AJ Davis  00:00 On today's episode of Experiment Zone, we're going to talk to John Roman from BattlBox. John shared with us some things that they've already tested. John's going to take us through several things that they've tested on their homepage and some key pages that visitors see in their journey, and he's going to share some surprising outcomes that they've had. So keep listening. All right, tell me a little bit about yourself and your company. Sure.

John Roman 00:33  So AJ, BattlBox is an outdoor adventure brand. We started in 2015 we're kind of known for a couple of things, one being our subscription box, and the other being our Netflix TV show, having been on quite the journey with the business. We sold it in 2021 and then bought it back last year. So it's been quite, quite the journey. 

AJ Davis  00:56  Tell us a little bit about that. What's the journey been like?

 John Roman  00:59  The buying and selling was not part of the plan. We planned to exit and, you know, figure out what the next chapter of life would be for us. But about a year in, we saw an opportunity to grab the business back and get it at a lesser price than we had previously sold it for. So it became a basic arbitrage business opportunity that we couldn't pass on. So we jumped back in the driver's seat and are now driving again. Nice.

 AJ Davis  01:35  So for those listening along, tell us a little bit about your target audience. Who's your ideal customer? 

 John Roman  01:42  Sure so we're a male-centric brand. So 90% of our purchasers are male, 10% are female. Out of the 10% that are female, 50% are purchasing for a male in their life. So super, super male-centric age I'd say 2024, to 5424 to 55 is all a sweet spot, but we excel in the 34 to 4430 35 to 44 range.  household incomes, typically 120, to 130

AJ Davis  02:21  Got you, and what prompts someone to look for a product, or to look for you guys, or to find you guys? 

John Roman 02:28  So we're a little bit different when you look at your traditional direct-to-consume brand, where it's very transactional, if you will. So we lead everything with with content and building community, which is a lot in the fun one, it's a long game, for sure, but it's in the long run, it's better for really brand equity and creating a brand so people typically find us on Tiktok or YouTube, just going through maybe some outdoor best practices or some preparedness tips. The average BattlBox customer could be one of so many different buckets. It could be just the adventurer, the hiker, the camper. It could be just an outdoor lover who wants to go, you know, camping one weekend with their family, and it could even be just someone who cares about being prepared and just having a stock of gear in case something possibly goes wrong. Think of it almost like an insurance policy, except you get something tangible every month in the mail. So typically they find us on some sort of social media platform, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and they start learning about us, and eventually they decide they want to join

AJ Davis  03:52  and tell us what the experience is like. Once they do join, what do they get?

 John Roman  03:56  Sure? So, we have four different tiers, the basic goes up to and the basic, the advanced Pro, and the Pro Plus Basic start at 35 a month, plus shipping and sales tax, all the way up to the Pro Plus, which is 170 a month, plus shipping and tax. 50% of our base is in the Pro Plus, the largest Tier, which is quite unusual for a traditional e-commerce to have that large of average order value. So in addition to the products that are in the box and they stack, if you get the pro box, you get everything from the basic, the advanced, and the pro items. But, you know, it could stand alone, because the value, if you're to shop these on your own and try to procure this box without our buying power, you're going to be paying significantly more. So a $200 all-in after shipping and tax box, it might, might not be able to source it for less than $350 so right there, there's, there's value. But we don't push that. That's not the value that we talk about. It's probably fourth or fifth on the list of benefits. So one of the biggest is the community. So we have nobody to join right now. The community is on Facebook, so it's a private group only. You have to be an active member. Not everybody joins the group. I think we have maybe 10,000 active members there right now. And it's a true community, right? It's not us facilitating communication or trying to stem engagement if you will. It's, it's a true community, right? They're interacting with each other, they're trading gear, they're talking about hiking, they're talking about preparation. They could be talking about anything, right? They could be talking about what they do with their kids during the day. It doesn't necessarily even have to be outdoor-centric, right? It's just a bunch of like-minded individuals having a conversation. And the community, to me, is probably one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable pieces. In addition to that, one of the big things we wrote out is called the Battle Vault. So if you're an active member, you have access to this and two different sections of it right now, but we're building it into something greater. One is the product section. So we have about, I think, 1200 different SKUs in there at price, at the best price you're going to find the item. So you will not be able to find it for as good of a price as we are going to sell it to you for. It's not it's not a profit center for us. We're using our buying power and passing all the savings on to the consumer. And the second section is for partners, so outdoor gear, but not even necessarily limited to that. It's just people. We found other company partners that we can provide discounts or services for our members just as an added value, added benefit, besides the actual box. So those are probably the two biggest things the community in the battle vault that our customers love. 

