Test-Driven Marketing – with Tim Parkin

Arlen Robinson [00:02]
Welcome to the E -commerce Marketing Podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Tim Parkin who is a coach to marketing executives globally. He specializes in helping marketing teams optimize performance, accelerate growth, and maximize their results. By applying more than 20 years of experience merging behavioral psychology and technology, Tim has generated over $100 million for global brands. Welcome to the podcast, Tim.

Tim Parkin [00:37]
Hey Arlen, I’m excited to be here, really looking forward to this conversation and thanks so much for having me.

Arlen Robinson [00:42]
Yes. And I’m excited to talk to you, Tim. Thank you for joining us. You know, today we’re going to be talking about test driven marketing, which is we’re going to be diving into using experimentation to rapidly find, you know, the most profitable experience for your store, which can then of course, skyrocket your conversion rates and then Mac maximize your revenue, which is what all e -commerce businesses are trying to do these days. And so I’ll.

Tim Parkin [01:09]
Yes, super excited.

Arlen Robinson [01:11]
Yes, for sure. So I’m excited to get into that. But before we get started, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

Tim Parkin [01:21]
It’s a weird and wild story. And I’ll keep it brief, but you know, as a kid, uh, I was in the backyard and my dad had a bucket that was empty and he pulled a quarter out of thin air and dropped it in the bucket. And I said, that’s amazing. And he kept doing this over and over again. So we had a bucket full of quarters. And I thought we’re going to be rich. You know, my dad could just pull money out of thin air. Uh, and so at a young age, my dad introduced me to magic, you know, prestidigitation is the formal name. And so I was, I was fascinated by magic as a kid and I was in a magic club and I thought I’d be a professional magician. Well,

Arlen Robinson [01:38]
Right.

Tim Parkin [01:51]
So find out, you you work nights and weekends if you’re a professional magician. So I didn’t pursue that. Um, but from that, I got into programming. I did programming for many years. I built some really cool products for startups, but I kept running into this problem with programming, which was we’d build a really cool product and then no one would hear about it. And that’s when I realized there’s something here. It’s not a product problem. It’s a marketing problem. And so that got me into marketing. How do we get attention? How do we keep attention? And I tell you about the magic because what I’ve found in marketing is that marketing and magic have so many similarities.

Arlen Robinson [01:56]
Right.

Tim Parkin [02:21]
It’s about telling a story. It’s about capturing attention. It’s about focusing on the things we want people to focus on and avoiding and misdirecting from the things we don’t want them to see. So there’s so many parallels with magic and marketing. And I think it brings a really unique background that I have of magic, but also technology. Like today, marketing is synonymous with technology. You can’t do marketing without technology. So combining magic with the behavioral psychology and how people think and act. And then with the technology side, it gives me a really unique perspective on marketing.

Arlen Robinson [02:49]
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way. The correlation between magic and marketing, but I think you’re totally right. There is definitely some similarities there when you’re thinking about the psychology, because I know with magic, a lot of what you’re doing is, well, depending on what type of magic you’re doing, I know there’s a lot of these, what do you call it? These type of musicians that are…

Tim Parkin [03:13]
Like mentalists? Yeah.

Arlen Robinson [03:13]
not necessarily doing sleight of hand tricks, but they’re doing more of the mental side of things where, you know, they’re kind of doing the mind reading type thing or trying to figure out, you know, what’s in a news article that hasn’t been published yet, that type of thing. So yeah, I can definitely see how there’s that correlation. So yeah, interesting.

Tim Parkin [03:19]
Yes.

Tim Parkin [03:28]
Exactly.

Tim Parkin [03:35]
Yeah, it’s so cool with magic because there’s it’s like the method, right? There’s, there’s a method to the magic. Uh, of course it’s not real. I hate to spoil it to all the listeners and viewers here, but there’s a method to it. I think just like marketing, you know, there is a, a methodology we can follow to do great marketing. And if we can deliver an experience that’s unique and memorable and powerful for our customers, then that’s how we can build brand awareness and affinity and conversions and, and customers. And so I think there’s, like you said, a lot of similarities between.

