Leader Spotlight: Boosting conversion rate optimization, with Josh Patrick

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Josh Patrick is Director of DTC Sales at United Wheels, Inc. He has a vast background in finance, retail, software engineering, and marketing. Josh owned his own consultancy and also worked as a freelance web developer for many years. Before his current role at United Wheels, he served in various roles within web development and ecommerce at Range USA.

In our conversation, Josh talks about effective conversion rate optimization (CRO) techniques, such as adding trust builders and safety and security measures. He shares examples of when he and his team successfully removed friction within the customer journey at United Wheels, as well as what it means to understand buyers throughout the entire lifecycle.

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The evolution of bike brands

To get started, could you give us an overview of United Wheels?

United Wheels is the parent company of household-name bicycle brands like Huffy, which is essentially our entry-level brand. We have a large portfolio — some of our bikes are sold at bicycle shops and big box stores, but we sell all of our products to consumers directly.

We also own Batch Bicycles, which are high-quality yet affordable bikes, Niner Bikes, which is a high-end brand of mountain and gravel bikes with 29-inch wheels, and Buzz Bikes, our eBike brand. Much of our manufacturing is vertically integrated, so we also control our entire supply chain from design to distribution. We put more kids and adults on bike seats than any other bike company in the United States

Huffy was established over a century ago. Can you talk about how your product suite has evolved to meet changing needs?

We’ve been around for over 130 years, with over a century of expertise within the wheeled goods industry. People from the ’70s and ’80s often remember our banana seat bikes. Even though younger folks don’t typically recognize Huffy, they often remember having one of our Marvel or Disney Princess bikes..

In recent years consumers have discovered the joy of ebikes, and we continue to cultivate innovation at the forefront of this new category. This new technology has allowed us to welcome a whole new segment of riders that might have been previously limited by mobility or range.

Huffy has also recently returned to BMX after a long absence from the sport, sponsoring BMX freestyle rider and former Olympian Nick Bruce, nine-year-old BMX freestyle prodigy Huck Kurinsky, and BMX racer Carly Kane.

Understanding and appreciating how different riders and demographics use our products is critical to our success, from those seeking a leisurely weekend ride with their kids to commuters and cycling enthusiasts. To that end, the conversations we can have with our riders and the zero-party data they provide via our DTC efforts help us deliver better solutions to their specific needs.

How CRO combines psychology and data science

You’ve described yourself as someone who enjoys constant challenges. Are there any specific CRO techniques that you’ve found particularly effective in your work?

CRO is by far my favorite discipline within ecommerce. It’s a combination of psychology and data science. It’s best to start by applying industry best practices, which means using techniques that are inherently effective, or very likely to be effective, based on what we already know about human psychology. For example, we were able to triple on-site email collection just by implementing industry best practices. A few simple changes can make a huge difference.

After that, I recommend researching your actual users to identify, diagnose, and remove areas of friction. There could be issues with the headings, callouts, microcopy, merchandising, or even something that might seem very insignificant like the order of the credit card number, CVV, and expiration date fields. All it takes is a little confusion, complexity, lack of trust, or on/off-screen distraction to lose a person’s attention.

Do you have an example you could share of a time when best practices drove significant improvements?

Sure. The smallest changes often make the biggest difference once they’ve been compounded. I’ve actually found that the tricks that work for big retailers such as Amazon will work for most other businesses too.

For instance, in one of our recent projects, the greatest fall-off for users occurred at the shopping cart. We were able to improve the conversion rate by 60 percent by introducing some of the patterns that our primary demographic was experiencing on other websites they frequented.

The key changes included adding trust builders and other safety and security measures, transitioning to a one-page checkout experience, and removing the need to log in.

What’s your stance on the color of submit buttons? Using bright buttons was sort of the rage for a while, but now some folks say that it doesn’t have much of an impact. In your experience, what matters?

It really is situational. For example, it’s generally considered best practice to avoid yellow, orange, and red because they’re reserved for warnings and destructive actions, but yet Home Depot does very well with orange.

There’s a cultural aspect too. For example, the color red has a different connotation culturally in different parts of the world.

Ultimately, design is about context. It depends on the audience and the composition of the design overall. There are so many nuances at play, so these are all great things to A/B test.

Bridging the gap between functions

In your role, you work with a variety of functions. Could you talk about that from a leadership standpoint? Are there any practices that you’ve found especially effective for promoting cross-functional collaboration?

Often, especially with ecommerce and DTC, companies don’t know how to organize their teams. They don’t know if the development team should report to IT for independence. In particular, I’ve noticed that if the development team is paired with IT, they’re very reactive instead of proactive, which isn’t great because IT doesn’t typically drive business. It’s the same thing with digital marketing and brand marketing — the customer experience suffers if the machine is disjointed in any way.