AJ Davis  06:57  I love how many different aspects of the value you're bringing out here. And what I'd love to do now is to transition to taking a look at the site together, seeing how much of that stuff is really coming out, and then hearing a little bit from you about some of the choices that are on there. So let me go ahead and get this screen shared. Before we hopped on today, we talked about how most of your traffic is on mobile. So we're going to be doing our review today on your mobile site. I'll just start with a couple of things as I go, but please jump in as you know you want to share, share things for why you're doing it, or questions you might have, or any input I can share. So looking at your site, there was another thing that popped up before this, and the screens were up for a little bit. So now this email sign-up has popped up. I don't know if you guys have tested this before, but we always find, a little surprisingly, that this doesn't hurt conversion, and it helps drive a lot of email. You guys, yeah. So we 

John Roman 07:49  Yeah, so we have, so we're, we're crazy with the amount of testing that we do. So the pop-up you're seeing now is a couple different so we have called them campaign journeys depending on behavior on the site. This is typically not the first, it's normally the second or third in the series, and it's just 100% based on the user interaction with the site, how they're behaving, if we've already identified the traffic or not, and this is simply a digital asset. We put together 12 outdoor survival skills that everyone should master, and we're just gonna share them with you in exchange for your email address so we can market them to you later. Probably the first thing you saw was the spin to win. Yes.

AJ Davis  08:41  Okay, so I did see it, and unfortunately I had, I, like, either clicked away or it went away before I could get the screen share going today. So tell us a little bit about why you guys have that first

John Roman  08:50  so, at least, I will say, in at least the spin, when is a completely custom spin to win. So we build it, it looks like you have a couple of axes, and it's an AX board, if you will. Like, like, throwing the X to see what, what you win. So it's not your traditional, um, boring, spin to win. I don't like spin to win. I've just never been a fan of it. But I'll be darned if it doesn't consistently outperform everything else we do. From a pop-up perspective, it just converts significantly higher. And I'm just, I'm waiting for the day when, when something performs better because I don't like it. But you can't argue with the data, right? If it's, it's converting at a I think it converts at 16% which is just phenomenal, even on bad months with maybe less ideal traffic going to the site still north of 12. So it's just, it's tough to argue, yeah,

AJ Davis  09:56  and you guys sound like you're just very data-driven, right? So we're not just. Is acting on what we think might work, but you're measuring it and making decisions based on it. We're nerds.

John Roman  10:05  Every little incremental lift or change or tweak we can make to make the traffic, the finite amount of traffic we get, more valuable. Yeah,

AJ Davis  10:16  and it sounds too like I'm seeing here both in the value you're giving in the joining the newsletter exchange, as well as in the description of that custom spin wheel, some brand elements is being introduced to so it's like, these are the first touch points for some people on the site that kind of introduce what you guys are all about too.

John Roman  10:34  Yeah, that pre digital piece is interesting, because you typically don't see that on direct to consumer brands. It's more of a B to B play, and that's where we got, got the idea from, right? You see it all of the time on B to B sites. Get, get this white paper. See this top 100 Brand X, and the reality is it works. And we tried to figure out, how do we get that type of pitch on a consumer site, and we went through quite a few iterations, and we finally, that finally performs the best out of out of the things we tried, that's

AJ Davis  11:09  great. What are some areas of the site? Or maybe there's, you know, some shifting, or some questions you might have that would be interesting to dive into next Yeah.

