Welcome to the first installment of our new Q&A series: 5 Questions. For our first interview, we sat down with Rebuy Agency Partner and Co-Founder of Electric Eye Agency, Chase Clymer.

Electric Eye is a group of Shopify Experts passionate about growing your business. They use their expertise in strategic design, development, and marketing, to maximize sales for Shopify merchants. Electric Eye leverages platforms like Shopify Plus, Postscript, and Facebook to give your Shopify store exactly what it needs to thrive.

Q1: What is your process for increasing sales for Shopify merchants?

Chase Clymer: The first step is always strategy. We need to do a lot of discovery. We’re going to look under every rock. We're going to look into every nook and cranny to figure out what's going on with the business now, figuring out what's working, what’s not working, and formulate a plan.

The next step would be to use that plan to optimize all the bad stuff. We're going to narrow the focus based on your KPIs. We will agree on the numbers we care about—the levers we’re going to pull. And we’ll make them better.

Once we fix any issues and improve any processes, we move on to the final step - scaling the business. A lot of that is going to be in the form of paid ads or paid media. But oftentimes, it could be even more strategic marketing initiatives through email or SMS.

After that, we can repeat the process. Everything can always be improved. We’re usually around for the long haul with ongoing strategy, optimization, and management.

Q2: What are 3 things Shopify merchants can do today to maximize ROI?

Chase Clymer: First, really look at your user experience and conversion rate. Really optimize the journey from homepage to collection page to product to cart. All that needs to be seamless. It needs to make sense.

"Exclude people who should NOT see your ad, and then it will show to more people that should. Your cost is going to go down. And any time your cost goes down, your return goes up."

Next, a lot of people don’t look at exclusion audiences when they’re doing ads. An easy one is excluding people that just bought something. They’re not going to buy again. I've seen menswear brands advertising to everybody. It’s like, women shouldn't see this unless it’s offered specifically as a gift. I’ve seen people advertising internationally and not offering international shipping. Exclude people who should not see your ad, and then it will show to more people that should. And then, your cost is going to go down. And any time your cost goes down, your return goes up.

Another KPI to focus on—and honestly, the hardest to improve—would be average order value (AOV). If you’re spending $10 on ads and people are buying a $50 item, you’ve made a 5x return. Invest time strategizing on your bundling, your upsells, and your cross-sells, with your popular products. You need to figure out a working system there. You need to make it seamless. It should be part of the flow. Don’t make it clunky. That breaks the user experience.

Q3: Tell us about a project you’re working on now.

Chase Clymer: We're working on extremely fast mobile-optimized websites for our clients. We’re about to launch one for a historic body-building brand. They had a documentary on Netflix. The owner of the gym is famous in that world. I’m not going to say who it is but if you visit our website by the time this piece comes out, there will probably be a case study. But that was a super fun project.

"We’re trying to help the customer give you money faster."

Fun projects for us are working with older brands, older companies. They've got a product-market fit. They've got a fan base that’s ravenous. And they have an underperforming website—one that is just a bad user experience [laughs].

We like to imagine what could happen if you were doing things right! And that's where we come into play. At the end of the day, we’re trying to help the customer give you money faster. Once we do that, it’s just an explosion. And it’s awesome.

Q4: What are you reading these days?

Chase Clymer: This one’s fun. I’m reading a weird book right now. It’s called “It’s Not About Me: Top 10 Techniques for Building Quick Rapport With Anyone” by Robin Dreeke. It’s terribly written [laughs]. There’s a bunch of grammatical errors. But, someone tweeted that this book really helped them with sales. It came one day with Amazon. I’m halfway through it. It’s like 100 pages. But essentially, it’s 10 techniques for building rapport with anyone, which is really helpful in sales.

Q5: You've got a lot going on. How do you get it all done?

Chase Clymer: You gotta get a budget for VAs (virtual assistants). I’ve got four. I’ve got one that does outreach that reaches out to brands to get them on as guests for the podcast. She's actually about to start doing outreach to get me on other peoples' podcasts, too. So I’ve got a VA strictly for outreach. And then I've got one that does all of the audio and video editing for the podcast. Then I’ve got two VAs that work on all of the content and scheduling.

"Tell them what the end goal is. Delegate the outcome."

When it comes to talking about VAs, I got to point out that it’s all about your system. You can’t hire a VA to build your system. You have to build the system first and it needs to work. And then you have to help train the VA. Because if you hire a VA and it fails, most of the time it’s your fault. It is never the person’s fault that you’re hiring. It’s, you were bad at delegating. You were bad at explaining things. Tell them what the end goal is. Delegate the outcome. Be like, “Hey, I want a podcast up every week, and these are the things I want, and here's a system that I built. We can work with it and change it if you think there are better things to do.”

But yeah, I started with one VA forever ago when we started doing the podcast. When we started doing more episodes and more content, we started adding more people in. And actually, just in the fall of last year, added the fourth for outreach. I believe, collectively, they do about 40 hours per week of work.

Listen to Chase Clymer interview a guest every week on the Honest Ecommerce Podcast. If you think Electric Eye might be a good fit to work with your brand, give them a shout at electriceye.io.

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