Do you know the story of Amazon and free shipping?
Early in the days of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos realized he had a problem.
He was spending a ton of money on advertising, to get people to come to Amazon to shop — mostly for books, at that time.
They were doing okay. They were selling books. They were growing the company.
But there was a problem. There was a significant number of shoppers who’d arrive at Amazon, look at their books, and then go to their local bookstore to buy.
Why?
Cost of shipping.
If they bought locally, they may have to pay sales tax but not for the more expensive shipping.
And so Amazon stopped spending money on advertising. And instead invested all that money into offering free shipping, if you spent a certain amount.
Suddenly it made more sense to buy from Amazon than your local bookstore. Not only could you avoid sales tax, you didn’t even have to leave home. Sure, it’d take a couple days for your items to show up, but it could take you a couple days to get to the store anyway.
Suddenly shopping on Amazon was a lower-friction experience than shopping locally.
It transformed the company — the book industry — all of retail — and ecommerce.
Removing friction from your offers can be a marketing breakthrough…
And here’s where it pays to think about marketing as bigger than just copywriting or advertising. It’s about what you can do, as a company, to get more people to do business with you.
One decision to sink all your advertising dollars into paying customers’ shipping cost instead of advertising could be marketing.
Restructuring your offer so that customers can pay in installments can be a marketing decision.
The hours you’re available to serve customers can be a marketing decision.
There can be a thousand points of friction.
Each one is potentially stopping huge waves of customers from doing business with you.
They can be small, subtle changes to what you’re doing. They can be minor variations from your standard business model. But if they’re what’s missing in your industry — if they’re the key friction point — making these little changes could have a huge impact.
It pays to be a problem solver…
The best marketers aren’t defined solely by actually creating marketing materials.
Whether we’re talking copywriters, designers, whatever.
The best marketers say, “What will make more people want to do business with us? What can we do to make our offers more compelling? What can we do to reduce friction?”
And on and on.
Look for problems, issues, and challenges.
And find ways to solve them.
One more quick story…
A few years back I did an on-site at a client’s office. We met with their team, toured their facilities, the works.
We addressed a ton of issues while I was there.
But the most valuable five minutes were when I asked them about price on their most expensive product.
In short, there was no justification for price to be as low as it was. They were basically giving away money.
So I encouraged them to test a higher price.
It worked — and they doubled their profits (worth more than $1,000) — on every sale.
What does this have to do with friction?
Well, some points that you believe are friction may not be. In this case, price was not at a friction point. And so raising the price didn’t do anything to the friction in the selling process. But it did allow them more margin to better serve the customers, which did allow them to remove friction elsewhere in the process.
Again, look for little changes that will have a big impact.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
