10 Questions Every Shopify Merchant Needs to Ask Ahead of 2025.

Hey everyone. I'm excited to introduce to you a style of episode that we're going to be doing called moments. Now we're still going to be interviewing experts like we normally do. but between those shows, I often want to have these episodes where it's just. And sometimes these will be reflecting on something happening in the market.

Maybe something very relevant at a specific time. Maybe there's some big announcement from Metta on paid advertising, and we just need to dive into it at a certain time. these will be. Just personal episodes, me, you diving into a specific topic. I think they're really important because, you know, at the end of the day, I think the biggest value of a podcast is you build relationships.

It's intimate, it's one on one. And so I'm excited for these. This is moment number one. Okay. So given the time we're at right now, 2025 is right around the corner. I spent some time this morning thinking about. What will it take to be successful in 2025? I know a lot of you listening are probably going to have New Year's resolutions.

Probably a lot of those resolutions are going to be related to your store to grow it in some way, you know, being successful, in e commerce. It's not as complicated as you think. We overcomplicate things as human beings. when you look at some of the best brands out there, they're really doing a few things really, really well, and they don't get distracted.

By the noise, you know, you've probably heard this term kind of like signal versus noise. What's noise and what's true signal of what's relevant and what's signal towards success. And so I want to try to focus on the core things that are going to make you successful in 2025. And what I did was I wrote down.

10 questions. This is 10 questions that I think every e commerce store owner should have an answer to for 2025. So these are not resolutions and specifically goals, but these are questions that if I asked you. You should have an answer to and it's not specifically a right or wrong answer to these but for your brand How do you answer this question?

Okay, and so I have ten questions. I'm going to go through them I'll share some ideas that you maybe want to use for each answer but at the end of the day, there is no right or wrong answer. It's what is your answer? What's important is knowing it really really well But what's dangerous and scary is when you don't have an answer for it.

One of these questions. So let's go through them. I wrote these down. I just literally wrote these down this morning. What I do know is that these questions, if you have a clear answer to them, will make you successful in this next year.

Okay, the first question that you need an answer for is how will you get more quality and relevant traffic in 2025?

So how will you get traffic? More relevant traffic in 2025. Now there's a lot of ways to get traffic. The problem is, is a lot of traffic isn't relevant, you know, and so you can pay for more traffic. It's easy to do that. but how do you get more relevant traffic? And by relevant, I mean people with a higher propensity to buy, you know, Maybe it's through influencers.

Maybe you're finding that, you know, influencer traffic is your most relevant traffic. Maybe it's through referrals. maybe it's through live events. One of the things that I know a lot of brands are focusing on is very long tail PPC paid search, campaigns. So rather than, you know, if you sell hiking boots, focusing on long tail and by long tail, An example, instead of, you know, targeting hiking boots, it's best hiking boots for snow.

That would be a long tail search and really going deep in long tail paid ads. why does that get more qualified traffic? Well, If I'm just targeting hiking boots, I might be getting someone looking for how to repair hiking boots or, how to clean hiking boots or how to dry hiking boots properly.

But, you know, best hiking boots for snow is clearly someone looking for hiking boots to probably purchase, for snow. Another way is, brands are really focusing on going all in on SEO in 2025. Maybe that's a way you want to really improve it. not just going all in on SEO, but improving your search to make it more relevant for people looking to buy.

So, you know, if you sell organic skincare, maybe You haven't come up for search terms like best organic skincare online, or where to buy organic skincare or transactional type search phrases. maybe that's something again, I'm going to list a few here. None of these are. The right answer it's what's the right answer for you.

Okay. So that, you know, the question is, how will you get more quality traffic? Maybe it's running more shopping ads. You know, that that's quality traffic. If someone clicks on a shopping ad versus a text ad, they're probably of the mindset that they're trying to buy. maybe it's partnering with influencers and affiliates.

Maybe you want to double down on your affiliate program this year. Maybe you want to, really. Manage your affiliates better and create affiliate material and campaigns for them. Maybe you want to have A monthly affiliate zoom call where you get all your affiliates in and you educate them on your products.

You give them materials to share. You give them video, you give them content. maybe that's how you want to grow your qualified traffic. social media ads is another great way. If You target things specifically, maybe it's specific platforms. Like TikTok is of course becoming a very much a shopping platform.

Pinterest, I think is still one of the more underrated platforms for shopping intent. YouTube, people always search YouTube for reviews of specific products, running pre roll ads and other types of ads on YouTube are very effective. Maybe that's something, maybe you want to build, Content marketing funnel that you have, with tutorials and comparison guides and things like that to get more qualified traffic.