I pride myself on being able to bridge the gap between various disciplines because of my programming, business, and marketing experience. I’ve had a lot of success in being able to manage both the technology side as well as the marketing side. If there’s a new feature, I’m more able to convince developers what they need to do or why they need to do it. And because I’m able to own the customer experience, I’ve enabled developers to feel the problems experienced by the business, be creative, and collaborate with the marketers to find the best technology solution out there.

We’ve also put project management procedures in place. If there’s a new feature desired by one of our stakeholders, it gets debated in a monthly meeting with all of the department heads where they get to agree on what’s important. The transparency and context that our stakeholders get from this enables us to prioritize and understand why some of their concerns can’t be addressed right away. This approach also prevents all of the back-and-forth communication that would otherwise occur.

What’s your process for collecting customer feedback on the DTC side of the business?

We use a tool called Digioh that generates interactive modules — from simple email address collectors to quizzes that drive product recommendations. The quizzes glean really important customer data for us.

For example, if someone is taking our bike finder quiz and they specify that they’re shopping for a children’s bike, we can say, “Are you looking for a character bike, like Spider-Man?” We can actually learn which buying process they’re in and give them a much better set of results, reducing analysis paralysis and decision fatigue.

Removing friction to increase conversion

You’ve worked to remove friction from the bike-buying process. Is there an example you could share?

Something that I’m particularly proud of is the fact that we translated kids’ inseam sizes into a friendlier, more understandable unit of measurement. When I first joined, I was evaluating our bike quiz and bike finder tools. All of the bike sizing recommendation charts mention kids’ inseams as a way to figure out which bike a customer should buy.

I’ve got four kids and I barely know what my own inseam is. So, I went through and started translating those inseams into kids’ sizes because though I can’t tell you each of my kid’s inseams, I can tell you what size clothes they wear. With that new translation, we found that we reduced a lot of that friction.

An added benefit of having this information is that in a year or two when the kid has grown too big for the bike, we can be there for customers at just the right time and help them on the next part of their journey.

That’s a great example. Are there certain tools or metrics that you tend to lean on when you’re analyzing the performance of certain conversion strategies?

As far as metrics are concerned, we look very closely at straight-up conversion to evaluate our performance. In terms of tools, we mostly track conversions using our own data because of the way that online privacy has changed in recent years. For example, if third-party cookies are suppressed by users, it can be problematic to not have data on a third of your traffic, so we try to use our in-house tools and data where possible and are making strides toward service-side tracking.

For instance, because the email open rate metric has become very skewed due to privacy technology, we’ve been comparing the number of clicks to the number of unsubscribes. We call this metric email risk, and it gives us an idea of how well the content and messaging are resonating with consumers. We’re always looking for new tools, metrics, and ways to acquire insights.

Understanding buyers through the entire customer journey

A bike could certainly be a repeat purchase, especially if you have children. However, it’s not something that you’d be purchasing every month. Do you find that there is a percentage of consumers that initially engage with the emails, but then unsubscribe when that annual purchase is finished?

Absolutely. The key is understanding which consumers are hyperfans. Hyperfans are ultra-engaged consumers who are the brand’s best evangelists. This is where most of your business comes from, especially if you sell hobbyist or enthusiast products.

I think most of us are familiar with the 80/20 rule. Well, when it comes to ecommerce, I’ve found that it’s more like 95/5, where 5 percent of your hyperfans drive 95 percent of your business objectives.

As an example, with Buzz Bikes, customers receive helpful maintenance reminders in three or six months. We also write articles on our blog like, “What are the best snacks to take on the trail?” This helps us to stay relevant in that 5 percent’s everyday life so that when purchase time comes around again, they’re still eager to repurchase from us. As a result, it’s OK if the other 95 percent isn’t as eager.

As you reflect on your career journey, how would you say that your experiences have influenced the way that you think about the customer’s journey and customer value overall?

I have a background in finance, retail, and marketing. I was also a programmer for about 15 years. To lead a successful ecommerce site means to understand technology, business, customer service, and psychology. All of those things combined have helped me to better understand buyers throughout their whole customer journey.

I’ve also owned a couple of businesses, so I have an entrepreneurial spirit that enables me to embrace challenges, see obstacles as opportunities to drive customer value, and enables me to direct diverse teams of professionals.

I frequently talk about value exchange with my teams. When we ask for customer data, like an email address, or engagement, like a follow on social media, we need to be sure that our offerings are a reasonable exchange of value in the customer’s mind. Is your discount offer enough to “buy” space in your customer’s inbox? Do you offer content on social channels that enlightens and entertains, and therefore justifies the room you’re occupying in a customer’s feed? We have to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes.

As a lifelong learner. I enjoy getting obsessed with something, learning about it, and trying to master it. That being said, I don’t think there’s actually such a thing as “mastery” within this space because there’s always something new to learn. A website is an iterative thing, for example — it’s never finished. That’s all part of the fun though.