E87: Tim Mawson

Richard Hill:
Hi there, I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One, welcome to our 87th episode. In this episode, I speak with Tim Mawson, Head of Partnerships at Salesfire. Tim's focus is working with store owners to improve site conversions through a suite of optimizations, intelligent personalization and onsite search solutions. With over 1500 clients benefiting from the solutions, Tim shares some of the biggest takeaways from the frontline. In this episode, we talk all things personalization and some of the biggest challenges and how to overcome them, how retailers can drive a true omnichannel experience online and in store, specifics of clients that have seen growth through personalization and of course, Tim's view on the future of personalization in the eCommerce world. If you enjoy this episode, please make sure you subscribe so you're always the first to know when new episode is released.

Richard Hill:
Now, let's head over to this fantastic episode. This episode is brought to you by eComOne, eCommerce Marketing Agency. eComOne works purely with eCommerce stores scaling their Google shopping, SEO, Google search and Facebook Ads through a proven performance-driven approach. Go to ecomone.com/resources for a host of amazing resources to grow your paid and organic channels. How are you doing, Tim?

Tim Mawson:
I'm doing very well, Richard, thank you very much for having me on this Wednesday morning. Really appreciate the time taken obviously to come on and looking forward to it.

Richard Hill:
I am looking forward to it too. Obviously, I heard so much about the brands and I know a lot of our clients use your services and whatnot so I'm really looking forward to finding out more. And I think it'd be good to kick off, tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into the eCommerce space and then a little bit about Salesfire and what they do.

Tim Mawson:
Yeah, let's go for it then. So, it's actually quite weird, so I've been with the company about four years now but the chap who was our head of marketing at the time, basically I was working in sales for another company and I rang up trying to sell them my wares at that company. And essentially, the chap who was head of marketing as I said, turned around and said basically, "We should hire him," to the CEO. So, I ended up in eCommerce on the back of working in recruitment via a call trying to sell someone that, and as I say, since then we've not really looked back. We've been going around about five years based off, as you can probably tell, my delicious accent in the Northeast of England, Middlesbrough, to be precise. In that time, it's kind of interesting as well. We've evolved from being a singular product system into a system where we've got six products within it. So it's become a lot more comprehensive for eCom retailers and something that, as I said, we'd like to see develop more and more through the years, I suppose.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. So four years in the space then, or four years in eCommerce, gone from recruitment to eCommerce sales. I think it's surprising actually, how many people we speak to that are in recruitment. I think they are a certain breed, aren't they, the salespeople in recruitment. They are pretty, pretty good, but a lot of them, or there's other words I've used to or I've heard to describe recruitment some sales people, but maybe not for the podcast today.

Tim Mawson:
Keep it PG-13, please. But I think gives you that sort of level grounding almost. You understand that recruitment is a really hard game, but when you come to eCommerce, you find that a lot of people want your stuff or your product. They want to re-platform. They want SEL PPC to work better for them. And then it becomes that sort of smoother transition almost where you can sit down and go, "Cool. That's how we do that. Easy. Thank you very much. I'll stay in this space."

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So let's get into it then. So I think what would be the best word to describe personalized experience, personalizing the experience of a user on a website? How important is that now in this day and age? Our listeners, eCommerce store owners of a certain size, how important is it that they are using some form of personalization on their store? And maybe give us some examples of some of the things they should be doing.

Tim Mawson:
Yeah. 100%. I think there's a lot of stuff that personally there's stuff that we don't do within the company that I think is still obviously invaluable for retailers to look at. But the best way I can put this is if you go into, for example, I was in Holland & Barrett yesterday and you walk in there and the second you go in, somebody's asking you, "Do you know what you're looking for, number one? Do you know what would benefit your specific ailment if you have one or what sort of area do you want to be in?" And that level of customer service is something that eCommerce is getting really strong at the present. And you're looking at it. And there's tools like chat bots, there's tools like product recommendations, dynamic content, and even things like search bars where you can literally put in, I have, I don't know, an upset tummy or something like that. And it'll go, "Right. We recommend X, Y, Z for that." That's how it works.

Tim Mawson:
And I'd think that retail, like customers as well, it's not so much for the younger generation, I'd say. I'd say for people, when the specific example I always give is my father. So if he goes on a website, he nine times out of 10 doesn't know doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes and yada, yada, yada, but he would go on and go, "This is a problem I have, how do I fix this?", if he's being cute or something and having that sort of real world example that someone can turn around and guide you through the process and go, "This is where you go. This is what you want. And these are other bits that will help you achieve that" to upsell the customer along the way I personally think is invaluable. And I think when you look at, as you mentioned, certain size retailers have obviously been doing it for a while.

