The Perspective #16

Welcome to the 16th edition of The Perspective by Oddit!

Twice a month we send out actionable tips for creating brand-first and conversion-optimized customer experiences from the best in DTC.

In this edition 🗞:

• Brand-first breakdown with Canopy

• 5 questions with Taylor Davies, Co-Founder of Oddit

• Menu mistakes to avoid

• New brands we discovered this month

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If you missed our last editions, you can read them here! 

Brand-First Breakdown: Canopy

Canopy is a humidifier that promotes healthy skin and alleviates symptoms of cold and flu. It features no-mist technology free from bacteria and particles + it has built-in aroma diffusion.

Canopy was incubated by the awesome team over at Doris Dev.

We're breaking down various parts of the Canopy website and offering a couple of tweaks to make it an even better user experience and conversion machine. Let's jump in!

Mobile Menu

 Suggestions to test:

Suggestion 1: Surface your primary products front and center.

Suggestion 2: Surface other products as secondary actions, separate from the primary products.

Suggestion 3: We suggest including a blanket action to a collections page where users can shop the entire Canopy catalog.

Suggestion 4: Surface the free shipping threshold!

Comparison Chart

Suggestion to test: Rather than showing all the things wrong with old technology show users a direct comparison of why yours is better. Add a comparison chart outlining the key features in comparison to old technology.

This format is easier to scan and can be used for marketing, and across the site in other areas.

Buy Box

Suggestions to test:

Suggestion 1: Clearly show a selected state vs deselected state so there’s no confusion.

Suggestion 2: Reformat the heading and content to be stacked so they aren’t apart from each other.

Suggestion 3: Let users know they can cancel the subscription anytime!

Suggestion 4: Simplify the deselected state and make sure it is CLEARLY differentiated from selected. As well, call-out the subscription timing.

Suggestion 5: Pull out color selection as a step AFTER picking kit.

Suggestion 6: Pull out “Add To Cart” as an action that is always in the same spot — beneath the color selector.

Suggestion 7: Help push users over the edge by letting them know the order would be above the shipping threshold.

Bundles

Suggestion to test: Add a cross-section pushing your bundles, and surface them as a simple way to get everything you need AND save money, rather than a way to outfit your dorm.

Focusing on the dorms is fine for an ad strategy and sales flow, but on-site there need to be more bundles and a push towards more blanket language. For example “The Diffuser Essentials” vs “Dorm Room Bundle”.

Desktop Hovers

Suggestion to test: Rather than not having a hover state at all on the desktop, have the image change to a secondary one on hover to give users more info.

In this example, we show the filter being changed which helps give context to how easy it is, AND we’re showing the size better by giving them a reference point (a human hand).

If you want an Oddit Report just like this one, check out our Essential & Premium Reports!

Founders Five 🖐

Founder: Taylor Davies is the Co-Founder of Oddit

He's founded numerous other companies including ad agencies, brand development studios, and CPG brands including Hecho (premium canned tequila soda) & Drink Arte (Cold pressed juices for the hospitality industry). Both brands are now distributed throughout North America.

For this Founders 5, we let Shaun, our other Co-founder, ask Taylor the questions. They’ve been buddies since childhood (proof below) so let's take it back to the 90's

Shaun: We started Oddit poolside in Baja, Mexico during a six-month working trip in 2021. Everyone else went back at the end of the trip, except you stayed and started living down there full-time. What are your 3 best tips/hacks for working completely remotely?

Taylor: If you’re traveling quite a bit and staying in Air BnB's, get them to send you an internet speed test before you book. They always say they have “great internet” but that's very subjective.

Change up your scenery. I think as much as it’s convenient to work from home, or a beautiful long-term rental by the beach, any setting can get old if you live, work, sleep, and eat there.

Look for local WhatsApp or Facebook groups - it's a great way to find like-minded people who might be living/working remotely in your area.

Shaun: Rumor has it that you and Shaun got in a tussle in grade 9 – who won?

Taylor: There were a few. I obviously won all of them. And if you need proof, check out the scar on Shaun's chest or the hole in my childhood bedroom that matches his 8th-grade skull perfectly 😂

Shaun: For anyone out there looking to productize their own service, can you give them any of that secret sauce that Oddit discovered along the way?

Taylor: The most important thing we’ve realized when productizing a service is setting expectations - both on the output side and the customer communications/CX side(we’re still working on this daily).

With our Oddit Reports, this is historically a very agency-related service, so once customers are convinced and ready to move forward they're expecting a SOW, a big services agreement, multiple calls, feedback loops, and a smiling account executive updating them constantly.

Instead, we send them to a product card on our site to purchase. We’ve purposely made things look as automated as possible, we use the word “product” as much as we can to replace “service” and we clearly communicate to clients that they usually never talk to us other than maybe an initial call.

We’ve stripped all of those agency bells and whistles away to give clients a true, unapologetic teardown of their UX and customer journey at a very affordable price. Most brands are tired of working with agencies so the Oddit experience is refreshing for them.

Shaun: You cut your teeth in door-to-door sales – what’s the one strategy from those days that you still use when giving the Oddit sales pitch?

Taylor: Those were true boiler room style sales days - totally different approach. Reeeaaaal salesy (take 9 "no’s" before getting to a "yes" type sales. Lots of PTSD from thousands of slammed doors over my college years.

With Oddit it’s much different, we’ve done virtually no paid sales or marketing (a couple of tests here and there) but most of our customers have come from our shared content through Twitter, newsletter content partnerships, or warm intros from some of the best in DTC.

So with that said, sales calls are already coming in with a lot of knowledge and trust in Oddit. More than anything it's about helping them find the right package, checking on timelines etc.

As we grow, I'm sure we'll start talking to customers who have little knowledge of Oddit - at that point I'll dust off my old Zig Ziglar books 😎

Menu Mistake to Avoid

Classifieds 🔎

😎 5 mobile menu changes to test out ASAP!

🎙 Oddit Co-Founder, Shaun Brandt, joins another podcast to discuss improving your site speed, choosing a Shopify Template, and solving UX issues. Have a listen!

😥 Why it's CRUCIAL to make sure your images + copy match.

🔵 New brands we discovered this month: tazzy, Big Little Bar, Loop, and Gnome

Want your own brand-first breakdown? 🚨

Check out the essential and premium reports!

If you don’t find any value you’ll get all your $$ back. No questions asked.

The Perspective is written by Shaun Brandt, Taylor Davies, and Thomas Schreiber

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Oddit in the Wild

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• 🎧 Listen to our Co-founder Shaun on your favorite podcasts

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  • The Quiet Light Podcast: "Reducing Friction Points with Shaun Brandt"

  • Customers Who Click: "Optimizing with brand first CRO"

  • Adspend: "The proven CRO playbook with Shaun Brandt"