THE ANDZEN APPROACH
Ep 10: Shaan from Alia [Bonus Offer]
In this episode, we have young prodigy Shaan Arora, the CEO & Co-Founder of the fast-growing popup tool Alia.
Shaan sat down with us at Shoptalk and we discussed the company’s origin story, what makes Alia stand out and acquisition tactics.
There is a tonne of insights, tangible action items and fascinating insights.
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BONUS OFFER: Shaan made sure he dropped an offer before we wrapped
Anyone who comes from the podcast – he’ll do 20% off the monthly subscription and 30 days free! Book a demo or just sign up and mention you came from the pod.
More info:
https://www.alialearn.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaan-arora/
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As always, don’t forget to visit https://andzen.co/podcast to view all our past episodes, subscribe and register your details to get notified about new episodes. You can find all the links to listen and watch episodes on your favourite platform.
Thanks to our podcast sponsor Klaviyo.
Jason Anderson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of The Andzen Approach. On this episode, we’re joined by Shaan, CEO, and co-founder of Alia. I’m also joined by Brendan, founder at Shaan, and I’m of course Jason, director at Shaan. Shaan, thanks for coming on board. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it,
Brenden Rawson: Shaan. Good to see you.
Uh, we are in Vegas still, day two of Shop Talk. Um, so good to see you mate. Thanks for jumping on the pod. Of course. Thanks for having me. You’re very welcome.
Jason Anderson: I’m really keen. Um, this is only the second time we’ve had a founder on. Um, over the platform. So I’d love to start off with you maybe telling a little bit about your story, telling us about Alia, but also kind of what was your vision, what was your reason for starting the platform and what are you trying to achieve?
Shaan Arora: Yeah, for sure. Happy to, happy to dive into that. Right. So, uh, I’m [00:01:00] 23, so I graduated college about a year and a half ago, and while I was in college, I. Was helping my mom transition her retail store mm-hmm. Into the online setting. Right. Nice. To a Shopify store.
Mm-hmm.
Shaan Arora: Um, I was doing so, and you know, running ads, doing those kind of things.
Right. Yeah. And kind of one of the first things I did is like, what’s the popup? So I went into the discovery of like, what is a popup? What does it do? Mm-hmm. And what I realized is. Number one is the main, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s the best way to get more revenue and in, and, and emails revenue, right?
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s like the more subscribers you have, inherently you should be able to make more money. Yeah. To me, that seemed kind of obvious, but I mean, the, the, the ones that existed, I don’t think. Um, we’re doing that right? Yeah. And it was like, there’s a lot of basic versions of it. Like why is there nothing that is specifically the best at this one thing?
Yeah. Um, but doing it in like kind of a more modern way and approaching modern brands and doing it like from a design standpoint too mm-hmm. Didn’t really exist.
Yeah.
Shaan Arora: So I saw that gap in the market. I also saw that in the [00:02:00] popup. It was really just email and SMS and I was like, what else can you do? Can you.
Tell a bit about the brand. Can you tell a bit about the story? I just thought there was more. Yeah, of course. So I was, I was, I was helping her build a store and, um, I was like, wait, I think there’s a pretty big gap in the market for a popup. Lemme see if I can make a better one.
Yeah.
Shaan Arora: So, you know, work with my team.
We, we ended up making something that I thought was better. Took on A CTO, who’s also from my college, um, launched the company, had two brands using it. Nice,
Jason Anderson: nice. And was one of them your mother’s? Yeah, one was my mom. Yeah. That’s great, man. Family support. And then
Shaan Arora: one was this friend I had in college who was like, sure, I’ll use it.
Yeah. Yeah. And then the third was, I. My co-founder’s cousin. Right? Yeah. Right.
Jason Anderson: But that’s Crossroads. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Shaan Arora: Graduated had about two brands, but I was like, I’m gonna go full time anyways. Mm-hmm. So I went full time, lived at home for six months, got to like about 20 brands using it. Great. Um, and then last year we took from having about 20 brands to now having actually over 900.
Um, so yeah, I saw a ton of growth. That’s phenomenal growth. Thank you. Wow. Wow. [00:03:00] So yeah, I saw a ton of growth just in the past year. We actually went from one 20 brands to 900 in the past eight months. Wow. Um, so yeah, we, we, we’ve grown a lot and, um. I think the biggest reason is ’cause we’ve chosen to do one thing, which is the popups and do nothing else.