Arlen Robinson [03:40]
Right.

Right. Yeah.

Tim Parkin [04:03]
magic and marketing. Everyone wants their marketing to be magical.

Arlen Robinson [04:03]
Yeah.

Right. We all do. Yeah. We all want, you know, to be able to put out these marketing information, do these marketing strategies and magically have our revenues increase. But unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Yeah, but it is. It definitely is a challenge. Speaking of marketing, I want to just kind of start off with seeing if you could explain what specifically what test driven marketing is.

Tim Parkin [04:17]
Exactly, that’s the goal. It’s a challenge.

Tim Parkin [04:34]
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson [04:34]
and how does that differ from, you know, just traditional marketing approaches.

Tim Parkin [04:39]
Yeah, there’s a challenge that we all are facing right now that the world has changed. And if you think about traditional marketing, you run ads, you send out emails, you do all that stuff and that’s marketing. But the one thing about marketing is that it’s constantly changing, that the technology is constantly changing. Look at chat GPT and AI, you know, we didn’t have this a year ago. The pandemic has changed consumer behavior. We have curbside pickup, you know, thank God, because I couldn’t live without it. Right. It’s amazing.

Arlen Robinson [05:05]
Yeah it is.

Tim Parkin [05:05]
But consumer behavior and technology keeps changing. As a result, marketing keeps changing. And if you’re not keeping up with that, you’re falling behind. And if you don’t understand how people are buying things online today or how they’re finding out about things to buy online today, like TikTok, you know, that wasn’t all the rage a couple of years ago. So you have to keep up pace with all these trends and all these changes and all the technology and all the consumer behavior. And on top of that, culture is changing. There’s so many dynamics, you know, globally that are changing.

And, you know, supply chain challenges and shipping prices, there’s so much stuff. And so my prospect here, my theory is that, uh, if you’re not keeping up with that, then how can you, because it’s so overwhelming. And I think the reality is we can’t just keep doing the stuff we’ve been doing and expect the same or better results. You know, we’re going to get worse results because things are changing and you’re not on pace. You’re not keeping up with that. And the reality is if everything’s changing, how do you know it works? How do you know it doesn’t work? And to me, there’s only one clear answer. And that is to test, to test everything.

that what works for your competition doesn’t necessarily work for you. What works for their users doesn’t work for your users. What works in your industry doesn’t work in a different industry. And so you need to find out what really works for you, for your industry, for your customers, for your products, for your pricing, for everything about you. And if you don’t know that, that’s a big problem. And the way to find that out is to test. And when you test, we can talk about all the benefits of it, but you can do that in a safe way that doesn’t cost a lot, that doesn’t take a lot of time.

you can figure out what works and what doesn’t. And of course then do more of what works and do less of what doesn’t.

Arlen Robinson [06:36]
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think with marketing in general, you know, salespeople, marketing people, there’s, there’s this phrase that a lot of people are always, that’s always been in the marketing circles, which is always be selling or always be closing because you always have to close deal, always constantly selling. I think that also applies to testing, always be testing. So not only do you have to always be out there, always getting leads, always selling. But yeah, at the same time, when you’re

Tim Parkin [06:51]
Yes.

Tim Parkin [06:58]
Absolutely.

Arlen Robinson [07:06]
implementing marketing strategies, I have to always be testing because otherwise you don’t know what’s working, what’s not. And the bottom line is if you don’t know, you’re going be wasting a lot of valuable dollars and getting really literally no return.

Tim Parkin [07:17]
Yes.

Absolutely. That’s a great point. Dollars and minutes that are wasted because you didn’t test it. You know, we assume that we know, and you know, I ask a lot of my clients, you know, when’s the last time you talked to your customers? There’s no good answer to that question. Most people say, I don’t know. Or it was last year, even last week. It doesn’t matter. You need to constantly be talking to your customers and the same with testing. You know, if you think you know better, you don’t, I guarantee you. And there’s been tons of studies on this where they’ve run experiments and they’ve had marketers guess which variation of the experiment will perform the best.