Tim Mawson:
Other retailers maybe starting out of, I don't know, like in the sort of million pound region, five mil turnover are probably starting to explore this. It's key for them to sort of get a grasp of it and understand how customers are behaving and what they'd like.

Richard Hill:
So let's say, you've got a million pound, million pound-ish turnover company listening now, where would they start? What's some of the functionality, some of the experiences they should be looking to implement to give an initial, personalized experience?

Tim Mawson:
I think the best way of looking at this first and foremost is when you land on a website automatically and again, if you don't know what you're looking for, if you do know what you're looking for, the first part that customers will tend to look at is the search bar. Now, if your search bar is, I don't know, a native platform one, they tend to not be the best of breed and it tends to not deliver either the results in the time you'd like, or maybe it's not the aesthetic you're going for with the site you've paid thousands of pounds for.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
That's the first part. And then being able to customize results in there and make sure that customers are seeing exactly what they want is the second part and making sure that you can get that information across is pivotal 100%.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
The next step as well is when that customer lands on a specific product page and you're looking at it there and you are, I don't know, the best way I can think of describing it, again, is that in-store experience where a customer, you go, "Right. Okay. You've got this set of weights on the gym site. Now, have you looked at resistance buttons? Have you thought about this?"

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
What are you going to do to kit out like your whole workout gym as we saw in lockdown?

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
That's the big part for me is making sure that you're actually providing not just a website people can buy off, but an actual service at the same time.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, I think, yeah. That's brilliant. I think though, I think the guys will be listening, thinking, "Well, that sounds quite obvious, I think. Okay, we're going here. We know that a tool or a system would then know that we've bought X, Y, Z, recommend other things," but it's not always that straightforward, is it? There are challenges trying to implement things like that. What are some of the challenges our listeners? They may be thinking, "Oh, we can't do that because of the limitation with technology, or we can't do that because we haven't got a technical person." Obviously things have moved on quite considerably, but what are some of the biggest challenges? And what are the sort of the ways around them or a different way of thinking to look at that particular challenge to sort of push through it?

Tim Mawson:
Completely, as you said, it's something, as you say, in that specific example, we're talking about now where you're at that million pound level, you could well be a husband and wife business still at this point with like a couple of people in warehouse, and again, dev is not going to be your priority because you pay dev, let's be honest, dev wages are quite high in employing them yourself or [inaudible 00:08:01] can be quite tricky. So yeah, I'd say first and foremost, the sort of where you look at, as you say, developing this out and making sure you can read sort of attain what you want is, I know this sounds really straightforward again, but it all comes down to the analytics side of things. And if you are analytics isn't wired up correctly, or you're not seeing the data that you need to provide those decisions, then that's where a problem really kicks in. And you can't make a decision without having data to go, "Right. Okay. This is this."

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
As you say, you're looking at issues in regards to integration being the big one, [inaudible 00:08:36] integration where you have to send off and it'll be two weeks because Bob the freelancer's in his garage [crosstalk 00:08:43] time to do it.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
That's if they're on a bespoke platform, but if you're on a big commerce or something like that, you have so many options now within the space where you can start off on a free tier product that is a one click integration to go, right. We can actually monitor where people are going, be it like heat map side of thing as well. That then feeds into that personalization element, I suppose, is where I'm going with this. So not necessarily just diving straight in, but making the data accessible and readable, so you can sit there and go, "Right. There you go. This is our problem. Let's fix it there."

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I love it. So we've got to get the data right in the first place. And I think whether that's Google analytics or any other platform, but I think quite often you go into a GA account, for example, and the code was where put on there the day they started, but then nothing's enabled, there's no exclusions. There's no eCommerce specific tracking set up and actually conversion tracking isn't working. That's, surprisingly, I wouldn't say rare because it isn't rare at all actually. We've had instances of people spending million pounds a month with no tracking that we are aware of that have come to us, and we are aware of people that are spending high street brands that have spent way more than that and tracking doesn't work. And it's just like, wow. And obviously that's another level, slight sort of tangent. But ultimately if your tracking's not working, you can't layer in then another technology potentially, or if it's relying on that you can't to then to give you actions to give you some next steps.

