as the 12th fastest growing agency in the world by Adweek. If you want to learn more, you can go check out Elumynt That is elumynt.com. That said, enough of the boring stuff on to the fun stuff. Allen, tell me about what got you started on Blue Stout starting the business as a whole starting to focus it on CRO what was going on that kind of brought you to this moment to to create this company?

Allen Burt 2:17

Yes, it's a good question. I think it's, you know, like most entrepreneurs have convergent have a few different things. But you know, the sort of the original origin story of Blue Stout is that we know back in 2011, we actually had a totally separate business toy, separate company, it was in the e-commerce travel space, we actually sold adventure travel packages, and had a technology component to it. And we had designed this incredible user experience that we constantly heard from customers and potential partners, just how beautiful the site was, and how amazing it was to book these these travel experiences, etc. And we were in a position where we had bootstrapped the company, when we were about to sell it, the seller ended up falling through at the last minute, and it was a, it was one of those experiences where we were kind of banking on that acquisition, we were either gonna go out and raise capital, or we're going to sell so we decided we're gonna sell the seller fell through. So then we were in position where we needed to generate cash pretty much immediately. And to do it, we basically took the team and said, Hey, look, what are we really, really good at? And we had all these people asking us who had designed our site who had built our site. And it was us internally. And so we basically called up who those other people and said, Hey, we're gonna do some work on the side, do you guys need some help. And that was the beginning of a snowball effect that eventually turned into Blue Stout and Blue Stout. And scaling bigger than the e-commerce business did and eventually became the main business and we've shut down the e-commerce business. I love that because it's a sign of a pivot. And one of the things I've talked on here before about is the importance of being able to pivot. I have talked to a lot of angel investors, VC investors, and one of the things that they've told me over and over again, is that

William Harris 3:58

the biggest reason for why they will or won't make an investment is not often because of the idea in the company. It's the person leading that vision that at the company, and if they believe that that person has the ability to do it, and if that person has the ability to pivot, because they said, usually whatever you start off as you will very likely need to pivot at some point in time. And do you have what it takes to to make that happen? And so I love just hearing that story about, you know, how you guys were able to kind of change directions? That's a that's a tough thing to do. Yeah, it's,

Allen Burt 4:29

you know, I think it's part of any businesses you have to be you have to be willing to evolve, right. And so that was a pretty hard pivot. But I think, you know, over time, we've continued to evolve and so you talked about no CRO and focus on CRO. And, you know, we, we design, you know, we were we started the agency, because we were, we had gotten all these accolades and sort of compliments on our design and usability and UX. But my background prior to all this was very data driven and I worked in finance years ago and Wall Street in Chicago and I didn't read data. You didn't know that. Yeah, I did so. And so it's, you know, my background is in economics and finance. And so my, you know, I've always been a very data driven individual. And so for me, one of the hard things I always had with when we were running the design and UX agency really early days was, we could design as incredible user experiences, but so much of it was kind of gut, right, it was like, Okay, we have a knack for this, we understand how buyers buy, and we can design these experiences. Over time, it just became very clear to me, that wasn't enough. And I wanted to merge a much more data driven approach to design. And I think, you know, a lot of brands think that sort of one or the other, right, it's either you can have a beautiful brand look and feel, or you have this ugly thing that's been optimized to convert no matter what. And the reality is that it's you can absolutely have both. And both the brands that are the best are the brands that have found a way to marry both. So they have this incredible user experience, they've got a very potent emotional design that connects the buyers. But they've been able to work within those confines using data to convert at high rates, high average revenue, high AVS. And so over time, I just continue to sort of push the envelope to say that, yes, we're going to continue to develop beautiful design user experiences, but we want to make data driven decisions as much as possible. And where we're at today is where data really is the tip of the spear. So all of our all of our clients, all our projects, for the most part, have a CRO data driven AB testing component baked into what we do. And that's all been backed up by a very talented design team.

William Harris 6:39

Well, and I love the duality between, like you said, data driven versus gut. And I feel like, that's something we talk about often in our space. There's a lot that can be figured out through data, and by being data driven, but there's some things that the gut is just, it's a very intelligent thing that I think we miss. And I don't know if you've ever heard this, I read an article not that long ago, where they actually took some type of a fungus, and they put it into it was like a Petri dish or something. And they had almost like these walls set up, mimicking the I think it was like the Tokyo layout or whatever. And they wanted to figure out if, if the, if the fungus would find a more efficient route between all the different subway stations or something like, yeah, and, and they and they did, and it pretty much mapped out almost exactly what they had, which was very interesting. But the fungus, you know, just working, it's a little magic. And there's intelligence there. And I think there's a lot of intelligence in our guts, that we oftentimes maybe just don't recognize or understand the intelligence that's there. And when you have that gut feeling, as an entrepreneur, sometimes that is just your, let's just say Biology, being aware of something that you can't even mentally process yet, but there's, there's something to it, and it's worth paying attention to