I actually, one other one I want to throw out is, we're seeing a lot of brands doing localized campaigns. And so. Yes, maybe you sell everywhere in North America, but run your campaigns to target demographics in specific regions. So if you're selling to someone in, Seattle, they're searching for maybe very different type of hiking boots versus someone in Arizona.

And so running ads. Targeted by region and locale, we'll get you definitely more qualified traffic. A lot of different ways. I won't spend too much more time on it, but that's question number one is ask yourself, how will you get more qualified traffic in 2025? Okay. Question number two is how will you convert more of those visitors into shoppers in 2025?

So it's great to get more qualified traffic, but if you've got a leaky bucket of a website, how are you going to convert them into more shoppers? So you should have a goal in your head. How will you convert more of your visitors into shoppers? Now a lot of different ways you can do that. Maybe it's, you want to really focus on optimizing your site speed.

we know that anytime a site loads under three seconds, we see a drastic increase in conversion. Anytime under three seconds, that's kind of the magic number there, but in general, faster is better. Maybe you want to rethink your site navigation. I can't tell you how many sites I go on.

Their navigation makes No sense as far as being optimized for buying, you know, you look at the top menu and it's about us, contact us, affiliate program, community, join this, sign up, there's nothing related to buying, Every single, if you're looking for advice on what your top nav should be, every single thing in your top navigation should be related to buying.

It should be, should have some buying intent. Put your contact us. I don't even have an about us, but if you do put it in the, in the footer or there's other ways to expose that. but the top nav, everything there needs to be buying intent. Okay. So maybe that's one. And I'm not going to go deep into this, but simplifying navigation, mobile optimization is, you know, You'd think in 2025 everyone is mobile optimized, but I can't tell you how many sites I go on.

Yes, their site is mobile friendly, but maybe they have a quiz or a pop up, or they're using some product recommendation tool or something that isn't mobile friendly. How many times have you been on a site and a pop up for an email has popped up but you can't figure out how to close it because the X is up in the top right corner and it's covered or you've got a banner that comes down across the top and then maybe it looks great on desktop but on mobile it's three lines because the text runs into the second and third line and ends up taking a third of the screen on mobile.

So, yes every site is mobile friendly now. But optimize for mobile. it really should be mobile first. maybe that's one way you want to convert more visitors into shopper. maybe it's, high quality images. We're seeing this a lot. Like images matter. At the end of the day, like a website is just a website.

If you've ever looked at a, wireframe of a website, like imagine you went to the Shopify theme store and there was no demo products on the themes. It was just a wireframe. You would, there'd be no way you could tell what theme was better. If it was just a wireframe or a placeholder gray image, that's why the people that sell themes on Shopify know that if they have great product images and great imagery, more people will buy their theme because they think it's a better theme, but really all it is, is images, imagery is everything.

Everything on an e commerce store. It's everything. And in fact, like I would almost go to say like the actual frame work, like the wireframe, like the UX of the site really hardly matters. If you have great product images, great lifestyle photos, you can get away with a really, really crummy website if you have great images.

so maybe that's one way you want to increase a conversion. product descriptions. I think someone right now who is creating great product descriptions with everything going on with AI, there is a lot of junk out there as far as product descriptions go. Yes. It's easy to use AI to write your product descriptions, but if it also does not help you stand out as a brand, it doesn't lean into who you are.

I think the opportunity has never been greater to really be unique when it comes to product descriptions and not just the text, but, think about how you're creating the product description itself. Like using, make sure you use bullet points, make sure you use titles, maybe images within the product descriptions, maybe videos.

Have you ever thought about putting in some social proof or a short testimonial? In the product description itself. So, you know, think a little bit outside the box on product descriptions. Maybe that's something, a lot of other ways you can, increase conversion, thinking about your pricing, offering free shipping, you know, that free shipping is, they say that like 80 percent of shoppers just expect free shipping.

So if you don't have it, you're going to have less conversion. Highlight free returns and refunds. That's a, thing. the list goes on and on. I honestly could speak to this for a long time, but I won't. the question is how will you increase conversion in 2025? What's your answer?

Write it down. Okay. so that's question number two. Question number three, how will you increase average order value in 2025? You need to have an answer for this. Okay, now, getting more traffic is great, increasing conversions is great, but how are you going to get those customers to spend more? So, first thing is, you need to know what your average order value is right now.

I can't tell you how many brands I talk to and I say, what's your average order value? They say, well, it's around 30 bucks. It's around 35 bucks. They don't, they don't know. You should know. It's a simple thing. You should be able to say, My average order value is 34 and 21 cents. Like, that's a report, you can go on Shopify and run it and know it.