Richard Hill:
So yeah. Getting that right is invaluable. So, I think a lot of our listeners also are retailers as well as eCom store owners. They're quite a lot of our, I did a tour last week to a brand that's got 260 or 230, sorry, stores, but they also have eCommerce. So what would you say about trying to deliver personalization and user experience to those that have got stores, but they've also got this eCommerce? Now, trying to really tighten this omnichannel bridge between the two, there's something I'm quite really interested at the moment. We have a lot of sort of high level conversations with big brands that have got a lot of stores, not one or two or three stores. And obviously we've got a lot of listeners that have got a lot of stores, but they've obviously got this eCommerce piece. What would you say about trying to have that seamless personalization across store and eCom?

Tim Mawson:
Yeah. So I think this is something that, as you mentioned, this is what I would classes like the upper echelon of personalization, where you look at it and obviously, as we mentioned, you can do bits on your star. When you look at omnichannel as well, like the standard example that comes to our mind is how people would deal with it on Amazon and eBay, if you through those and then you've got your main channel. Well hopefully your main channel is your website. What you are talking about there is to is something where one of the examples that I really like for this is when you look at things like Klarna and how that changes from being not just on a marketplace as well, such as Etsy or whatnot on your website, and you can also do it in store.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
That whole experience feeds in from, it feeds that whole customer ideology where you want everything to be seamless. You want it to be as quick as possible.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
You want to have flexibility. Now, if you look at that as a payment option, again, there'll be some people who use Klarna, some people who don't and some people who use other buy now pay later methods, but just seeing the way that you can scan a QR code and start to access your client account and purchase something. Genuinely, I think again, for a younger generation of shopper is not a problem, but I think if you were like, for example, going into a, I don't know like a shoe shop where your average audience is 40 plus, I think that might be different. And I think that level of personalization and seeing what customers want depends on your target market first and foremost. If you can outline who's your most common customer? What's type of demographic they are? Is it male or female as well, or any other gender for that matter? What else is out there to basically get your customer feeling as involved?

Tim Mawson:
I think another great example I came across was so during the pandemic was basically, I think it was ShipStation were doing it whereby you could order from Matalan online and then they would have the item in your local store and then you could go pick it up from the store on the door. And that sort of thing is a real sort of clever use of how to do utilize something that would, would be derelict otherwise, I suppose, during a pandemic.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
So I think there's different facets for different companies, but the omnichannel experience is something whereby if you can sort of if, again you can tell I'm a big data nerd and this is the thing where I sit there, look, and I'm like, "Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Pair that together and see what happens."

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
What utilizing that level of data on your customers, using loyalty things and such that you can transfer from online to in-store, building that picture of where your customer is and what they do and how it works. And that's where you can fuel the rest of your decisions.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Love it. I think QR codes, this is an interesting one because they almost sort of disappeared, I think. A few years ago they came out and then that disappeared and they're having a massive resurgence, I think. And because, well, especially going into restaurants recently and bars, you scan your QR code, you get your menu up. And obviously you're ordering. At first I was like, "Oh man, I just want to speak to somebody order my drink or my whatever it is." Then I went to a restaurant a few weeks. This was like at the start, when we opened back up, what was it? Three months ago? Yeah. And scan the QR code, ordered my drink. And I set a timer on my phone. I'll see how long this takes. And it was like 57 seconds. And I had a drink at my table. I was like, "Oh my God, this is insane." So I finished my pint of lager with a friend of mine, then I thought, "Right, let's do another one." And we said to the waitress, "Blimey, that was quick."

Richard Hill:
And she was like, "Oh, to be honest," she says, "that was slow. Normally we're a bit quicker than that." I was like, "Right." So we ordered another drink and lo and behold, it was like 50 seconds. I was flipping out. So then we ordered another drink and each time it was, it became a bit of a thing with the waitress sort of thing, where it was like 45 seconds from pressing pay to having a fresh pint of IPA on the table, which was like, wow. So, I've got a sort of a fresh love for QR codes not just because I like to drink the odd pint of beer, but just that speed. But also I think you walk into a retailer, you scan that QR code and you're looking then at the product page of that jacket, that coat, that hat, whatever it may be, whatever it may be. We are seeing more of that. And I think that's something that I genuinely believe is, we are going to see a lot, lot more of that. So people are getting that full omnichannel experience.

