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Raphael Paulin-Daigle is the CEO of SplitBase, an e-commerce conversion optimization agency for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle brands. SplitBase combines rigorous customer research with A/B and AI testing to enable long-term growth for DTC luxury brands. SplitBase is at the forefront of conversion optimization, generating revenues of over $1 million for famous brands like Kiehl’s and its parent company L’Oréal, and increasing conversions by double digits for many DTC brands like DIFF Eyewear and Dr. Squatch. 

Before founding SplitBase, Raphael led special projects at Blockstream and was a digital marketing consultant. Raphael also hosts the Minds of Ecommerce Podcast, where he interviews founders and executives of highly successful brands on their top growth strategies. 

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [4:40] Raphael Paulin-Daigle talks about SplitBase
  • [5:44] The “Testing Trifecta” method and how to apply it for effective conversion optimization
  • [7:51] The common mistakes brands make with A/B testing and how to avoid them
  • [10:19] The “quick wins” from A/B tests and why patience is key
  • [15:03] Raphael shares the pitfalls of copying best practices from other brands and the importance of validating specific strategies
  • [24:29] How SplitBase helped Dr. Squatch use CRO to generate significant revenue increases each month
  • [28:00] The various stages of growth for DTC brands and what they should focus on at each level
  • [34:25] How a VC firm can influence the success and marketing efforts of e-commerce brands
  • [39:49] The Minds of Ecommerce Podcast

In this episode…

Are you looking for ways to boost your online store’s performance but feel overwhelmed by conflicting advice? What if there was a method that could help you sift through the noise and optimize your sales efficiently? Can understanding the art and the science behind successful e-commerce strategies lead to tangible growth?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle, an experienced professional in the e-commerce world, unveils the intricacies of elevating an e-commerce brand to its fullest potential. He addresses common missteps companies make, such as rushing A/B tests and blindly applying industry best practices. Raphael emphasizes the critical importance of customer-centric research and data-driven decision-making to tailor your website for peak conversions.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Raphael Paulin-Daigle, CEO of SplitBase, about maximizing e-commerce growth. Raphael explores the nuances of A/B testing and why quick, superficial results can be deceiving, applying the “Testing Trifecta” method for effective conversion optimization, the common mistakes brands make with A/B testing, and SplitBase customer success stories.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related episode(s):

Quotable Moments:

  • “Don’t assume anything is how I think of things.”
  • “Focus on messaging; it is a kind of conversion optimization.”
  • “As soon as you want to start spending a lot of money on ads, you want to make sure that you’re relevant.”
  • “If you want to test something, you need to have data for that data to be reliable.”
  • “Don’t assume that because it’s fancy or big or shiny, it’s necessarily going to do good for your business.”

Action Steps:

  1. Apply the “Testing Trifecta” method before running A/B tests: This approach uses analytics and customer feedback to prioritize and inform testing efforts, ensuring the tests are based on actual user behavior and feedback.
  2. Implement rigorous QA processes for each test: Thorough quality assurance prevents costly technical errors that could disrupt the user experience. By minimizing the risk of introducing flaws in the website, businesses can avoid potential revenue losses and maintain customer trust.
  3. Avoid relying on early A/B test data: Allow sufficient time to pass and gather more conclusive results to make informed decisions. Early data can be misleading and result in premature conclusions, so it’s crucial to wait for statistically significant results before making changes.
  4. Be cautious of blindly adopting industry best practices: Always validate if a strategy is relevant and effective for your specific audience and goals. Not all strategies work universally, so it’s essential to tailor optimization efforts to your brand’s unique position and customer base.
  5. Avoid under-budgeting for landing page tests: Invest an adequate amount to accumulate enough data and transactions to determine the effectiveness of the page. Adequate budgeting for tests allows brands to draw reliable conclusions from their efforts, leading to more effective optimization and better use of resources.

Sponsor for this episode

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz, here. I’m founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Raphael Paulin-Daigle of SplitBase. Splitbase.com. Raphael, I don’t often have people on twice on my podcast, so welcome back, and before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. I did an episode with Ian Garlic. I know Raphael you know Ian videocasestory.com. He had some really interesting stories. He talked about his daddy in a restaurant, and they had live dolphins in the restaurant. I always like unique ideas, because It gets me thinking out of the box. And that wouldn’t be normal.

Anyways, he’s in Orlando, but the restaurant was actually in Wisconsin, so having live dolphins in a restaurant Wisconsin is definitely abnormal, very abnormal for that area, I would say. And he just talked about some great stories in marketing and how important is for to highlight client stories. And that’s always valuable for me to hear. Also, another episode was with Adi Klevit. Adi Klevit has an agency as well, and she specializes in SOPs. She actually is an easy button for a company to create SOPs, which I surprisingly geek out on. We talked about our favorite productivity tools, but really smoothing out. She helps people smooth out their operations, their hiring process, their onboarding staff process, their onboarding client process, is just anything that was important to the company. So that was a really good episode as well from Adi.