Whatever that is, go print that out right now, put it on your wall, if it's 34 and 21 cents. And say, my goal in 2025 is for that to be 38 or 36. It doesn't matter, as long as it's going up. there's a Lot of data out there over 80 percent of customers say they will spend more with brands if given the right opportunity.

So like your customers want to spend more. now there's a lot of different ways you can increase average order value. Upselling and cross selling is a massive opportunity that even if you're, there's a lot of brands that do it, but they're not doing it well.

Upselling is upgrading to a better version of product. So it's like you're, you're buying a coffee maker and it's upgrade to the pro version for only 20 more upgrade to the better version that's cross selling is recommending a complimentary add on. So you're buying the coffee maker. It's like, Would you like to add the, coffee filters or coffee beans to go along with it?

make sure if you have an upselling and a cross selling strategy, like the steps, step one, step two, make sure the products make sense that you're recommending. Maybe you need to use an AI tool to recommend products.

if you don't know what to recommend, it will do it for you. you'd be surprised. Sometimes the best product to recommend actually is the same product. So you're buying a coffee maker and how about add another one for 25 percent off? People have two homes or they have a cabin or they have a friend that might need one or a family member.

Volume discounts are huge. Are you offering volume discounts? Like buy two, get one free 10 percent off. If you spend a hundred dollars or more, save 20 when you buy three together. do you have free shipping thresholds? That's another great way to increase.

So if you know that the average customer is spending, like we said earlier, 34 and 21 cents, set your free shipping threshold at 40. Don't set your free shipping threshold at a hundred dollars. If your average order value is 34. Put it just 5 more or 10 more, and then next year, increase it a little bit more just to get them enough over that line.

bundling products, another big one do you have bundle offers? do you have limited time offers? urgency is a huge psychological reason people make decisions If you go on your site and there's no urgency, and I'm not talking about those cheesy, pop ups that are clearly fake that say offer ends in seven minutes.

And every time you reload the site, it says seven minutes again, but legit urgency offers where, you maybe have a limited number of inventory, but if you're not saying that on the site, what good is it? letting customers know that this is a final offer, or you have a limited number of in stock or the sale ends at a certain time.

Like how many times do you go in a store and you see a sale, but it doesn't say when the sale ends. So, urgency is important. you can offer. Gift cards, or discounts for future purchases. So this is another great way to, increase AOV is, maybe you can't offer free shipping because you sell really large products, but you can say, spend a hundred dollars or more and get a 10 gift card for another purchase, which is also a great way to increase repeat orders, but also a great way to increase average order value.

or you can do something like receive a 20 percent off coupon when you spend 200 or more, These are great ways to increase AOV as well to add on products during checkout, after checkout, you know, we kind of call these like order bumps. So there's upselling and cross selling and then there's in the checkout and, and there's a lot of apps that do this.

bold upsell is another great app that does this, but these order bumps are these kind of like one click add ons. And so we call them add ons, not, necessarily upsells, but it's, you know, you're in the checkout and it's like, Hey, just add this for 9 gift wrapping or warranty or something, something simple and easy and almost mindless to add tier discounts.

I mean, every store probably should have tiered discounts. I can definitely see where it doesn't make sense for some brands, but I would say like three quarters of stores probably should have some type of a tiered discount. You know, spend by X amount, get 10 percent off by this. amount, get, get 15 percent off, whatever.

so the question is, is how will you increase average order value in 2025? What's your answer to that? Okay. That's question number three. Question number four, how will you increase customer referrals in 2025?

Now, Kind of like the last question, this is something that I was actually at a conference at sub summit a couple of years ago. I was giving a keynote and I asked everyone, put up your hand, it was a subscription conference. I asked them put up your hand. If you can tell me the LTV of your subscribers and almost everyone put up their hand I said, okay, well put up your hand.

if you know your churn rate, almost everybody put up their hand. I said, put up your hand. If you can tell me what your referral rate is. Nobody put up their hand not one person in a room of about 150 people knew what their average customer referral rate was.

And so number one is you got to figure it out, know what it is. And it's, it's a, you know, there's a number of ways that you can track it. Like you could have a simple survey. When people buy your product is how did you hear about us? And if referred by friend, you know, you can email existing customers, but like, Whatever it is, it's okay.

But if it's, Like 0. 01, referral rate. That's okay, but figure out what it is because you can't grow anything that you don't measure. And now you're going to know, how are you going to increase that in 2025? So that if you know that the average customer refers 0. 1 other customers, that means, it out of every 10 customers you get, there's one referral.