Arlen Robinson [07:31]
Yeah.

Tim Parkin [07:48]
And in almost every single case, marketers are always wrong because we’re not the consumer. We can’t think like a consumer. We’re the marketer. And so it’s a big problem that we have a big bias that we think we’re smarter. We think we know the answers. And the reality is, I hate to break it to you. We don’t, you don’t know what works. I don’t know what works. You know, nobody knows what works, but the only way to find out is to test. And fortunately, it’s not challenging or difficult to do that.

Arlen Robinson [07:49]
Mm -hmm.

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Arlen Robinson [08:01]
Yep.

Arlen Robinson [08:06]
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And that’s that is the good thing, especially these days with the kind of amount of tools that are out there. And, you know, there’s there’s a lot of ways that you can do it. And also for a business that’s, let’s say, looking to implement a test driven approach in in their marketing strategies, where should they start? Let’s say from day one, what exactly should they do?

Tim Parkin [08:31]
The first step is you got to figure out what to test, right? And you got to focus on the right things. And there are so many things you could test, but we need to focus on the highest opportunities, the things that actually have a difference. So if you read, if you Google right now about like experimentation and marketing and stuff like that, you’re going to hear like, you should test a red button versus a blue button. Don’t listen to any of that advice, please, because that won’t make a big difference unless you have a ton of traffic and a huge site. You need to focus on the things that have a lot of opportunities. So your homepage, you know, the top…

above the fold section on your homepage, the hero section, that’s probably a good place to start testing or your abandoned cart email sequences. You know, a lot of people get those. If you tested that, if you change the subject line or something, it’d have a big impact. So we need to first find a bunch of opportunities that have enough traffic, enough eyeballs that if you made a test, if you ran a test, it would have enough people see the test so you can evaluate whether or not there was a difference statistically or not. So that’s number one is go through your site, go through your marketing, go through emails.

and see where are we getting traffic, where are we getting eyeballs that we could actually test something. And then once you find those areas, then you can look at them and analyze them as a group or get some feedback from customers and say, what questions do you have about this? What’s missing? What could we add? You can look for inspiration from competition too, but first find the areas where you have a lot of traffic. And then second, analyze those and figure out what’s wrong or what could we do differently that would provide a better experience.

Arlen Robinson [09:45]
Mm -hmm.

Arlen Robinson [09:54]
Yeah, good stuff. Yeah. And one of the things I was just thinking about is a lot of e -commerce businesses these days, they’re using some of these major e -commerce platforms for their online store, whether it’s Shopify, whether it’s Wix, whether it’s Squarespace. And with each of these platforms, you know, they’re, of course you can have your own template that they provide. You can customize it. You can do something, you know, totally custom, or you can just kind of go with their bare bones design. But

Tim Parkin [10:08]
Yes.

Arlen Robinson [10:23]
there is how much weight should a business owner put on the flow with these different platforms, meaning that each of them is gonna kind of have its own fixed kind checkout flow that you don’t have a lot of control over. Do those things make a big difference when it comes to conversions and maybe abandoning cart?

Tim Parkin [10:39]
Yeah.

Tim Parkin [10:49]
Yeah, it can make a big difference. So Shopify, you know, one of the most popular has a ton of plugins you can use, you know, to change a lot of aspects about it. So those are really good, like Rebuy is a really good plugin. There’s a ton, you know, it gets a whole list. But when you’re optimizing something, when you’re trying to find opportunity, you know, a lot of people think from left to right and they think like, okay, people come to the site and then they get to the product page and then they add to cart. And so you naturally are inclined to want to optimize and test like from the beginning.

to the end. And that makes sense from a traffic perspective. Most people are coming to the homepage, so let’s focus there. But from a revenue perspective, if you want to have a big impact and you have enough people buying, working backwards is a really smart approach. So from the cart, how do we improve the, like you said, abandoned cart sequence, how do we improve the cart experience and the checkout experience? Those are really good places from e -commerce perspective to start because if you can make a small improvement to those, a massive gain, right? If you improve the conversion rate of people coming to the website, the homepage,