 John Roman  11:18  So we, you know, when we're sending traffic for the first time to the site more times than not. It's a landing page, but the landing pages are iterations of our home page, which you're on right now. Our most popular page is our section is the what's in the box. So people, typically, the customer journey is they're here. They're going through this site currently. And they can pick your box, and they can convert and make it all the way, if you click Pick your box, it's going to fast forward to the box sections. And you have the four options we've done testing on moving, moving them out of order, moving them on mobile in a swipe graphic. This still performs best, but when people are not ready to buy the first thing they do is they hit the hot dog button, right the option menu button and they go to what's in the box. 

AJ Davis  12:24  Yeah, let's take a look at that and to your point, around the like the carousels versus exposed things, those are all really good variables to play with. Like we've seen ourselves sometimes, just like text links to things are more effective, or have the full image and description. So there's a lot to test that's audience-dependent. 

John Roman   12:40  if you're if you're scrolling down, and you eventually get to the option of picking your box. So we walk you through the steps. We walk you through the benefits. We get you excited, and then it's time to pick your box. So these images, there's four of them. It's just overhead shots, and it's, you know, truth be told, they're, they're, they're transparent images. And we just made the overhead shot. They're not, you know, shot overhead, and I don't like them, not a fan of them. We had. So we're, let's. We have to do something better. Do some easy way to move the needle. So we did these amazing actual items in the box, box shots. We did above, we did so, we did overhead, we did side, we did front. We came up with all of these. And they look beautiful. And it truly shows what you're getting instead of us having this. And if you screw up a little bit, we have to even put a warning. Products in the images below are examples of products that could receive and not the actual box itself, which like having to put that gives me anxiety, but us testing the beautiful imagery that we did, professionally done, not photoshopped. Um, significantly underperformed these, these overhead photos, overhead digital photos. And it just kind of is a great reminder that you have to test right, and even the things that seem glaringly obvious aren't necessarily the case. It's just funny, because you I would have bet every dollar in the bank account that these beautiful ads, beautiful shots we came up with, we're going to outperform, and they don't. It's just, it's just a fun reminder that and the last thing on the homepage, if you scroll down a little bit further, past this, you know. And then we have over a million boxes shipped, and we have our trust pilot, you know, unbiased third party. And then as seen typically. You see those right at the top of the site, arguably, either above the fold, or the first thing you see as you scroll from above the fold, they perform better down here. Does that make any sense? For people who don't know that we will like, send us an email, and they're like, Excuse me, you have your social proof at the bottom half of the page. Like, what are you doing? Like, you don't know which we can move the needle for you. And it's like, here's a link to our test. Like, doesn't work. So just funny, those little nuances. But then for some brands, it might, it might be the best practice in the needle mover. So it's just, just kind of a fun reminder that all these things need to be tested.

AJ Davis  15:48  Yeah, I love your sharing those, because I think you're right. Like we have this sense of what best practices are, but at the end of the day, the only way we know is if we test it with our customers, with our live experience exactly. And I think, you know, there's ways we could understand it if we wanted to dive into it. You know, one of the things I had in mind as you were saying that is, wow, I'd want to see a usability study of your page and see how people move through it, and what kind of questions they have as they go, because I'm guessing they're not thinking about, you know, is this something that I should trust? Because they're still learning what it is, to begin with, and that might be a reason that it is this way, but it's not intuitive that that makes sense for all brands, right?

John Roman  16:26  So yeah, so the next place they go, of our most popular section is the what's in the box. So unlike, you know, I don't view us as a subscription box, but we do have a subscription box. So if you're going to look at subscription boxes across the E-commerce realm, there's not a lot of transparency in what is actually in the past boxes, right? Most don't talk about it. You have to kind of do some recon and research, and it's oftentimes because part of their model is, you know, high margin, low cost, not a great customer experience. So they, they don't, they don't showcase what was in the box previously, which, which we do the opposite. So we showcase every pass box. You know, we send one out every month, so 113 months of boxes, and it's, it's the most popular area because you can come down. You can see a video. It's a 30-minute review of the box. We go through each item. You can buy it all apart, individually, if you like, but you truly understand everything that came in there. And it just does a great job of setting proper expectations, there's no surprise, right? You'll have people go through four or five, 610, of these pages before then coming back. Or we have a call to action on here to subscribe if you're ready. So eventually, ooh, maybe we don't. We did. Maybe it's

 AJ Davis  18:00  at the top. Maybe, let's see. Oh, it is. You have a join now on the top, yeah,

John Roman  18:05   so you know the video is interesting. I don't know if you click it, or what it looks like on mobile. I know desktop, it's quite the experience. So it's cool because we'll have all the items in the box that are at the bottom, so you can scroll through them too and see kind of the items. You don't have to leave the video and scroll back down. 

