The Design Business Show 191: The Ultimate Customer Experience Using Ecommerce with Adam Pearce

Adam Pearce is the co-founder and CEO of Blend Commerce, the eCommerce Customer Experience Agency. Adam and his team have worked with over 200 Shopify retailers to help them provide memorable customer experiences that drive growth in revenue and profit.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

Adam’s Start With Shopify

I share how Adam and I met and that he’s on the show to talk about designing sign-up experiences that sell and add value to customers and brands
Adam shares what he thought life would be like after college and the different types of jobs he had
While working for an education app company, Adam’s brother-in-law approached him about a new Canadian app called Shopify that he was going to start developing on
Because Adam had experience marketing for app companies, his brother-in-law thought maybe they could do something together
Adam admits that he didn’t think Shopify would work out but has never been happier to be wrong
5 years ago, Adam, his business partner, and his brother-in-law started an agency that started doing eCommerce sites for small companies
The importance of customer experience has been amplified, and companies realize that it will drive profit for them
Adam talks about moving from consulting to teaching and says after a few years of teaching; he realized how difficult it was
Adam shares that running a company is easier than teaching was and what you should think about when deciding to switch careers or companies
The beginning of their agency was crazy, and they realized they needed to niche down
How Shopify was a completely different company from when it started to what it is now – as Shopify has changed, they’ve had to adapt
When looking at eCommerce sites, Shopify is only 2nd to Amazon
The initial challenge of the agency Adam shares was picking a niche that was going to be enjoyable and is something that the market and industry wanted
A typical client profile for their agency would be someone who has been doing business for 2-3 years, 3 million dollars a year in revenue, and uses Shopify as their main channel for driving revenue.
A few years ago, Shopify was about getting someone to make an initial purchase – now, it’s more about the customer and thinking about how we can get them to come back

Tracking Customer Lifetime Value + Creating a Unique Customer Experience

For Adam, the concept of just having a website to sell is going away because so many different social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook offer eCommerce for customers to purchase on their app
Business owners and companies need to know that consumers will want to interact and buy from you on multiple different channels, in multiple different ways – so only having one way for consumers to buy isn’t ideal
When clients come to Adam with a problem, he first looks at the data to identify if that is the true problem they are having or if it’s actually something else
Adam and his team focus on CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) and look at metrics like average revenue per customer, average order value, and doing calculations to determine the real CLV and the projected CLV
Instead of just looking at conversion rates, you need to consider how profitable each customer for your company is based on what they’re going to buy, how much it costs to provide what they’re going to buy, and how much it costs to acquire them
When it comes to a good conversion rate, Adam says it depends on the industry, product, and quality – he gives an example of two clients who sell similar products but have very different conversion rates because they have different price points and target demographics
Some companies offer industry data and benchmark tracking reports like Klaviyo, which gives you a better idea of what your conversion rate should be so you can change things in your business if needed
Adam feels most agencies do not do a great job with customer experience because everyone involved, the designer, copywriter, developer, etc., are working for themselves and not together for the user to create an excellent customer experience
I love that Adam focuses on the customer experience because I feel another thing that has been lost is the onboarding and offboarding processes
When you get a client committed to a contract or get paid at a physical store, Adam explains that as business owners, that’s a winning point, but for the customer, that winning point hasn’t started yet – your job is to make them feel great about their purchase

Blend Commerce Offerings + New Ecommerce Trends/Apps

Adam explains the 2 ways clients work with their agency 1) through their Customer Value Optimization Program and 2) on their email marketing through Klaviyo
What’s different about their agency Adam says, is that they understand at times, you will need to dip more into the design side or the marketing side than others
Before a customer even comes across your brand until they make their last purchase – they look at all the interaction points that aren’t great for your brand so far or don’t exist so they can increase the customer lifetime value
Adam shares that they have been partnered with Klaviyo for the last 4 ½ years – and when they work with clients in that capacity, they look at where money is being left on the table through their email marketing and help clients increase revenue
The agency focuses on website design, development, and Klaviyo email marketing – Adam says when it comes to social media, paid, or SEO, they have a couple of partner agencies who they refer their clients to
What has been working for eCommerce product and service brands is using onsite quizzes – Adam gives a client example where they have a button on their site that people can click if they aren’t sure where to start, and it walks them through a couple of questions and asks them about their taste to better recommend products and create a personalized experience
Adam says that quizzes have good conversion rates, but even if a person doesn’t convert from your onsite quiz, you have now captured a lot of information about that person – all that data can be used in Klaviyo for your email marketing to personalize responses
If you search for eCommerce quizzes, you will be flooded with information because it does work as a sign-up and conversion tool
In Adam’s opinion, pop-ups that still work are ones for products with low average pay for the brand, but because everyone uses pop-ups in the same places, it can be overwhelming to consumers if they are jumping from brand to brand
When you’re offering pop-ups for large discounts, you have to ask yourself if that is attracting customers that will keep coming back – Adam suggests being smarter with pop-ups by asking one simple question instead and gives an example of how this would benefit you as a brand
Adam says when they ask questions in their pop-ups, they like to build anticipation and then ask for the consumer’s email at the end to share their results
If Adam could go back 5 years ago, he would tell himself not to judge a book by its cover and what he means by that is, as an agency, they used to judge the way a potential client approached them and their initial site – but you can never know how good or bad a business is without talking to the business owner
Adam shares some apps that are unique and work well from a customer experience point of view – one is VideoEyes which crawls YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. for videos that mention your products that you might not know about and bring them back to your Shopify store – it also allows you to grab any video you’ve made and create a call to action so people can buy and checkout from the video
Another app Adam recommends is Penny Black which allows you to personalize your packaging based on data from a customer
To learn more about Adam’s agency, you can go to the Blend Commerce Website, and you can connect with Adam on LinkedIn