Allen Burt 8:00

100% I couldn't agree more of that. In fact, you know, we, when we work with brands, just as an example, you know, one of the some of the best performing optimizations and tests, if we are gonna run a test that we run are things that just come from the founder or come from the head of marketing, it's just and it for them, it's very much a gut thing. Like, I think our buyers want this. And my preference always is to say, yes, lean into that those gut, those sort of net decisions, but the sort of good ideas, right, but let's back it with data, right, let's make sure that the best of both worlds and end of the day, it's we can we can make sure it's moving the needle in the right direction. And sort of the point I always bring up with with with any brand is that, you know, if you're really, really, really good at CRO testing, and like a B testing, your win rate is still only going to be you know, 70% 80%, you know, and over time it degrades, right. And what we see a lot of brands do is they make very gut driven decisions around design or a product page, right. And if you're really, really good 80% of what you did on that product page was the right thing, and 20% was wrong. Sure, it means that 80% is moving the needle in the right direction between percent is actually moving it in the exact opposite direction, and you don't know which, which force is moving it in a harder. And so that's one of the reasons we always like to use data. So like, let's, let's marry this idea of strong branding. And or just know we're the direction you want to take the brand. But let's make sure that we're only implementing the elements of those that we know are gonna move you forward.

William Harris 9:35

Yeah, like that. You know, you you brought up even right now. You have a background in economics and Wall Street and everything. And right now we're in a very interesting economic environment. You said something to me one time, though, that I thought was very interesting. And I'm going to try to make sure I say this here. But CRO is the most profitable marketing investments available is what you said. Why, why there's a lot of things that people could do right now and they might be thinking I need to pull back on, you know, adspend pull back on CRO pull back on some of these other things. Why is this the most profitable thing that they could do?

Allen Burt 10:08

Yeah, so when I, when I say most profit, what I'm referring to is, you know, for every dollar of additional spend that you're gonna put into marketing, what's going to be your profit return, right? And in your in ADS guy, right. And so we know that if we want to drive 10%, more revenue with ads, right, and let's say so let's say we've got a $20 brand, and we want to drive, you know, an additional 2 million in revenue just from just from advertising. Inherently, that next 2 million in revenue now, with some exceptions, right, but generally speaking, is going to be less profitable than the last 2 million in revenue, because you're gonna have to tap a brand new audience, a cold audience, you know, less effective, less warm, right, it's gonna be harder to convert them, which means we're gonna have less, we're gonna drive less revenue, or it's going to cost us more to drive the same amount of revenue than the previous. And so you might have a 10 10% increase in revenue, but that's not going to equate to a 10% increase in profit, right, it's actually a much lower profit increase for that additional ad spend. CRO is the exact opposite, right? But we're saying, we're going to increase your revenue, we're gonna go and optimize the site, we're gonna boost revenue by 10%. That additional 10% additional 2 million is coming from your existing audience, existing traffic, existing marketing budget existing ad spend. And so there is no incremental cost to acquisition or incremental cost to that next dollar of revenue. So which means a 10% increase in revenue is actually going to be a larger percentage of profit. And depending upon your contribution of gross margins, it could be anywhere from 10 to 20, to 3040. So it's it is a when you look at how to spend that next dollar. And this is especially true for eight-figure brands. CRO right now, for every brand that we work with is it is the most profitable next dollar investment, it's not going to scale you to 100 million, right? Like I can't skate you can't take a $20 brand $200 billion brand was CRO so it's it's not one of those things where we say look, you can only do you should only do this and you should not continue to drive adspend but in terms of your return on investment, profit return on investment, it is it is the highest return.

William Harris 12:16

And I like where you went with that, too. We're making sure that you clarify, you know, the the scale aspect and so when from an ad side, a lot of times we work with CRO a lot like that, right? We don't do the CRO but we work with you guys and and partners on CRO and one of the things that I like to look at, and I'm make sure that I'm going the right direction here for you. I'm going up into the right if I do this, right, yes. All the way figure, okay. So it's like, you know, it's like, okay, great, let's scale. And then we're going to need to do some CRO, and let's scale so to some CRO and with is this balance here. And what a lot of times I tell brands is let's create a problem that needs to be solved with CRO but right now we may have a scale problem we actually have to do is you don't have enough traffic to even mess with here. Let's scale that. Yeah, create that problem where you say yeah, now we have a CRO problem. Let's fix that now. Great. Now let's scale again. Okay, now we've got a CRO Brahm, let's fix that, again, let's continue to optimize it is this thing where we're constantly doing, you know, there's constant scale constant CRO, constant scale constant, CRO, this, like, level checks at balance type thing?

Allen Burt 13:17

Absolutely. And it's in the reality is that, you know, you may have a traffic channel that the last six months has been unprofitable to scale, right, or even unprofitable today, that if you just optimize the customer journey, once they hit the site, you better congruence between, you know, ad creative insight, right, you know, removing friction points from the point of landing on the site through to through to the point of purchase, improving average order value, upsell, cross sells, right? Like, all of a sudden, the economics of that traffic channel completely change. And all of a sudden, that becomes a scalable source of new traffic, where previously you looked at it as a dead opportunity. And so that's where CRO steps in. And it's, and I think we've we may talk about this a little bit, but we've spent the last five years 10 years where there were however long, you wanted to find it just pumping money into traffic generation, because it was cheap. And now that it gets more more expensive, we have to balance we have to balance out the scales and the equation between money being put into scaling audience, but also ensuring that that audience is being put into the most efficient, most profitable experience on the site to drive the most profit and revenue from that traffic. So it's a balance, and I like that concept of scale, kind of optimize scale optimize. Approach. Yeah.