And check out that many more on inspiredinsider.com. I’ll have to pull up, because since Raphael helps people in the B2C space consumer package good. There was a couple. There’s several venture capitalists I had on my podcast, which I’ll have to find and mention, because we had some interesting conversations, because I know in that space where I felt it takes money to grow those brands and companies, because the more they sell, the more inventory they need, and that takes cash, so we’ll chat about that as well. But this episode is brought to you by Rise25. And at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships.

How do we do that? We actually do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to do that. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution and Rafael, we want to make it easy so the hostess can have the conversation, create amazing content, create amazing relationships and run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you have questions, go to rise25.com, you can also email [email protected].

You can also check out Raphael’s podcast, Minds of Ecommerce Podcast. So if you know of an amazing B2C founder, CPG, let him know he’s had some amazing guests on so I’m going to introduce Raphael Paulin-Daigle founder and CEO of SplitBase. SplitBase is a conversion optimization and landing page agency for direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands. And we’ll talk a little bit about their testing Trifecta method, which they’ve been running for seven-plus years with brands. They’ve helped brands like Dr Squatch, which actually I have right here, surprisingly, so a lot of these companies, I’ve done business with, or I personally as a consumer, Butcherbox, L’Oreal, they’ve added millions to their bottom line through what they do. And as I mentioned, he hosts the Minds of Ecommerce Podcast, where he has top e-commerce brands share growth strategy. So Raphael, thanks for joining me.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 4:26 

Thank you for inviting me. I’m excited to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 4:29 

So talk about SplitBase for a second. We have a lot of good topics, like bad advice out there. I see a lot of advice on stages of growth, but talk about SplitBase a little bit more. And what you do?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 4:40 

Yeah. So SplitBase, we’re an agency. We’ve been around for six, seven years now, and really all we do is we work with seven, eight and nine, mostly eight and nine-figure e-commerce brands, and we help them scale profitably through conversion optimization. And yes, that includes AB testing, that includes landing pages. It includes, building quizzes, sometimes doing customer research to understand why people are buying and why they’re not buying. And ultimately, yeah, we work with most of our clients for years at a time, and we help them grow right? We really aim to be that kind of partner in their growth, that can help them understand why people convert, why they don’t convert, and what they can do to fix it.

Jeremy Weisz 5:30 

What is the testing trifecta?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 5:32 

Yeah, the testing trifecta is a method.

Jeremy Weisz 5:34 

By the way, if someone’s listening to the audio, there is a video piece. So, I do have the SplitBase website up. So we’ll poke around here as Raphael talks.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 5:44 

Awesome. The testing trifecta is really the best way for me to describe how to do conversion optimization, and it’s a method that we named and came up with when, pretty much when we started. And what it does is, essentially the testing trifecta is a Venn diagram with three circles. At the top, you’ve got testing. At the bottom that supports testing. You’ve got quantitative data, so analytics, and then on the other side, you’ve got human data, which is qualitative data. Ultimately, what we’re saying, If I am summarizing the testing trifecta method in like one sentence is, well, ultimately, in order to be running tests that actually helps you grow, it needs to be supported by quantitative and qualitative data.

And what that means is, a lot of brands decide they want to start testing, they want to start doing CRO and they’re just going to look at competitors trying to figure out what they could change on their website. They’re going to brainstorm with their marketing team trying to figure out, hey, what could we be testing? And then they’re just going to go and test but testing like that, like an ad hoc testing strategy, is really the equivalent of throwing a dart blinded and hoping it works in the bull’s eye. It’s really luck. It’s really luck, it’s crossing fingers and hoping it works. So what we say is, instead of wasting your time and money, the average AB test needs to run for 2, 3, 4, weeks, it can cost quite a bit to develop and to run right.

So if you’re going to be testing, test the right things. And what we say is, in order for you to test the right things, have your test ideas backed by analytics and human data. And that’s really how we’ve been able to make our programs pay for themselves, like client hire us, and generally, by month number three, the services pays for itself more than five or six times over minimum, and we’ve seen sometimes 100x as well.

Jeremy Weisz 7:46 

What are some of the mistakes people make? And we’ll get into some of the bad advice in a few.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 7:51 

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of mistakes in the sense that conversion optimization is not as simple as you build a test, you run a test. There’s a lot of technical mistakes that people make. So for example, one that I actually just tweeted, I think last week about, is a lot of people go they build their A/B test, but they fail to queue their A/B test properly, right? Like A/B tests are highly technical, they change how your website works. And sometimes a small change can actually mean a lot when it comes to the experience of your website, and technically speaking, something that can seem so simple, if it breaks right, it could stop people from being able to even make their purchase. And I think a lot of brands underestimate, they really underestimate how much they need to QA their A/B test to have a process and to be really diligent about that. So I would say that’s one of the big technical mistakes I see people make all the time that can cost brands a lot of money.

