Nathan Frater
Field notes on e-commerce, email and growth
Offers & pricing
Run Black Friday as two sales, not one
Split Black Friday into two phases. First, an early-access sale for your email and SMS list only, in early November, with its own offer. Then the public sale, with ads, automatic discounts and the whole site behind it. You get two things to talk about, cheaper attention, and the people most likely to buy get rewarded first.
Website & CRO
How do you relaunch a Shopify website without losing sales?
Don't do it all in one day. Move to the new theme with your current design first, then release the new site a page at a time, starting with the product page and testing each release against the old version. Change one big thing at a time, and launch on the content you already have.
Paid ads
How do you stop fake leads from Meta lead ads?
Let a brand-new ad account have its junk leads for a while, so Meta can learn what a lead looks like. Once it has some data, add friction: ask for contact details at the end, make people verify their phone number, and send the quality of each lead back to Meta. You'll get fewer leads, and far more of them will be real people.
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Website & CRO ›
How do you improve your product page conversion rate?
Answer every question a shopper could have before they think to ask it. Add reviews first, then a guarantee, then social proof, FAQs and the technical detail, and keep the page fast. Then look hard at the words, because most product descriptions list materials when they should be selling the feel and the story.
Is A/B testing worth it for a small online store?
What pages does an e-commerce website actually need?
Email & retention ›
Is there a best time to send marketing emails?
Not one that works for your whole list. Send time is about your individual subscribers, and the old advice to send on Tuesday or Thursday at 11am or 2pm has made those some of the most crowded slots in the inbox. Test a range of hours and send each person when they're most likely to open. The exception is a recurring email that goes out at the same time every week, because that trains people to look for it.
How do you email an old list without wrecking your deliverability?
Your email list is the only marketing asset you truly own
Growth strategy ›
How do you increase e-commerce revenue without spending more on ads?
Grow your revenue per session. Get more of your existing visitors to buy, and get them to spend more when they do. Lifts of 10 to 15% on cheaper clicks, site conversion, basket size and email multiply together, which is easier than one big breakthrough and leaves you more profit than buying extra traffic.
Why are my e-commerce sales declining?
How would you grow your business if you couldn't run ads?
I run Backbone, the performance creative agency I founded in 2016, from Wānaka, and write up what's working for the stores we look after.
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