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HEY! We'll be in Chicago next week for h+h americas.
We'd love to meet. Will you be at the show or in town? |
Hi Reader,
I'd like to trade my insight for yours today! Read on.
When I look at a website critically, there are three things I ask:
- What is this business about? Can a customer quickly tell what you sell and what the basics of your business are?
- Who is it for? Who is your target customer, and are you speaking to them in a way that helps them self-select as being in the right place?
- Why should I care? What makes your business different from even your closest competitor? If you don’t know, your customers don’t, either.
There are thousands of shops in your niche, so how do you stand out? If your homepage doesn't tell me what makes you different, if I’m a match for you as a customer, or anything interesting about your business, I'm going to bounce.
We like to use the 3 Uniques concept from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS):
Other common marketing terms for this are "differentiators" and "value proposition." Plainly put, these are what make you different, what make you stand out, and what you're competing with. If you line yourself up against 10 of your competitors, you might all share one of these uniques. Some of you may even share two, but no one else should have the three you do. You need to settle on three qualities that will truly make your company unique to the ideal customer. Do you know what your three are? We are constantly adjusting and refining these. In fact, I just got mine right where I like them, and I said them out loud to a member of my mastermind group. He respectfully disagreed with one and told me something he thinks of as one of our uniques. I think he was right, and I just need to run it by my team.
Sometimes it helps to get an outside opinion to see these clearly. I talked to a competitor. If you're friendly with a competitor, you could try that. I recommend you ask some of your perfect customers why they shop from you instead of someone else, or what they see as special about you.
I'd love to hear what you come up with!
And speaking of research, would you do me a huge-for-me, easy-for-you favor? Please reply and let me know what makes Aeolidia unique to you. In return, I'll take a look at your website and make some suggestions to improve it.
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Here's a reader question about bot attacks, from Ellen, as answered by Helen Hulskamp, Ecommerce Strategist on our team:
Q: We are getting bombed on a daily basis with bot traffic, and I'm not sure how much I should be worried about this. When I reached out to shopify, they weren't very helpful. They recommended the Blockify app.
I'm wondering what you think of this app and if you would recommend it for us. It's only 10am and we have already had over 10,000 visits to our site (mostly from Singapore). We don't ship internationally so I don't care about people looking at the site outside of the US. But I didn't know if it would screw up our algorithm in Google or something.
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A: You are not alone! These are the two most common types of bots we see, what to do about them, and why it matters:
Checkout API bots will show up as an increase in abandoned checkouts on your store. These bots cannot be blocked by any app you install on the front end of your site because they bypass your site completely using a programming interface. The only way to stop them is by setting up a firewall that filters traffic before it even reaches Shopify. However, Shopify strongly recommends against setting up a firewall because it interferes with their native bot blocking (which clearly isn’t doing a good enough job). The one firewall app that Shopify support had previously recommended to us has now been removed from the app store. The only recommended solution is to clean up the data after the fact.
The other common type of bot can be easily identified by the country of origin. Go to the “Sessions by location” report in your Analytics dashboard and in the sidebar add the metric “conversion rate.” Any countries that are sending a lot of traffic with zero conversions might be sources of bot traffic. We most often see bots from China and Singapore. Apps like Blockify and EasyBan will allow you to block traffic from specific countries. Again, this doesn’t stop bots from hitting the checkout API. But if they are showing up as sessions in your analytics, then they are hitting the front end of your site and can be blocked.
Bots wreak havoc in multiple ways, so it is important to take action. They completely skew your stats, making it nearly impossible to measure your conversion rate, add to cart rate, and other metrics that involve sessions. But even more critical, they can completely tank your email deliverability and drive up your email marketing bill. It is crucial that you segment bot profiles out of your newsletter campaigns and flow emails or you could have serious trouble getting your emails to land in the inboxes of your human subscribers.
Question: Answered
Our team includes experts in branding, design, development, email & SMS/text marketing, search engine optimization, copywriting, conversion optimization, ecommerce strategy, business growth, and more. Have a question for us? Email back, and I'll consult one of our experts and share one weekly response over email.
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Wishing [COMPANY GOES HERE] all the best,
Arianne Foulks | CEO & Founder
Aeolidia, Shopify Plus Partners
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Refer a Friend
If you have a colleague who could use help with ecommerce, email marketing, and/or branding, I invite you to connect them with me. Refer a friend »
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