Maybe you have a decent improvement, but it’s usually pretty small. But people are in the cart, they did all this journey and they’re like ready to buy. So if you can improve a little bit there, it’ll have a massive gain in terms of revenue and sales and AOV and things like that. So if you want to optimize, start at the end, if you have enough volume, but if you don’t have enough volume, you know, start at the beginning with that. But in terms of that whole journey, you’re right. It can make a big difference. And I think having the right platform is important. I wouldn’t switch platforms. Most of these platforms are extensible and you can change things.

Arlen Robinson [11:54]
Yeah.

Arlen Robinson [12:07]
Mm -hmm.

Arlen Robinson [12:12]
Yeah.

Tim Parkin [12:15]
And there are even external tools you can use like A B testing tools to change the site, you know, even with outside of the platform. So you can have some more control if the platform doesn’t allow you that.

Arlen Robinson [12:18]
Mm -hmm.

Arlen Robinson [12:24]
Yeah, that’s, that’s good to know. And I do see with most of these platforms, they have an app store or extensions that you can add upon your site to modify things, improve the checkout. But yeah, that makes Lentz where you’re going to improve those things at the very end. Cause like you said, if somebody has gone all the way through and they’re reaching their very last part and then they’re jumping ship, then, you obviously if you can correct some things there, you can, you can get them.

Tim Parkin [12:31]
Yeah.

Tim Parkin [12:53]
Absolutely.

Arlen Robinson [12:54]
that you can get them to finalize the sale. So that’s definitely good to know. Now when we’re thinking about testing, doing these modifications to the site, making these improvements, trying certain things with as far as marketing campaigns, maybe sending people.

to different landing pages, testing out how those work versus sending people to the homepage or another page of your site. You have all these things that you can do and all of the stats and things that you’re gonna gather. Once you’ve done some things and let’s say you’ve got, I guess you could say kind of a body of test results, what would be some key performance indicators that a business should focus on when they’re just evaluating the success of all of these experiments that they’re doing, these marketing experiments?

Tim Parkin [13:13]
Yeah.

Tim Parkin [13:41]
Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s really important because if you focus on the wrong metrics, the experiments are null and void, right? You wasted your time running the experiment at all. And so it depends on how you set up the experiment, what you really want to measure. But for example, if it’s the abandoned cart sequence or the checkout or something like that, obviously you want to have the completion rate. Did more people who went through this experiment actually buy something or did they spend more money or did they convert at a higher rate? So,

Typically it’s going to be revenue and in e -commerce, we call it RPV revenue per visitor that people who experienced this experience, this variation, this new version, did they generate a higher revenue per visitor than other people? If it’s the cart or something like that, a product page, it could be checkout rate or add to cart rate. So did more people who saw this version of the product page actually add to cart? If so, that’s really good. You know, for example, the goal of the product page is just to get people to add to cart.

It’s not necessarily to get them to buy, it’s to give them to add to cart. So you can’t measure the efficacy of the product page on whether or not they actually bought necessarily. You need to measure, did we get them to the next step? And so whenever you’re looking to run an experiment, you definitely look at overall, did this generate more revenue? But let’s also be mindful that how much control can this really have in terms of the bigger picture? A product page will get them to add to cart. An abandoned cart sequence might get them to come back to the site and maybe, you know, view the cart. Hopefully check out and finish that process.

So whatever step you’re working on running experiment to, that should be the metric, whether it’s add to cart or checkout, or if it’s revenue, that will determine what metric you measure.

Arlen Robinson [15:14]
Got it. Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Now you’ve of course worked with many brands to improve their marketing that they’re doing, doing marketing experiments and looking at the results and then making changes from everything that you’ve kind of seen in your experiences. What would you say are some of the most common challenges or obstacles companies face when they’re just trying to adopt just a test driven marketing approach?