William Harris 14:35

Well, and I literally just had this conversation with a brand. I'm gonna say, just last week, where, you know, they were wondering, it's like, okay, well, how can we continue to grow right now? And one of the things that I call it out for them was, let's just say from an overall demand perspective, because I think this is something we have to be very aware of right now, especially from a macro economic standpoint, demand for their product category. If you looked at even just Google Trends or something was down about 20%, year over year. So they're, they're fighting for a little bit of a smaller, you know, pie. And then in as a result of that, their conversion rate is down as well. And so they're growing, but they're not growing as fast as they'd like. And if you look at the website, conversion rate is down. And I want to say it was down about 40%, year over year, like they're down pretty significantly, but they're a higher priced item. And so there's something for what I think makes sense where people in their their group are hesitant, and they're trying to see, do I have the money to buy this or not. But, you know, when we looked at the advertising side of things, we were able to show that as a result of what we've been doing, we are driving, I want to say was about, you know, almost 50%, more traffic, pretty significant more more amount of traffic, we were able to drive 50% more engagement on their ads, like there was all of the metrics that we can point to from an advertising standpoint, where it's like, this is good. And that's where we we basically said like, this is the point in time, when you haven't been doing the CRO, we've recommended this for a while, you absolutely need to start doing CRO because without it, there is only so much that the advertising can do. We can run ads that get better engagement, again, significantly better engagement, run ads that are getting doing a better job of driving people to your website, like we've we've done those things now. But now there's a point where you have to figure out how to convert people that are maybe slower to convert because of economic factors. This is the CRO thing. And I think that's exactly what you were just saying, this is the time you had the opportunity to drive traffic cheaper traffic before, this is the time to dig into how do you increase conversions from people that are maybe a little bit slower to want to convert right now?

Allen Burt 16:45

Yeah, it's exactly right. And I think it's, in a lot of ways I hate the name like the or the hate the acronym like CRO because it's it understands what it means if you're in our space, and it's conversion rate optimization, but conversion is just one lever, right. And, in fact, it's actually the lever we cared the least about, the one we could host about is average revenue per user coming to the site, or Okay, caring about customer lifetime value, right. And so, it I think something to consider too, is in, and I think this leads a lot of brands to do things like look at full store conversion rate and make decisions based upon it, when it's a really, really a terrible metric for understanding how well the site performs. You know, we've got no, you kind of mentioned, you know, effects, like macro effects, like seasonality effects are going to affect your full store conversion rate more than anything else, you know, if you sell blue jeans, right, and we're heading into the summer, like, no matter what we do, you're going to, you're going to convert less people into blue jeans in June, right. And, and so looking at that full store conversion rate is not is not an actionable metric that's going to help you make decisions on how to grow the business. And so when we work with clients, you know, we're always focused very specifically on a let's let's look at your business. And let's let's define the metrics that matter. Now we're a subscription, we focus on customer lifetime value focus, you know, so if let's kind of take subscription out of the picture for a second. But, you know, if you if the end of the day, what we care about is how do we maximize profit and revenue for the traffic that you're driving. And lots of cases, that actually means a decrease in conversion, if it means an increase in average order value, right, so we were just having this conversation with a client before this, which is, no, they're looking at removing their free shipping option and implementing a free shipping threshold, that would be you know, be over 100 bucks for them. And the reality is that it's likely going to decrease their conversion rate, but we're gonna run test and it's, you know, if we set that free shipping threshold correctly, and we position upsells. And cross sells correctly to help people get over it very easily, it's very likely that that change is actually going to produce a a higher ARV, and result in a much higher profit margin for them and scale their ad. And so in this case, it's a win for their conversion rate to go down slightly, so long as average revenue and profit goes up. So it's, it's, it's always more complex than just looking at conversion. And I think what we see a lot with brands at certain stages and tip, in particular 10 to 15 million is where we see this sort of position where they've been able to hit that level, through maybe one or two channels, but it's been very focused on acquisition very focused on traffic generation. And there's all this data, there's just like this goldmine of data in their analytics, that nobody on the team either understands how to decipher or more likely just also doesn't have the time because these are still very strapped teams. Where a lot of these brands are sitting on millions of profit if they just knew how to dissect that data, understand where their customers are getting stuck, understand where there's an opportunity to either increase conversion or increase upsells or increase ARV, right. But most of them just don't have the time or the experience to know how to do it right now.