Yeah, yeah. But do that one thing extraordinarily well.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. I think it’d be great for the listeners to dive in a little bit more about what you were saying there around like. The storytelling and the function Yeah. Of the popup. ’cause I think that’s probably the biggest thing. When I was first introduced to the platform, I remember the conversation I was having.
It was actually with a merchant. Mm-hmm. And they were talking about the complexity of their product. Right. They were in kind of a saturated market in the protein space, but they had some really important, specific things about their product that they wanted to be able to convey. Yeah. Um, and then we kind of went on that discovery and, you know, looking at Alia.
That’s how we ended up getting there. So I’m keen for you to maybe just elaborate a bit on like that function.
Shaan Arora: Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, like, I mean, within Alia there’s, there’s, [00:04:00] there’s two in components, right? One is like, let’s get your opt-in rates to beat what your previous pop-up was giving you for the opt-in rates.
Mm-hmm. And the second part is. Can we educate site visitors in the popup? And to be transparent, the first part of that, let’s get your opt-in rates up. That works for every single brand under the sun. ’cause every brand can do better for opt-in rates. Now the second part of the education, which is the education works well for two kinds of brands.
One, as you mentioned, like brands that have a complex product, right? Yeah. Complex product offering. Um, where education, educating the customers leads to better conversions and they’ve seen that happen before. And the second being, brands that have a great story hostage tapes, one of our clients, you know, their, their, their founder, Alex has a very great story.
He tells it within the popup. Through Alia.
Yeah.
Shaan Arora: Right. The idea is that after someone’s opted in for email and SMS through the popup. Um, they can get a higher reward for being educated about the brand.
Jason Anderson: Yeah.
Shaan Arora: So I, I think for the brand you mentioned, let’s say it’s like a 10% off for email and sms Mm. And then 15% off for taking 30 seconds Yeah.
To learn about the brand. [00:05:00]
Yeah.
Shaan Arora: Um, kind of thinking about it in like a, putting the welcome, the welcome email of the Yeah. Welcome series. Into the pop popup itself, but kind of in a more like gamified way. Yeah. Where they get a reward for doing so. Yeah. Um, and again, like we see great opt-in raise from the first side of that.
And then on the education piece, which is always after the opt-in of the customer mm-hmm. Um, we see really good like purchase conversions.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. I think. That whole, the staged approach is really what’s kind of unique about this, right? Yeah.
Brenden Rawson: Jason explained this to me the other day, um, and I immediately thought about our own process.
So we do these comprehensive audits for, for brands. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, as, as part of our kickoff and, uh, getting access there at Klaviyo accounts and their, their e-com stack, working everything out and sort of finding where the opportunities exist. Um, but in order to take that first step, you know, there’s a fair bit of trust involved.
Like they have to get access, you know, there’s NDAs involved. They have to under really understand the value of the audit. And I was like, how good would a [00:06:00] Aaliyah pop up form where we can step them through? And these audits sort of range between, you know, 2,005,000 depending on how, how, um, complex it is.
But, you know, read some information, find out the value proposition. Mm-hmm. Get 5% off. Yeah. Uh, go through the steps. Yeah. Get the NDA, get the access sorted. 10% off. Yeah, exactly. And true. I think that’s fantastic.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I really like the, I think like you said, it’s, it’s that gamified piece, but it also feels genuinely rewarding for the customer.
Totally. Um. So you kind of mixing those things. But I think the third crucial bit that you kind of touched on before is that it’s like, it’s modern, right? Like the platform is like a very design first Yeah. Kind of platform. So it’s very much guiding the merchant and like this thing needs to like look good, not just function well too.
Um, and which kind of leads me onto the next piece that I’m keen for you to talk a bit more about is one of the things that I really liked when we [00:07:00] first met. It was, you’re kinda like, you know what a popup is? We do popups. Like, you get it? I don’t need to explain that. Yeah. Um, but when you get into the platform, there’s actually a huge focus of the platform and the UI itself is on split testing.
Mm. And the emphasis you guys put into making it easy for a merchant to test different rewards, different timings, different kind of stuff. And I guess testing is one of those things that merchants. Always will say they wanna do, but they have very limited time. And when you have limited time, a lot of these platforms, they don’t make it easy to split tests.
