Podcasts about lucky orange

In this episode of the Customers Who Click podcast, we welcome Sean McCarthy from Lucky Orange to discuss the world of behavioural analytics in conversion rate optimization (CRO). Sean emphasizes the importance of understanding customer motivations and anxieties through surveys and feedback loops. We delved into the role of behavioural analytics in CRO, highlighting Lucky Orange's tools such as heat maps and session recordings. We also discuss the need for hypothesis testing and data-driven decision-making. Overall, this podcast explores how behavioural analytics can optimize conversion rates and improve user experience on e-commerce websites.

Entry Envy was founded in October 2021 by Jennifer Lea in Omaha, Nebraska, to help others create a welcoming entry with simplicity and convenience that also identified their home for their guests and delivery drivers. Entry Envy custom signs with modern address numbers, last names and monograms feature a small planter box for their monthly faux floral holiday and seasonal decor refill kits. Her inspiration came after a divorce and fully remodeling her home with outdated, hard-to-read house numbers and wanting something functional and fun. Entry Envy was awarded Best New Subscription of the Year by the Subscription Trade Association in 2022. Before founding Entry Envy, Jennifer served as the Executive Director for two medium sized law firms in Omaha for 18 years. She has a bachelor's degree in business with a marketing major, an Executive MBA, and is a contributing author of the book, "Wisdom Before Me." She enjoys mentoring and sharing what she has learned about managing businesses and starting her own to help others. She has two teenage daughters, a dog, and a tortoise. Her life purpose is to encourage more young women to consider the trades as a noble profession.In This Conversation We Discuss: [00:00] Intro[00:58] What are Entry Envy products?[02:27] Where the idea of Entry Envy came from[07:14] Validating the idea through an art fair[09:02] Hiring a coach to help launch the brand[10:19] What was the preparation before going public?[12:15] Getting help from overseas [13:58] Don't cheap out but don't overspend[14:39] Sponsor: Electric Eye electriceye.io/connect[15:36] Sponsor: JSON-LD For SEO jsonld.app[16:58] Showing appreciation to first supporters[17:41] Your friends and family aren't your customers[18:20] Getting lucky on the time of launch[19:15] When should you quit your job[20:11] The turning point when Jeniffer finally quit[21:22] At some point, you have to go all in[22:08] Where to find Entry Envy products[23:41] Invest in yourself, but don't do it by yourself[24:51] Don't skip testing your MVP[25:31] Definite your success and set your deadlines[26:26] The best way to understand your product-market fit[28:05] Don't outsource getting customer feedback[28:21] Customers providing their own niches[29:44] Always talk to your customers[30:35] OutroResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeCustom exterior & interior entry signs with house numbers, last names or monograms and faux floral refill decor kits entry-envy.comUse code WELCOME at checkout to save 15% off your first orderFollow Entry Envy on Instagram @entry_envyConnect with Jennifer linkedin.com/in/jenniferleafounderSchedule an intro call with one of our experts https://electriceye.io/connectGet your free structured data audit for your store https://jsonld.appIf you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

Episode 161 Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week's show includes: 00:00 Fix your MSP's website navigation 07:42 Three types of MSP sales people 17:32 The MSP who turned a potato into $30,000 Featured guest: Thank you to MSP owner Zach Kitchen for joining me to talk about how he turned a potato into a new client for his MSP. Over 20 years ago, in middle school, Zach got caught hacking into the school computer system. The incident made him extremely popular with the students, but it sat negatively with the school administration. Students went home and told their parents about the incident, which is how he landed his first IT job in cybersecurity forensics at only 17 years old. In running his successful MSP business, Digital Crisis, Zach has discovered a love for experimental marketing. Connect with Zach on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalcrisis Extra show notes:Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ https://www.paulgreensmspmarketing.com/about/ On the subject of tracking how users interact with your website, I mentioned the tools from HotJar and Lucky Orange: https://www.hotjar.com/ https://www.luckyorange.com/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing Thank you to Anne Hall from IT Agree for recommending the book The Introvert's Edge to Networking by Matthew Pollard: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Introverts-Edge-Networking-Leverage-Connections/dp/1400216680 https://nz.linkedin.com/in/annehall-itagree Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d

Monster Lead Group is a data-driven direct mail company and developer of marketing & sales technology. They work with clients in financial services and the mortgage industry. Mail is likely not the first thing you think of as martech—but it can be extremely effective when combined with a killer tech stack. As VP of Sales and Marketing, Martin is focused on building a lean and efficient stack to drive revenue. He's a big believer in always clearly identifying a problem before finding a martech solution to avoid building a bloated and cumbersome stack. Martin's goal with Monster Lead Group is to help a billion customers make better informed financial decisions. His stack includes tools like ZoomInfo for lead generation, Gong.io for AI-driven insights and Lucky Orange for heat maps and replays. We'll dive into the outbound strategy Martin references that helped Aaron Ross secure 100 million in revenue for Salesforce. This involves breaking down leads into the categories; spears, nets and seeds. We'll dissect the power of language and communication in sales and how incorporating human error into automated interactions can help increase believability. Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack. You'll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

In this podcast episode, we interview Sarah Bond, Vice President of Marketing at Lucky Orange, a website conversion optimization tool.  Sarah shares her career journey on how she got into marketing, and how Lucky Orange helps B2B marketers understand website visitor behaviour.  She explains the different tools available such as heat maps, session recordings, and live chat; and how these tools help understand visitors' behaviours in aggregate but also at an individual user level.  She also shares details on how Lucky Orange remains GDPR and CCPA compliant, and what she thinks is the key to conversion rate optimization.  