William Harris 20:00

Well, and I think that's where sometimes people get frustrated. I know, they've heard people say that they're frustrated here. Oh, we did that. And, you know, people say that it's gonna take one out of every 10 tests are gonna be successful. And, you know, 10 tests takes us 10 months. And, you know, or I've got a guy on the team that ran all these tests. And I think a big part of this comes down to working with a team that knows what tests to run. So you're not testing the wrong things like, hey, we change the button color, fine. That's not really that effective of a test. What are some bigger tests to your point where it's like, we might actually decrease conversion rate a little bit if you're looking at sitewide conversion rate, but it's going to increase your profitability. That's a test that a lot of people may not be willing to run or even know how to begin setting it up and testing it and validating whether or not they've decreased the conversion rate too much to where it offsets the gain and profitability. And so that's where I think the value is in in working with a team that understands that. But let's just say moving beyond that, then what are a couple of other tests like that, that you'd say these are tests that I see people missing out on that are oftentimes some of the low hanging fruit?

Allen Burt 21:04

Yeah, so the way that I always like describe this, as brands, brands always want to do big things, right? There was like, hey, we want to know, we want a brand new product page. Now we want a brand new homepage, we want to totally redo our navigations. Right? Because they think that it's these massive changes that are can produce the biggest results. And in some cases they do, right. The reality though, is that for most brands, it's more boring than that. It's compounding three to four small wins a month, month, over month, over month, over month over month, kind of like in the way that you know, this goes back to just like my finance brain, but it's like, it's like compounding interest, right? If you if you tell somebody that they save 100 bucks a month for, you know, 50 years, right, they're like, they can't understand the level of compounding that that's gonna produce. And it's the exact same thing. So when you run CRO, the gains get bigger over time, because you compound them on top of each other, just like compounding interest. So three months of CRO is not reflective of what 12 No is not three months CRO results times four doesn't equal the same that you would get from 12 months of CRO results, if that makes sense. Yeah. So we look at so first off, what we're always looking for when we talk to brands is a we want to compound wins fast. So if there is an opportunity to like test an entire store product page, right, that might take, you know, a couple of weeks of design dev set up and all of a sudden, you're a month in for one test, in which case, you could have already implemented three testing winners, each of which produced a 5% uplift for your top landing page for your main traffic source that is going to drive an extra half a million in revenue over the next 12 months. And so our goal is always to have that conversation upfront and go like look, these look like very small tests. But it's because the data we have that we've run hundreds of tests, right, so we have this database of what we know works. And so we can, we can come in and look at your analytics, we can understand your customer base, we understand your product industry you operate in. And we can look at what we've seen be successful in the past. And we can, with a pretty high level of confidence, say, of these four tests, pretty positive three are going to win. We don't know how much. But that's definitely going to be a better use of your time and investment over the next month, then redesigning entire page and just hoping it converts a little better. So first piece is what we see people make big mistakes as they try to make these massive changes, without just compounding a bunch of small wins first. So that's sort of the the big piece. The second piece we see is for brands that have tried to do AV testing in house is that there is no methodology to it, it basically comes down to the team brainstorming and coming up with a whole bunch of different ideas where the founder just has a bunch of things that they want to test because they saw it on a bunch of different sites. And so people just run tests, and there is no methodology around who those tests are meant to impact or how we're positioning those tests on the site to leverage the most revenue increase, meaning, you know, we look at sites you can look at, okay, what are the top three traffic channels? Where are those channels being directed how those customers moving the way through the site, we want to we want to very specifically focus our initial tests on where can we have the biggest impact and the biggest impact is always going to occur on the pathways with the most traffic, right? And pass was pathways with the most traffic that we see underperforming, right. And and so a lot of times, you know, we'll run a test, and maybe it only produces like a 2% uplift in conversion, which is a very small uplift. But if that is the number one traffic source, and we're sure testing it on the landing page of your top traffic source that produces a six figure plus, you know, multi six figure result over the next 12 months, and you can pound three of those on top of each other and all of a sudden, that's that's a heck of a lot of profit. So it's also understanding where to apply the test. Right. And that requires not just coming up with a list of hypotheses, but it's looking at the data understand where the highest leverage points are first. And then I think the biggest piece we See is just a lack of understanding of kind of consumer buyer patterns and consumer psychology. And the best tests are always rooted in understanding how your buyer buys. And will, will have, you know, brands that are very emotional customers, right. So there's a no things like I'm speaking very generally but like look at things like you know, fashion brands, in a fast fashion brands, things like that a lot of those are very impulse emotional driven decisions, versus maybe if it's like a food product, or if it's like, you know, like gym equipment as an example, right, like, for some reason, like gym equipment buyers are like spreadsheet buyers, these guys are like, Well, I'm gonna compare all five different products against each other price points, weight, durability, how it's gonna fit my gym, right. And so that type of buyer needs to be presented with very different information to the point of purchase than somebody who's mainly been driven from a an emotional decision. All decisions are emotional, but depending on the product in the industry, there's different levels of emotional decision making. And so again, you have to, you want your test to be rooted in how your buyer buys and presenting the right information that's going to move them forward of purchase. So that's through the third big issue we see is that a lot of brands a test don't really think through the buyer psychology to understand how their buyers buy, and then prioritize test accordingly.

