Dollar Shave Club’s Answer to the Question: “Is Being Mobile Really Worth It?” (And How It Led to 100,000 New Customers)

Tim: What’s up fellow marketers?  Thank you for joining me on this episode of ConversionCast. I’m going to say two words that have been the source of a very heated debate in recent times — and those two words are, “mobile responsive”. While some marketers have jumped to ensure that all elements of their marketing are mobile responsive, others have been slower to the party. Some have questioned whether it’s really even worth it to take the plunge or if it’s just a passing fad with little impact on conversion rate. Mike Dubin the co-founder of Dollar Shave Club is joining me on today’s episode to weigh in on the debate. Dollar Shave Club by the way is an awesome service which brings high quality razors and other bathroom necessities right to your door. For only a couple of bucks a month. For credibility, yeah they’ve got over 500,000 paying customers. It’s time to put some data based evidence on one side of the mobile responsive debate. So did they get worthwhile results? Listen on to find out.

If you want to see the exact images of Dollar Shave Club’s changes so you can make the right choices for your business, head over to ConversionCast.com/DollarShaveClub and you can download it right now. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages. This is Conversion Cast… and here is Mike Dubin from Dollar Shave Club.

Hey Mike, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate having you on the show today.

Mike: Thanks for having me.

Tim: Awesome. So before we dig into today’s tactic, can you just kind of share with us the results that you were able to get with the case study we’re talking about today?

Mike: Sure. You know, we launched a responsive funnel on the site and increased conversions anywhere from 15% to 20%.

Tim: Awesome. I love it. That’s awesome. So especially I mean you guys are really well established and you have you know, a brand that’s really exploded so to see a 15% to 20% increase in overall sales conversion is awesome. So tell us a little bit about Dollar Shave Club and kind of what your role is at the company?

Mike: Sure. I’m the founder and CEO of Dollar Shave Club. You know we started in March of 2012 solving a really big problem for guys which is that razors are overpriced and the experience of buying them in the store is really frustrating. You have to find the razor fortress. You have to find the guy with the key. He’s always texting his girlfriend, the whole thing takes 20 minutes and then you know, it takes you – then it costs you 20 to 30 bucks. So a pretty primitive experience and a big problem that guys talk about a lot and then we offer a really simple solution which is you know, high quality blades delivered to your door for a couple bucks a month.

So that’s where we started and you know, we earned an incredible amount of trust. You know, we have over 500,000 members and now we say well we’ve got some more promises to make and that is to help guys look and feel great through great products, content and technology. By products I mean products for men’s bathroom. So anything from what you put on your face to shave to what you use in the shower. We believe we can make and deliver high quality products for half the price of market equivalent. So you’re going to see us make a big push into the men’s bathroom this year.

Tim: That’s awesome. I mean I noticed a new kind of newer product, men’s wipes. Can you tell us about that just because I’m curious?

Mike: Sure. So we get that question a lot.

Tim: [Laughs]

Mike: But it is a serious product even though butt stuff is pretty funny. But yeah I mean it’s called One Wipe Charlie’s. It’s a butt wipe for men. It’s got a little peppermint tingle so you know where the clean is. But yeah it’s a really useful product. I mean it’s a better way to wipe, it’s a cleaner way to wipe. It’s faster and it feels fantastic. So you know, and this is something that I’ve been doing for a long time ever since college using a wet wipe to kind of finish things off at the end and I thought it was an insight. [Laughs]

Tim: [Laughs]

Mike: ….a behavior motivation if you will that I wanted to share with our members. So yeah we launched it last June and it’s going great. I mean members love that product.

Tim: That’s awesome. That’s cool. All right so let’s talk about the mobile responsive change that you made. So how did you kind of come into the idea that it was time for you guys to go mobile responsive?

Mike: Well you know we track everything very closely and we use Google Analytics which is a tool that’s accessible to everybody. You know, we noticed that our traffic coming from mobile sources wasn’t converting at the rate that it wasn’t desktop. So we made that change.

[0:05:06]

We decided that it was time to you know, I mean we had… The case studies of companies increasing conversion rate when they optimized their sites for mobile it’s well documented. So we decided it was time.

