Northern Comfort

04/11/2022

Hello everyone! Hope you're all well. Three things:

1. How To Make Money From Your Website; the online course has been launched. It's aimed at early stage D2C websites, or new builds and will make your website much better. An MOT for your website. You can find it here: https://robdobson.co/the-course. If you use code FIFTYOFF you get 50% off the first month.

2. If you're not bothered about that, I've a newsletter you can sign up to on the site above that gives you free advice each week.

3. Finally if none of that is interesting for you, then take a look at this other newsletter I do, which is nothing to do with websites and all about other stuff I like. You might like it too:

https://attemptstomaintainsanity.substack.com

A irregular publication about things of interest which are not also terrible. Click to read Attempts to maintain sanity are ongoing, by Rob Dobson, a Substack publication. Launched a year ago.

07/06/2022

Workbooks being posted!

20/05/2022

We don't understand prices as rationally as we think we do. Here are five weird things which are proven to make a difference.

17/05/2022

A study in 2010 looked at 1,200 companies to see what would most improve profits: a 1% increase in price; 1% improvement in unit sales; or dropping costs by 1%.

Which do you think won?

A 1% increase in price won, with a resultant 11% increase in profit.

On average, increasing price by 9.1% caused a doubling of profit; the equivalent of improving sales by 27%.

Remember this when offering 10% for a newsletter sign up.

10/05/2022

Hello - about six months ago I started to write a one-pager about how D2C F&B founders could improve their conversion rate and, more importantly, profits on their site.

This turned into a 130 page book, and is finally available to buy. It's been worked through by other D2C founders who've made more money from it. If you buy it, you get lifetime updates and a money-back guarantee if your conversion rates don't rise.

Here's the link to buy now, or get the first section free:

Conservatively, 20-30%. That’s 30% more income, each month. This seems a lot, so let’s make it feel more achievable. First, let’s make it clear what we’re talking about. If your conversion rate is currently 2%, a 25% increase will make it 2.5%. So if you were previously getting 4 out of ever...

27/04/2022

I've written a book on CRO for small businesses/D2C brands. It'll be out next week. In the meantime, each week I'm going to pick a book I'm reading and draw out three interesting parts of it, and see how we can link that to websites (or just life). Here's todays:

From Eric J Johnson's wonderful book "The Elements of Choice":

"What we say we prefer depends upon what we recall. Sometimes we think we know what we want, but often we are faced with a situation that is not exactly like anything we have dealt with before. In these cases, we consult our memory to see how we might feel about the options based on our most relevant experiences. I call these memories, and the feelings they conjure up, assembled preferences. You might think that choice is about knowing what is desirable and then locating it. In fact, the hard part is often deciding what we want. To do that, we review our experiences to retrieve relevant memories."

This is important when considering how to design a website to sell D2C. Customers may be unaware of your product, in which case they will consult their memory to find one which is relevant to this situation, and use that to draw comparisons against your product.

You should help guide them in this, and steer them towards which things in their memory they should be drawing comparisons from. For instance, we worked with a real estate company, and in rental it's hard for people to draw on immediate experiences of another apartment to create a comparison and understand what constitutes value or not. What makes an apartment worth £2k a month rather than £2.2k? Or £1k? So rather than sell the apartment, we made a feature of the elements in the apartment - high end furniture and appliances - things which people *knew* were good or bad, based on their experience. In this way the conversion rates of the page we tested on increased by 50%.

04/04/2020

Just a repetition from earlier - if you're currently running a small bricks and mortar business and have to move to a web one asap because of this awful situation - email me at [email protected] and my team and I will help you for free to do that. Or if you've currently got a website but something needs sorting to do it, shout.

16/09/2019

A 44% increase in conversions. Last week we made a small change to a client's website, after a bunch of research and A/B testing. They then had the highest performing week ever, despite traffic going down. Get in touch if you want to see if we can get more value from your website.

24/06/2019