William Harris 26:22

You You talked about how, you know, there's there's power in these incremental wins with that, right? It reminds me a lot of going back to Wall Street. Financially speaking, I think there's something to be said for entrepreneurs where we want sometimes those big giant tests for you like we're gonna scrap the whole website and start over. Because that's what makes to a point that's, that's what an entrepreneur is, it's somebody who says, this is a dumb idea, really, for me to go and pursue this right now. Because this is an absolutely massive undertaking. If I fully understood what I was getting myself into, I probably just wouldn't do it. But I'm gonna go ahead and do it anyways, right? Like that is kind of an entrepreneur mindset a little bit. And I'll say that I'm an entrepreneur, right? So I'm throwing myself under the bus with that. But when you look at, Let's even say investing, it's very easy. I think the general, general public, myself included, we like trying to say, like, figure out how we're going to pick the right stock or the right cryptocurrency that's going to take off and go to the moon, and we're like, I'm going to pick this, I'm going to pick this and when you do that, take these big giant swings, you end up missing out on on just like this really good sustainable growth. And that's where you know, things like, you know, ETFs, or whatever. And other just basic investing strategies of dollar cost averaging things like that, you know, there's so much that can go into significant growth, we say, how about you just go ahead and go with the 8%, this year and the 8% next year that compounds and compounds and compounds? And you're saying, Hey, how about we get this 2%? Let's compound that with another 2%, compound that with 5%, let's compound that with 10%, right? You get all of these things adding up, and it makes a lot of sense versus trying to go for this massive big win.

Allen Burt 28:00

Yeah, and it's anything a lot of it depends on the stage of the business, right. And the analogy I always use with clients and brands, whether or not it's a coupon or not, but it's, you know, Formula One's super popular, right. And so I always think of like, think of your site as an analogy of like, it's an f1 car. And there's absolutely a time in the evolution of an f1 car where you have to tweak their dynamics right there fine tune the engine, like every little dial is what's going to be the difference between, you know, sixth place, and fifth place and fourth place in the first place. But you don't even get on the grid, if you're missing the back to tires, right? And there's different and some brands are at that stage where you know, like really early in their, in their lifecycle early in evolution, or if they're on like, an ancient platform, right, if the brands on, you know, they've got a five year old side of Magento, right, like, let's times those full site redesign efforts, like they're absolutely required to get on the grid, right. But once you're on the grid, and you're in the right car, then, you know, you don't need to reboot the car every single year, you just need to fine tune their dynamics and continue to improve, right. And that's where that's where CRO comes into play. And so and most brands that have made it to that eight-figure level, assuming they're on the right platform, you know, like like Shopify, you know, not all of them, right, because we do a lot of lot of redesigns for those those types of rents too. But the overwhelming majority are probably better off with compounding incremental gains with their existing site. And then if they do want to redesign efforts doing them based upon the learnings of those CRO tests. So as a great example, when we've got an eight-figure fashion brand that we work with, that we started working with them, we did nothing but incremental CRO testing over the course of six months, and we'd learned an incredible amount about their buyer. And based upon those those CRO wins a we compared to a bunch of wins for them over six months. That then led the strategy for how to redesign their homepage, how to redesign their product page, and then those homepage or product page launch it launches, both produced 20%, uplift and conversion, after you know, all the surveillance compounded. So it's one of those where when you re launch a page without data, you're just kind of just guessing, right? And if you're really good 80% of your guesses, right 20% is wrong, and the 20% moves you in the wrong direction. And so you're better off starting with data, incremental gains. And then once you have enough data to make that decision of what a redesign should look like, then redesigning,

William Harris 30:27

we see this in advertising, too. So oftentimes, a brand may want to come up with this, you know, $400,000 ad, and I'm exaggerating, but I'm not there are some some ads that are in that level, right? Where they're like, this is this is the ad, this is the ad that we're going to do. There's been no testing that went into that to prove out that this was the ad that was going to dynamically change their business, that they spent all this money with this agency that maybe put together some absolutely beautiful ad. And he's gorgeous, right? Like, like the quality of the production actors, like it's done so well. But because it wasn't done with data, it doesn't convert any better than the UGC that was just done on their phone. But here's where this gets different. And here's where I think people miss this. UGC is still just a stepping stone to some of the highest converting ads though. And let's just even say, you know, I'll throw out the Harmon brothers, they make some absolutely beautiful ads. And in some of the ads that they have there that we are all familiar with, let's just say the one from the Dollar Shave Club, right? Or the squatty. Potty, like these are some some iconic ads that people shared out. So they got virality from that as well. But these were some really, really good ads. In those cases, though, there's data that went into proving out that this is what needs to happen. And so on the ad side, one of the things that we'll do is, let's run a bunch of copy tests, to see what people are resonating with now, great, let's run a bunch of different, you know, Vision tests, let's you know, from from these types of ad creatives, or whatever that might be like from these types of UGC or people doing these things, saying these things, this type of person, this type of person, this type of object, whatever that might be. Now, you can take all that data and put that into something you say, Great. Now, let's make this really good high production piece that is, you know, perfectly dialed in. And now it actually converts. The problem wasn't the production value. The problem was that you didn't have that research those micro improvements that went into it. And if I can continue on that for one more second more, there's a book by Neville Medora, that I absolutely love. And I believe it's called this, this book will help you write better or something like that. Yeah. And I'll link to it, you know, it's what I'm thinking of probably, right. Short book. It's like 20 pages long. And one of the things that I love is, you know, especially the people who say, Oh, you know, the copy doesn't make that big of a difference, or whatever. It's like, man, it is so powerful. He has the one, the one part of the book where he's like, Okay, imagine you've got two letters, same piece, papers, same pen, same envelope, same stamp, right. And on the one, you write a letter to your mom, and you say, you know, Mom, I hate you, you've ruined my life, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you go through all this stuff, it's like, you know, PS, I also hate dad, and you put that one in the mail and send it out. And the other letter, you say, Mom, I love you, you have made my life, you know, absolutely amazing. Everything you do is wonderful, and I can't wait to see you, you know, love your son, William, whenever you send them both, it's that the medium is the same, like, let's say the ad creative is the same, the only thing different are the words, and both are gonna get a very visceral, emotional reaction from that, and it's literally just the words. And so I think that sometimes we downplay those micro things that you can test out along the way.