Right. It’s not logical, it’s not like a simple setup. Whereas you guys have tried to make it in just incredibly easy. Yeah. So that there’s, they don’t actually have to do that, put in that much effort to start validating some of these things. And like you said, that’s how you get from one point a half percent to 2% to three, 4% opt-in rate.
Mm-hmm.
Jason Anderson: Um, so I’m keen to hear a little bit about the kind of. Your ethos there around building that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Such a great question. I’m
Shaan Arora: glad you brought it up as well. Um, [00:08:00] yeah, like, I mean, testing is, is, is is the crux of building, I think anything great, right? Yeah. I think, you know, when you come to like, let’s say Oli and you try out the popup at first, right?
Mm-hmm.
Shaan Arora: You’ll see an increase in opt-in rates and then the. The huge value add is like, okay, now what do we test now? Do we test offer? Do we test copy? Do we test time delay? Do we test graphics, right? Mm-hmm. And each of those right, can incrementally bring your popup up, right? Let’s say you come in with like a 4%, we test time delay.
That brings it to like a 6.2%. Yeah. You then test copy it brings it to like an 8%. You then test offer and it brings it to 10%, like Yeah. And we’ve seen that time and time again. Yeah. Where if you can test the right things and I think the, the benefit of. What we do is that we know what tests work. Mm-hmm.
Right? Because I mean, if you look at a popup, you can literally test every single piece of it, but like when you don’t have the context as to knowing what tests are the ones to run, it can feel like you’re throwing [00:09:00] stuff at a wall and hoping it sticks. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, oh, do I test my, do I test like 15 versus 10 or do I test like, you’ve got a, like what do I test?
Right? Yeah. Other, I think platforms don’t do a great job of telling you, you should test this. Yeah. You shouldn’t test this. Yeah. But like, that’s the ethos, right? Mm. It’s like, come into Alia. The first test we’re gonna do is a time delay. Mm. Then we’ll test copy. Right? Like mystery offer copy. Yeah. We’ll test offers, and we’ll test graphics as well.
Mm.
Shaan Arora: Right. Those four tests even just like, not even that rigorous testing, just those four tests right there. We’ll get you a significant increase. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. And then you can get more granular like, oh, what about I’m change this word if I change this image. Yeah. What if I do like three versus four versus 3.5?
Right. Yeah. You can be like, you can get very granular then. Mm-hmm. But if you just do those four things, right. So like, let’s test the. Copy that’s there. Let’s test the offer, let’s test the time day and let’s test like one graphic change.
Mm-hmm.
Shaan Arora: You are already getting a, like you’re getting majority of the way there.
Yeah. And let’s say the last like 20% is like [00:10:00] the nuanced parts of those testing.
Brenden Rawson: Yeah. And I assume you’re exposing, I guess all of those tests results within the platform.
Shaan Arora: Yeah. And how good, and I think something unique that we do, and it’s because we’re a Shopify app built into the Shopify, is we actually show onsite conversion rate.
Yeah. Right. And like, it’s so important because yes, you wanna optimize for opt-in rates, but if having a better popup means you’re losing like five points on your CVR, like probably to think something to think about. Right? Yeah. We, there’s been cases where, you know, um, having a full screen popup versus not a full screen popup can increase the conversion rate or it can actually decrease it, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Those decisions companies need to make there. Yeah. But. Within other platforms, they actually don’t show conversion rate. And it’s like, oh yeah, we got you 20% opt-in. It’s like, okay, that’s great. My conversion just tanked.
Yeah. Yeah. And
Shaan Arora: like we have guardrails where it’s like, oh, if your conversion rate is dropping by this much, we’re actually gonna end the test for you automatically.
Yeah. And just kill the test so that you know you’re not gonna see a CVR loss. [00:11:00] Yeah. That’s really interesting. Yeah. Or if CVS going up. And we maybe pump more folks traffic towards that, right? Yeah. And you know, what we’re doing right now is we actually run those tests for our brands. So my co-founder, our team, like we sit down and we run those tests for our brands, right?