Okay. So that would be like a 0. if your average customer refers one customer, that means if it's one, it's on average, you know, some customers might refer three, some might refer zero, but on average they refer one, then you have a one. and actually that's the magic number. If you have one or more, what you have is a viral coefficient that will give you that.

like I call it hockey stick growth, where it just kind of keeps going up. So as long as you have, on average customers referring one or more, you will have healthy growth for the rest of your life. I, I, I don't want to go too deep into it, but it's really, really, really important. And what, what's interesting is like, again, at this, at this conference, like nobody knew their number, but if you, if you look at, you know,

You know, I'll put a link to this talk in the show notes because I think it's worth watching. I called it the subscription death curve talk. And it's not just related to subscription brands. It's related to every, even if you sell one time products, if you don't have a healthy referral strategy, you'll almost, Always hit a plateau in growth, where you get to a point where even if you're requiring a hundred customers a month, 10, 000 customers a month, you get to a point where you're losing as many as you're requiring.

And you get to a point where you just can't pay to acquire more customers because you are losing the same amount of customers every month and you flatline. And so the only way to. Break out of that in a healthy growth way is to have a referral strategy.

the key things are you need to make it super easy to refer customers. I think you need to make it exclusive, these Give 10, get 10 discounts don't work. Every single store has a share it with a friend, they get 10 percent off. It needs to be exclusive.

So like when you buy something, you get three coupons or three links that you can share or something exclusive and then three is super valuable. So like, just as an example, I'm just use a skincare, subscription brand. If I signed up for a skincare and I, after I sign up, I see in my customer portal or I get an email saying like, give 10, get 10, or like, if I share it with a friend, they get 10 percent off.

I'm not going to go run out and share that with every friend I know. Like, Hey everyone, great news. You can get 10 percent off the skincare if you use this link. It's there. If someone asks, if someone's like, Hey Jay, you are subscribed to that skin lotion. Do you get any type of a discount if you refer someone?

And I say, Oh yeah, actually I do. Here's my, here's my code. That's probably the only time I'm actually going to use that code. Now, all I'm doing, like that customer was, or my friend was going to buy the skincare anyway, all I'm doing is giving a discount to someone who was going to buy anyway, like there's no point in those.

but now imagine. I sign up and in my customer portal is three offers, like three coupon codes where it says, you can give three coupon codes for someone to get three months free, like something super valuable, or it could be a hundred dollars worth of product, but I'm going to use three months free.

that's super valuable. Like that's not just like give 10, get 10. I have three unique codes in it and maybe it says somewhere in there, we'd love to give you more, but due to the high value of this offer, we are only able to give each. New subscriber, three codes.

So think carefully about who you give them to, and you can give three of these codes to someone and they will get three months completely free of the skincare. So now what am I going to do? I'm going to go, Whoa, okay. Who needs this skincare? And I might think of my friend like John or someone that just, as an example, and oh, you know, John's got kind of like dry skin and eczema, and I might go to him and I might say, Hey John, you know, I know, I know you, you've got,

Dry skin. I just, I, I've been using this skincare lotion. It's great. And I actually have this crazy offer. I can give three people three months for free. Like, are you interested? And John might be like, yeah, I actually, I'm super interested. Okay. Well, here's your code. This gets you three months free. Now, what am I doing?

I'm getting a, a very qualified customer for this subscription brand who is like the ideal customer, cause they have a skin problem. They're, they're. Asking for it. They're not just like, Hey, do you have this coupon? Yeah. Like I'm getting them a new customer. They wouldn't have had any way, but they are asking for it.

It's always a good thing to get someone to like put up their hand and say they want a product. and then of course, this person is probably going to have a much higher LTV lifetime value than anyone else because I've pre qualified them. And I've recommended them myself yes, a recommendation from an influencer is great, but the best recommendation in the world is an intimate friend is someone, you know, like when someone, you know, recommends you a product and says this product has changed my life.

Like I can give you a code that gives you three months free. There's nothing better than that. So now this person is probably more likely to become a, you know, Ambassador and then recommend. More customers than him and it just spirals and snowballs. So, I'll put the link to the talk I did in the show notes.

It actually was one of those ones at sub summit that was supposed to be a 20 minute talk. And after the talk was done, I remember standing on stage for about an hour and there was questions and, Paul from Sub Summit had to actually come in the room and say, okay, we have to shut it down because the next talk is about to start.

That's how much interest there was in this because so many brands just simply are not doing it right. And, you know, when, bottom line is when you look at the impact of increasing Your referral rates. Like if you increase your referral rate, just like 0. 1, the impact that has on your long term revenue from like increasing your conversion on your site by the same amount or increasing the number of your traffic, nothing makes a bigger impact than increasing your referral rate because it's compounding.

how will you increase customer referrals in 2025? So number five, how will you increase repeat orders in 2025? And here's the thing. This is why this is so important.