Tim Parkin [15:39]
It’s hard to get the buy -in of the team or the company to do this because people are afraid that if we change something, what if the results go down? What if we break something? What if it doesn’t convert as well? And the opposite is actually true, right? Like if you keep it the same, you’re not going to get better results. So we got to keep trying stuff. And the reality of testing is that most of your tests will probably fail. I mean, they won’t have a positive result and that’s okay because you can run a test for a week or two and say, you know what? That didn’t work, but we learned something.

We learned that this approach doesn’t work effectively. So how can we change that? How can we improve that? But oftentimes in the beginning, there’s so many low hanging fruit available to you and quick wins. For example, I work with one brand and they have a 30 day money back guarantee, a hundred percent. You don’t like it for any reason. You just contact them, ship it back and they give you all your money back. They didn’t put that anywhere on the site. So all we did was we took that with the badge and put it on the PDP, you know, right below your seat of price and stuff to add to cart and said, Hey, we got a 30 day money back guarantee.

conversion rate shot up immediately. I mean, that’s how simple this can be, but oftentimes we’re sowing the weeds that we’re not looking at those things because we’re not thinking like a consumer. So oftentimes there’s a lot of really quick, easy things you can do to just improve the credibility or the authority or the reasons to buy, or even the benefits that you have being more clear. So I would say, you know, test small, start really small. That way you can get buy -in. And once you start to see some of those wins start to stack up, then the company and the culture will be, hey, let’s test more stuff.

And also get other people to contribute ideas. This is not just a marketing thing. You know, marketing should own this and should have the ideas. But, you know, if you have a sales team, talk to the sales team. If you have leadership, get leadership involved and say, what things do you not like? What ideas do you have? Let’s test them. You know, there’s no harm in testing.

Arlen Robinson [17:20]
Yeah, there really isn’t, but I can definitely get where businesses are coming from. Like you said, a lot of people are a little bit leery to do some of these testing experiments and then make changes. Cause like you said, they’re like, you know, they’re afraid they’re going to break something. They don’t want to change anything because you know, all right, what this is going to do is going to have like a drastic effect. But yeah, I think there’s really no way to tell until you really test it and see the results. So you mentioned a couple of keys, a couple of key things. Yeah.

Tim Parkin [17:34]
Yes.

Tim Parkin [17:38]
Right?

Tim Parkin [17:44]
There’s a lot of opinions too. The brand person might say, oh, it has to be this color. It has to be that font or we can’t move that. Or leadership might say, this is the way it is and we’re not changing it. Well, can we just test it? Just test it once and let’s see what happens. You’d be surprised.

Arlen Robinson [17:59]
Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned a couple of key things earlier, um, as well that, um, I never really thought about, but it makes sense when you’re testing, obviously when you’re marketing and you have a business, you have an ideal customer persona, um, in mind. So an ideal customer that, you know, would be a right fit for your products or your services. And that’s what you’re typically trying to market to. And typically the type of people you’re trying to get into your funnel. And it seems like if you’re doing testing based on the results that you’re gathering, what people are clicking on, what.

marketing campaigns, people are becoming responsive to, it seems like if you’re testing, you’ll be able to really almost validate your actual ideal customer persona and then even figure out if you have the wrong one. So maybe, you know, you’re targeting the wrong type of customer, but if you’ve done this testing and you’re seeing what works, you’re going to be able to, to modify that if you need to.

Tim Parkin [18:54]
Yeah, that is, it’s such an important point Arlen, because that’s foundational, right? Like not only can you figure out what works and get better results, but those insights, that’s kind of the closing loop of the testing is you have a bunch of ideas, you prioritize them to figure out which ones will have a big impact. You run the experiment and figure out, did it work or not? And then you analyze the results. And that’s the last step here. Cause then we can say, okay, what did we learn from this and what do we do about it? And one thing, do we update the page cause it worked better or did it not work better? And we don’t have to the page.