Mm-hmm. I mentioned we’ve about 900 brands. So as we’re gonna scale, what we’re building right now, we’ve already built it, is infinity testing. Mm-hmm. So 24 7 for our customers, there’s gonna be tests running all the time. Nice. Using our best practices. Yeah. Like internally, we built out hundreds of best practices.
It’s like. Let’s run these best practices as ab tests 24 7 for our brands. Yeah. So brands don’t, brands don’t have to even think about what tests to run, it’s just automatically running them. Yeah. And the AI is just getting literally better and better. Yeah. As we get more data and as we run more tests for brands.
So that’s, that’s super exciting. And um, that’s really like, that’s, that’s been built right now and currently my co-founder’s doing it manually. We’re taking my co-founder’s knowledge and putting it into ai. Nice. So every customer gets all that, like all that AB testing done for them.
Jason Anderson: [00:12:00] Fantastic. Yeah, that’s great.
Yeah, I think the, that conversion rate piece is really important. I actually, last night was having a chat as you do at shops hockey. You just meet people that have really interesting businesses. We were speaking to a, um, conversion rate optimization, um, guy, and we were, we were actually. Talking about pop-ups.
Oh, nice. And um, he was saying how important it is to make sure that the coupon code is in the pop-up, not in the welcome email, because it’s really good for conversions. And I was saying to him that it’s interesting because we actually recommend testing that. And measuring your, the rate at which orders with coupons is going month to month.
’cause what we’ve seen is if people learn that the coupon code is in the popup, you sometimes get a really big spike in bounce rate from the welcome email. And a huge jump in the number of orders per month that have a discount because people learn they can just put anything into the popup and get the coupon code.
Mm-hmm. And so you start actually [00:13:00] losing data because you might have one person who’s been a customer three times, but they shopped with their work email, their personal email, their college email. So you have all this disparate data about this one customer, and you’re giving away maybe 10% on every order.
Mm-hmm. Um. But to your point, like when I was talking to him about it, he was like, you know, I never, it never occurred to me to be looking over here for this stat over there for that stat. He was purely just looking at, well, what’s the onsite conversion rate? And it goes up dramatically. If the coupon code’s there, well then that’s the best thing to do.
Mm-hmm. But then, yeah, you look at the margins behind the scene or the bounce rate on the welcome email, what impact is it having on deliverability? You need to kind of bring these things together. Right? Um, and I really like that you guys are, yeah, to your point, every other popup tool I know that focuses on opt-in rate and the conversion rate is vital.
Like, yes, if you’re spending two, three, $4 per click and your conversion rate’s going down, but you’re getting more emails, it’s maybe not the best strategy. Yeah, that’s
Shaan Arora: true. And. And to your point about like showing it [00:14:00] on, on this, on the site, there’s Sinat show on the site Navy test. We, we, we love to run as well.
Yeah. And the, the data I, I’ve seen in over the brands tells us that you actually do see a higher purchase conversion rate mm-hmm. When you show it on site. But typically you’ll see a lower open rate in the email. Yeah. Right. And like that’s a trade off that I think brands need to think about.
Jason Anderson: Yeah.
Shaan Arora: Um, like if you really care a lot about LTV.
That’s like a, like let’s, if you’re a huge A OV brand
mm-hmm.
Shaan Arora: And LTV, like, and it’s not an immediate one time, let’s make a purchase today. It’s like, yeah, let me think about it. You probably don’t wanna put on the site, right? Yeah. But if you are a fi and we were, compare this, you sell like $5 stickers.
Yeah. You show it on the site because Yeah. You need that conversion. Yeah. I need that conversion right there. Yeah. And LTV is just less important. Just like gifting brands, right? Yeah. Sometimes LTV is less important, whereas if you’re buying like, you know, a couch or something like you, probably, it’s not, they’re not gonna convert in 20 seconds.
Yeah. Like they need at least think about it. Yeah. Um, I think like it’s, it’s for different brands. That makes sense. Yeah. Um, either [00:15:00] way it’s good to ab test that though. Yeah. Different industries.
Brenden Rawson: Yeah. Nice one. Well, um, I think we might, um, have a word from our sponsor. Cool. Founded
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Brenden Rawson: and we’re back. Uh, so please check out zen.co/podcast. Um, you [00:16:00] will of course, uh, get this episode. You can, um, like and subscribe. Find it on Apple Podcasts, uh, Spotify, YouTube. Instagram, uh, TikTok, all of the places, um, as usual. Um. Jumping back in, um, let’s maybe chat about a couple of specific use cases.