So if you don't have a strategy to. Increase repeat orders, you're missing out huge. So the average customer who orders something once has a five, roughly a 5 percent chance of returning. So don't celebrate and crack the champagne when you get an order. It really means nothing. They have roughly a 5 percent chance of ever ordering from you again.

But now if you get that customer to order from you, A second time, they now have a 27 percent chance of ordering from you again in the future. Okay. So you just, you didn't just get another order. You increased their chance of ordering again, 27%. Now, if they do order a third time, their chance of ordering again, goes up to 54%.

It goes up each time they place an order. So you're not just getting the revenue from the extra order. You're increasing the likelihood of them ordering again. When people order from you more times, they exponentially have a higher chance of recommending you as well. So like this kind of also helps that last question is how will you get more referrals in 2025?

If you increase repeat orders, you're going to get more referrals just organically, because. They are more, embedded with your brand and your product, and they're a better customer. it's crazy the data on the impact of, getting someone to order a second and a third time.

what are some ways you will increase. Repeat orders in 2025 re engagement emails, better follow up marketing, better loyalty programs, really good customer service, checking in on customers after they, place an order. A lot of different ways, but you need an answer to this.

How will you increase repeat orders in 2025? Write it down. Next question. How will you turn more one time shoppers into subscribers in 2025? Now, I know this one doesn't apply. Everyone listening, but I think it's going to apply to a lot. And the reason why is roughly 75 percent of DTC direct to consumer, e commerce brands have some aspect of subscription or membership billing.

how are you going to turn more one time shoppers into subscribers in 2025? Now, a lot of different strategies. you know, as simple as just reminding them through the buying journey, that they can subscribe. we have tools with bolt subscriptions to like, we call it upselling a subscription.

Like when someone tries to buy something one time, it. Upsells them to a subscription that can pop up, you can do it in the cart, you can do it in the checkout. but at every step of the journey, remind them, cause they quite frankly might've just clicked by one time, defaulting to subscribe.

we've seen stores increase their subscription rate by 20 percent just by defaulting to subscribe. So, you know, on a product page where there's the option for one time or subscription, I don't know about every subscription app, but I do know in ours, it's a setting. You can just go in and you can change it to default to subscription.

So they have to manually, change it to one time, just doing that can increase your subscription rate by 20%. properly timed email follow ups at a time when they might need to reorder is a great way to turn them into subscribers. So like, you know, if you sell a product, protein powder or coffee or whatever it is, and you know that, well, usually people need to reorder this after around 30 days, or maybe it's after 60 days, whatever it is, send an email at.

Around that time saying, Hey, just wanted to check in. how was the coffee? Did you need to reorder? the best way to get our coffee is monthly at your doorstep hassle free. And if you'd like to subscribe, here's a coupon for 50 percent off your first month. People sometimes say, I want to give too big of offers, but you have to understand that if you're a subscription brand, the average subscriber is worth over 400 percent more than a one time customer.

And if you think about how much you spend to get a customer on Instagram, like people are used to spending 50, 60, 70 customer acquisition costs on Instagram, but yet they're not willing to give a 50 coupon to a customer because Oh, that's a 50. So if you just think of it as your CAC, your customer acquisition cost, what, what are you willing to spend on Instagram?

Give that to the customer instead. So you know what, if it costs you 60 to acquire a subscriber on Instagram, give a 60 coupon to that person to subscribe. You can do that in Shopify. There's bulk discount apps. You can do that with it's really Shopify now actually lets you create, coupon codes that.

Only work on subscriptions and they only work on the first month. You can make them only work on the second month. Super, super easy to do. you can do things where when someone subscribes, there's a minimum subscription length.

So you could even do something where like your first month is free, but there's a minimum subscription length of three months or six months or something. So give a really, really valuable offer and time it in an email to activate them as a subscriber. Like make it. Irresistible. maybe you do want to have a minimum subscription length of three months or something, but it's, you know what, they bought the coffee once and, and they're likely to buy it again.

So they might be okay with a three month minimum. So anyways, the question is, how are you going to turn more one time shoppers into subscribers? A lot of different ways to do it, but you need an answer for that. Question seven, how will you increase average subscriber value, in 2025? Now this is often referred To as net dollar retention.

speaking of sub summit. So this last sub summit, I did a talk on this and I actually asked everyone in the audience. I said, who can tell me their net dollar retention rate and not a single person put up their hand. so if you're listening to this right now and you don't know your net dollar retention, don't feel bad.

So net dollar retention. Is there's user churn and there's dollar churn. So if you get a hundred subscribers per, let's just say in a month and you lose 10 of them, you have a 10 percent user churn. Now, if none of those subscribers. Bought anything else or increase their subscription value in any way.

