Mastering Online Experiences for Today’s Digital Shoppers with Jeremy Aaronson

[00:00:08] Jake Fuller: All right. Welcome back to the Profitable Performance Marketing Podcast, the PPM for short, which you can see why, that’s a mouthful to say sometimes. This week’s topic, overall consumer experience on-site, conversion rates, and different tactics you can pull to make sure you’re capitalizing on the consumers that are checking out your brand.

[00:00:33] Our guest today is Jeremy Aaronson from UpSellit, someone that we’ve had the pleasure of working with for quite some time. Thanks for coming on, Jeremy.

[00:00:41] Jeremy Aaronson: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. I like being here. Love, love you guys too. And yeah let’s do this.

[00:00:47] JF: Yeah, let’s jump in. So for some of our listeners who may not know about you personally, why don’t you talk a little bit about your background and where you’re at and give a, an overview of UpSellit as well.

[00:00:57] JA: Yeah, so I have been lurking around this space for, I don’t know, geez, 22 years now, maybe even more than that. I’ve been doing this for a while, actually longer than 26 years. I just think about it. I think it started about 1999. The original search marketing and back in the day pop ups and that kind of advertising and yeah, it was a wild west back then.

[00:01:20] So it’s…

[00:01:20] JF: Miss the pop up days.

[00:01:23] JA: it’s been interesting uh, changes from what I’ve seen in the beginning till now. So it’s cool to see the evolution and where we’re at and what we’re talking about and we’ve grown. It’s pretty cool. So yeah, I started in that space and been at UpSellit now 19 years.

[00:01:36] We’re celebrating our 20th year this year, very excited about that. Been just nonstop hustling and innovating and love what we do and how we do it. And yeah, we get to meet great people like yourself.

[00:01:49] JF: Awesome. And 20 years, that’s, we just had JEBCommerce just had their 20th anniversary founded by Jamie Birch as many people know. So a lot’s changed in 20 years. A lot’s changed in really five years. If we’re being honest, 2020 was a quite a shift COVID threw a whole wind of change into not only brand marketing, but specifically digital marketing.

[00:02:13] And that’s definitely made its way through to the affiliate landscape, so…

[00:02:16] JA: yeah, I think with AI, I think it’s going to, It’s going to take an even bigger rocket boost in the next few years that we need to buckle in and be ready for.

[00:02:24] JF: A hundred percent agree. I’m still wrapping my mind and hands around what AI tools are out there, what’s useful now, what is still needs to be fleshed out, but it’s really cool to see some of the use cases with AI overall. I do agree, that’s a big topic for 2025.

[00:02:40] One thing that we can get into that I think, the topic of this week specifically is how brands are utilizing their presence online and curating a consumer’s experience, which I’m going to say in my opinion, and as someone who runs an agency and works with a lot of brands, I see a lot of brands missing the mark a lot of the times.

[00:02:57] So just to open it up softly, with your guys’s experience and your experience in the space, what are some big issues, that you would find now and again, where brands are just missing the mark and not capitalizing or understanding the importance of a consumer’s experience with them.

[00:03:13] JA: Yeah, I think you said a little bit in there, which is personalization, right? I think people are starting to catch on to it, but trying to figure out what exactly personalization means for them. And what I mean by that is, we got very aggressive with personalization for a while, where we’re dealing with some of those issues now in terms of cookies, how we’re using cookies, how we’re tagging people, data we’re keeping, etc.

[00:03:32] We got aggressive, right? One way and we had to pull back a little bit, right? And I think people are trying to figure out what that looks like. I think we’re starting to slowly see and AI is going to play a role in that, and some of that personalized content, right?

[00:03:45] Whether that is, before the user even gets to the site, we talk about with publishers and personalizing content with publishers to actually, once the user gets to the site, how do we personalize it without overstepping our boundary and how we’re doing it. And I think a lot of people are trying to figure that part out right now.

[00:04:00] And we’re going to start seeing more and more of that personalization come back in because at the end of the day, users, they want personalization, right? But it’s, it depended on us and how we go about it and doing it the right way.

