It’s almost time for our first Worldwide Online Conference! If you haven’t already, you can register for the event here which we’ll be bringing to you live Wednesday 22nd April at 9.00am India Standard Time (GMT +5:30).
Once you’ve registered you can get involved in the chat and polls over on the Crowdcast platform. If you’d prefer to simply watch it without the interaction, we’ll also be streaming it on YouTube Live which you can view here.
This forum space has been created to keep you updated on the day, and as an alternative place where you can discuss the topics with other authors and ask any questions for talks you may have missed. This is also a great place to continue the conversation after the conference 
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Our Worldwide Online event is now live! Join the Crowdcast, watch it on YouTube Live, or follow along in this thread - we’ll be posting some updates here throughout the day, particularly for authors joining later on from different time zones, or those who find it difficult following our Canadian/Australian/New Zealand/US/Brazilian English accents in real-time 
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First session for the day is Cam Gough (@camgough) - Envato’s General Manager of Content. He’ll be sharing some insights into how the current global environment is affecting Envato, and some of the things Envato is doing right now.
From Cam’s presentation:
Currently, Envato has around 25k Authors earning through our platforms each month. $136M in Author earnings last year, which was our record so far. We’re still tracking very strongly towards our goal of $1B in total Author earnings, too.
The two main areas that authors earn from are Envato Market (ThemeForest, CodeCanyon, VideoHive, AudioJungle, 3DOcean, PhotoDune and GrapicRiver) and Envato Elements.
So far in 2020: Market is in a very strong level of performance, particularly led by ThemeForest and CodeCanyon which are both at multi-month highs. Elements is similarly very strong in terms of new customer growth, with an all-time high for subscriptions during the last month. That’s very welcome news for everyone, as we enter these uncertain times.
One of the drivers of this is businesses either starting up, or further developing their digital presence all around the world. Many countries are currently in a lockdown period, and there’s a strong push towards online trade.
More info on two areas of particular focus at Envato: the first is improving our communication and insights with the Author community, on a range of different channels. Those include forum Q&A sessions with our senior managers, as well as insights reports and new dashboards. If you’re on the forums reading this right now, I’m sure this is welcome news 
We also want to help Authors to understand what the opportunities are in their markets. Both Elements and Market authors will be receiving improved dashboards that help identify the items and item types that are performing the best, so they can prioritise their new projects.
Our second big focus is on providing more opportunities for the Author community to earn: especially where we can see a gap in our library where there’s customer demand without enough content available; new content types, and content challenges.
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Now for a quick break - we’ll be back in a few minutes with the next session 
While you’re waiting, please join our latest UX questionnaire - asking “as a content creator, what does success look like for you?”
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Next up is Sunni Cooper (@sunnicooper) - Digital Producer for Envato Market. She’s talking about understanding our customers and their content needs. Session 2 is now live in the video stream!
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Referral programs are generally built for end user, so that if they like the product then can share it with their friends/family/audience, promote it and earn money. But here at envato, the referall program is literally targeted towards authors themselves, so its a loop where author is referring their own product to earn more on their product. Is this going to get fixed?
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From Sunni’s presentation:
We have several major types of customers, all served to different extents by Envato Market. Some of these are better served by other products - for example, Placeit is aimed at DIY customers who would typically not purchase items from marketplaces like GraphicRiver, or who would purchase once and find they didn’t have the skills or technology needed to successfully use those items.
By segment size, the biggest customer types on Market are:
- Website creators
- Multimedia creators
- Graphic designers
- Communicators
Different pain points for each type - particularly relating to item ease of use (live demos, detailed documentation, relevant updates), and customer service. Are there reviews on the item page? How do authors respond to questions left by customers? All these things help customers to make a decision on which item to buy.
Quick summary of the biggest reasons why customers buy from Envato Market:
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Great question @UnitedOver - I’ll see if @emile_b has any insights here, as he looks after the Envato Market affiliates.
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Joined the live broadcast
My connection dropped out, so I missed details on the first current project from Market. The second is some (okay, a lot!) of work that the Market team has put into optimising Item Cards for conversion.
TL;DR: Increasing customer confidence in the items, and making it easier to compare items, has resulted in significant increases in conversion.
#3 is about changes to default sorting options, helping customers to make an initial purchase. We know that these users are then more likely to make subsequent purchases, and also more likely to purchase items from other categories (or marketplaces).
Category pages are visual collections that tell customers what to expect within a category. The new item cards have let us redesign the category pages, which leads to #4…
Also, some important points from Sunni about the “continuous experimentation” model that we run on. We know that there are many different factors at work in customer purchase decisions, so we need to test these extensively when considering any kind of change.
Not all of these will be visible to all users - the aim here is to find the right way, to tell the right customers, about the right products, at the right time. Quantifying the impact of each change, and the overall effect of any combination of changes, is a huge task!
Importantly, these changes have a huge impact on the customer experience, and the sales made through each marketplace. We don’t want to guess at what the best answers are, so the only way to get it right is through extensive testing.
Currently, improving trust signals for customers is a major area of focus. Next up we’ll cover the live Q&A from the Crowdcast Q&A - I won’t try typing fast enough to cover all of those in here, though Note that this is the first of several Q&A sessions that we’re running throughout the day, so Sunni will be focused specifically on Market Roadmap questions.
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Hope you’ve been enjoying the video stream (or this live blog) so far! Next session will be @jamesgiroux, sharing some tips for selling well on Envato in 2020. He’ll be starting at 2.45pm, so you have time to grab a quick coffee 
In the meantime - What information do you need from Envato to create your best work? Let our UX researchers know here
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