Happy Monday newsletter friends,

The last 48 hours have been a whirlwind of emotions for everyone and I hope you can hold your loved ones extra close tonight. There is no place in the world for the violent hate that we’ve seen across our timelines and I pray for better times to come to our Israeli friends.

My good friend Eli Weiss and his family put together this GoFundMe for the Israeli troops to purchase portable phone chargers for the soldiers. Many of the soldiers do not have access to electricity and are unable to charge their phones and reach their loved ones to keep them updated on their safety.

It’s a small part of what we can do to help but they are planning to organize a shipment of portable chargers and other cables to them. I’m sharing with my audience as every dollar counts.

Shifting gears here our company has been full force onboarding a new performance & email agency in the past few days and we’re going full steam ahead for the biggest holiday in company history.

I don’t know if you know Gonçalo Pimentel from Rise, but they’ve graciously decided to sponsor this newsletter after spending the past two weeks together getting CROSSNET & Good Sport’s website right for BFCM. He’s a wizard in fixing site speed, optimizing our site, and getting rid of any unnecessary script and I’m so damn impressed. They improved our site speed by 25 seconds!

If you know me I’m not one for nerdy studies but I am one for making money. I found this study pretty interesting as The State of Online Retail Performance has said that for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20%. So essentially I’m gonna be rich now with a 25 second improvement.

This week’s newsletter is going to be all about the things I’m doing behind to scenes to get our website in tip-top shape for Black Friday. Most of these tasks you can bang out in an afternoon or two of work or you can just have Gonçalo do the dirty work.

Improving Site Speed & Conversion for BFCM

The most impressive win that I actually shared in Founder’s Club earlier this week was that I learned that there are different load times for people who are on WiFi and people who are on 3G. Of course, having fast loads are expected on WiFi but I didn’t know there was a whole set of parameters for people who are loading your site on 3G. This would be when they are in the car scrolling, walking on their daily commute, on the subway, etc.

Thank god CROSSNET’s site was pretty good but on Good Sport, our newer company, they increased our load time by 25 seconds!! This basically means people on 3G had to wait like a minute for our site to load. I sure as hell am not waiting a minute for my site to load, why would our customers? It never even occurred to me to shut off my WiFi and test our load times.

So I’ll break this down in layman's terms because it was fun learning from the guys. The biggest impact on our site speed is a thing called lazy loading. If you’re already familiar with the term skip this paragraph and keep reading. For my new lazy loading friends essentially what this is in the simplest terms is normally sites will load up the entire webpage on mobile or desktop when you go to a site.

For example, if I go NFL.com without lazy loading it would pull up all the games, headlines, blogs, and about 40 pages of information at once. The bigger the site, the more information, the longer the load. With lazy loading the site only loads up what you are currently seeing. So when you look at your iPhone and see the homepage of a site, you know there’s more but you haven’t scrolled yet, that section hasn’t loaded yet. As you scroll it will load. This improves your overall site speed and customers can get to the main action faster.

So what else did we do:

1. Removed excess scripts - We had several Google Tag managers from previous media buying agencies firing. We only needed one of these, our site was trying to load 5 every time a user went to our site

2. Actually removing apps - Sadly when you delete an app from your store a lot of the time the code stays on your site buried in the background. Regardless if you’re seeing it live on the site or not, this code still is there and slowing down your site. It’s kinda like my chocolate chip cookie addiction. The hundreds of cookies I ate a few months ago are still slowing me down even if I’m eating clean presently. We removed scripts from over 7 apps!

3. Compressing image sizes! Some of our photos we massive. We got image size down below 20 megapixels for fast loading

If you want an intro to Goncalo and the team at Rise Speed either shoot him an email at [email protected] or send me a response back and I can make an introduction. The whole process takes like a week and is extremely affordable.

On Site Improvements

So now that we have the back end firing like a well oiled machine and people can actually load our site its time to make improvements to the actual website. Here’s some low hanging fruit that we were able to improve in the past 72 hours.

1. Improve your welcome pop up - We are currently A/B testing two different wheels with two different images (one showing CROSSNET outside in a park & one in the pool). As the weather gets colder we are curious what image & popup will perform better. Common sense tells me the one without the pool, but let’s see how consumers are thinking when they are shopping for gifts.

2. I went into our post purchase upsells and was appalled. We were lazy! I spent 5 hours the other day building out the logic for all potential post purchase upsells. If somebody buys a CROSSNET they get an offer for a discounted H2O. If they decline the H2O they get an offer for our pickleball paddle at 50% off. We’ve already paid a shit ton to acquire these customers, so we need to do everything possible to increase cart value, especially since LTV is not too common in our line of work.

3. Scroll through your site and give it the cringe test. Is there anything you look at that makes you say “ah that sucks or we could do better” - if so go fix it or hide it from the customer until you’re ready to put your best foot out there

4. Increase reviews! I just realized some of our newer SKUS don’t even have 10+ reviews. We are going on full sprint mode to get as many positive reviews before the holidays. For better or worse, people tend to trust other people’s opinions.

5. Have a new theme going on in the background that you’re working on for the holidays. Have all of the copy be on brand for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas countdown. This means popups that are different. Your email team should also be fixing your welcome flow to include the BFCM deal that you are running. We expect to see a 500%+ increase on the big day this year and we are putting everything we can into making sure our offer is clear and attractive for customers.

6. Make the discount offering obvious and very clear on the site! Nothing is worse than a confusing offer. You will lose the customer’s interest. Don’t do stuff like if you buy this you get that and if you buy that you get this and a million different options. Keep it simple with a concise message. For us it will be “Up to 50% off Site Wide” - Some products will be marked down 10%, some 20% and a few 50%. Our main SKUs we are preserving margin and not really marking down.

What am I missing? Just like you I want to crush the holidays and have the best winter in company history. Anything you’re trying new? Please send examples or questions!

Tell Everyone in Your Life That You Love Them

Life’s short. None of this ecommerce bullshit matters if we don’t have our freedom and our loved ones. If you have an extra dollar help contribute to GoFundMe or just tell your loved ones you love them.

I’m heading up to New York for the rest of the week and would love to meet as many of you as possible. I’ll be staying in Chelsea for the first time and stoked to explore some new spots. Send some recommendations and lets hang!

Have a great night,

Chris