[00:04:11] JF: And I don’t know if you’d agree with this statement: I feel like more than ever, consumer sentiment on authenticity for brands is a really important thing to keep an eye on. Whereas, years ago, I felt like you could advertise something. You might not hit your mark, but if you hit your audience, they’re still going to come in, they’re going to buy, they know it might be a bit clunky.

[00:04:31] Nowadays, I feel like authenticity rules. There’s so many competitors in the market, whether it’s through Amazon’s platform or other overseas, knockoffs, if you will, for different brands that they compete with directly and they have to connect with that consumer in a much more personal manner than they used to have to do so.

[00:04:49] JA: Yeah, I think authenticity starts with who you’re working with, right? And making sure that the authenticity starts there to then show itself on a website. And so that the consumer will see all that, whether they realize it or not.

[00:05:04] JF: Yeah, let’s talk about the actual website part. I think there’s a lot of conversations that we’ve had on this podcast that I’ve, we’ve had in the industry about a consumer’s journey, how they are specifically made aware of a certain brand, maybe through influencers or top of funnel placements or content creators, et cetera, how they go down that journey through consideration.

[00:05:23] And they finally go, great, I want to check this site out. And they go directly to a brand website. And if you’re lucky, or if you’re doing things correctly, I should say, luck is not always the case that consumer journey and that experience specifically of the consumer translates from when they found you, how they found you, what they found about you. And as they come to your site, they experience what they’re expecting to see.

[00:05:45] Talk to me about the importance of that onsite visit from a consumer and how that consumer is experiencing a website as they scroll around and what are some mistakes brands make when they build their site.

[00:05:57] We’ve all seen them. Sometimes they’re super clunky. They’ve got a ton of different modules or overlays. It’s hard to identify where to actually go find a certain product. And I won’t keep diving into it, but what are some mistakes brands make on that site when they drive consumers out?

[00:06:14] JA: I’m taking a step back for a second. I think we just touched about it. Touch on it briefly. I think it goes with collaboration in terms of again, brands and publishers talking with each other, but understanding what they’re doing with other publishers as well. Because that’s going to make that whole approach seamless for the user, right?

[00:06:31] So understanding who they’re working with, that they’re working with publishers that are doing AI-powered content. What does that content look like? How are they getting to the site? What does that user seeing so that they can make sure that the experience is the same all the way through? And that only comes with collaboration and talking with agencies like yourself. Who are you all working with? Who are we all talking about and how do we then make that experience on the site very similar to what they brought them there? If that makes sense. And then that starts with communication and talking and then taking that and putting together a plan.

[00:07:04] Like you said, not overdoing something or taking content that is coming from outside and make and using that same content on the site in your modals in your onsite placements in where you are putting your product placement on the site and what does that look like and making that experience the same all the way through.

[00:07:25] JF: That makes total sense. And I think when you’re onsite as well, one thing that we look at, even as an agency when we’re standing up an affiliate program for a brand, as we start looking at metrics, like what their site traffic looks like, what their bounce rate looks like, what their conversion rate looks like from either specific channels or just holistically, what is your overall site conversion rate can that be improved and there’s a lot of different methods that you can kind of use.

[00:07:48] Sometimes a site was built in 2002 and it really needs an updated version. And it’s something as simple as… nothing about that is simple, but it’s very obvious out of the gate. Sometimes it’s not obvious. It’s very nuanced is why they’re having an above average bounce rate and a below average conversion rate.

[00:08:06] So talk to me a little bit about how you guys view data from UpSellit. I know you guys specialize in onsite and kind of exit engagement activity to keep that consumer engaged, keep them on site. What kind of data points do you guys really look at and where do you go? Yep. There’s definitely some improvement needs here.

[00:08:24] JA: Yeah, so we try to get approval from our merchants to really take a deep dive in analytics. But we try to go beyond just the click, right? Beyond just the conversion. We try to look at what people are looking at on the website. What are they buying? What are they not buying? What pages are they on? What pages are they making it to? What pages are they not making it to? And why are they not making it to those pages?