Richard Hill:
They're going into the webpage in effect or a version of the webpage for in-store, where there's a lot more details. There's a lot more details about the brand. I think there's a real angle for people that are this sort of homegrown local, if you walk into a store, you scan the the bag of potatoes and it brings up a picture of the farmers in the field and and the history behind the farm and that local produce. And when you think about maybe some of the smaller retailers as well, when they're selling products more around like that locality, they're supporting that town, that city with 20 different, smaller, independents selling it in a farm shop, for example, or you're aware of where your products come from. I think that's really powerful. So I think, yeah, that's great. That's great. I think we should go talk about data. You've touched on data.

Tim Mawson:
Yeah.

Richard Hill:
And I think obviously we are massive data fans here in our agency, obviously eComOne agency, so data and personalization, I think, who important is that and give us some insight into what you've been doing with data.

Tim Mawson:
Yeah. So essentially where my love affair started with this, and it's only really recent, I would say it was literally at the turn of the pandemic and what we as a company decided to do was basically create a tool whereby we would anonymize our customers' data, so our clients' data, our retailers' data and put it into something that we call trend desk essentially. And what that tool can do is then break down per sector the average conversion rate, that average spend, the average traffic coming to a website, what percentage it's up or down depending on the day. It's almost like a NASDAQ for eCommerce, I describe it as.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And that tool in itself is something where, when you're looking at certain transitions, obviously around this time of year, it's kind of a bit different because traffic's inflated due to, I don't dare say it because I'll probably break out in a sweat, but so a level of being able to analyse your spend, like what customers are spending on your site, if you're in a high, like, I don't know, like a high ticket fashion, for example, or furniture.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And you can analyse that and go, "Right. Okay. Average spend's down. Why is that? How could we, again, funnel that back into our process? Is it something where our free delivery barrier is enabling people to get away with spending less for getting free delivery? Is it something whereby if we did a tiered sort of discount structure, if you spend 500 quid, you'll get 5% off versus if you spend below that you'll get nothing?" It's that sort of tool where you can turn around and go, "Right. Okay. So this is how, again, we find more insight, more insight in the overall market.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And more insight into what other retailers not are doing specifically, but how they are performing if you catch my drift. So that's the idea with that. And again, the sort of way I've looked at this as well is when you take a look over a specific, so I'm quite big into my affiliate marketing side of things. I quite enjoy just looking around it and seeing what's going on.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
In that space, there's a lot of really cool things where you can look at it and see how your website is performing in your specific sector again. So very similar.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And also what tech providers are performing well in certain sectors, so that as a business, you can turn around and make that evaluation go, "On toys and games or whatever, this company ranks number one for what they do. I wonder why that is? Can we spark up a conversation, see what's going on?"

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And that again, just makes retailers perform with that level of insight that they may not have had before, they may not have had time to look at.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And that's [crosstalk 00:19:05].

Richard Hill:
I love that. It's a bit like the, obviously the agency, when you're looking at SEO, there's people that are obviously doing better than you or whoever you are listening and ultimately there's a lot of data there. There's a reason why those people are ranked and there's a reason why they've been spending a million pound a month on ads, and there's a reason why they're doing X, Y, Z. So what you are saying is obviously look at that combination of transactional data, whether that's the got site search, they've got this, they've got discounts, they've got a loyalty program. They've got this, this, this, this. So you are advocating that data from your clients in each industry and sub-industries, verticals. And then you could go in as somebody in the fashion industry and go, "Actually our average basket is a lot lower than them and our retention and our rebuy's lower than them. Oh, we don't have a loyalty scheme or we don't do discount based on volume.

Richard Hill:
Or we haven't got this, this, this, this, this," and then you end up with, I think that's what you're saying, sort of a hit list of things that then, "Actually, we are behind these guys. We don't know who they are exactly because obviously that's confidential and whatnot, but we know that we're maybe here in the industry where we could be, if we implement this, this, this," and that's where your software comes in and you can sort of layer in various tests, whether that's what would be their sort of, what would be the number one thing would you think that most retailers are not doing? If you were to go right to a retailer now or eCom store now, what's the one thing that every time you speak to a retailer, it's like, "Ugh." So for us it might be, we go, have a look, it's like, "You haven't got tracking on, or you're not running this type of ad. Ugh, you're not doing remarketing. Flipping heck"? What's the one thing normally that is a bit of, "Ugh," you know straight away you're going to add 2, 3, 4, 5%? What would it be?

