How to Fix Invisible Conversion Problems | #619

Most ecommerce conversion work targets the same moment: the customer who is already close to buying. But the most expensive conversion problems happen before anyone adds anything to cart.

That customer doesn't show up in your abandoned cart report. They just don't show up.

In today's Playbook: 

• Your real conversion barrier is probably invisible to you
• The best experience investments solve a functional and emotional problem at the same time
• The data you collect through the experience is worth more than any third-party signal you're buying
  
  Connect with Chloe De Winter 
  Explore Nala

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Transcript

Nala’s Fit Guide Origin Story<br>

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Most of what I see e-commerce teams spending their energy on targets the same part of the funnel. It's usually the checkout, the abandoned cart sequence, the free shipping trigger, all of it is aimed at the customer who is already close to buying, trying to extract a little bit more conversion out of what is already there. And that is really important, and it will always be important. But there's a category of conversion problems that barely anyone is looking for because they don't show up where we look. This is the customer that bounced before adding to cart, not because the checkout was confusing, but because they couldn't work out their size, because they couldn't find a body like theirs on the website. Because the product they needed was technically available, but practically impossible to buy and to buy with any confidence. That customer doesn't appear in your abandoned cart report. They just don't show up. And the brands that are building around the invisible friction are capturing customers that their competitors don't even know they are missing. Chloe DeWinter is the co-founder of Nala, an Australian underwear brand operating in one of the most technically complex categories in e-commerce. Dozens of sizes per style, a product that most people have historically needed to try on before buying, and a customer that's been underserved by almost every other brand in the market. Rather than treating that complexity as something to manage, Nala built their fit guide around it. 100 photographed bodies across every size, shape, and lifestyle designed to answer the single question stopping their customers from buying. Let's get into it. Tell our audience, I'd love for you to recap how you came up with that because I know fitment and size charts are the bane of most retailers' existence. You have taken it a thousand steps further.

Recruiting 100 Bodies For Representation<br>

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Yeah, we have. So before we launched, we knew the biggest challenge for us was doing an e-commerce where we sell brows and underwear online because so many people would never buy a brow online. They have no idea what size they are, firstly. And all their boobs have changed size, they've changed, they've gained weight, they've lost weight, they don't know what size they are anymore, they've had a baby, they got sick, whatever it is, no one really knows. We knew that would be our biggest barrier. And we wanted to try and come up with a creative way for people to understand what their size was to then convert them into sales, really. So we came up with this idea of our fit guide, our online fit guide. And if you go onto our website and go to fit guide, you'll be presented now with images of 100 bare naked chests and breasts. So just a lot of boobs, all different sizes, shapes, types, experiences. And what you can do is you can find a body that looks like your own. You can click on that body, and then you see that person in two Nala products that will suit that person's body. So we just wanted this to be and to just to break down another barrier to entry to buying online. And it's been really, it was really cool. I mean, we redid it last year as well, middle of the year, because at first we only had about 30 bodies, but we shot that before we even launched. So finding 30 people to essentially pose douche for a brand that doesn't exist was quite a challenge. I really felt strongly that we didn't have enough representation of people. So we reshot it with 100 people last year, which was a huge logistical challenge, but we got it.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

How do you get 100 people to go, hey, we want to show you boobs online? Can you come and be part of our boob guide?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

I know, I know. I think it's harder before you're a brand. Like kudos to the 30 initial volunteers who put their hand up. But then I think people, our customer really connects with the brand now. They love the brand, they love what we're about. So when we put the call out out there, we just put it out to our customers and said, hey, who wants to be part of this? And we just, yeah, we just recruited people based on our existing network and customer base, which was really cool.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

It's incredible. It's because you do have such a big representation of different body types, different people. You've got old, you've got young, you've got black, white, people who've had massectomies, LGBTQ, I community, like you've, you know, a really great range there. Have you had any feedback from people who might have felt not represented previously?

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Yeah, we did. We did. Initially, when we did the fit guide, and we only had about 30, I think it was 33 in the end bodies on there, we got that feedback a lot. We had people, we had customers reach out to be like, hey, I love the idea here, but I don't see my body. So when we redid it, we were really strategic about making sure we had representation of all different, not just body sizes, body shapes, but also things like exactly what you said. So women who have had mastectomies, who had had reconstructions, but also women who had had mastectomies but hadn't had reconstructions, breastfeeding, mom's pregnancy, all different types of bodies. And since that, we've had amazing feedback. I've got to say, it's been very heartwarming. Even just recently, a few weeks ago, I saw someone who has had a double mastectomy because she has the brackagene, and she said that she had never before seen boobs like hers online represented and how much she appreciated and felt seen by seeing a body like hers online, which was really cool.

Personalisation And First Party Data<br>

SPEAKER_01 5:29

That's very cool. And from a commercial perspective, that's all nice and would obviously make you feel very good and experience that people are represented. Do you notice that since the evolution of your Fitman got has it impacted conversion rate?