[00:08:45] Are they products that just don’t normally sell and they don’t realize it. And then how do we take that data, ingest it, and either help them sell more of that product or create add ons to what is selling to help them sell more of it, right?

[00:08:58] So it’s not just about the click that how do we take, how do we help them sell more with the data that we have available? So we try to get really involved with our analytics and show them that data and then say, “Hey, this is how we’re going to use it” and put together a full plan for them.

[00:09:11] JF: And what are some of the quickest wins or techniques or technologies, you guys offer that you see effective in general when working with a partner or a merchant to improve that engagement on site?

[00:09:22] JA: if we’re talking quick win, frankly speaking, a lot of times it’s something simple and offering some sort of an incentive when maybe they don’t normally offer an incentive, but that may not be the direction we want to go. Just cause it’s the simplest doesn’t mean that it’s right for that brand and what they’re looking to do.

[00:09:37] So it really take an eye, get an idea of what the brand’s identity is, talk with them about their identity. Obviously we can see a lot of that on the site, but what are they hoping to accomplish as well and develop a strategy around that whether that is selling more product, increasing the AOV, increasing, again, products that aren’t selling how to get those out the door.

[00:09:57] I’m taking a look at clearance items. How do we add those clearance items to what was currently being purchased? Or help them with data points in terms of just new user acquisition or getting users to come back. So every one of our clients has a different idea of what they’re looking to do.

[00:10:11] And we help them dig deeper and find out what’s really happening.

[00:10:14] JF: And do you find that brands typically are all over the board when it comes to re engagement? If they’ve got people dropping off the site or maybe they go to partially fill out an order in cart or even enter their email address to get an initial coupon or discount for their first purchase, which is a tactic that a lot of brands use to capitalize on new acquisition.

[00:10:33] Do you find a lot of brands struggle or have completely disparate ways of trying to re engage those consumers?

[00:10:40] JA: Yeah, and a lot of that, honestly, sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen and to get an idea, I’m sure you guys come across that quite a bit. So it’s helping them all come together to understand what we’ve seen historically in our 20 years to work and not work. And again, show that with, the data with brands that are similar to theirs and how consumers are behaving on those sites to show them that this is the way forward, but sometimes it’s hard to open those eyeballs when everyone’s stuck in their ways.

[00:11:08] JF: Yeah. And I don’t disagree with that. Education always is on the forefront of what we do as an agency, and it has to be because you have to open the eyes of brands that have different perspectives, different experiences, and understand how they’re trying to grow within our channel and where it makes sense to do.

[00:11:24] JA: Talk about things are moving so fast, right? That what…

[00:11:27] JF: Faster than ever.

[00:11:28] JA: May not work anymore. And so you may have to, you have to pivot sometimes quickly in this industry. And if you’re not willing to do that you’re going to be playing a lot of catch up, right? And so staying ahead of the curve and understanding what’s out there and listening to people is a big one, right?

[00:11:40] Listening is, I tell my team all the time, listening is the biggest part of collaboration. And you have to be able to do that to understand what their concerns are or what their ideas are and help them down the right path.

[00:11:52] JF: Yeah, I’ve always said, this is not a one size fits all industry, and digital marketing, I think as a whole, it’s not a one size fits all. You can’t copycat one brand. You’ve got to be very unique to what your goals are and what you’re trying to specifically get out there and how you’re trying to capture a consumer.

[00:12:06] JA: And we see it all the time in terms of just brands that we work with that are exactly the same, right? You think everything would be the same, but they don’t have the same conversion rate. They don’t sell the same, necessarily the same products, even though they could be mirror images almost of each other because you different traffic sources, how you’re, what publishers are using, what publishers you’re not using what type of CPC and SEO you’re doing. They all drive different traffic because they have different ideas.

[00:12:28] But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding and gonna look at that.

[00:12:32] JF: Yeah. And we’ve said conversion rate a few times. Ironically, I would say over the last, and this is an agency perspective from JAB Commerce, over the last couple of years, I’ve paid a lot closer attention to conversion rate and onsite experience for consumers than I did in maybe 21, 22, that post COVID boom.