Tim Mawson:
The easiest one straight away for me is so, within our system, we have a specific trigger for an overlay and something where if you've ever shopped on Curry's or ao.com, you'll see them do it and I think it's a really smart way to doing things. So naturally the example I give from Curry's is say, I'm on looking at a MacBook Pro or something like that. And you know as well that they are not the only people on the web that stock it. Apple themselves do it. Everybody else. What I would then do as a customer is go on said product and try and highlight the product title to basically go, "Right. I'm going to bang this in Google and see where else-"

Richard Hill:
Copy and paste it. Re-Google it, find a better price, maybe.

Tim Mawson:
Exactly. Or if it's not based on price, is it based on your trust pilot score? Is it based on your, I don't know, returns policy or do you have better payment options? Whatever it may be.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
One of the big things we see, especially in, as I said, brand name clothing, electronics, that sort of job is that customers do that more frequently than you could ever imagine. It's literally every, like, not every time, because that's ridiculous, but I'd probably say about six times out of 10 people are performing that action.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And if you can just literally flash up a message when somebody highlights a product title and go, "Hang about. Do you want to speak to one of our experts in store?", again, creating that omnichannel experience.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
So they speak to Brian behind the desk, who's been selling it for 20 years or something and go, "Right. This is why you should buy it from us because we'll give you X, Y, Z, and you'll get a," I don't know, "a carry case for it or something like that as well if you buy from us," rather than going to a giant like Curry's or something.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And again, that's one of the big things we look at and I think that's probably where, leading on from that as well, I don't know if you use this in like your day to day as well, Richard, for like heat maps and that sort of job.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, we do. Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
Yeah. I think personally I used to think it was sort of a vanity tool, so you could just see if people were engaging with your website correctly and clicking on certain categories and which ones were getting ignored, but more and more, you look at this side of things and you go, "Hang about. That customer's bounced off there, they've scrolled down the payment options and they've gone, 'Right. You don't have want I want,' or they've performed this action. How do we then develop something into this system to make it more inclusive of everyone?"

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I think that's brilliant. I love the fact. I'm sitting here thinking, yeah, I copy, copy, drop, paste. Price is obviously a big factor, but it's not the only factor. And when you need that little nudge, maybe, as a customer, that little nudge just to go, "Oh, five is not the end of the world if it's a..." Obviously depending if it's a 10 pound product, it is, but if it's a 200 pound product and everyone's between 190 and 210, price, maybe, is not all that for most people, I would say.

Richard Hill:
But obviously if you are getting that what seems personalized touch, "Hey, this is John," little picture of John in the corner, like you say, going, "Oh, dah, dah, dah, well, we're actually giving away a free bag or whatever it may be or free," or just generally be able to have a chat and just sort of confirm that "Yeah, we've got them in stock. We can have this to you tomorrow," I think that's brilliant, that little touch point. So a little overlay, I think, yeah, that, that you don't see, , not that often. So there's obviously a lot of customers out there for you still.

Tim Mawson:
The interesting part is, again, you'll probably come across this as well, where you speak to a retailer and say they're a small, like what I would describe as like a small, fast fashion concrete. And the start of the conversation always seems to go something like, "Right. We want to be like Boohoo." And it's like, "Right, what you need to do first and foremost is you don't have the capital that they have, so ignore that end goal for now and turn around and go, 'Right? How can we sort of set a precedent of how we want to move forward?" And that's the difficulty is like calming somebody down to a point and going, right, slow down, take a look, evaluate, and then come back and go, "This is where this is where your customers are going. This is what they're doing. This is your problem."

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Love it. Love it. So on that similar vein, then, maybe give us an example of a store, if you can mention the name, fine, if not, it's okay not to, but sort of talk us through the project. So you've taken on a client and you've then layered in the overlay maybe and various tools and different triggers and just run us through. If an eCom stores sitting here, maybe they've, I don't know, they're doing five, 10 million quid and they're maybe not doing too much on personalization, talk to those guys and think, right, this is an example of what we've done and how that's worked in the real world.

Tim Mawson:
Yeah. So I think, again, it's quite an interesting one because it was again, bringing it back to the lockdown. I hate doing this, but obviously we know that cycling went mad as an industry and people were going [alpha 00:25:37] of it because they wanted to get out. And these people are maniacs, by the way, who do like 40 kilo on the weekend. I don't know where you getting the time, but I can't mention the specific client name, but for this example of a client, the first thing we did, they got in touch with us last year, basically mentioned that their site navigation needed a bit of a tweak. The first way we looked at doing this was via site search. And what we'd look to do was implement the site search. Now what we have in behind that is, within our dashboard, you can see the sort of mechanisms on how much customer spend is improved per basket, how much conversion rates improved and what search terms are basically trending, if you will.