Jeremy Weisz 8:51 

Yeah, it’s interesting, because any change, if we make a change the website, I’m super paranoid, like, yeah, again, because I’m not technical, so I’m like, wait, you do this? Is that gonna break something else over here, right? I just don’t know enough, but obviously that happens.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 9:05 

Yeah, totally. Well, just imagine when you’re a brand that does $30, $40, $50 million a year, right? And, yeah, you’ve got a lot working on this.

Jeremy Weisz 9:14 

Goes down for an hour.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 9:16 

Exactly, you can’t afford to have your website go down for an hour. And sometimes, just changing an image. I’ve seen brands try to change an image on their website with an A/B test, and then it maybe worked for a little while, but then a developer on their end made some change, and it created a conflict with the code, and then all of a sudden, there’s this big issue where, okay, the website is unusable, right? We have a QA process and monitoring process, and we know how to code test in a way that we can minimize that. But I think that’s a risk that a lot of people that get started with A/B testing tend to forget, right?

Jeremy Weisz 10:00 

Yeah, so bad advice. You’ve been doing this for many, many years now, and there’s just stuff that people maybe they’re not as experienced and they’re just sharing. Maybe they learned one thing, or they did one thing, or they learned it from somewhere else. What’s some of the bad advice you’re seeing out there?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 10:19 

Yeah, well, let’s put it into context. You know, I’ve been doing CRO for about 12 years. When I started, there was basically no content on the topic. There was maybe one or two online courses. I remember the content that was being taught in there at the time. It’s very different from what it is today. It’s evolved. There weren’t any big blogs. I think the CXL blog started appearing maybe in a year after I started, or around that time, but it was still pretty small and niche. And now today, right we’re looking at, obviously on Twitter, on LinkedIn, I feel like I see less blog content these days. A lot is just happening on socials, but there’s something happened, I think, post-pandemic that really caused CRO to become a hot topic, right?

Conversion Optimization, landing pages, all really became something that everybody wanted to do, and what that created is, all of a sudden, this very niche discipline, all of a sudden, a lot of people are seeing opportunity for making money with it, and so a lot of people are just improvising themselves as consultants or experts in the topic, or a lot of agencies are now offering it as an upsell without necessarily knowing what it all means and the skills. So there’s two sides to this. It did lead to a crop of fantastic experts and me, agencies and people that I really respect, that yes, are new, we’re in the space, but that are doing the right thing and are giving great advice. But just like anything else, like we’ve seen with SEO, like we’ve seen with PPC, like we’ve seen with content marketing, right when you’ve got a discipline that gets so hot, well, for every one great expert, you have about 10 or 20 bad ones.

And CRO conversion optimization being so complex, so technical, then there’s aspects in design, then there’s data analytics, and there’s strategy, then there’s generally e-commerce knowledge, and it englobes so much of digital marketing. What happens is you have a lot of mediocre content or bad advice to sort through. And when I look at, let’s say, a brand that really isn’t an expert at CRO, and they want to start doing CRO well, it’s easy to get lost. It’s easy to take bad advice and implement it, because you don’t know what’s the good advice versus what’s the bad advice. So I think when we look at some of the bad advice that I see almost every day, there’s a couple things, I think, Twitter and Instagram. Well, Twitter, Instagram, but I mostly, I mean, like LinkedIn, has been great for people to share content, but one of the things I see all the time is brands or people launching an A/B test a day later, takes a screenshot of the test results, posts it on Twitter and says, oh, this test is doing great. Or we just launched this test is going really well for now.

Love that people are sharing, but that type of content can lead people down the wrong path, because here’s the deal, test results a day in are completely invalid. There’s this generally, when you launch a test, the data from the first couple days is going to be very wonky. One variant is going to be performing better than the other. It’s going to be very wonky, but also just the math isn’t there, like you have small sample sizes, we’re still just looking at data from a day or two, and it’s not representative of a full week or two full weeks, right? There are so many things that can change that I don’t think it’s even worth looking at numbers in the beginning. It’s not to forget about even getting excited about potential wins from that test, because in a week from now, in two weeks from now, that test that might have appeared to be winning big on day one might actually end up losing, right?

And I think a lot of these screenshots are getting shared. And what it does is, I think, for people that don’t know better, well, you know, it creates this sort of, I don’t know if expectation is the right word, but it creates a sort of…

Jeremy Weisz 14:55 

I mean, it’s like you can get what you need. And. And get quick results. And that’s what you’re judging off of.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 15:03 

Exactly. It’s like, oh, I can launch a test the next day. I can end the test. I got my wins and, you know, and then it just leads to a lot of false negatives, false positives. People start to think that CRO is just this one tactic that, you know, you launch as many tests as possible, and then you make a bunch of money. It’s not how it works, right? So, that’s definitely one of the big things I see, the most.

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