Jason Anderson: Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the fun things about, I guess how we actually got connected directly is, um, an old, um, colleague of Brendan and I. So, um, we’ve told the story on the podcast before that we used to be in email marketing software and it was actually the original founder of that software. Um, he now has a CBD brand.
We were speaking to him and he mentioned using you guys. ’cause again, he has that really big brand story that he wants to sell. Um, and yeah, so we’d used, we’d been exposed to the platform before, but we hadn’t met personally. So it was kind of a fun, like full circle moment to speak with him. And then [00:17:00] now we’re on with you.
Um, I’m really keen to like. Go into a bit more of that conversation that we had when we were going through the platform. There were a bunch of really interesting, specific strategies that you mentioned. Mm-hmm. Um, I think, you know, one of the great things about e-comm as well is that for the people that are listening, they’re potentially on a laptop right now.
Yeah. At work. They could just plug the platform in and start having a play around. So what are a couple of like. Great examples that you have from merchants that are doing cool things.
Shaan Arora: Mm-hmm. Totally. Yeah. And I’m happy to be very, like specific and, and, and, and to give like good advice and what, like if you use our platform or not, that’s totally okay, but at least go into ala you popup and try these health just because they’re, they’re like easy low hanging fruit stuff.
Yeah. I’m happy to share. Fantastic. Right. So first would be, you know, I’ve seen a lot of popup players do, and, and the crazy thing to me is like huge brands, nine figure brands, like they. Or not even optimizing their popup. Yeah. So like, it’s okay if you’re not right now ’cause it’s [00:18:00] might not seem like it’s, it’s valuable, but it is reliable.
First thing would be right when you see a popup, um, and the email collection field mm-hmm. Is on the first part of the popup. Yeah. That’s not best practices. Okay. Right. So like if it says get 15% off, enter your email and the email field is there. Mm-hmm. That’s, that’s, that’s actually not the best practice I’ve seen.
I’ve seen popups have, and I’m sure I, I, I’m sure there’s people assume who do this where it’s like email collection field, SMS collection field and name collection field, all in the like first page. The first page. Um, that’s really not the best practice because you actually see higher opt-in rates when you ask a question as the first step of the popup.
Interesting. Yeah. So there’s, there’s two kinds of questions, right? One is a microcom commitment question, which is do you want to discount? Yes, no. So that’s gonna outperform an email collection popup every day.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. Wow.
Shaan Arora: Now the one that’s gonna even further outperform that is a poll question popup.
Mm-hmm. And I mean, we work with a ton of brands. We work with milk makeup, Patrick Todd Breeze, solo [00:19:00] wave, uh, vie. Um, we with a bunch of awesome brands, bunch of nine figure brands, and they all use this strategy. Mm-hmm. Which is, you actually put a poll question at the beginning. Um, so for Patrick ta Right.
Actually they don’t do it, but uh, I think milk makeup does this. Yeah. Where they ask like, Hey. What are you shopping for today? Yeah. Um, and also Nike is one, is one of our clients, they do this too. They say, what are you shopping for today? Right. And they sell all the different equipment. It’s like home gym equipment.
Yeah. Apparel sweats. Mm-hmm. They have four answer choices, right? Mm-hmm. Now, the crazy part about this is it actually outperforms the yes versus no question. Yeah. Right? Um, the poll question outperforms that. Yeah. Two great things about it. One. You get zero party data off the bat. Yeah. And that is very, very easily segmented into Klaviyo with the Klaviyo popup or through the Alia popup.
Yeah. Where, you know, if they answer in the Alia popup, I’m here shopping for home gym. Mm-hmm. That, that, that flows into their profile. Yeah. And then segment them and email Great, great grade zero party data off the bat. Yeah. Right. And by [00:20:00] asking a question, people are more likely to go through the entire flow versus if they had just seen the email collection field up front.
Yeah. Nice. Um, there’s the idea of I’ve already been micro committed to this, right? Like I’ve taken one easy step already. Yeah. I’m more likely to complete the email. Thus I’m more likely to complete the sms. Yeah. Thus I’m more likely to go ahead and make a purchase. Yeah. Right. So bringing customers through that funnel.