Tim Mawson:
So one of the really key parts is they've basically taken the data that's in our dashboard now and they can see in month on month, what sort of search terms are trending, what people are looking for. Is it winter cycling jackets now or something like that? I don't know, but back in summer, was it like lightweight jackets? So you merchandise your search effectively to get customers to where they probably want to be in the first place. If I'm typing in that, then I'm going to show like this sort of range first because it's the most common one or it's a big brand, something like that.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
And over the course of that, we noticed that just five people engaging directly with the search, I've got the figure here. It was something like the overall conversion rate per search term was something like 27% because they were merchandising it specifically to them, every search of that ability, job done, perfect. And what we like to operate as a company is not throwing every service at someone straight away because then you can't measure increments on it.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Mawson:
The next popeye was basically we layered in the overlays recently and one of the stats we've had by this is, and I was quite amazed by this to be fair, so it was over the course of the last month for orders that weren't influenced by Salesfire, their order value was 129 pounds, which isn't too shabby, I suppose. I don't know. Obviously if you're buying a high end bike, that's probably not too good. But the orders fluids by Salesfire were at 332 pounds, so saw a jump where, again, just providing people that customer service and going, "There we are."

Richard Hill:
That's huge, isn't it? It's like 200 and whatever, 250%. And obviously majority of those won't be buying a bike. They'll be buying bits to go with it, whether that's the. I was one. I'm guilty. I bought a bike during lockdown. Obviously its still wrapped up in the garage. Not been [inaudible 00:28:06] but no, it has, but there hasn't been too many miles, but not a race bike, but a road, sorry, a mountain bike. But that's brilliant. That's really. Yeah. Yeah. So we're looking at that navigation. We're looking at site search, we're layering in overlays. I think the key there is, as you said, like any sort of AB/UX changes, it's sort of one thing at a time, one thing at a time, then get data, make decisions finalized. Yes, now it's working. Obviously majority of the times, obviously the things that you are recommending are proven through thousands of stores and hundreds and thousands of customers.

Richard Hill:
You know that if somebody's not got a site search and the navigation is not doing this or it's not laid out in a certain way, you've got a very strong indicators in industries, what's going to work so you can layer in, number one, yeah, worked. But obviously you guys knew and know it's very likely to work if not definitely going to work because they've got no site search to start with or they've got no dynamic site to start with, or they've got poor plugin site search potentially or a standard out of the box one that maybe hasn't got X, Y, Z. That's brilliant. Brilliant. Any other sort of maybe anything else, a bit more advanced on UX or personalization that you've got a good example of recently?

Tim Mawson:
Yes. So it's our brand spanking new tool basically and it's something whereby I've only ever seen one other company in the world currently do it, I think it is, apart from people who've self built it obviously, because they've got mad level dev team and afford to do that. And it's what we call at this end, visually similar search. So it is literally probably the most rumsail of tools you've ever heard of. So for example, I'm on a fashion website now and I'm on the product page, looking at this shirt, for example, blue check. I could basically go down, look at the sizes and see that they don't have my large shirt in stock. Sorry. So the next step for me would be going, "I really like that pattern. That would go nice with my outfit. How do I see more of this product?" Now you could do that through recommendations, but what we've developed at this end is a tool whereby there's a button that sits just below like that add to basket, that sort of job, and you can click that.

Tim Mawson:
And then what it will do is it'll drag you up every other product on the site that looks similar to it. Now we've seen, again, this is something where it's early adaptations of it and it's really relatively new. I think Facebook and Pinterest are launching something similar and Instagram as well.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
But where we're seeing this on eCom sites, it's few and far between. The idea with the visually similar is that what we are building from this is if somebody, for example, then the shirt example I've just given, isn't finding what they want in their size, they may then find another shirt that's slightly more expensive, but it is in their size and they can get it tomorrow, so it's naturally upselling people like that.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
Which is a really interesting to look at things as well, from our perspective.