But either way, how do we take that knowledge and that wisdom that we’ve gained, those insights, and apply that to all of our other marketing? So like you said, if we did a message test on the homepage and we test one message versus another, and we realize, hey, this one really resonated with people. Well, let’s put that in our social media. Let’s put it in our emails. Let’s put it everywhere. Let’s give it to our influencers to talk about. Like that’s how powerful testing is. It’s not just on the website or in your emails. It’s let’s figure out what works and what people want to see and need to see.

Arlen Robinson [19:30]
Mm -hmm.

Tim Parkin [19:49]
And then let’s use that to our advantage everywhere we can. That’s really the crux of testing. Like, yes, you get better results, but the number one benefit of testing is that you get to know what works. And that’s just like a superpower. Once you have that, everything is so much easier.

Arlen Robinson [19:53]
Mm -hmm.

Arlen Robinson [19:59]
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that’s really it. I mean, you nailed it there. It’s figuring out what works and the only way to do that is through testing. Now, earlier you’d also mentioned that we’re kind of now in this, I guess you could say evolution of the world and technology where there’s a lot of tools out there to be able to, that allows you to be able to test marketing and do these marketing experiments. And so,

Tim Parkin [20:09]
Yeah. Absolutely.

Arlen Robinson [20:28]
Could you share some insights into any of the tools or technologies that you’ve used that you think are essential for conducting all of these marketing experiments?

Tim Parkin [20:31]
Yeah.

Tim Parkin [20:36]
Absolutely. There’s a ton and you don’t have to use these tools, but I’ll tell you some of my favorites. If you’re on Shopify, Shogun is a really good tool to use. You can build landing pages. It has AB testing built in. It’s a great place to start. It’s relatively affordable and really easy to use. So it’s a really good place to start. My favorite AB testing tool that I use with almost all my clients is called convert .com. It’s more expensive, but extremely capable and just an amazing tool with an amazing team behind it.

And if you’re serious about A -B testing, if you have a, you know, a growing e -commerce brand, definitely convert .com is I would say the only way to go. Um, but there’s a lot of other ways to test that don’t rely on your site. But if you don’t have heat maps or hot, uh, or session recordings, hot jar, really great tool to use to see how people are moving around your site, what they’re clicking on. You can watch them basically over their shoulder from recordings of how to use your site. Super valuable for experimentation. And then also there’s a really good tool that just rebranded.

It used to be called usability hub. Now it’s called Lysna, L Y S S N A dot com. And with Lysna, you can create a survey so you can show people like images or videos or ask questions. And then they have an audience of people and you can choose from that audience based on demographics. You can say, uh, women, 25 to 40, who have two kids or more in the U S certain income level. So you can run the survey to these people and so you can say, Hey, we have these pages. Which one would you trust more? Or this is our product image. What do you think about it? Or.

Here’s some messages, which one resonates with you. So that’s a really good way to test. It’s very cheap and affordable and you don’t need to have any fancy tools or change your site at all, but you can still gain some insights. And a lot of my clients use that when they launch campaigns to test creative assets or messaging before they launch the campaign to make sure it’s going to resonate with people.

Arlen Robinson [22:14]
Okay.

Arlen Robinson  [22:22]
Okay, awesome. Yeah, those are some great tools. I’m familiar with most of those and yeah, it’s good to know that most of these tools are very affordable. They all have plans. Some of them even have some free plans that you can get in there and try them out and see what works. So yeah, really, really good stuff. Well, Tim, as we get ready to wrap things up, I wanted to see if you could give us an idea of where you think test -driven marketing is evolving and are there any kind of emerging trends that you think are gonna…

Tim Parkin [22:29]
Yes. Totally, yes.

Arlen Robinson [22:51]
kind of change the test -driven marketing game, if you will.