I'm excited to introduce my guest Danny Wajcman, the Co-Founder and COO of Lucky Orange. They're a conversion rate optimization platform that helps Shopify merchants reduce cart abandonment and grow sales by understanding visitors' behavior in their Shopify store. They are Shopify Plus technology partner, which means they have the privacy and scale to assist all brands on Shopify. Let's jump in a learn more!Get today's Shopify ecommerce podcast show notes, full transcripts, actionable DTC marketing strategies, and tips to fast-track the growth and profitability of your Shopify ecommerce business.LEARN MORE and grow your Shopify store at eCommerceFastlane.com and eCommerceFastlanePodcast.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sarah is the Senior Director of Marketing Strategy at Lucky Orange, a software company that helps businesses around the world improve website conversion rates. She is responsible for leading all aspects of marketing and communications including product marketing, brand positioning, market research, pricing strategies, and communications. Prior to joining Lucky Orange, Sarah grew her knowledge of marketing, communications, and brand strategy through roles with a Fortune 1000 health care information technology company, a marketing agency focused on higher education, and an Air Force public affairs office. In this episode we talked about: How often should a marketing team review their strategy documents? How should a marketing team use OKRs (Objects and Key Results) and goal-setting frameworks to leverage their strategy documents? What is Lucky Orange? How does Lucky Orange (the team) use Lucky Orange (the tool) for conversion rate optimization? How often should a business leverage giving out a free trial? What's the difference between product-led growth and sales-led growth? How can B2B SaaS companies optimize their onboarding funnel? What's the best way to build out experiments? What is a Product-Qualified Lead (PQL)? How often should a marketer experiment? And more! You can say Hi to Sarah via email - Sarah@LuckyOrange.com Resources Mentioned: Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr - https://amzn.to/2XIMIjn --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kennysoto/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kennysoto/support

About this episode My guest this week is Danny Wajcman, co-founder of Lucky Orange. For those that might not be aware of Lucky Orange, this episode will be an absolute treat for you because Lucky Orange is one of the most dynamic website analytic tools available to help you truly optimize the customer journey to increase your conversion. Most people think of Google Analytics when it comes to website analytics, but Lucky Orange fills some in the gaps that Google Analytics doesn't address. Google Analytics is phenomenal at telling us how a site visitor comes to our site and how they leave our site, but Lucky Orange informs us on their entire journey across our site. Lucky Orange is truly a powerful tool for conversion analytics. In this episode, you'll hear: The influence that his Grandparents, who survived the Holocaust, had on his life How Danny saw a need to understand user behavior on a website, beyond just numerical metrics About the significance and power of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) What distinguishes an entrepreneur and a leader How ego can impact the entrepreneurial journey and how to keep it in check Resources from this episode Join Grindology: https://grindology.com/ ExpressVPN: Get 3 Months Free → https://www.expressvpn.com/startupstory Get Emails: https://app.getemails.com/referrals/newaccount?ref=R18HWW5 The Startup Story Inner Circle: https://www.thestartupstory.co/vip The Startup Story on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thestartupstory The Startup Story is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/jamesmckinney The Startup Story on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thestartupstory Lucky Orange: https://www.luckyorange.com/ Share the podcast The Startup Story community has been so incredible in sharing our podcast with others, and we thank you! We do have more stories to tell and more people to reach. So please keep sharing!