Hmm. Um, so, you know, advice there is don’t put the email field do Definitely don’t put the email field with the SMS with the name up front. Definitely not. Yeah. It’s gonna scare people away.
Yeah.
Shaan Arora: Have it be a poll question where you ask, like, you can even ask like, um. Are you a man or woman or other? Yeah.
Like you can ask very simple questions. Yeah. That’s good data for you. Yeah. And very easy answers for them.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. I really love that because. This is something that we did very early days when we were, you know, ourselves being an e-com agency. We were working with, um, a Australian retail [00:21:00] brand. There was like a family owned brand.
They sold, um, athletics wear, so it was like an active west store. Um, but you know, they sold like Nike added ass Puma stuff. They had a couple of physical retail locations around Sydney. Um, but they’ve been doing it for like 40 years. It was like the kid was taking it over from his. Dad who’d started the brand and he was really bullish on e-comm, and we just said to him like, you know, in the popup we should just collect gender so that in the welcome series, rather than just saying like, shop by brand or whatever, we could say like, you know, top footwear for women, top footwear for men.
Depending on what they came through. And we just dynamically changed the hero image as well. Put a man in or a woman in.
Mm-hmm.
Jason Anderson: And the previous conversion rate of their welcome series, I think was like around like 7% or something like that, which is pretty low, but it was just one email that had a coupon code in it.
We fleshed out like a full series. Um, did some educational stuff in there, but it was all. Based on what gender they chose, and if they didn’t choose a gender, then there was like four back for popular products. We kind of try to collect, [00:22:00] depending on what they click on, judge, what they might be shopping for.
Conversion rate went up to over 20%. Oh wow. So like you’re talking about before, like less than one in 10 people purchasing to now like. You know, one in five.
Shaan Arora: No, that’s huge. Yeah.
Jason Anderson: Um, and it seems like such a innocuous thing to just ask for that upfront, but the quality of experience the customer has where then everything they see is personalized, right?
Like that welcome email because it’s got that product feed in it if you’re sending them there. It’s not as disruptive to the journey because now they’re effectively on a collections page just within the email, and then they can click on a product and when they go back on site, they, they are those couple of layers deeper than they were when they started the platform.
Sorry, it started the popup.
Right.
Jason Anderson: Um, and then I, on the commitment side, so if you’re listening to this and you think like, I don’t know, adding steps might pop up. Like you’re saying, it sounds good, but it. I’m not sure if it is. Um, we work with a couple of brands in the [00:23:00] workwear space in au So you think their customers are tradies?
Right. These are not people who like to be super technical, that don’t like marketing. If you ask them if they like marketing, um, their popup, once we put the SMS on the second page after email. The rate of people putting their mobile number in went up to over 90%.
Shaan Arora: Wow. Nice.
Jason Anderson: And so, like you think about tradies, like most of them would hate to be marketed to on SMS, you would think, right?
Mm-hmm. But like you said, it’s that little commitment. Once you feel like you’re in the journey, you’re completing all the steps. Um, and yeah, they had, have had exponential growth in their SMS program ’cause of that. Mm-hmm. So yeah, it definitely works. Um, what else?
Shaan Arora: Any other Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely more than happy to share more tips.
Right. Um, another easy win here, which works super well is let’s try out mystery copy. Mm-hmm. Right? Um, you’ve got a mystery discount, we’ll oftentimes outperform anything else. Yeah. [00:24:00] In terms of performance. Now, there’s a caveat there that if you have a really great offer, right? If your offer is 20% off, I say 30% off to 50% off.
You’re probably better off saying that. Yeah. However, if your offer is like. 15% or less. Mm-hmm. Uh, you’re pretty much always gonna have mystery. You’ve got a mystery discount be you’ve got 15% off a guaranteed time. Yeah. Okay. Right. Um, I, for the reason being that they don’t know what’s behind it. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. In their mind it could be. Yeah, could be 50% off. Who knows percent off, right? So that one thing can significantly skyrocket opt-in rates. I mean, and the cool thing about that is you actually don’t need to give any crazy discount. Yeah. But you could still have an amazing opt-in rate. Like let’s say you were giving 20% off before now you could give out 10% off, have mystery discount, save margin, and have a higher opt-in rate.
