Arianne Foulks of Aeolidia shares her biggest discovery behind helping to grow & market over 800+ ecommerce websites her team has redesigned in the last 20 years.

Marc: Hey, it’s Marc Rodill with 10 Minute Ecom Success. And today my guest is Arianne Foulks, captain and founder of Aeolidia, a one stop shop Shopify development studio working with artisan and designer businesses for over 18 years, launching more than 700 website redesigns to help shop owners level up and create effective sites that don’t just look remarkable, but actually multiply sales.

And so, Arianne, thanks so much for being here.

Arianne: Thank you. Thanks for thinking of me. And that was an amazing intro, but I have just realized it’s slightly out of date because this is my 20th anniversary in business.

Marc: Nice. Congratulations.

Arianne: Thank you.

Marc: Do you know how many designs we’re up to now?

Arianne: It’s at least 800.

Marc: Wow. So that’s obviously a lot of experience. So I appreciate you coming on. That being said, you know what the show is about. We’re here to make ecom sellers more money. So what is your single best business building strategy or tactic that you teach or you implement with your clients that really helps their ecommerce sales grow?

Arianne: Yeah so this is something I’ve been thinking about, my thing is less of a tactic and more of maybe a mindset or a big picture thing, which is, I think a lot of businesses are not making decisions specific to their own business. So everybody wants to grow. But I think the methods people are using are maybe not the right methods for where they’re at.

So we have the privilege of working with people at all the stages of business. So sometimes we will work with a brand new business, or a smaller business that’s making a couple hundred thousand a year.

And then we have many clients that we work with that have multi-million dollar businesses. And it’s funny how often people will be doing the wrong thing. Or the right thing, but at the wrong time for their business. So I will see very small or new businesses going, “Oh, hey, I heard on a podcast that CRO is very important.”

“So I’m going to work on my conversion rate.” And then we look at their stats and we’re like, you are getting 200 visitors per month. It doesn’t matter what your conversion rate is. You really need to work on building traffic. But then at the same time, I will see people on the other end where they’re making a ton of money from their site, but they just decide for some reason, that it’s good enough. And they don’t really work on optimizing it.

Or for instance, I’ve been talking to this one woman over email for a year. She wants us to redesign her site, but it keeps getting pushed onto the back burner. She has, I don’t know, five brick and mortar shops. All that’s going well. She’s been focusing on changing their packaging this year, but her website is not working very well, so much so that one of my team members tried to use it to buy something, and she almost went to her competitor because she was having such a hard time getting checkout working.

And it just seems crazy to me. You’re getting so much traffic, and we need to at least have the site not be broken. But at most we could be optimizing or A/B testing or figuring out all kinds of ways to make it work even better. So I think sometimes businesses will start out kind of attacking the wrong problem.

They need to be building their customer base. And then as they grow, maybe whatever worked to get those customers, they haven’t noticed that it needs to be a different thing now. So that “what got you here won’t get you there” saying, a lot of times it really won’t. And then we’ll see big businesses where things are going so well…

And the type of business we work with, we work with designers, it’s all different kinds of businesses, but usually the connecting thread is the owner of the business is the designer of the product. So we work with a lot of stationary brands, or jewelry, or bath and body, but this is like, “their” product.

It’s something they’ve designed. So I think they have this kind of mom and pop sort of feel to them still, even if they’re making 10 million dollars a year or something like that, where they’re just like, “Wow, this is going great” and they’re happy with it, but they don’t really realize they could dig in there and do a little bit of tweaking, and that could lead to a lot more money for the other projects they want to work on. Like the product packaging or whatever.

Marc: And so are you saying basically focusing on the right thing at the right time is sort of a knack that you have?

Arianne: I think so. I think another thing that I notice is that people are not using their own data from their own shop. So even the biggest businesses, sometimes I’ve been getting on chats with our clients where I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on with their whole business, or what their mindset is.

And I’ve asked people, a few people, “When you ask us for things and you have features you want to add to your site, where do you get those ideas? How do you know you want to do that?” Very often they say, “Oh, our competitors doing it.”

And so the only reason to do it is they’re copying a competitor, which scares me a little bit because they don’t have any information on that. That might be the worst decision your competitor made this year, right?

It might’ve been expensive and it didn’t work. You don’t know that.

Marc: You don’t have their data. Yeah.

Arianne: You don’t have their data. Or maybe it was a great decision for them, but it wouldn’t work for your particular product or for your customers. So I think it’s interesting how often people kind of keep that small business mindset when they have the ability to be doing so much more.

