Google My Business adds call analytics, read receipts
People buy from people.
Google has known this for ages and has now introduced several features to optimize your business conversions:
- Call history: If you’re a merchant with a verified Business profile from the U.S. or Canada, you can now see which inbound calls originated from your Business Profile. You’ll also be able to track your inbound call performance, such as the number of answered and missed calls over time.
- An easier way to reply to messages: With this update, you’ll be able to reply to messages from your Business Profile on Google Search. This should save you a few mouse clicks.
- Read receipts: Google will tell you if you’re being ignored. All Business Profile merchants will be able to check whether their messages were read (i.e. “seen”) by a specific person.
The Crew’s take: If you use these features right, you should be able to reduce missed calls, respond to messages faster, and just stop texting when a customer plays passive-aggressive with you.
E-COMMERCE
These 3 companies could dominate the Buy-Now-Pay-Later market in 2022
Affirm, PayPal and Square.
According to an analysis by Yahoo Finance, these companies could be major players in the buy-now-pay-later market in 2022. Here’s why:
- Affirm has recently partnered with Amazon. As a result, people will soon be able to buy products on Amazon in installments.
- PayPal recently acquired Paidy, a Japanese BNPL platform, for $2.7 billion. If you sell in the Asian market, look for some interesting BNPL news from PayPal later this year or early next year.
- Square recently acquired Afterpay, a major BNPL provider, for $29 billion. We expect Square to more tightly integrate buy-now-pay-later functionality into their platform in the near future.
Why you should care: You’ll soon get more options to accept payment in installments (where the customer pays in installments and you receive your money upfront). The buy-now-pay-later market exploded in 2021, and this trend is likely to continue into 2022. So get ready.
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BUSINESS
Know your numbers
Being a great founder doesn’t always mean that you know how healthy your business’s finances are.
In fact, according to Ali Ladha, many businesses fail because the founders aren’t aware of this vital information.
If you doubt that you’re seeing the full financial picture of your company, Ali Ladha came to the rescue with this thread explaining the main financial metrics you should be paying attention to:
- The difference between users and customers: Users spend time on your platform. Customers pay for the products on your platform. Facebook, for instance, doesn’t charge its users. It charges advertisers.
- Frequency of transactions: How often do customers pay you for your product or service? Is it recurring or is it one time?
- Revenue drivers: Is your product volume-driven or price-driven? Do you need to sell more items or do you need to charge more?
- Revenue vs cash flow timing: The time that passes between the moment you generate revenue (make a sale) and the moment you collect the cash.
- Your biggest costs (and how to lower them).
- How are you going to find new customers? You need a way to replenish your lead pool as customers leave. Create a system that assures constant customer acquisition.
- Churn rate: In a year, what’s the percentage of customers that stop buying from you? Ideally, the new customers you add up every year should make up for this loss.
- Fixed and variable costs: These are costs that fluctuate based on how much you sell. Also, advertising costs belong to this category since they change over time. Fixed costs are the ones you need to sustain no matter how much you sell. Think about employees, software, etc.
- Unit economics: What’s the margin on every unit you sell? This is calculated by subtracting the fixed and variable costs per unit from the revenue per unit.
- Gross margin: This equals the sales minus the cost of goods sold (COGS). It doesn’t take into account the fixed costs.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Some of the worst upsells (or cross-sells) The Crew has seen
They’re a must to increase your AOV, they can always be tweaked… But some are really bad. Here are the 3 worst we’ve seen.
1. No upsell
It’s actually more common than it should be that some stores don’t have an upsell.
Please have some sort of upsell or cross-sell in your e-com funnel. Goli is a good example (link only for members) for “one product upsells”. It’s rare that you shouldn’t have any kind of upsell as an e-commerce store.
2. Everything
Yes, the opposite is also something we’ve seen. Too many upsells, cross-sells and downsells are extremely bad too. This is how we felt about Snow, who hit us with 6 of them (link only for members), which was almost their entire product list back then.
3. A tip
This was discovered by Tony in our Insights community, and it comes from a premium British supplements company who essentially asked for a tip to support the team.
The Crew’s tip: Make sure your upsell is always after the initial item purchase was confirmed. Don’t make people back out of the whole process because of bad upsells.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
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PINTEREST: “More money, less users.” That’s our 4-word summary of Pinterest’s recently released earnings report.
TWITTER: Looking for ideas for your next tweet? Twitter rolled out a feature where you can search for a specific user’s tweets.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Australia wants to ID its social media users. The (expected) backlash from major social media companies has begun.
APPLE: Do you have an app providing online events? If so, should look into this – Apple has changed their payment requirements for these kinds of apps.
GOOGLE: Uh-oh. Google favored its AMP platform by throttling load times of non-AMP ads with one second delays, according to a complaint.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
You can drop me from the tallest building and I will be well, but if you drop me in water I die. What am I?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
What do you do when you have too many drones? Make a flying machine
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a duct-taped flying machine.
This YouTuber has built a flying machine using a 3D printer, duct tape, and 50 drone motors.
The machine looks pretty cool but definitely is not something you want to try at home.
The science: Paramotoring, also known as power paragliding, is a type of ultralight aviation in which the pilot wears a motor mounted on their back.
The motor provides enough thrust for a paraglider to take off.
If this sounds like fun, that’s because it is (as long as you know what the heck you’re doing).