In the hyper-competitive world of e-commerce, how to the top performing brands drive continuous improvements in conversions and revenue? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Dexter Agency CEO Joris Bryon talks about the importance of A/B testing, and why small improvements to your website can drive big increases in revenue. From the process he uses to identify which website pages need to be optimized, to how he determines what aspects of the page are underperforming and the nitty gritty details of setting up and running tests and user surveys, Joris lays out, step-by-step, a process anyone can use on any type of website to improve conversions and pipeline. Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the Dexter Agency website Connect with Joris on LinkedIn Check out Joris's book Kill Your Conversion Killers Transcript Kathleen: Welcome back to the Inbound Success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. Today, My guest is Joris Byron, who is the founder and CEO of Dexter Agency and the author of Kill Your Conversion Killers. Welcome to the podcast, Joris. Joris: Thanks, Kathleen. Great to be here, actually. Yeah. Kathleen: I am so excited to talk to you, but I have to start with a question. Kill Your Conversion Killers, is that kill or be killed, conversion rate optimization style? Joris: Actually, it came from the baseline we had when we started the agency. So it was Dexter Agency. And Dexter, the serial killer who kills... Kathleen: Oh, yeah. I didn't even think about that [crosstalk 00:00:55]. Joris: ... serial killers. Yeah. And that's where it came from. And conversion killers is a thing, actually. So we kill conversion killers, and it's a bit of a play on words. And that's where the title came from and the baseline for the company as well. Yeah. Kathleen: I love it. So speaking of the company, maybe you could just briefly introduce yourself to the listeners and talk a little bit about your background and what Dexter Agency does. Joris: Sure. So I've been in marketing for 20 years now, and I started my career in traditional advertising agencies and actually did that for about 10 years. But I got fed up with the typical discussions you have with clients, like make this blue, make this red, put this on the left, put this on the right, that kind of stuff based on nothing. Well, I discovered online marketing, and I started learning about SEO, PPC. I went working for an agency as well. I had to stop in between where the company, it had failed. And then I went into digital marketing. But anyway, in that visual marketing agency, I learned a lot about digital marketing. And at one point, I fell in love with conversion optimization. And that's how it all started. And I ventured out on my own. I learned everything I could about conversion optimization. And first, I tried to implement that in the agency where I was working. And it was a great agency, but back at the day, conversion optimization was still pretty new. And there weren't any clients prepared to start doing that, so I had to venture out on my own and started out as a freelance CRO consultant, and that grew into an agency. And yeah, here we are now doing this for six years already. Kathleen: And I saw in my notes that you have done over 1,500 A/B tests. So you have a ton of data that you bring to this conversation, which I love. Conversion optimization obviously is a broad topic. We're going to focus specifically on e-commerce, which is an area that historically we haven't talked about a ton on the podcast. Although, I've started talking about it more lately because selfishly I'm working in the e-commerce area. And so I'm really interested in learning more, and so I'm excited to dig into this with you. Let's just start with a background on conversion optimization because I don't know that everybody fully really understands what it is, why you should be doing it, how it works. Give me just a really quick summary on that. Joris: Yeah. I'd say conversion optimization for me is trying to make more from what you already have. You already have visitors; try to make more out of the visitors you already have. They already buy from you, so why don't you try to increase the average order value? And you have them as customers, so why don't you try to sell to them again? For me, that's conversion optimization. It's basically working with what you already have. I know there's definitions out there that focus entirely on conversion rate optimization, but I think that's too narrow. It creates wrong expectations. I don't think conversion rate optimization is a great name for the discipline as such. So if I have to say something about it, I usually say conversion optimization as you do rather than conversion rate optimization because that creates false expectations. Kathleen: Yeah. I spent a little over a decade as the owner of an agency, and I used to always talk about this and frame it as if you want to double your revenue and you look at a traditional marketing funnel, there's two ways to think about it. You could say, "Well, I have these conversion rates and this number of visitors and this number of leads. If I want to double the number of visitors who ultimately turn into customers, I can double my traffic, and if the conversion rates all stay the same..." And I'm going back to conversion rates right now, so I'm deviating a little from what we just said. But I think it's a helpful rubric. You can either try to double your traffic and just stuff twice as many people in the top of your funnel, hoping that it produces the same outcome, or you can work on converting more of the people that are already coming into your funnel. And in a perfect world, you're probably doing a little bit of both, but the reality is that the fastest path to more revenue is the second thing that you focus on. It's much harder and longer term effort to double your traffic than it is to double the number of leads you're getting that ultimately turned into customers. And I'm sure the same is true of repeat purchasing and things like that. Kathleen: When you talk about ultimate impact on the business, trying to squeeze more juice out of the orange you already have is always a better approach in the short term, certainly, than trying to grow more oranges. Joris: No, absolutely. And I think a lot of business owners, they're so focused on traffic that they forget there's other ways to double their revenue. And I get it. In the beginning, the fastest way to grow is adding more traffic, and especially PPC. If you pay for that traffic, it's going to get you quick growth. But at some point, you'll hit a plateau, and it's going to get harder and harder to attract relevant traffic because you can dump the traffic on our site. But if it's not relevant traffic, why bother, and why pay for it? And