Richard Hill:
I'm a bit of a shirt fanatic, to be honest. My go to nice shirt and pair of jeans and absolutely. You go on these fashion stores and I'm a XXL kind of guy and there's so many, that just rings a bell to me straight away. Obviously if you go on and you look at one XXL, there's no point showing me when I go to the next, I do another search and then showing me the smalls. Obviously I should know that I'm looking at XXLs and only showing me the products that are in XXL. But obviously you are going a whole of level there where, if a XXL in a certain style colour isn't in stock, you're then the ability to then search for similar style and colour, which is hard to define in a navigation, isn't it, because obviously style, colour, brand, size is probably the normal go-to, but then by scanning an image potentially and looking at similar pattern, that's great. Love it.

Richard Hill:
Fashion, I think it's just such an one because obviously what you're also trying to do is reduce that backend cost returns, which that should possibly help with. Brilliant. So obviously work with a lot of retailers. What's some of the biggest mistakes that you see on personalization or trying to get going personalization or just biggest mistakes in general that our listeners should avoid?

Tim Mawson:
I think it depends on what you've got as a piece of kit. And I think as you say, there's many pieces of kit out there now that are super advanced and you can pretty much tailor it by the weather outside and a person's location and whatnot. And it becomes a bit black mirror at that point. I do think there's certain elements whereby you've probably seen it yourself as well, Richard, where you go on a site and it'll be like, I don't know, like say I'm looking at a pair of headphones or something and it'll be like in the bottom left corner, it'll pop up and it'll say so and so in Lithuania just bought this or something.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah.

Tim Mawson:
You're looking at that and it's like, that's cool that somebody's buying the product, but that is also probably not relevant to me at that point.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
I'm going like, Hmm. And again, coming back to that demographic piece, like if, again, I'm going to use my dad, Neil, probably if he ever listens to this, [crosstalk 00:33:14], if he saw that he'd probably turn around and go again, completely irrelevant. And again, if he went on the site and he wasn't logged in and it had recognized his IP or something like that, and it was like, "Hi, I'm Drew. This is what you were looking at last time, blah, blah, blah," he might be a bit turned off by that sort of tracking element as well.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
So not necessarily a do and a don't, if you will, it's just that sort of, if you're going to do it, sort of take your time to measure what you're doing again, the overall aspect.

Richard Hill:
I think some of those tools can be slightly, I don't know what the word is, but I think such and such bought this product from such and such. Well, a lot of the time from what I've seen, some of those tools are not true in effect. They are there to just to try and people know that, I think, in reality, so it's like, well, you're not starting that relationship very well, are you? You're basically saying that 15 people bought this product in the last 10 minutes. Hang on a minute, did they really? And obviously that's no way to go on. That's no way to build your brand star relationship. I think there's been a raft of products like that launched in the last couple of years, sort of certain product launch websites that launch these products for one off fees and whatnot. Obviously there [inaudible 00:34:23] to encourage people to buy, absolutely, but as long as, I think personally, if it's genuine data. Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
100% agree. And I think, again, just to come back to your point about dos and don'ts, the big thing that we notice as well from our end, again, coming back to the out of stock element and it's something that's quite, wouldn't call it quite serious, it's just something that is a bit weird to do. So you might have native recommendations from your platform and say you're on a product page and two of those recommendations slots you were going to fill have sold out, then what your native recommendations might not do is refill those other slots. So you've just got two blank slots that look pointless on your website and just leave a gap that you could have other products in there to back fill it and say, "Right, this is something else you can look at." And giving that opportunity to the customer is key. That's what we're trying to do. And if you give someone the license, it's likely they'll buy, like there you go.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
So then just something like that and just monitoring like the out of stock, like on recommendations and your search bar and what not, can be really pivotal in just getting a customer to a product they want.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. So crystal ball time. Obviously you guys are iterating, building, very progressive in the industry. It's well known. You've got a great reputation. So what would you say if we are sat here 18 months from now, what's some of the new stuff that will be in terms of personalization, some of the things that maybe become quite standard for those more progressive eCommerce stores? What would you say, 18 months from now we're sat here, what we're talking about?