Allen Burt 33:43

It's absolutely true. And I think, you know, there's a, I was kind of butcher this quote, but it's something along the lines of like, it's, it's hard to read the label when you're inside the bottle. And this is sort of a quote, that was, I want to say it came from like Pepsi or Coke, but the concept was, like, you know, you can't eat it when you're sitting inside the organization. Right? And you're kind of in the weeds. It's it's hard to view your brand in the way that other people perceive it. Right? Yeah. And so a lot of the times, like in this kind of goes no to this back to the site is no, we talked to founders talk to teams that have been running these businesses for years. And at the end of the day, you know, they still struggle with understanding with what how consumers actually perceive their brand and their business because they're in the weeds all day long, right. And so it's very hard to it's very hard to read the label when you're sitting inside the bottle. And so a lot of times, very data driven approaches can be very insightful to brands, because they all of a sudden realized that we had no idea that customers actually cared about this specific element. Now, we spent all this time promoting this on the site and talking about this talk about this feature talk about this benefit, and one simple shift in page layout where we deprioritize that part are routine and improved another priority improve conversions. I mean, this we ran a test for one of our brands a couple months ago, where literally all we did was change the order in the description on the product page of the benefits. So you know, I think we were, it was a shoe brand. And we're talking about, you know, talk about like the leather and the and the fit and like the, you know, lifetime value, add all this kind of stuff. And literally all we did was take the three words that were the benefits, and we just switch the order of them and positioned one of them first, and that repositioning just in the text of the description improve conversions. So it was just very clear that there was one specific benefit, they thought that the brand considered all benefits important. But there was John called out that majority of customers actually really cared about. And so it's just why it's hard to know that unless you you test. Yeah, did

William Harris 35:49

you exactly, there's probably some type of a gut assumption that went into it. Or maybe you're looking through things in Facebook comments. So that's what we do. Oftentimes we look through, okay, what are the comments people are seeing on your ads? What are the comments people are saying, on your competitors ads? What are people saying about you? Or your competitors in Reddit, on Twitter? Like, where's the underbelly? And people are just willing to share everything that they like or hate? Let's go there and find out what are those things. And let's use that to our advantage now to better align the ads or to your point that are aligned the landing page. The other thing, I wanted to start digging into that because I like to get into the human element of who you are, who is Allen Burt. And so one of the things you were talking about before here, Tiger Woods, performance coach for Tiger Woods, I tell the story about what was going on here in in, you know, books, mentors, that mattered to you. But there's something about Tiger Woods.

Allen Burt 36:47

What was now not forgetting where was no, it was it's a I had an opportunity to work with a performance coach. Yes, a number of years ago, that was the former performer he was a former Olympian cyclist. And he then transitioned into into coaching and no coach a bunch of the sort of the US cycling teams, as well as worked as a performance coach or just other major athletes and sort of business execs. And it's, he had this quote that, and I don't know why it's on my desk, it's on my desk at home. But um, it's a hit this one quote that for some reason has always stuck with me, and I'd write it down. And it's I think, as entrepreneurs, we kind of get caught up in kind of, to your point of this idea of like, you want to make big moves. And I think people sort of assume that in order to move the ball forward, like it's all these sort of big jumps as opposed to just compounding things consistently over time. And so the quote that he had is that end of the day, like if you look at any major majorly successful athlete or business exactly cetera, it always success always comes down to the way he described it was marrying an indomitable will win blue collar work ethic. And I think he actually said the opposite way that he was like, you have to marry a blue collar work ethic, with an indomitable will. And that just means showing up every single day, right? With a indomitable will towards the direction you're going, but it requires a blue collar worth that work ethic. And for some reason, that just always stuck with me as really just end of the day like yeah, sometimes it's lucky. And everybody does get lucky every now and then. But the rest of the time, it just comes down to a blue collar work ethic, married with indomitable will.