what I feel is by then, most business owners are so stuck in a traffic mindset that they look for ways to still make it work. Maybe I try something new, some new campaign or some new channel or fire their agency, work with another agency, whereas they miss out on the opportunity of working with what they already have and try to improve that instead. I think one question that helps is, do you want more traffic, or do we want more revenue? And when you put it like that- Kathleen: That's a pretty easy question to answer I would hope. Joris: Yeah, yeah. Right. And that's a bit of an eye-opener, but most business owners are so stuck in traffic mindset, whereas there's a lot of potential in increasing the order levers. I think for e-commerce, the formula that I always use is revenue equals your traffic times your conversion rate times your average order value times your purchase frequency. There's only four levers that you can grow your e-commerce. There's nothing else. If we're talking about your own life story, you can start selling on marketplaces. That's a different story. But if we're working on your online store, it's still those four levers. Yet, most companies focus only on traffic, and they miss out on the other three levers, whereas if you look at that formula and you can increase these three other levers by 30% each, which is pretty doable, then you double your revenue. And doubling your traffic sometimes it's going to be very, very hard. For me, it's sometimes a mystery why people get so stuck in a traffic mindset when there's auto levers that you can pull. Kathleen: Well, and I think everything you just said honestly applies to, really, almost any type of business. And in fact, I just had this conversation last week. I have a weekly marketing meeting with my team, and we had been tracking traffic and conversion rates and all that stuff. But we're also tracking marketing source, pipeline and revenue. And it was really interesting meeting because I've been feeling lately like I'm beating my head against the wall trying to increase traffic. And it isn't working as quickly as I would like it to, but my marketing source revenue is really good. And so I finally said, "You know what? I'm not even going to report on traffic anymore," because, clearly, it's not a good leading indicator for what really matters. And I don't want to keep pouring a lot of time and energy into changing a number that isn't going to get us necessarily where we need to go. It's not that I'm not going to ever work on traffic anymore, but I do feel like as a marketer, I could let it really eat away at me when it doesn't need to. So I think your point is really well taken. Kathleen: But what I want to start with on this topic is, how do you know if your conversion rates aren't good? How do you know if you're functioning in a way that there's real low-hanging fruit from conversion optimization? Because I think a lot of the marketers I've talked to in principle are fans of it. Everybody says, "Sure. We should all optimize our conversions to the greatest extent possible." But I do feel like there's this feeling out there that, well, I already have a pretty well running system, so why should I invest in that? So how do you look at your existing funnel, your existing business, and identify whether that is the right thing to invest in and when it is the right time to invest? Joris: Yeah. That's an excellent question. I think, first of all, I've never seen a site that cannot be improved. So we've always made our clients a lot of money. You can always improve. So never assume that you're at the top of your game and you cannot improve anymore. The second thing is always look at, for me, it's Google Analytics. So look at the data and try to figure out where you're losing money. So it's really about finding those areas on your site. Maybe there's a huge drop off in a certain page. Look at bounce rates as well. If you drive a lot of traffic to a certain page with very high bounce rates, start there. So look at those numbers in Google Analytics, and that'll tell you where you have opportunities. And whenever you can, try to also put a number to it in terms of dollar value. Joris: Let's say you have on a cart page on an e-commerce site. So you have a 50% drop off. So people reach the cart page and 50% drops off. There's always going to be drop off. But what you try to do there is, what if we can get it up to 60% going through to the checkout, so only 40% drop off? What would that represent in terms of annual revenue? Then you can look at, let's say, checkout pages and see what the drop off is there and what would be a more normal level and try to put a number to it or a dollar value to it on a yearly basis. And then you know where you have to start because if one page represents a problem that could, basically, if it's fixed, maybe you can get a $200,000 a year extra. And the other one is $1 million a year extra, you know where to start and start digging further to understand why that is happening. So we always start with where it's happening, and then you try to figure out why that is happening and try to solve that problem, basically. Kathleen: I like how you frame this. If I look at my Google Analytics and I find a page that has a really high bounce rate, in this case, maybe it's my cart page, I've identified where. And then how do I go about identifying why? What's that process look like? Joris: So there's different research methods that you can apply here. What I find is one of the most effective ones is user testing. So basically, you give a couple of assignments to regular people who they have to do those assignments. They have to comment out loud what they're doing. And if you're doing that remotely, you'll get a screen recording of it as well. And you see them moving through your site trying to do the assignments that you gave them, and they have to comment out loud. And it's going to give you a lot of insights. It doesn't always have to be that kind of setup. You could just ask someone random, I don't know, in a Starbucks or something and pay them for a coffee and say, "Hey, do you want to take five minutes and go over to my site and say what you think," something like that. Just try to get feedback from people who actually use the site. And that's usually going to be one of the most valuable things. Joris: Obviously, we look at it ourselves as well. We are conversion experts, so we know what might be issues. But you always have to test it and never assume that you're right because as an expert, we sometimes get it wrong because what works on one site doesn't necessarily work on another site. And I know a lot of people don't grasp that idea. They think, oh, it should work on every site, but that's not the case. So you can look at click maps and scroll maps. You can record