Marc: And so would you say that you take a data driven approach to website design?

Arianne: Yeah, we will do that when it makes sense to, right? So when you first come to us and you’re new, we’re going to say, “Hey, this is the quickest thing that we can set you up with. It has all the UX best practices that are probably going to work for your business.”

“But there’s no point trying to be super specific and optimize or look at your stats right now. You just need to have a good base to build on and grow that traffic.” But then once that traffic’s growing, it’s, I don’t know… it just feels like a crime not to look and see what’s working and what’s not working and how we can optimize on what is working well and what new things are worth bothering to try, rather than just, “Oh, I saw this on someone else’s site and it looked pretty. Let’s do that.”

Marc: Right. So that being said, what are some maybe before and after results that you’ve seen going through your process?

Arianne: Well, I have a story that I kind of like right now. So a lot of the brands that we work with are very focused on design and the look of things in the brand.

So we also do branding as well. And we do email marketing. And we work with a lot of gift shops and then, you know, brick and mortar stores that also want to have an online presence. So 1 of our longtime clients, they’ve been working with us for a very long time. And when we 1st built their shop, they thought of it as their flagship store because they just wanted to have a presence online.

They want to match their brand and be pretty. They have 3 brick and mortar locations. And they never thought the website was going to be like a big sales channel for them. It just seemed like something they were supposed to have more like a brand building exercise than…

Marc: Just to have it basically.

Arianne: Right. So they’ve had always had a very lovely website. You know, we kept it maintained, but we weren’t really doing any strategic growth stuff because that wasn’t their focus. But then they told us this year that their online store outpaced all three of their brick and mortar stores combined, which it was not a thing they ever thought could happen.

And now that they see that happening, they’re like, “Oh, Hey, we believe you now this is a real thing. And we’d like to, rather than just keep it working and kind of adjust it for our different new products and sales, we’d like to think about.” Since we’re paying for advertising now, how can we make sure that those ads are paying off as well as they can?

Do we need to build special landing pages? What stuff can we do that is actually tactical and will help us grow the ecommerce even more? Cause you know, it wasn’t their big focus and now it’s doing well. So just thinking, “Oh, if I, water this plant, it’s going to actually grow” is what we’re looking at with them now.

Marc: So quick question, you describe yourself as a one stop shop Shopify, you know, service provider. And so I was curious that client that you just discussed, did they already have a lot of traffic coming to their website?

Arianne: We are not a marketing agency, so we don’t grow your traffic. We have a partner that we like and will refer people to, but we the only marketing we do is we do email marketing.

But that feels, that feels more like the website to me. That’s not about getting traffic. That’s about continuing with the traffic that you’ve already found, right? Like re-engaging customers and things like that.

Marc: Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree. And so you’re really a good fit for someone who already has maybe a marketing agency on the front end that they’re working with, and then you can team up and link up with them, or even maybe obviously provide referral to someone who you know is good.

Arianne: Yeah, it’s really a chicken and egg problem. It’s like, the website’s not important until you’re getting traffic, but there’s no point getting traffic if the website’s no good. So you really have to think about both those parts of that. And sometimes you’re focusing on one, and sometimes you’re focusing on the other.

Yeah. My team’s focus is really on making sure that website’s working well for the traffic you’re getting. So we’re a great match for people who are pretty well established or have a marketing or advertising strategy that’s working for them.

Marc: Perfect. Absolutely. So that’s a great answer. And it’s very practical and real.

Right. And so that is about all the time we have for this one. So that being said, how can someone best find out more about you and what you do?

Arianne: Yeah. So for many years, I have been writing a weekly email newsletter about how to make sure your shop is working as well as it can be. And we also branch out into some branding information and email marketing.

And I always try and give you actionable info. So anybody who wants to join our newsletter, it’s at my website, Aeolidia.com. I’m going to spell that for you, a e o l i d i a .com. And if you scroll down to the bottom, you can join our newsletter and make sure you know what is going on in the Shopify world.

Marc: Thank you so much. And it is a tricky name to say, so I appreciate you spelling it out. How did you come up with that name?

Arianne: Well at one point in my life, I was going to college to be a marine biologist and that is the scientific name of the shaggy mouse nudibranch, which is a sea slug. So I don’t know that I would recommend naming your business after something that is not only a slug, but impossible to pronounce and spell, but.

It’s worked for us for 20 years.

Marc: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining me and I’ll talk to you soon.

Arianne: Thanks so much.