Tim Parkin [22:55]
I think so. I think this is the future of marketing. As I said in the beginning, I think traditional approach of marketing is let’s just do marketing and hope for the best. And we know better than our customers, you know, the pace of the world changing, the pace of marketing changing is only increasing. And if you’re not testing now, you need to be. And if you don’t know what works or if you think, you know, it works, you’re probably wrong. And so I think testing is the only way it’s the way forward. And you would be surprised once you get into that momentum of testing, how enjoyable it is and how rewarding it is.

and the wins you can have and how they compound on each other. And so I would really encourage anybody, you know, I call it experiment zero, just do one test, you know, this month coming up, pick one thing really small and just test it. You don’t have to worry about if it works or not, but just get started with testing. Once you learn the process and get in it, you’ll see it is, it’s a superpower for marketing and especially in e -commerce when you have a very consistent, you know, site and structure and flow, uh, small tests can have huge wins. Uh, and so can’t encourage you enough to test.

Arlen Robinson [23:54]
Okay, awesome, awesome. And I’m glad you mentioned that start small because yeah, some of these small tests can definitely go a long way. And I can definitely, you know, testify to that fact for sure. Well, it’s been awesome talking to you, Tim. I definitely have learned a lot. We really appreciate you coming on to the e -commerce marketing podcast because I think test driven marketing is not going anywhere as long as marketing is out there. As long as digital marketing is out there, you have to test it. That’s that’s just really the bottom line.

Tim Parkin [24:20]
Yes.

Arlen Robinson [24:23]
But lastly, before we do let you go, I always like our guests to share one closing fun fact just so that we can get to know you a little bit better if you don’t mind sharing.

Tim Parkin [24:31]
Of course. Yeah. I told you my secret that I, you know, ex professional magician. But, uh, in addition to that, you know, I’m colorblind and it’s been fascinating to live a life as colorblind cause I am red, green, colorblind. So I see colors, but I just can’t tell what some of them are. And the number one question I realized when people ask me when they hear that is how do you drive? Cause the traffic lights are, you know, red, yellow, green, and I can still kind of see them, but they’re in order. But it really gave me this perspective that we often think we know how people perceive things.

Arlen Robinson [24:54]
Right. Okay. All right.

Tim Parkin [25:01]
but we don’t until we’re in their shoes. I think the same is true of marketing that, you know, really the key here is how can we get in the customer’s shoes and see things the way they see them? And so being colorblind has been, you know, a struggle in my life, but it’s been a fascinating experience of how do you think about how other people see things and how can you put yourself in their shoes?

Arlen Robinson [25:01]
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Arlen Robinson [25:10]
Mm -hmm.

Arlen Robinson [25:19]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Interesting. And thank you for sharing that. And I can definitely see how you’re right as far as a business owner. I mean, that’s really what you really have to do. You got to try to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. I mean, and then, and then from there, you know, adopt whatever the marketing tactics or strategies that you’re trying to use to reach that person.

Tim Parkin [25:35]
Yes.

Tim Parkin [25:43]
Yes.

Arlen Robinson [25:44]
And the only way you can do that is to try to get in their shoes as difficult as that may be. You gotta do it, you gotta at least attempt to do it.

Tim Parkin [25:52]
It’s true. It is so true.

Arlen Robinson [25:57]
Well, great Tim. Thank you for sharing that again. We appreciate that. Lastly, before we do let you go, if any of our listeners or viewers want to reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about test driven marketing, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Tim Parkin [26:00]
Yeah.

Tim Parkin [26:10]
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I post daily their advice and content on how to get more from your marketing. And you can learn more about the coaching group I have. I’m often sharing some insights from that. And every month I have a round table where we get a bunch of marketing leaders together and just share and hang out and talk about what strategies are working and how to do it. So again, on LinkedIn, you can find me there. I’m promoting the round table every month, but would love to have you guys join us and share more of what’s working. And actually this coming month, we’re going to talk about test -driven marketing and some of the ways to implement it. So really looking forward to it.

Arlen Robinson [26:37]
Okay.

All right, that’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing. I definitely encourage people to check you out on LinkedIn and we’ll also have a link to your website and our show notes so people can check you out there. So thank you for everything that you’re doing and we really appreciate having you on the e -commerce marketing podcast.

Tim Parkin [26:55]
Thanks, Harlan.

Podcast Guest Info

Tim Parkin
Founder of Parkin Consulting