visitor recordings so that you see people moving through the site. So there's a bunch of research methods that you can use to get some qualitative feedback. You can also, which is very good one, is on the checkout. So basically, on a thank-you page, you can trigger a survey, ask a couple of open-ended questions so that you get valuable, qualitative feedback because that's the thing. It's not always about percentages and the hard data that you find in analytics. You have to understand the why. So the qualitative feedback is going to get you so much further than trying to look at the hard data. And you really have to try and step into the minds of your consumers. That's where tools like user testing and surveys come in and can give you very valuable insights. Kathleen: I love those little surveys. And I know there's a lot of tools out there from Hotjar to Lucky Orange and platforms like that that you can use to create them. But I've tried using them before, and I don't get many submissions. And so I'm wondering, what is a typical survey response rate? And are there any ways to increase the odds of getting somebody to actually fill it out? Joris: So there's two ways to do it. You can set it up before someone checks out, so before they buy. So it's visitors, not consumers, and that's different. Your response rate is going to be lower than when you do it after the checkout, for instance, or you send them an email with a questionnaire. In that case, you're going to get a lot of responses. If you trigger that Hotjar pop-up to any visitors, it's really going to depend on the quality of your traffic as well, the timing of the pop-up because I often see those pop-ups really being [inaudible 00:15:05] after five seconds. And I don't even know what you do yet, And you already asked me what your experience is on the site. Kathleen: How long do you think it should be? Or should it be on exit? Joris: Well, it could be an exit, for instance. If you look at the average time on site in Google Analytics, that's when you know it's probably going to be somewhat qualified visitor already. They've spent some time on the site. And I would start there and trigger it there, and then you can start playing around. Another thing that helps- Kathleen: Wait, I just want to make sure I understand what you just said. Do you look at Google Analytics for that specific page and see how long people spend on that page or the overall session length? Joris: Yeah, session length. So basically if you see a session length is on average one minute 27 seconds, then you trigger it at one minute 27 seconds to start with. And you'll see what happens. You'll get much better feedback also because people that bounce usually are not interested anyway. It might be a mismatch, so it's not only about the amount of responses that you get but also quality of feedback that you get. So you've got to play around with those things. And there's no one formula for that, but it's just a couple of criteria that you can use and play around with it. Another thing that you can do is ask two questions, and the first one is a yes or no question. And then the second one, you expand on that and have an open-ended question because what happens is people want to be consistent. So if they've clicked on yes or no and then you ask them a follow-up question, you'll get better feedback. More people will fill that out. So that's a good way or another way to test. Joris: Never make it longer than that if it's one of those pop-ups before someone buys. If it's after the checkout, you can ask more questions. People will be more involved already. So I don't have a hard answer there. It should be this percentage, but you just have to try and improve what you already have. I think that's the main message here because it can vary wildly. Also, if you have a site with a lot of diehard fans and you have a good, interesting brand and a lot of brand fans, you're going to get much more response. Yeah. It's [crosstalk 00:17:19]. Kathleen: No, that's good feedback. I like the idea of looking at session length. That certainly is a little bit more scientific than just randomly picking a number of seconds. So I have a bunch of questions on this topic. So I've been in the situation before where I know I have a page that has issues, and it's that feeling of like, oh my God, where do I start? And you can certainly go to user testing, and there are other things like that. But I also know there's some gold to be mined within Google Analytics. And sometimes the issues you have have to do with devices or browsers. So how do you approach sussing out whether the issue is something that's on the page or whether it's more of a device or browser issue? Joris: Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think it's a matter of keep asking the right question. So when you see a number that looks off, then you have to think, oh, okay, is this only on mobile? This is on desktop as well. Is this on a specific browser? So you start checking all those reports. There's no one way to go about it. You start very high level to see if there's some numbers that seem a little bit off, and then you start digging and look at segments and apply other reports and that kind of stuff. And it's a matter of asking the right questions and being curious and really trying to figure it out. And you can spend a lot of time in Google Analytics before you find something that is off and find a reason for it. Joris: It could be bot traffic for instance as well. If you see very high bounce rates, then you might want to look into, is it a specific browser or even a browser version causing this? Is it only on the homepage? Is all the traffic going to the home page? Do you see 98% bounce rate or 99% bounce rate? It's probably a bot. If that then comes all from one location, it's very likely it is a bot, and you have to exclude that traffic and it's just skewing your data. So you really have to keep asking questions to find the answer. And I start at high level and then dig deeper. Kathleen: So wait, the bot traffic thing is fascinating to me. What do you do about it? How do you fix that? Joris: Yeah. You can exclude some of the bot traffic if it's really clear. If, let's say, it's all from one particular location, you could [crosstalk 00:19:46]- Kathleen: Meaning one IP address? Joris: ... for instance. Yeah. You could just exclude that. Or it could be, let's say, even on an old Internet Explorer browser version, sometimes you see that it's sending bot traffic. And if you're like, oh, the only traffic that's coming in is from that bot, you could exclude that particular browser version as well. You try to find a unique identifier for that bot, and then you exclude it. Sometimes it's just impossible to do, but at least you give it a try and see if you can find one unique