[00:12:49] When everybody said, we got to go digital, we got to get online and things are shut down. People are, in their homes, they’re not traveling.

[00:12:55] JA: converting.

[00:12:56] JF: Yeah, everything. Not only was it converting well, but at the end of the day, budgets seem to be far less scrutinized than they have been, I would say in the previous 18 months.

[00:13:05] And so are you guys experiencing, brands that are starting to become more sensitive again on not only overall budget, but the return on that and the profitability or even incrementality on whatever budget they do put into a channel.

[00:13:17] JA: Yeah, I think we started seeing a lot of that in beginning of Q4, when people are realizing they’re not necessarily hitting some of their goals that they were hoping for, right? And so I think they’re reevaluating some of that, need to put some stuff on pause so they can really take a look at what’s working.

[00:13:29] But as us in the affiliate industry, that’s, I think that’s our time to start getting louder to say, “Hey, we’ve been converting over here. We’ve been doing X, Y, Z, get some of that budget back over here because a lot of budget did go back to where it was because people fought for it.” But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s working.

[00:13:45] So we have to continue to prove what we’re doing.

[00:13:48] JF: Well, then our channel has evolved quite a bit where it’s, I think some people have a misconception. It’s still purely CPA based, but then they come in and understand that, “Oh, I can access large publications now, and I want editors to pick up our brand and write about us and post something about us on the New York Times.”

[00:14:05] Or, they want to be in blog sites, or kind of mid funnel partners, or content creators, and they assume it can be CPA based. And as they learn it’s not, it still requires budget. Again, I think the reason I go back to the importance of that consumer experience and a conversion rate that you have on site is if you’re not willing to put in budget to lower funnel partnerships, but you want to put out a $5000 spend a $50,000 spend, whatever it is on these larger content partnerships or influencers or whatever it might be, you better hope that traffic’s going to convert, if that’s going to be the end KPI that you’re looking at is great. I got a lot of traffic, but I only sold a thousand dollars worth of product over a $50,000 spend. And so sometimes we’ll look at that and bring that up, and while we look at certain partners in the technology sector is due to that very reason. We’re going to go spend $10,000. You’re only at 40 percent of the standard conversion rate for your vertical on site. Let’s explore as to why that is, and if you can’t fix it, can we bring a partner in to help you fix it?

[00:15:08] JA: Yeah. I think conversion rates always, obviously at the end of the day, right? You still have to look at conversion rate, and see how it’s affected by the changes that you’re making on site. Cause if it’s vastly decreasing your conversion rate or affecting it in a negative way, obviously, you got to fix that, right?

[00:15:24] So you may fix something somewhere and then lower conversion rates somewhere or remove something and maybe conversion rates go up as well. I think the other big one besides conversion rate that you’re going to see is people are going back to budgets and where things are at and not necessarily hitting goals or whatnot.

[00:15:39] People are going to try to find ways to lower their cost per acquisition. And how do they do that? And I think a big part of that is going to be additional partnerships or partnerships outside the scope of what they’ve been used to over the years. That’s one of the things we’ve been looking at too, is how do we get more brands to collaborate together?

[00:15:56] Brands that aren’t necessarily offering products that another brand may offer. Talk about a laptop company that’s selling mostly computers and laptops, but they don’t sell printers. How do we get those brands together to maybe sell more product on their website or post transactional to help lower cost per acquisition?

[00:16:14] So I think you’re gonna see a combination of both in the coming years, as people try to get some of those budgets online, how do they tell the story of higher conversion rates and lower cost per acquisition?

[00:16:25] JF: Yeah, brand to band partnerships are not new. They’ve been going on for a very long time, but I don’t disagree. It’s been a conversation that I’ve had more often in the past 12 months than the previous three years. In terms of what are some outside of the box ways that we can maybe collaborate with other brands and both of them benefit and it lowers CAC.

[00:16:43] And it, it doesn’t usually cost a whole lot for the brands to implement a partnership there. So I’m excited to see that.