Tim Mawson:
I think that genuinely in 18 months, if I get the opportunity to come back, what we'll look to do is I think is standard across the board. So mentioned I've harped on today about site search recommendations, yada yada yada.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
Next level for me in that sort of personalization journey is dynamic content and being able to show people what they looked at last time and things they would be interested in as standard.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Tim Mawson:
I think what we will probably see is that next level from platforms, so they'll turn around and go, "Right. Okay. You are on enterprise or you're on a big commerce enterprise or whatever, this comes as standard for you." And I think that is a game changer for retailers across the board, where then they can sit down and go, "We have this facility immediately and we can see the results by getting more granular." And it's all AI based, all AI driven, giving the customer the license to then present stuff that is relevant to the customers as standard. I think that's where we go.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I think that's brilliant. And only yesterday I was reading about Netflix on this same vein. I would imagine most people who are listening have got a Netflix account, but ultimately when you're on Netflix now and you are browsing through what to watch and the example that I read about yesterday was Stranger Things and obviously hugely popular show, one of the top 10, I believe. But basically what it's saying is that Netflix show a different thumbnail of that show to potential people that are going to watch that show based on what you've watched in the past. So obviously net Stranger Things covers, it's like horror, it's a bit gory. It's a love story. It's sort of a team. There's all sorts of angles potentially to cover a lot of demographics of listeners. So if Netflix know that you like watching love stories, for example, then they'll show you the thumbnail with there's a couple of different relationships in the show.

Richard Hill:
If you like horrors, there's a definite horror sort of scare element to it. They show you the horror and it showed you about 12 different thumbnails to cover out the 12 different profiles, personas of different people that watch different types shows. I thought that, yeah. And that's what you're talking about. Absolutely. Obviously that's very, very progressive. That's insane, isn't it? You go into a store. If I'm looking at another purple shirt, it's showing them on a, it knows that I'm a certain size, it's showing you a picture of them on a bigger guy, or on person potentially wearing jeans because I like to wear the shirt with my jeans. It's very personalized as opposed to maybe, yeah. Brilliant. Love it.

Tim Mawson:
Taking it back to that piece as well. It is literally, if you think about it, if you are a regular customer, let's say at a local menswear shop and you'd go in and they'd be like, "Oy, Richard, you're back again. Yeah. We've got more purple shirts over there. You've got these that you bought last time. There's a new range of them. Ta-da, have a look at those," it's that sort of thing that, and I know it's a cheesy industry term, but it's literally replicating the in-store experience online and that's what we're trying to do.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Love it. Right. Well, coming to the end, I think, I think it's very clear to me. You're very straight talking, say it as it is, which I love. So if you were to give one bit of advice to our listeners, what would it be? Anything.

Tim Mawson:
Yeah. The first point of contact I think is if you are looking at anything to develop your site and if you've just got to say it fits everyone really, I think the best way to look at it is keep it simple, first and foremost. Do not dive in both feet and go, "Right. We're going to do everything now." Keep it simple, build on stuff, layer it out there, because if you are throwing six pieces of tech at your website at once big and free plugins and whatnot, that is just going to confuse that, and it's not going to make everything crystal clear for where you want to go. That is the key part I would go to every time. Keep it simple, analyse and then grow.

Richard Hill:
Brilliant. Well, thanks, Tim. It's been an absolute pleasure that has flown by. I like to end every episode with a book recommendation. Do you have a book that you recommend to our listeners?

Tim Mawson:
See, I'm going to be a bit edgy here and being from the north, I can't really read. So, what I tend to do is I don't, as I say, I haven't reread a book as such since school probably, speaks volumes, but the thing that I'm really into at the minute, it's a podcast specifically so it fits the tune of this. The big one is it's called the High Performance Podcast.

Richard Hill:
Oh yeah.

Tim Mawson:
Like a cheesy sort of sales guy going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But the idea is it shows you how people have reached a certain level in their career and it shows you the sort of things that they value. And that's what I've took a lot from recently as well.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. That's a brilliant recommendation. Thank you, Tim. So for the guys that want to find out more about you, more about Salesfire, what's the best way to do that?

Tim Mawson:
Great. So the obviously the best way is heading to our site. So it's www.salesfire.com. If you want to, as I say, have a reader around there, see what's what, you pop in an inquiry and see where we're at and failing that, you can always find me on LinkedIn because I'm all over that like a rush.

Richard Hill:
Yes. Well, thanks Tim. It's been an absolute pleasure. Absolute nuggets left right and centre there. I look forward to digesting a few bits there and talking to our team further about more of the functionality there that we need to focus on for our clients as well, so fantastic. Thank you so much. I'll see you again and we'll see if your predictions come true in 18 months.

Tim Mawson:
I'm telling you right now they will. I'm putting a bet on it straight away. Thank you, Richard.

Richard Hill:
Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to the eCom@One eCommerce podcast. If you enjoy today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter and leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eComOne, the eCommerce marketing agency.