identifier that you can filter out. Kathleen: And then, I've always been taught with any conversion optimization or any A/B test you only change one thing at a time. So walk me through when you're trying to really optimize a specific page. You pick one thing, and how long do you let that experiment run? Is it a matter of time? Is it a matter of volume of page visits? How do you know when that experiment is up and it's time to move to the next thing? Because I'm assuming these all layer on top of each other. You're testing multiple things sequentially, correct? Joris: Yeah. So typically, we test on several pages at the same time. So you could have a test running on all product pages. So we don't test on one product page, but on all product pages at the same time, when I'm collections pages or category pages, one on the cart, one on checkout pages. So you could have those running simultaneously. Well, you have to have enough data before you call it. And usually, what we look for is, to make it simple, It's more complex than that, but is at least 300, 400 transactions per variation. So you need quite a bit of traffic to pull it off. And I like to or I prefer to say the number of transactions rather than in traffic because, ultimately, that's the main conversion that you're tracking. So you need at least 300, 400 transactions per variation, and you always have to let it run in increments of seven days. The reason for that is you can see a big difference. On a Thursday night conversion rate, could be totally different than on a Sunday morning. And a variation on a Thursday night could work better because it triggers something in your consumer that is relevant at that point, but it could work not so well on a Sunday morning or the other way around. Kathleen: Right. The type of person who shops on Thursday night might be completely different behaviorally than the type of person who's shopping Sunday morning. Joris: Absolutely. Yeah. Especially if, for instance, you're going to buy something you need on Saturday, so you need it to be delivered on Friday. Then you're going to decide a lot quicker than on Sunday morning. So there's different times of the day, different days of the week that have different conversion rates and different behavior from your consumers. So always run a test in increments of seven days. So if you have enough data after five days, sit it out. Wait until you have full seven days. If you have enough data after eight or nine days, too bad, you have to wait 14 days. We had one client where we joked about it because on Friday nights, it was always like, oh, this variation seems to be winning, and on Monday morning, it was totally flipped. So the behavior- Kathleen: Interesting. Joris: ... on the weekends was usually completely different there. So it's really something to do to be very strict about. And if you do this for clients and you look over your shoulder and you look in the A/B testing tool, you have to educate them on that because they're going to be like, "Yeah, but we have enough data. This version wins. Let's implement it." No. Just be calm. Let's give it some time because you don't want to implement something that ultimately ends up being a loser because then it's going to cost you money. Kathleen: Yeah. So this is interesting to me. And I started thinking about this as you were talking because you mentioned doing something on a category page or product page, a cart page. Any given customer, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, goes through a journey. And when they're on their path to purchase, even in an individual session, they're going to visit a lot of different pages on your site. And so I already mentioned once changing only one thing. So if you're doing an experiment on your cart page, you pick one thing to change and you test it. But how does that reconcile with the fact that a customer has this journey, they're visiting all these different pages on your site, if you have experiments running on your category page, your product page, there is a chance that that person in their single journey to purchase could encounter three different experiments at once on three different pages. It's one thing to say we're testing a change on the cart page, but if there are experiments going on three, how do you know what really led to that purchase? I feel like that's where it starts to get complicated. How many things can you have going at one time on different pages? Joris: That's a very good question. And it's something that a lot of people struggle with. Just the easy version is as long as you equally divide the traffic for every test, there's no issue because let's say you have two tests running, one on a product page and one on a cart page. Now, 50% of your traffic is going to see the one on the cart page. No, sorry, 25% version A on the cart page. 25% is going to see version A on the product, version B on the cart. And 25% is going to see version B on the product and version A on the cart. And 25% is going to see version B and version B. So it's hard to follow and very hard to explain without a visual, but bottom line is if you divide the traffic equally, there's no issue. Kathleen: So it basically allows you to create cohorts, and each cohort has one single experiment running for them. Joris: Yeah. You could also double check all of that in Analytics, for instance, by making a segment. So anyone who's seen version A here, if you suspect some influence from one to the other, then you can basically make those segments in Analytics and see if there's a different behavior and a different outcome. So you could double check that. Apart from that, there's also something like a multi-page experiments. So let's say you want to test something that is on several pages at the same time. A typical one would be the navigation or the footer or a benefits bar with all those USPs you typically see on an e-commerce store. That's something that is across pages. That's not an issue either because it's very consistent across all those pages. So sometimes you want to set up a multi-page experiment as well. If someone does something on the product page and this needs to happen on the cart page, that could be an option as well. But I'm making it a bit complicated. So it really depends on what you're testing, but if it's two separate tests and you split the traffic evenly, there's no issue. Kathleen: So as I listen to you talk about this, I'm fascinated because this is not my primary area of expertise. But I'm also a little intimidated because it's starting to sound like you, A, could potentially need to be really, really well-trained in this, and B, it sounds like it could be a complex tech stack to support this, having these multiple experiments running with different cohorts going through your site. Can you talk me through