AJ Davis  18:35  I'm curious about what kind of testing you've done in this section. Are there certain things that surprised you along this way?

John Roman  18:42  Yeah, so you know before, this is probably the 10 iteration of the what's in the box pages. Now, it seems like a lot, but you know that's 10 different iterations. Um, big iterations over nine years. So it's not that crazy. It's changed a lot, so we previously, it's just grown over time and through testing. Initially, the page was just two images. We used to send a single card in the box, and one was kind of a summary, a couple-paragraph summary, and one was the items in there. We would just scan the two images, or, I guess we had the digital images, and that would be the breakdown. And then from that grew, grew us putting the video there too. And then we quickly found, through just customer feedback that, you know, we can want everybody to be a member, be a subscriber, to the box. But the reality is, you know, that's not for everyone. Some people are not comfortable with strangers procuring a $2 box for every month. So we got a lot of feedback from some people. Will religiously come and watch the box, and then they purchase. They want just one item from the box, and they're going to a full retail store and not get it through the subscription. So through feedback, we tested different iterations of if you scroll down how we're showcasing the items in there. Eventually, initially, we had a test, where it was a pop-up of the product. You could decide if you wanted it. Then we opted to test just having a quick add to cart, quick button, which was a pretty large needle mover, allowing them to not have to leave this page and add something to a cart was a benefit.

AJ Davis  20:45  That's great. I'm gonna flip the question that I usually ask around because today you've shared some inspiring test ideas that you guys have already done. So rather than me asking you what you would test, I'm going to recap a couple of things I heard that I thought were interesting for the audience. Okay, I thought that your conclusion, or your testing of the placement of testimonials is something that a lot of companies don't think to do. Your product image tests stood out to me. As you know, not just following your gut instinct on what images might be better, might look better to us, but really what performs better. And then I think the other thing here is, you know, challenging the subscription model. So I'm hearing, you know, you can subscribe to the box, but we also work with customers and meet them and how they need to shop otherwise. So this ability to add to cart here follows along, build as part of that community, but not necessarily get that box every time or to operate in we trust you. Here's the great, curated good value you get each month. So thanks for some great takeaways, and I appreciate having you on and sharing some of the things that you guys have learned along the way before. We wrap up for our audience, interested in getting to know your business better and getting to know you. What's the best way for them to reach out?

John Roman  21:57  So obviously, if they want to check out the business, just go to battlbox.com, and BattlBox is the handle for both social media, TikTok, and YouTube, our two largest channels. I'm most active on LinkedIn, and I'm on x a little bit, but I don't have the patience for it, and then I have a blog online case, which is a resource of all things, e-commerce the focus on the blog is not just showcasing the wins, also showcasing the losses. Because four reasons one, the losses are we get the most learnings, which is paramount for growth, but also, and probably one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of x is there's just so much toxic behavior in e-commerce, it seems, where people are touting these wins, and it sounds transparent and it sounds realistic, and they don't talk about the L's they take, and that just kind of bothers me a little bit. So that's the focus of that. And then also, we have a podcast. So it's called an Awesome Podcast. Awesome is spelled as O, M, and it's, it's all things e-commerce from a few different perspectives.

AJ Davis  23:21  Love it. Thanks for sharing all those resources. Appreciate you being on today and taking the time to share with our audience as well.

John Roman  23:28  Thanks for having me,  AJ. 

AJ Davis  23:29  Thank you for tuning in to the Experiment Zone Podcast. You can check out more episodes on YouTube, Apple Spotify, and your favorite podcast apps. Check out the show notes for any websites Linked In this episode, including where to connect with us on social media. We appreciate you tuning in. Remember to like, subscribe, and turn on your notifications so you'll be updated on each episode release, and visit us at Experimentzone.com  for all podcast updates as well. Thank you for dropping by.