[00:16:50] JA: So I think, sorry while brands has been around for a long time, it’s nothing new, I think traditional e com websites have been a little nervous to go that route, right? Because it hasn’t traditionally been in this part of the industry in terms of what’s worked and how do they… they want their data, right?

[00:17:06] They don’t want their data to go to somebody else necessarily. But sometimes you have to open that up a little bit and not be as worried about that kind of stuff to make changes if you will.

[00:17:16] JF: I’m excited to see how that evolves overall. I’m not sure what it looks like quite yet, but I want to see what that does for our industry. Cause there’s certain partners that specialize in utilizing those partnerships to help make sure it’s congruent and it works together. So do you guys specifically help support any of those kinds of partnerships?

[00:17:32] JA: Something we started last year that we’re trying to get more brands talking to each other. Cost promoting confirmation page. In card potentially clicks a button, stuff like that to help sell more items and again, lower that cost per acquisition. That’s really the goal for us to help our clients do some of that.

[00:17:46] Also doing some of our more traditional stuff, but yes, there are companies that are already been doing that for a while and it’s good to see that they’re starting to gather steam on that and people are starting to realize that’s a very legitimate source for them to help lower that cost per acquisition.

[00:18:03] JF: Yeah, which is a good consideration for those who haven’t considered that. And I think it’s an important one to throw into the mix. So back on the site side, you guys have worked with probably more brands that I could possibly count over that 20 years. If there was one or two specific call outs, you had that you’ve seen time and time again, if you look at a brand website, their e commerce site, you go in, you start just digging through and checking out that user experience, what is the one or two biggest things that pop out at you where you go that’s not good. Or, Oh man, I thought this was over. I’m not used to seeing this anymore, where there’s just an obviously clearing mistake that’s going to drive consumers away and have a negative impact on their experience and that user’s likelihood of even coming back to that site. Are there anything that come to mind?

[00:18:50] JA: Not taking the user directly to the cart or having the cart, I think still reminding them what they have in their cart, what’s there, is a good one. I think you’re starting to see a lot more people do that where they have the mini carts that kind of pop up, remind them that it’s there.

[00:19:04] That’s a great tool to just remind the consumer what they’ve been looking at already and whatnot. Because sometimes you keep shopping around and you just see the cart go up by two, three, but sometimes out of sight, out of mind, right? And even though they just did it, consumers still have a very short term memory sometimes.

[00:19:19] And what they’re looking at, or they’ve already been to three competitor websites and they can’t remember what they did where, and they’re still comparing prices and whatever. And I think that’s a big thing. That’s definitely a big one. I think going back to personalization as well, showing them what else they can buy, what matches with what they’re currently looking at is another big one that I’m so shocked a lot of people don’t do.

[00:19:38] Or to the extent where it’s, they do one that, that isn’t very… that isn’t very personalized where you look at the product and what does that have anything to do with what they were just looking at? I think that will drive the user away quickly as well, if you’re not doing that correctly.

[00:19:52] JF: And then I want to talk about incentives. You brought it up briefly earlier. I think there’s always been talk and it depends on the brand there’s brands out there that want to be luxury brands or are luxury brands, maybe they don’t discount often. But regardless, when you look at consumers and I won’t quote it now, cause there’s a report that I recently read, it was a consumer data report that even higher end luxury or higher earners in the US that shop for what you would consider more luxury, higher AOV, think $500 and up, still look for an incentive when making a large purchase. And so talk to me a little bit about the best practices to help stay engaged with consumers or bring them back to site and the types of incentives that you’ve seen work well.

[00:20:33] JA: Yeah, that’s good. And I think to start the year, we’re talking about a lot in this industry and that is tracking, and how we are tracking a lot of that stuff as well as making sure that we are, engaging users correctly and or publishers getting credit for what they need to get credit for.

[00:20:50] And part of that, I think goes back to our ability to see the users that are on our website, where they came from and that user journey. And then if I’m narrowing it down a little bit more, answer your question is how do we then take that data and say, okay, this person’s new, never been to the website and using the right tools to engage them with a discount to get them as a consumer, right?

