The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Optimizing your Slide Out Cart to increase AOV!

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Google and Yahoo’s Deadline for New Authentication Requirements is 2/1.

• The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Ben Sharf, Co-Founder @ Platter, a theme and app bundle for Shopify brands.

• App Highlight: Shoplift - A fully integrated CRO platform for Shopify.

• Upcoming Events: I’m super excited for EEE Miami on February 22nd in my backyard in Miami! Last year was my first year at the conference, and it was by far the most insightful and tactical event I attended all year. Take 20% off your EEE ticket with the code BRANDON20. And if you’re a brand doing more than $5M in revenue per year, email me!

Let’s Chat D2C - Optimizing your Slide Out Cart

For starters, every ecommerce site should have a slide-out cart. If you don’t have one, start there! Once implemented, the following tactics have helped hundreds of Electriq clients increase AOV and conversion rates.

Free Shipping & Gift-with-Purchase Meter

Implement order value thresholds with a tiered meter bar in the cart that shows how far away the customer is from each perk. For example, you could have free shipping unlocked at $35, a gift at $75, and an additional gift at $125.

Product Recommendations

Showcase products the customer will be likely to purchase based on the items they already have in their cart.

Upgrade to Subscribe & Save

Enable customers to change their product in the cart to a subscription in exchange for a percentage off.

What I’m Thinking About This Week - Google and Yahoo’s Deadline for New Authentication Requirements is 2/1

On February 1st, Google and Yahoo are beginning to enforce new requirements for bulk email senders. The guidelines focus mainly on three areas: authentication of outgoing emails, reported spam rates, and the ability to unsubscribe from email lists easily.

Google defines bulk senders as anyone sending over 5,000 messages to Gmail addresses in a day.

Senders must also keep their reported spam rate in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.10%

In advance of February, take these 6 steps to get ready:

1. Remove Gmail or Yahoo from your brand’s “from” address

2. Verify a custom sending domain in your email marketing platform

3. Update your “from” address in your email marketing platform to reflect your domain

4. Set up a DMARC policy for your custom domain

5. Keep spam rates low

6. Make it easy to unsubscribe (one-click unsubscribes)

Not meeting these requirements could hurt your deliverability!

Klaviyo also has an article here on how to get ready.

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#91 – Challenges and Myths of Ecommerce

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Ben Sharf, Co-Founder @ Platter, a theme and app bundle for Shopify brands. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 The role Platter plays in streamlining ecommerce functionality to increase conversion rates and save money.

📲 The value of productized delivery and how to create a scalable business.

😎 The concept of “bad revenue” and not saying yes to everything.

🚀 The pros and cons of headless websites - including when brands should think about going headless.

App Highlight - Shoplift

What is it: The first fully integrated CRO platform for Shopify

Differentiator: Aside from integrating directly within Shopify templates, Shoplift also provides a host of unique capabilities:

• Ability to test versions of your Shopify templates without writing a single line of code

• Recommended tests for your homepage, collection pages, product pages, and landing pages leveraging millions of data points

• Lift Assist: Powerful blocks and sections automatically styled to match your brand, like countdown timers, sticky carts, inventory indicators, and more.

• Segment your tests based on audience, devices, etc., and get all the actionable analytics in one place.

Starting Price: $149/mo

How we use it: We use Shoplift to conduct A/B testing to optimize conversion rate, average order value, revenue per session, and more. Once the test variant wins or loses, we conduct another test, continuing to iterate on our results and learnings.

Upcoming Events

I’m super excited for EEE Miami on February 22nd in my backyard in Miami! Last year was my first year at the conference, and it was by far the most insightful and tactical event I attended all year.

Take 20% off your EEE ticket with the code BRANDON20. And if you’re a brand doing more than $5M in revenue per year, email me!

I’ll also be heading out to:

• Vinexpo: Feb 12 - Feb 14 in Paris

• ShopTalk: Mar 17 - Mar 20 in Vegas

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