really what does it take to pull this off? Joris: Yeah. So I think in terms of tech, if you have Google Optimize, it works perfectly fine as perfect tool to get started. It's free. We still use it a lot for a lot of our clients. There's other tools out there as well, but don't spend any money if you can do it with Google Optimize. So that's the tech side of things. For the rest, it's a matter of understanding a couple of best practices as well in terms of how to set up a test, like let them run in seven days, let them run long enough, how you need to analyze those tests. I describe all of that step-by-step in my book without making it needlessly complex because what I find myself is the whole CRO community likes to make things complicated and sound very high level and a lot of statistical stuff in there as well to make them look smart. Kathleen: Yes. And it makes me feel really dumb. Joris: Absolutely. Kathleen: [crosstalk 00:28:43]. Joris: No, no. Absolutely. I think that's a mistake from CRO community because we alienate people we do this for because they don't understand it. And it is complex. There's a lot going on when you do a conversion optimization. At the end of the day, you need to know a lot about design, about copywriting, psychology. This takes research, all that kind of stuff. So it is a hard discipline to grasp, and there's a lot of misconceptions about it. And clients don't always understand it. And then on top of that, as a CRO community tend to make it look much harder than it actually is. That was one of the reasons I wanted to write my book, is make it as pragmatic as possible without... My objective was not to make me look smart but really to help people out. And usually, people in CRO community want to look smart. I had a discussion about that the other day on LinkedIn, where someone was attacking me because I didn't share all the statistical stuff behind an A/B test. And it was like, I think that's not always needed. It's about inspiration, about opening their eyes. [inaudible 00:29:55]. Obviously, that's our duty as well. But if we use all that statistical stuff around it, we scare people off. And as you said, they, they feel dumb themselves. Kathleen: Yeah, and then they check out. Joris: Yeah, absolutely. And we're marketeers. We say it to our clients. Hey, you have to understand your clients and speak their language, and then we don't do it ourselves. So there's a big gap there, I think, in the CRO community and a big responsibility in the CRO community as well. But most of the CROs, they just want to look smart, and that's a mistake, I think. Kathleen: Well, I appreciate that, that you are focused on making it accessible, because I will be the first to admit that sometimes I read this stuff, and I think I just must not be smart enough to fully understand it. So I want to do a few rapid fire questions for you on this theme of debunking myths and making it more accessible to people. The first one is, and you alluded to this earlier, why should people be running A/B tests? Why can't they just read a best practice somewhere and do it on their site or look at what their competitor's doing and do it on their site? Joris: Yeah. We see that all the time. So there's something called best practices. I prefer to call them prototypical principles or common practices because what we see is when you test the best practice on a site, it may fail and cost you money. We've seen that many, many times. So there's just no way of predicting it. Those are great way to start. If you're just starting out, use those best practices by all means. But then at some point, you'll have to start questioning is this actually working for me. And if you have the volume to the test, then you definitely should start testing it. So the word best practices is very misleading. Joris: The second part of your question, following what anyone else is doing, that's also thinking, first of all, they know what they're doing. Kathleen: They're right, exactly. Joris: So you assume that. That's not true. Or you think like, oh, I know they're [inaudible 00:32:00], but then you're assuming that they've already beat us at that, which may not be the case. If it's, let's say, a call to action, maybe they haven't even tested it yet, so it may not be working. It may be a problem for them. And then you're maybe implementing problems on your site. You don't know their data. You don't know anything, and you just assume that they are doing a good job. And you just implement it. And it's very dangerous to just follow what your competitors are doing. The only situation in which you can do it for me is when you see you have a problem and there's an issue and you're looking for inspiration on how do other people solve it or go about that problem and maybe work around it, and then you start testing different solutions. So you can go out there and look for some inspiration, but don't just follow it and implement it. Kathleen: That makes sense. Use it as the basis to inspire your tests as opposed to assuming that the test has been successful. Joris: Absolutely. Kathleen: So if somebody is listening and they're in e-commerce and they're thinking, okay, I'm willing to give this a shot, what are three things that you think they should start out doing A/B tests on? Joris: Yeah. First of all, start doing the research. You'll know where your problems are. But where we often see a lot of opportunities is anything around value proposition on the homepage. If you don't have that yet, that's usually a good area to start. Then anything else that underlines your USPs, basically, and that gives people a reason to buy from you, and especially if those reasons are unique. We see a lot of value around that as well. And then what I think is usually a good place to start as well, product pages, anywhere in what I call the decision area. So anything near the picture and the button, anything you can improve there is usually also a good place to start. But product page in general usually is a place where you can make a lot of improvements. Joris: But do the research first, and try to understand where your biggest problems are because I remember one time where working for client, and we were testing on the product pages. We just looked in Google Analytics, and we saw they had a huge drop off in one of the steps in their checkout. So they were losing millions of euros, a Dutch client, of euros a year in that step in a checkout, but didn't even know it. And they were testing a product page, which was acceptable at every product page at the time. So look at the data first. That's the best place to start. Kathleen: So on that note, look at the data first, and you mentioned Google Analytics. We've all got it. It's the one tool I think all marketers use. At least all marketers that listen to this podcast