Yeah. So like that’s a very tactical thing that I think brands can implement today is like, oh, let me. Take, give myself 10% back Yeah. On a sale. My company Yeah. Of [00:25:00] my sales, and let me see my opt-in rates increase. Like that is, that is very powerful. Yeah. Um, so definitely recommend testing that. Mm-hmm. Some brands don’t love the aesthetic of saying you’ve got a mystery discount.
And that’s, and that’s a brand choice. Like I, we get a ton of high fashion and luxury brands as well, and they’re like, can we try ex, like exclusive discount or personalized gift like stuff. You can change copy to fit it if your brand’s aesthetic, but majority of brands are more than happy to try out, you’ve got a mystery discount.
Mm-hmm. And that is, that is, that is a great winner most times. Yeah. Great.
Brenden Rawson: I want to go the opposite direction, um, and ask you like one of your pet peeves or one of the things that you really dislike about popups that you’re seeing, um, you know, other brands do.
Shaan Arora: Yeah, for sure. I think, um. One of the lowest hanging fruits that I’ve seen as well is at the end of the popup instead of, you know, them being on, on whatever page they are when they [00:26:00] finish the popup.
I think a very easy thing to do, and it’s kind of pet peeve to me ’cause I think it’s really just like it’s, you can do it. Every platform is dropping them into the collection page that you wanna drop them into. Yeah. Right. Like, um. It’s, let’s say they, they complete the popup on the homepage, like Alvi does this, for example, Alvi drops them into their, you know, the collection page they wanna drop them into Yeah.
You can drop them into a specific, like a very specific LP as well. Yeah. Right? Mm-hmm. Um, and you also do logic in a lot of places where it’s like, if they’re on this page, don’t redirect. But if they Yeah. You know, if they’re already on a collection page, probably don’t wanna redirect them. Yeah. But if they’re on your homepage, you might as well redirect them to a new lp.
Yeah. Um, and I mean, brand spend, um, so much money creating great landing pages and it’s like, oh, there’s another way you can redirect track of your landing page is actually through the popup. Um, and bringing them, dropping them onto the collection page that you wanna drop them onto. Mm. I like that is a very easy win.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. Especially like you said, you, if you’re collecting that piece of information up front, like. The Nike example on there, shopping for home gyms will then at the end of the popup, just send them to the home gym collection. Right? [00:27:00] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And you just cut any sort of nav confusion, particularly if they’re on mobile.
Simplify the journey so much more for them and get them to that layer deeper. Mm-hmm. And then on, like what we would say on the email side as well is then they’re also on a page where you’re triggering things like viewed collection events. And then if they abandon, then we can, we’ve, we know that they got that.
Layer deep, we can start sending them the browser abandonment flows or SMS to try and get them back on the website rather than that session just being lost. Totally. Um, I think I’m keen to just chat about one more example because you kind of mentioned it there and I think it’s something that we come up with a fair bit where.
Those higher end brands where maybe they’re very nervous about a popup ’cause they’re not sure if it’s like, you know, fits the aesthetic. Um, they’re, you know, certainly not discount led, so they don’t want to, um, be using any discount language in their popups. What’s the strategy that you guys are using for that, those kind of brands to.
Engage people.
Mm-hmm.
Shaan Arora: Yeah. For brands that are [00:28:00] not keen on giving a discount, get early access. Mm-hmm. This is an easy one that works pretty well and it, you’ll still see good collection rates there. Mm-hmm. Of course, most, most times if you give it a discount, it’ll outperform like early access, but. It’s an option.
And, and, and you don’t need to give any discount. You, they just get, join your newsletter. Yeah. Um, but you can still collect some pretty high rates and you can probably have some good copy around there. Like you get early access to like, this new collection line we’re dropping, or like be the first to know there’s some good, there’s some good copy you can try around there for, for, for luxury rents.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. This is essentially what we recommend as well, like leverage the sense of community and exclusivity. If we’re not gonna go for a discount Mm, then it’s just about. Um, creating buy-in with the brand. Right. And so yeah. Promises like early access or being the first to know, um, that for a high-end brand is actually probably more rewarding than a discount.
Especially ’cause stock levels are usually low. People know that if they don’t get notified straight away, their sizes are almost certainly gonna sell out. They’re [00:29:00] gonna miss out. Right. Um, so yeah, it’s a great way of doing it. Mm-hmm.