You'd also have a 10 percent dollar churn. So your dollar and your user churn would be the same. But if those subscribers upgraded, added products to their subscription or increased the value of their subscription in any way, you might not have, any dollar churn. In fact, you might have positive net dollar retention, which is you might have a situation where you have 110 percent net dollar retention.

Even though you're churning 10 percent of your customers, if 20 percent of your customers become more valuable by upgrading products, adding on products, you might have a situation where you have 110 percent net dollar retention. So that means for every dollar you get in, It grows 10%, a hundred. So if you have a hundred percent NDR, that means the dollar value of people that join stays exactly the same.

if you have 90% net dollar retention, that means you're losing a little bit. If you have 110%, it actually means you're growing. And this is actually one of the most important metrics to investors. So if you're a brand listening and you ever. Plan on raising money or getting acquired or selling in any kind of way.

They will look at your net dollar retention. they will look at is someone who subscribes becoming more valuable over time. Every single metric that investors look at, you should also track not even if you don't ever plan on selling your business, but you should track these numbers because they're what make a business healthy, like investors want to invest in healthy businesses.

every metric that they would look at should be an important metric for you, even if you don't plan on selling your business, because this means you have a healthy business. Net dollar retention. So how to increase it, you need to have strategies to increase average subscriber value.

So this means once someone is subscribed, how do you increase the value of them? lots of different ways you can do this. You can do this through, email. Upsell add ons, like in bold subscriptions, there's a number of ways, but you can, in the customer portal, have exclusive offers.

Actually. Did you know, 92 percent of subscribers visit the customer portal at least once. It's one of the most valuable pages on a website. if you don't have some type of an exclusive offer in there for your subscribers, you're flat out missing out.

so have some offer in there where as a subscriber with one click, you can just one click add. As many products as you want to your next upcoming order. And they can do it through the front end of their store with what we call express add ons.

So like if you're a subscriber to coffee and I'm shopping on the coffee store, I can with one click, add anything to my upcoming order. In the customer portal, I can also have exclusive offers. So in the customer portal is a great place, in upcoming order emails. So, you know, speaking of the customer portal being a valuable piece of real estate on your site, do you know what one of the most open emails on the entire internet is?

Order confirmation emails. and so yeah, most of them, like they're just plain, your order is about to ship or here's your confirmation for your order. but it's one of the most open emails on the internet. So you can use that email for a lot more than just order confirmation. So for subscriptions, You know, we trigger an email that goes out three days before, or five days before you can do whatever you want.

you can put an upsell in there and say, Hey, your subscription is about to ship out. this month we have an exclusive offer to add, you know, pumpkin spice coffee or some exclusive flavor for 25 percent off one click add. Now, the customer doesn't need to go through checkout because all of their shipping and payment information is stored.

It's just one click and it adds it to the next. upcoming subscription. you're actually doing your subscribers a favor by offering them add ons. So, we saw a recent study that one of our brands did. and they found that 92 percent of their subscribers said that they wished there was more opportunities for monthly add ons.

So your customers want to buy more. So You're not offending them by offering them. That's one of the reasons they subscribe. They subscribe because they think they'll get exclusive offers each month. And so when you don't send them emails and when you don't have offers in their customer portal, and when you don't give them easy ways to add to their subscription, You're actually doing them a disservice because that's something they expect.

And that's something that 92 percent of subscribers say they wished there was more opportunities for. So question number seven is how will you increase average subscriber value in 2025? Question number eight, how will you grow your business? Your email list and SMS list in 2025, you need a strategy for this.

It's not going to just happen. You know, the days of just having pop ups, obviously they'll get some, but really how are you going to grow it even more? this is so important because paid marketing is becoming more and more expensive. Timu and all these other giants are just driving up the cost.

Bottom line is owning your customer relationships has never been more important. So how will you grow? Your email list in 2025, you need an answer for this? Are you going to create some irresistible offer for them to download?

maybe you sell shoes and you've done the ultimate. Guide to, the proper way to stand or to walk or to how, how, how to pick, you know, 90 percent of people pick the wrong type of shoe and it causes lower back pain or something like that. how do you actually pick the right shoes for your feet?

maybe you're adding some gamification or some rewards to signing up. Can you do a quiz? This is a great way to get people to sign up. Do you have any type of a quiz you can do for the products you sell? Like if you sell any type of health and wellness product, can you have a quiz where they answer questions about their lifestyle, how much they move, what do they eat?

what do they do every day that, gives them any type of a report or it could be a recommended product or it could be a download, but something, can you do any type of a quiz where then they enter their email and then it sends it. The answers to their email, great way to get a, email, QR codes.

I think these are super underutilized and add QR, you know, can you add QR codes on your packaging or little inserts in things? So like, you have the email when they place the order. can you, there's other people in the household. Is there ways that QR codes can be utilized to get emails.