William Harris 38:33

Yeah, and Let's even say and throw in a little bit dash of good luck as well, because the right time, wrong time, you know, a lot of plays in but you got to, you know, put all that together. That is a really good quote. And I don't know that I've heard that before, but I like that. What else? What, you know, when you think about your daily routine? Are you somebody who has, you seem like you're somebody who's very, let's just say, you know, you've got your things figured out and your systems and your processes? Are you that way in your personal life? No, no, not a boring thing, right? Like, this is a good thing. You're just like, hey, this is how we're going to approach growth. And we're gonna approach it from like this incremental standpoint. Are you the same way in your personal life where you're looking at like incremental gains in your personal life?

Allen Burt 39:18

Yeah, I tend to be very regiment for the most part, which, recently, I've actually started to question like, whether or not that's actually a good thing, which we can talk about if you want to, but But yeah, I tend to be very regimented. I thrive on routine. I'm one of those kind of guys where it's like, you know, like, vacation is great and I love vacations, but it's almost like sometimes vacation will be stressful because it's a change of the routine right? And so I'm one of those kind of guys. So it's like for me it's like you know, morning routines like I wake up the exact same time every day like I make coffee the exact same way every single day I work out every single day right I get a there's like it's a time increments like I take my son to school every single day I come to work like the first thing I do every day is this right? Like I leave work at the same time every single day like it's a it is absent be routine. And for me, what that does is it removes all the other kind of micro decisions of like what I have to do. So I don't have to decide whether I'm gonna work, I don't have to decide what I'm having for breakfast, I don't decide what have to have for lunch, because I actually the same thing for lunch every single day during the week. And so it's like, those things are removed. And that actually helps kind of lower my anxiety and stress levels to then focus on the other decisions that I have to make without having to worry about all those micro decisions. So for me, that works. And I found that for me, that's how I can thrive. I think recently, I've been beginning to question that, because I think that level of rigidity, makes it harder to adapt when things change very quickly. So I think there's a part of me that wants to try to put myself in more positions or change that routine or be able to thrive without routine. Because I think adaptability is very important. But for me, it's I'm definitely a routine person.

William Harris 41:00

Well, both are important. And Alyssa say from a neuroplasticity perspective, you know, people say brush your hands or brush your teeth, left handed or something like that, right? Like change your mortar do it backwards. I actually, my handwriting is terrible. I've always had terrible handwriting, and awful. So a long time ago, I was a nurse. And I don't know if people know that. He's listening. And I actually was a nurse back when we did paper charting. Before the even we did you know the computer charting and so terrible handwriting. And they actually made me at one point in time switch to writing with my left hand, because I had to slow down I always tried to write I think my handwriting so terrible, because it's I tried to write as fast as I'm thinking, assessing speak. And so they're like, by making the right left handed, I had to slow down, there was no way that I could write fast and actually got really good at reading left handed as a result of that. But just that idea of neuroplasticity and changing things up a little bit, which is which is good for the routine. But I have to go back and ask you now. Because you called out two things. One, you said you make your coffee the same way every day. And you eat the same thing every day. And so when I asked you if there were any quirks or anything like that, yeah, I can't think of anything, though. And so I want to know, like, how do you make your coffee? And what do you eat every single day for

Allen Burt 42:15

lunch? Oh, man, okay. Okay, let me all the I've ever talked about this. So there's a so first off a coffee nerd, I like coffee, I like good coffee. And so I wake up early. So I wake up to 430 and five every morning, because I have kids. And once the kids get up, it's like Kid routine. And then it's cool that it's work. And so like if I want to work out between five and 6am is my only time to do it. So it requires me to wake up early and I require coffee like I'm I can't do anything else have coffee. And so I do like a pour over coffee every single morning. So I wake up like beans are in the grinder. And I've got one of those fellow kettles and we've seen these things, turn them on, and they heat up and it's perfect temperature. And so it's like I've got an exact process like I gram weigh out the beans, I know exactly how many grams and know exactly how much water like wake up in the morning, it's like press the grinder it's exactly 45 grams of beans, I put the, the Chemex on the on the scale, and it's exactly you know, 550 grams of water. And it's a process. So it's the exact same way every single morning. And so it's it's, I'm doing it half asleep at this point. So it's like it's always the exact same like muscle memory like technique. So that's what I mean when I make it the same the same way. And so that way, it also means it's exact, it tastes exactly the same same way, which means is always good. And then for for lunch, I might, it's, uh, basically have the equivalent of like A meat wrap is essentially what it is. So I tried to get a certain amount of protein in my diet every single day and like dinners and be like, you know, people in town friends in town, or, you know, like with my cousins in town tonight, and so we're going out. And so I can't always control what I do for dinner. So I control how much like protein I get in breakfast and lunch. And I keep that basically the majority of the protein I need every day. And so I just eat the same thing every single day to ensure that no matter what happens in the evening, I'm always getting what I what I need by lunch. And so like breakfast is a shake. And then lunch is basically like a big turkey wrap that I make every morning. I love it. So um, that's my those are two quirks.