[00:21:15] We don’t have them as a consumer. It’s okay to offer that incentive sometimes to be able to get them in there. And that’s one of the things that we try to strive for with our clients is separating out returning users and new users and how do we engage them properly to give an incentive to those new users to make sure that they’re a life-long customer that they don’t go to someone else’s website who is offering incentive, maybe that same product or a similar product. So that’s a big one is being able to do that. Yeah.

[00:21:40] JF: And so what I took away from that is not only do you guys have this ability and personally I’ve seen it, so I won’t act like I’m surprised… this is just good advice for brands in terms of if they’re going to use an incentive based engagement onsite or even, through exit or follow up retargeting, you guys focus on the data that tells you, is this a new acquisition versus returning customer, which has different value for most brands. But beyond that, it sounds very customizable to how that brand wants to engage that consumer with an incentive and what makes the certain criteria to offer that incentive.

[00:22:15] JA: Yeah, exactly. And I think if it’s not us and it’s some other tech partner or even in house, that should be one of the first questions to ask is how are you able to differentiate the users coming to our website? And how are you able to engage them differently? Again, if it’s in house, making sure that the banner that you have on the top that has an incentive is only going to people that you’ve never engaged with before.

[00:22:36] And if it’s a third party vendor like ourselves is how do they do it? And what does that look like? Because again, every user that comes to the website should be engaged as a unique visitor and how you do it is important.

[00:22:49] JF: We’re talking a lot about onsite engagement, exit engagement, and incentives that we could offer consumers to help that experience and that conversion rate for brands. Talk to me about what you’ve seen successful for brands, or even what you guys offered from your tool belt to look at consumers that have actually dropped off site. Maybe they came in, maybe they put some data in, maybe they even put an email in, but they didn’t finish their cart. They dropped off and we want to re engage or retarget that consumer.

[00:23:16] What are some best practices in that case to make sure they do come back? Cause I think everybody knows it’s a very competitive marketplace, and once that consumer leaves the site, as you mentioned earlier, short attention spans, they might pop onto a competitor site the next day and purchase there.

[00:23:31] JA: I think, going back to what you said, some of the things people started doing, just take a look at what it is you’re doing internally in terms of, do you have the ability to offer some sort of free shipping? Is there a discount? If you’re not able to do discounts or get playful with your words, if you will, and why they need to come back, it comes back to personalization, right?

[00:23:48] I think personalization will help drive some of those sales as well, even if you’re not able to offer free shipping. Free shipping should be one I think a lot of people are offering these days because it’s a competitive landscape and almost everyone’s got free shipping of some kind these days, right?

[00:24:01] And so …

[00:24:01] JF: True story. My wife will not purchase a product if she has to pay for shipping almost ever.

[00:24:08] JA: Effect, right?

[00:24:08] JF: It’s pretty hilarious. Yeah.

[00:24:10] JA: You’re getting free shipping, and you gotta compete with it, unfortunately, sometimes, right? I hear a lot of those stories, people just not, because I get it somewhere, I’m gonna put my foot down, and yeah, not purchase it until I do. But I think if you’re talking emails and what we’re doing in emails, personalization goes a long way as well.

[00:24:26] What products were they looking at? What content was in their cart? If there is some sort of a loyalty program on the website, pulling in that data, the loyalty program, how close are they to getting a free shipping? If it’s based on points, how close are they getting to something in those loyalty points and putting that in the email of saying, Hey, come back.

[00:24:45] If it’s new user, again, loyalty program. If you sign up for this loyalty program, two more purchases or adding X, Y, Z to your cart, you’ll get free shipping on us. Now you’re increasing the AOV, you’re personalizing the content to what they were looking at on site and you’re pushing them to that sale with… as opposed to just sending a blanketed email that could have been for anyone.

[00:25:07] JF: So for 2025 for the affiliate channel in general, for consumers online shopping for brands, and for these merchants that are looking over their e commerce sites and looking over their data, trying to figure out how do we move forward in 2025, my takeaway from this conversation is really personalization, customization, and data attributed decisions that help incentivize those new acquisition costs going down and those new consumers coming in.