And, last one, I'll just say, I did this with a brand the other day and it worked like crazy. You wouldn't believe this is a very simple hack to get more emails, but you know, the pop ups, where it says, enter email to get 10 percent off. Like every site does that. All we did was we added, what's your birthday and shirt size on there as well,

Now we didn't necessarily even say we're sending a shirt. Now we probably will, at some point, but all we did was. you know, enter your email to get 10 percent off. And then there was one more field that says, what's your birthday and what's your shirt size. And we saw a massive increase in conversion on email submissions, just because we asked for their birthday and their shirt size, which is weird because That's extra fields for them to fill out.

People thought, Oh, they're asking for my birthday. They're asking for my shirt size.

Maybe I'm going to get a free shirt on my birthday. ask for a shirt size on a birthday, or, maybe if not a shirt, it could be something else. But put something that kind of insinuates that they might be getting a gift at some point on the email signup, and that will drastically increase it.

How will you grow your email and SMS list in 2025? Number nine, how will you strengthen your brand promise in 2025? this one's a little bit more strategical.

Something that I think is really important. your brand promise is what you promise to be. And also it's saying who you're for and who you're not for this, who you're not for is actually really, really important. And most people don't think about who they're not for. They really just think about who they're for.

But having a crystal clear understanding of who you're not for is just as important. In fact, I would say. to be successful, you could be not for 97 percent of the population. Like if you can just capture 3 percent of the population. That's a massive, massive audience, and you can grow a wildly successful brand, just selling to 3 percent of the total market.

And so if you know that you're not like, if you know that off the bat, it makes it easy saying, no, I don't need to sell to everyone. so what are your brand promises? And I think, I heard this the other day, someone said that there should be three The first one should be measured, and then qualitative.

So if you have three promises of your brand, two of them should be measured and one should be qualitative. So measured might be, we build, I don't know, say you're a razor. we build the highest quality razors. What are you saying? You're saying we aren't cheap. We are not for the 97 percent of people that want the throwaway cheap razors.

We build high quality products. Now measured, you can measure this by the number of returns or the number of positive reviews, or maybe you're where you're. Price point where you fall in the positioning charts. So a lot of different ways you can measure it, but that is definitely measurable to say, we build the highest quality razors that just as an example.

Another one might be, We are a brand connected to the community. And then this is measured by. Number of, community members, or how much do you give back to the community? Or how much do you engage? Or do you host events? maybe another thing might be like, we want to be, the most loved razor blade.

And you, you can measure that. by number of referrals, number of positive reviews, number of, UGC submissions on social media, but there is definitely ways to measure that. Okay. So what. Think about some, some brand promises that you can measure two of them and one that's qualitative.

And so qualitative is tougher to measure. And some examples of this, I just wrote down here that, what, so Samsung there's is inspire the world, create the future. That's a brand promise that is qualitative. Dyson engineering solutions for real problems. Nike, bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.

Lululemon, elevate human potential by helping you feel your best through functional and stylish activewear. Peloton, empowering you to be the best version of yourself. Fitbit, know yourself to improve yourself. So these are all examples of qualitative brand promises. And what's your brand promise?

What is your brand promise in 2020? how will you strengthen it in 2025? So, first you need to know what it is now have two ways that you're going to measure it. One that's qualitative. And how are you going to strengthen that brand promise?

This might be in better messaging. This might be through, through videos. This might be through testimonials. This might be through social proof, a lot of different ways, but how will you strengthen it in 2025? Okay. Last one.

we're already at 40 minutes, but that's okay. This is, this is, I think, really important. And if you get these questions right, you will have a successful 2025. The last question that you need to ask yourself is what is your biggest priority in 2025? What is your single biggest. Priority. And then what are three big numbers that you need to track to hit that?

So there's a lot you're going to do in 2025. And we talked about a lot already. We talked about increasing AOV. We talked about getting more referrals. We talked about increasing average subscriber value, more traffic, but what is your single biggest priority that if you had to put something up on the wall that you want everyone to rally around, and if you have people at your company that they set goals that align with that priority.

What do you need to do every day, every week to make it better? write it down, get it on a single page. You know, there's so many things you can do. You can't do everything. Well, you can't do 20 things well in 2025, but what is the biggest priority? It's your theme for the year.

Maybe it's we want to improve our onboarding experience. We want to have faster time to value, of our products. for an e commerce brand, onboarding actually is a great example too.

we want to improve the purchase and buying experience and onboarding someone from a random shopper to a long term customer. And we're, you know, we're going to do that through, through better emails, better engagement, better, strategies that, Teach them, give them knowledge about the products that they buy, like understanding the value of products, that perceived value.

so I don't know, like what is your big priority in 2025? And then what are three numbers that you're going to track that align with that? I heard this term. The other day, someone said, are you a crafter or are you pro? And really hit me that if you're a crafter, you, you love doing what you do.