SPEAKER_00 5:43

That is something I should definitely look into. Look, I think it it would help us in terms of the data that we collect about our customers. So if I know that you're on there and you're a certain size, I know that certain products are going to be better for you. So it means that we can collect, I mean, we collect the data when someone clicks on certain sizes and what they buy. It means that we can then build out funnels that recommend different products to them. We know if they're looking solely at breastfeeding maternity bras on the fit guide, we know that we can recommend those products to them. It also means like we can potentially make a prediction that in a certain amount of time maybe they're not breastfeeding anymore. We could ask them that question and then recommend new products to them as well. So it just helps us get more data on our customers really and personalize our approach then to our sales down the track.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

How do you personalize that online experience? Are you using a tool to collect and personalize that data online or are you doing that natively?

SPEAKER_00 6:38

I'm not the website ex the data collection expert, but I'm pretty sure we just do it through Clay View.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Yeah, great. So that's that journey that's set up then to help take people on that journey via email.

Three Takeaways On Invisible Barriers<br>

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Correct. Yeah, it's all done through email email, exactly. Yeah, it just puts them into a new funnel and they just go through a new funnel.

Where To Start Fixing Friction<br>

Join The Community And Closing<br>

Sponsor Story Convert Digital

SPEAKER_01 6:55

What Chloe built here isn't just a sizing chart. It's what happens when you treat your biggest barrier to purchase as the most important design problem in the business. Here are three things worth taking back into your business from what Chloe was talking about. Number one, your real conversion barrier is probably invisible to you. Most conversion work targets the same part of the funnel. The cart, the checkout, the moment a customer is already really close to buying, but the most expensive conversion problems, they happen before any of that. This is the customer who hesitated over sizing and just left. The one who looked for a body like theirs and didn't find one. None of that appears in your abandoned cart report. It shows up as a slightly lower conversion rate where your team probably spends months trying to explain or guess at. The team at Humi built their business around exactly this. Andy Evans joined me and told me how they created a mystery shopping platform because standard analytics miss the moments that actually matter. Two examples worth mentioning here again. Number one, a US brand was running paid acquisition in Australia, but they had no idea that half their shoppers were building full carts and abandoning at a pop-up, telling them that the brand didn't ship here. The other was a retailer whose site search returned zero results when customers typed in the apostrophe in the word Levi's. Easy to miss, right? Neither problem was visible in any analytics dashboard, but both were found only through a simulation of actual customer behavior. Your analytics tell you where customers leave. They almost certainly never tell you why they leave. Number two, the best experience investments do two jobs at once. The fit guide that Chloe talked about solves two things simultaneously. It's a practical problem that customers don't know their bra size, so they just don't buy. But it's also an emotional one. You belong here, whatever your body looks like. Those aren't separate outcomes, and they're part of the same investment here. Most brands treat functional and emotional serving of the customer as a trade-off. You fix the checkout or you fix the brand. Chloe's approach refuses that. The thing that removes the sizing barrier is also the thing that makes the customer feel seen. And the customer who feels seen doesn't just convert once. The clearest commercial case for this is jam the label. Emma Clegg and Molly Rogers built a clothing brand specifically for people with disabilities. It's a customer representing around 15% of the global population and is excluded from almost every fashion brand in the market. Their argument was really direct. When you design for a customer who has never been served by your industry, the community that forms from that is unlike anything you can do with a campaign. They advocate, they return, they protect the brand because they feel incentivized to, because the experience earned it, because you cared for them. Number three, the data from the experience you built is worth more than any third-party signal that you might be buying. There is definitely a commercial layer to the fit guide that Chloe mentions, and she mentions it almost in passing. Once a customer clicks on a body that looks like theirs, Nala knows a lot about them, their size, their life stage, what they're likely to need next. Someone browsing maternity bras goes into a clavio flow that tracks their journey and transitions them when their stage changes. The experience is the data collection, not a step that comes after it. The same instincts sit behind the style profile that Jane Kay built with the wonderful team over at Bird's Nest. Customers are asked about their favorite colors, body shape, and what they would and wouldn't wear. It's built deliberately as a first-party data foundation. Jane admits that we had all this great data and now we finally have the tools to do something with it. Data collected through an experience your customer actively chooses to engage with is more durable than anything an algorithm can infer from browsing behavior. The brands building this through experiences that people actually want are creating something that gets harder to replicate the longer they run it. It becomes a bit of a moat. Chloe didn't build the fit guide to win a design award. She built it because buying a bra online in a size most brands don't even stock was nearly impossible for most of her customers. The experience came from solving a real problem. The emotional connection and the data collection followed from that. The starting points for most brands is simpler than a hundred-body photo shoot. Don't start there. Pick the product with the lowest conversion relative to traffic and ask honestly, what is stopping someone from buying this? Not at the checkout, but before that. What do they not know? What can they not picture? Fix that first. You might have to speak to some customers. The customer who never made it to checkout didn't abandon anything. They just never showed up. And that is a huge problem worth solving. If you want to dig into where your own invisible barriers might be or how other operators are building experiences that do this work, that conversation is happening in the add to cart community every day. You can join for free over at addocart.com.au. That is the playbook for this week. I'll see you next Friday. 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