William Harris 44:26

No, those are good like, well, there's something to be said for the routine of like you were saying where it eliminates the need to think about some other things that as well. And I think oftentimes, even within art, this is very true to or you need to almost have like the rules down before you can before you can break them. So there's something to be said for how can you make sure that you've got the routine figured out and you've got the basics of things taken care of. And then you can use that to bend and break where you need to be the most impactful

Allen Burt 45:00

Yeah, exactly. And that's, you know, to go on the food thing, like, that's, that's what I do. So it's like, you know, if tonight if I want to go on a pizza and beer, it's like, it's totally fine. It's not going to impact anything, it's not going to impact the other kind of goals I have, you know, in terms of like, not getting in shape and things like that, because I've already kind of set the set the floor by having the same thing for breakfast and lunch. Yep.

William Harris 45:25

I'm getting close to the end of our time here. And so I want to make sure that I do the fun, silly game. I think I talked to you about this before. The one that I like to do oftentimes, it's just a random English word. Where you have to make up a definition it's very similar to the game balderdash. If you've ever played that, you're just gonna make up a definition as if it's gonna be believable for us. So the the word is erinaceus. And it is spelled e r i n, a C, E, O U s erinaceus. I'm maybe mispronouncing that, but I think that's how it's pronounced erinaceus. What's come

Allen Burt 46:03

up over the so erinaceus is so in gardening, and when you're building a lawn, right, there's a certain amount of air and nitrogen has to get under the ground. erinaceus is the principle that drives the science behind nitrogen growing grass.

William Harris 46:23

Makes a lot of sense. Obviously, we need to be very good with our erinaceus gardening. That's just really silly. Okay, on to the best I can do. It was actually really good. That's almost maybe too believable. If you want to look it up, you guys can look at what it is. I will say what is there an issue, it actually means Of or relating to hedgehogs? Not at all remotely? What I would have thought it means. Okay, final thoughts, though, if you were gonna give one piece of advice or idea to brands that are looking to get started in CRO, what's, what's the one thing that you're saying, Hey, do this don't do this? What's that advice?

Allen Burt 47:06

Yeah, if you're so if you're in all, if you're inclined, right, if this the idea is like, look, we know we're leaking money, or we just we just know, we're we're throwing a ton of money in acquisition. And we know there's money that's kind of leaking leaking through the holes, by not having a fully optimized site. I mean, frankly, the best thing you can do is dive into analytics. Right? And so you're, it's, it's, it's true in the sense that, you know, GA is a bit of a, no, it's, it's a bit of a black hole, right. And so you have to understand how to how to view it. And you've got to have the team that really understands it, that's the first place I would start is understanding a what are your top traffic sources? How are those customers landing on the site? Where are they moving through the site? How are they moving, and identifying where each of those primary causes of friction are or where you have depressed metrics, as compared to what they should be. So if you have somebody that seemed to understands that or if you understand that, that's, that's, that's gonna be the fastest way to provide an uptick in profit or revenue with the existing marketing budget that you have right now, right? If you literally just want to, like find money on the floor, you have to go in analytics, and you can find it like it is literally sitting there from what you're doing currently. So the problem is most brands that that we talked to, don't have that, that level of expertise. And so it's finding somebody who too does who can map that out for you and pointed out for you is, frankly, the the best first step. Otherwise, you're kind of just going to be throwing stuff at the wall and hope it sticks. And that's where most people start. And then they get frustrated because they don't see results. And they think that CRO is a scam or it doesn't work. So my advice is always you have to start with a deep, deep look at your analytics to understand where the opportunity exists, and then you target that opportunity. Specifically,

William Harris 48:52

I have to go into one more tangent before we close because you just reminded me of something. Have you ever actually found money on the floor? Like what's the most you've ever found? Like on the floor in a coat pocket or something like that? Or the strangest No, actually,

Allen Burt 49:05

I found 20 bucks in my ski jacket. This season. As for I went up to the Valley all the way up to the mountain. I was like 20 bucks. I don't know if that's a lot or not, but I thought it was a lot. That's I'm

William Harris 49:14

raising the phone. I had a buddy of mine in high school. He used to say that you could tell any story and if the story's not going very well, you just end it with it. And then I found $20 Right so you're telling a story and it's like nobody cares me like and then I found $20 every week to be like oh yeah, that's great. So finding money on the floor. If people want to reach out to you work with you follow you what's the best way for them to connect?

Allen Burt 49:39

Yeah, literally email me it's Allen allen@bluestout.com If you want to say direct line, I respond to everybody. You know the the best place to learn more about Blue Stout is our website bluestout.com. That's bluestout.com blue like the color stout like the beer.com is the best way to describe it and all Over social no Allen Burt on Twitter, Allen Burt on LinkedIn. We have a very fast growing right now newsletter that we send out every Wednesday, where we dissect a very specific optimization that we've made on an eight or nine figure brand anonymously. But we dissect the optimization and explain what we did and why it worked. And we've we've got a lot of a lot of amazing feedback from from brands that literally have just taken those dissections and applied those learnings to to their own business to see see uptick. So if you're looking to sort of test the waters, that's also a great place to start and you can just go to Blue stout.com/newsletter

William Harris 50:38

I love it. That's great. Alan, thank you so much for coming out sharing your knowledge with us.

Allen Burt 50:43

Know it's a ton of fun, William, thanks for having me.

William Harris 50:45

Everybody else. Thank you very much and hope you have a great rest of the day.

Outro 50:50

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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