Brenden Rawson: All right. Controversial question. Mm-hmm. Spin to win, yes or no?
Jason Anderson: Um, look, depends on the brand, but it’s mostly a pass from me, really?
Okay. Yeah. What do you think?
Shaan Arora: I mean, the numbers don’t lie, honestly. Yeah. It’s, it’s quite significantly, it’s quite significantly well performed. Most other things for most brands. Uh, now the aesthetic of it is. Is a different question. Mm-hmm. Um, mini katana, if you guys know them, it’s one of our brands too.
Mm-hmm. And, uh, it resonates well with their population. Yeah. Okay. We actually, funny enough, had this caviar brand that’s, that’s, that’s using and caviar obviously is high end. Yeah. Yeah. They’re using it, it’s working pretty well for them. Yeah. Interesting. Um, so I wouldn’t knock it until you try it to be honest, for brands, um, it is a super easy way to get some really nice opt-ins.
Yeah. And if you believe it fits with your brand’s aesthetic, like by all means, try it out. Yeah. Um. I’d say [00:30:00] one piece of advice also is like in the spin to win. Mm-hmm. Like make the, make all the discounts good. Yeah. Right. Uh, if you put like, one is free shipping, one is like 1% off. Like, they’d be like, I, I, I don’t, like, I don’t even wanna spin this for the chance that I get free shipping.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you can make all the discounts pretty good there, there’s a high chance they’re gonna spend it, they’re gonna get discount.
Brenden Rawson: Okay. Nice. Cool. Nice. I personally hate it, but I’ve been doing this long enough mm-hmm. To know that, um. My personal opinion doesn’t matter. Yeah. And, um, my perception of a brand or their tactics don’t matter.
Mm-hmm. I think that matters is data. Yeah, exactly. What’s actually true. Yeah.
Shaan Arora: And. AB test it as Yeah. Yeah. AB test it, see if it’s, see if it’s worth it. Mm-hmm. I mean, we saw a brand have like 80% increase from Yeah. Wow. Like we’ve seen how brands have crazy things from the try spend to win. Mm. We do recommend it simply because we know it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s super powerful.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. I mean, 80% increase is like, most people would give you their arm. Yeah. It’s like, so like [00:31:00] if you just, if the settling is for just a spin, a win pretty easy. Yeah. That’s pretty, yeah.
Brenden Rawson: Uh, thank you very much for being on, um, on the pod, um, for everybody. Uh, again, zen.co/podcast. Um, you can get this episode and we’ll have a bunch of information, um, as well.
Alright, Shaan, uh, where can people find more about Alia? Yeah, it’s a good question.
Shaan Arora: Um, on our website, Ali Learn, A-L-I-A-L-E-A rrn.com mm-hmm. Best place to find out more about us and, um. I post a lot on LinkedIn. I post a lot of strategies on LinkedIn as well. Mm-hmm. So just, my name is Shaan Aurora on LinkedIn.
I’m, I’m pretty, I, I like to give tactical advice on popups. So always, always sharing tactical stuff there.
Brenden Rawson: Awesome. Fantastic. We’ll put all the links in the description as well. Uh, thanks again. Thank you. Being on the pod. Fantastic. Um, enjoy the rest of the shop talk. Yeah, enjoy.
Shaan Arora: Thanks man.
Brenden Rawson: Um, and can I do a
Shaan Arora: offer plug as well?
Absolutely. Yeah. Like just now is fine. Yeah, yeah. Do it. Yeah. [00:32:00] Yeah. And for when that comes from the podcast, uh, we’ll do 20% off the multi subscription and 30 days free. So huge. Huge. That’s huge. Yeah. If you book a demo with me or you sign up and you just mention that you came from the pod, um. Just tell us that on the demo or if you just sign up yourself.
Yeah. And we’ll do the 20% off in 30 days free. There you go. Nice. If you’re
Jason Anderson: listening to your desk right now while working, go onto the website. Yeah. Right now make use of that offer. The 30 days free, at the very least, you’ll get some split testing done. You’ll get a bunch of data to validate. Um, that is a no brainer.
Do it right now. Totally. I’ll put the
Brenden Rawson: details in.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. All thank you guys very much.