[00:25:33] What, do you feel like that’s the landscape that we’re going into this year?

[00:25:37] JA: 100 percent and obviously coupon strategy and how are you using that.

[00:25:41] JF: Which that’s a whole nother topic. We could talk coupon strategy for another hour.

[00:25:44] JA: But a lot of that is goes hand in hand, right. Because your personalization is going to be based on the coupon strategy. Where if it’s a returning user, you don’t necessarily maybe have to offer them a coupon.

[00:25:55] Unless it’s based on the loyalty and how much they’ve gotten. You’ve acquired that user but you also don’t want to alienate them either. And so there’s a fine line with all of that and how you go about it. But if you’re personalizing correctly, all of that is manageable.

[00:26:09] JF: And that brings up, I thought I was done with questions, but another question: our space always evolves and it evolves, I feel like you’re right, it’s moving quicker now than it ever has. And so how important is it for brands to keep that open mind of let’s test, let’s A/B test. Do you guys suggest that you guys offer A/B testing for brands to really dive into what’s working and what’s not?

[00:26:30] Cause that might change every quarter.

[00:26:32] JA: Incrementality, Incrementality, right? That’s a big one for us and improving that incrementality, right? And that comes with A/B testing emails going out, A/B testing placement of stuff, A/B testing strategies, A/B testing colors and buttons, A/B testing everything, right? And incrementality can change very easily because of that, right?

[00:26:51] And so doing holdout groups for your tests is always a big one, whether using someone like us or other third party vendors to do that or internal incrementality testing. It’s a big one. Make sure the changes that you’re making and what you’re putting on the site is having a positive impact.

[00:27:05] And, if you do a holdout group and end of the day, the group that has the changes better show more sales than the ones that, are using the older strategies. So that’s, that’s a big one.

[00:27:16] JF: Yep. So always be open to testing. And that’s something I think as an agency we look for is brands that are open minded to trying new things and understanding that this is evolving this might not have been a strategy we used 12 months ago, but now we’re going to test the strategy and see how it plays a role in your program, in your consumer acquisition, and overall just that experience of growing and evolving.

[00:27:38] JA: 100%.

[00:27:39] JF: Fantastic. I do appreciate you coming on the show. I love the conversation around kind of site experience. I think, for me, one thing that a lot of brands get so heavy in data and how they’re going to market, and what’s the hottest topic or strategy or tip in any space that they completely remove or forget to look through the lens of the consumer.

[00:28:00] And that’s what this topic was about was the lens of the consumer. How to make sure you’re personalizing your efforts and your marketing material and your engagement material towards that consumer. And ultimately that’s what will make you win as a brand.

[00:28:13] JA: Yeah, 100%. I think it’s important to keep an eye on the future and what is coming out and making sure you’re keeping your finger on that pulse. But also, don’t forget about what you’re currently doing, right? Don’t hopscotch around because then you’re just… you’re not going to help anyone. So make sure you’re working on current strategies and what’s working, but yeah, keep your finger on the pulse.

[00:28:31] JF: Yeah, a hundred percent. So if anybody is not using UpSellit or they want to learn more about UpSellit or to reach out, what are the quickest or easiest ways to do so?

[00:28:40] JA: We’ll be at Affiliate Summit in a couple weeks. So if you’re there, I’d love to see you. But yeah, just get in touch with us. We’ve got a great team and they’ll take a look at the site, and I think going back to what I said, we do a lot of free analytic reports for our merchants.

[00:28:51] So if it’s something of interest, you’re not sure what’s going on your website, reach out, we’d love to do a free analytic report for you and show you what’s working, what’s not working on your website.

[00:28:59] JF: Awesome. Thanks again, Jeremy, for jumping on and sharing some insight.

[00:29:02] JA: Thanks, Jake. Appreciate it.

[00:29:03] JF: Yeah. See you soon.

[00:29:04] JA: See you soon.