Tim: Awesome. And so I just want to be really clear. We’re talking about conversion to sales. Is that right?

Mike: Yes. Sales.

Tim: Okay, all right. Awesome. You made this change and then was it that you built out, did you build out a specific version of your site for mobile or did you simply have a like a program or come in and change your site so that it was mobile responsive?

Mike: At first we had a separate site.

Tim: Okay.

Mike: We had a mobile site so an M site and then – but that was a while back and then we made some changes to the site and we had to go back to the desktop version and then ultimately what we did is we made one site that’s optimized for mobile.

Tim: Okay and so my question is why go to the responsive site versus continuing to keep kind of the mobile only site?

Mike: Because while it’s a little bit of an initial workup top, you know, in the long term it’s easier to maintain one site. You know it takes a little bit maybe longer to develop but yeah operationally when you’re at the scale we are, it just makes sense to do it that way.

Tim: Okay. So did anything else on the site change or is it in this change as we’re talking about the 15% to 20% increase was it simply the mobile responsive and that was the only thing that you changed in that time period that got you those results?

Mike: I mean we’re always changing things but that was kind of –we attribute it directly to that.

Tim: Got you. So do you know what went into changing a site that was already built and already you know, kind of in existence? So the reason I’m asking this question is if somebody were listening to this show that you know didn’t have the resources of like a Dollar Shave Club style company like what – do you know what would go into making a site that’s already non mobile responsive and turning that into a mobile responsive site?

Mike: I mean it requires you totally recoding your front end. It’s not something that you can just do. I mean you’ll know if a site is responsive if you take the browser window and you start shrinking it down and the page itself starts changing shape and form. If you shrink it down to the width of a mobile phone, it looks like you know what you’d be looking at on a mobile phone screen. That’s how you know if a site is kind of mobile optimized. So it’s a page that exists. It can exist on a web browser page and it can exist on a phone. So it is really you know, the JavaScript and the CSS that is telling this page how to behave when the browser size is smaller which is essentially all we’re talking about when you’re looking at your stuff on a mobile browser. It’s just a smaller browser size. So it’s not –you know, you really do have to code the page that way.

Now that just makes sense for us because we’re –you know, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for every company out there. We’re going to be changing it more and more and you know, we want –you know we don’t want to have to do double the work once on a mobile site and then once on a desktop site. So we’d rather have it be one responsive site so we make the change once, it might take us a little bit longer to do it but you know, ultimately it’s the right move. So you know, but that said you got to really assess whether or not it’s right for your business. It might not be right for your business to do a responsive site. You should just do a mobile site. Because maybe all you’re doing is updating inventory, maybe all you’re doing is changing the content of a home page with a CMS. You know those are decisions that each company has to make individually based on skill.

Tim: Got you and so otherwise it might sense to make either just a mobile only site or if you haven’t – if you don’t already have kind of an established brand, it might even make sense just to completely kind of grab a new theme or you know, have your site redesigned so that it’s already ready for mobile. Do you think that would make sense?

Mike: I don’t think it has. I mean you can do all of this. You have a recognized brand. You can develop all of this stuff in the shadows and then just flip the switch when you’re ready.

Tim: Yeah. I think we’re seeing a lot of brands doing that, a lot of e commerce stores that have been around for a long time that haven’t really thought about mobile are starting to make that switch and are seeing you know, pretty high conversions now that they’ve switched. But I don’t know if I’ve seen many that have gotten quite as high as 15% to 20% so that’s really awesome and what do you attribute that too?

Mike: Just easier, better user experience. You know, ultimately people believe it or not there are people browsing the web that have other things to do with their lives besides spend it on your site. What you want to do as you know, whether you’re a UI, UX designer or even CEO is how to create the best experience possible. It’s not easy but you know, it’s important to that person get in and get out, get what they’re looking for very quickly.

[0:10:24]

Tim: That’s great. Well thank you Mike so much for coming on the show and sharing this kind of piece of what you’re doing there at Dollar Shave Club. We really respect what you’re doing so thanks again and keep up the good work.

Mike: Thanks for having me Tim.

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