Like you might love the products you sell that you're creating, but if someone said, what's your key goal for 2025 and what numbers are you tracking to hit that? And you have no idea what your numbers are. You're just a crafter. You're not, you haven't turned pro. I think 2025 really tried to think, what do I need to track that?

If someone said, what's your big, what's your biggest priority in 2025? And how are you tracking it? well, my biggest priority is this, and these are my three key numbers I need to hit. And so like for us. saying that onboarding is a big focus. So one of our key numbers is activation. Activation is when someone installs an app and then they activate.

activate means they come off of trial and they become a paid user. And we know exactly what it is for each app. We know exactly what we're trying to do to improve it. Often it's. How fast can it get set up? Can we automate some of the onboarding? Can we have better onboarding emails, better tutorials?

Can we make it simpler in a lot of ways? And if 41% of people that install an app activate, how do we get that to 47% or 49%? So if the number of. People that buy a product, what percent buy a second one, what percent refer someone know those numbers intimately. So I'm not going to say what they need to be, but think about what are the three key numbers that you need to track.

That align with your biggest priority. you should be able to rattle those numbers off, track them every single day, keep score. It's a scoreboard. imagine playing a basketball game and they're not being a scoreboard and you just play for a couple hours. And at the end, they tell you if you want to lose, you need to know at.

Every second of the game, if you're winning or losing. so don't just track these and look at them once a month, look at them every single day. And yes, I think some people will tell you that that can be distracting. I disagree if. It's all in how you look at it. If you're looking at it and you're getting overly high, if it's up or overly down, if it's down, yes, it can be distracting.

So you have to have the right perspective when you look at it. same thing at a sports game. Like if you look up at the score and you're down by five or up by five, my coaches would always say never too high, never too low, never too high, never too low.

we're playing a battle, keep fighting, but it's important that we know the score. And so, never too high, never too low, but know your score, check it every day. once you have these three, key numbers that you need to drive to hit your goal, are your most talented and most expensive people at your company working on those numbers to help them go up into the right?

Is your calendar aligned around those numbers? Like if I looked at your calendar, do you have meetings? About increasing those numbers. Are you creating time to grow those numbers? review those numbers, strategies around those numbers. Like everything should be aligned around those numbers.

So don't just create those numbers and go, okay, I got my three numbers. Now I'm going to track them and see if they go up. Your key people at your company should be focused on those numbers. If you're saying this is our biggest priority, and these are the numbers that we're going to. Track to get to that priority.

I should have the most, and maybe that most important person is you. and I should look at your calendar and I should be able to see like, Oh yeah, I can tell by this calendar that this is what they're focused on. So, those are the 10 questions. I'm going to read them out real quick here again.

So, write these down and write an answer to them and follow through and you will have A great 2025. the first question is how will you get more quality traffic in 2025? Number two, how will you convert more visitors into shoppers in 2025? Have an answer for that. Number three, how will you increase your average order value in 2025?

Talked about a lot of ones for that, but answer that. Number four, how will you increase customer referrals in 2025? Number five, how will you increase repeat orders? Number six, how will you turn more one time shoppers into subscribers in 2025? Number seven, how will you increase average subscriber value in 2025?

Number eight, How will you grow your email and SMS list in 2025? Number nine, how will you strengthen your brand promises in 2025? And the last, what is your biggest priority for 2025? And what are the three big numbers you need to track? That's it. thanks so much for being a part of this episode.

I just wish you the absolute best in 2025. it's going to be a great year. stay tuned. There's going to be another episode coming up where I've got my, predictions of what the trends are for 2025 and what's hot. What's not, what's noise and what signal and what you should be focused on. And, that might be helpful in relation to some of these questions.

Thanks. that will most likely be out tomorrow or, within a day or two. so make sure you subscribe. you'll get a notification as soon as that's live. in general, great to subscribe to the show. So anytime there's a new episode, you get notification. Last thing. if this is valuable to you and hopefully it is, if you listen to this point, it probably is valuable.

would you mind leaving a positive review? wherever you listen to this on Spotify or Apple, as you know, this is a relatively new podcast. We're really focused on helping Shopify brands be the absolute best they can be. reviews are what help us get recognized. So if you would take two seconds and just go in and leave a positive review and a comment would be great.

Tell us why you love the show. Tell us what you got out of it. we're going to start reading these reviews on air, each week. So that's all for now. Wish you the best in 2025. Thanks so much, everyone. Talk soon.