I'm sure use it. What do you think? If we're going to rely on the data there, we better be looking at it correctly. Are there certain mistakes that you find that marketers make when looking through Google Analytics that somebody should be aware of if they're listening? Joris: Yeah. I think a lot of people focus on the wrong data. So focus on those data that are actionable and [inaudible 00:35:06] metrics. What I would say as some test if you're looking at the right data, always ask yourself, how can I use this to improve my site or my marketing? How can I use this number to improve it? If it's time on site, for instance, you can use that to trigger a Hotjar pop-up, but that's about it. If time on site increases, it could be that people have a harder time to find what they're looking for. So you can not really use that metric. Yet, some people look at that metric. So ask yourself that question. I think that helps because what I find is that most people don't have a lack of data. There's not a lack of data but lack of insights. And they get overwhelmed by the amount of data and analytics, and they don't really know where to look. And so we always ask the question, how can I use that? And if you don't have an answer, then don't use those data. Kathleen: Yeah. Your point is so good about session length and time on site. It seems like it would be good to increase it, but it's true. If somebody is frustrated and not finding what they want, they could have a long time on site or, what I find often happens, if they're a job seeker and they're reading all of your content. I'm in B2B SaaS, and the DIYers, the ones who are never going to buy from you, but they're like, I'm going to read all the educational content so that I know how to do this myself, those are the people that spend a lot of time on site, whereas somebody who comes in knowing they want to buy often has a very short time on site because they're high intent, going right to your contact us page and filling it out. Kathleen: And it's funny because I used to look at this too when I had my agency. We would try to look at patterns of people who bought from you, how many pieces of content did they consume, thinking, gosh, is there some rule where if somebody consumes more than 30 pieces of content, then they're a good lead? And I found actually it was almost like the inverse was true, that the customers that were converting consume very little content on site because they came in ready to buy. So it's really interesting, And I do think you have to question the assumptions that you have as a marketer before you go and try to implement changes. Well, last question on conversion because I am just curious. What is a good conversion rate? And I guess we'll talk about e-commerce because that's where your expertise is. Joris: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's a question I get a lot. And the only right question is a good conversion rate is one that's better than last month's. Just look at yourself because there's I know there's benchmarks out there, and people always want to look at benchmarks. But that doesn't really help you. Benchmarks usually you mention it's 2%, 2.2%, but it depends on so many variables. Kathleen: And is that for a visitor to purchase conversion? Joris: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: Okay. Joris: Yeah. But it doesn't mean anything. If your average order value is $20 and you have a 3% conversion rate, you might think based on a benchmark that you're doing all right. But I would say your site probably sucks because it's only $20 average order value. You could probably get it up to six, eight or maybe even higher. And so you could be complacent about it. Whatever. It's 3%. I'm doing good. Whereas if your average order value is $1,000 and you're a 2%, yes, then you're probably doing pretty good. Or you might be at 1% and thinking, oh, I should be improving a lot. I can easily go to 2%, maybe more. [inaudible 00:38:46] a little bit difficult to get to 2%, but you could probably get it to 1.2%, 1.5%, and it could be a lot of money as well. So there's a whole bunch of factors out there, also the quality of the traffic that you drive to your site. So I would suggest don't pay too much attention to benchmarks. And I get it. People want to have an idea. Am I doing all right or not? But basically, just look at your conversion rate from the past and try to improve that. The only good conversion rate is one that's better than last month's. Kathleen: That's great advice. All right. We're going to shift gears because I can talk with you about this forever, and I feel like I'm getting a masterclass here. But I have two questions I always ask my guests. And I'm just curious about your viewpoints on this. The first is, of course, this podcast is focused on inbound marketing, and the definition of inbound has evolved quite a bit. And so I really look at it as anything you're doing to attract the right type of customer to your business. So when you think of it that way, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really raising the bar or setting a great standard for what it means to be an inbound marketer today? Joris: Yeah. I think there's a couple of marketers that I follow and I look at. I tend to follow people more than brands. And you could say they're brands, so all their personal brands. I think when it comes to anything B2B on LinkedIn Marketing, I very much follow Matthew Hunt. He's doing a great job in anything small business marketing and startup marketing related. I really look up to Noah Kagan from AppSumo. Makes great YouTube stuff and great videos, and you just keep binge watching them. And he has a great style but also great advice. And when it comes to e-commerce, there's two people. I tend to follow Ryan Daniel Moran and Ezra Firestone. I think Ezra Firestone, he does a lot of inbound marketing the right way. And he experiments a lot and invests a lot of money in trying new techniques and then sharing those findings with his audience. I think Ryan Daniel Moran is really good in terms of building e-commerce brands and making it less complex because we tend to over-complicate things, and he makes it less complex and helps you focus on what really matters. Kathleen: Oh, interesting. I'll have to check those out. Those are some new ones for me. All right, second question. The marketers I've talked to consistently say that one of their biggest pain points is just keeping up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing. How do you personally stay educated? Are there certain sources of information that you really rely on to stay on top of your game? Joris: Yeah, it's hard to stay on top of the game. Fortunately, in conversion optimization, it's pretty evergreen. New things emerge, new tools, for instance. And obviously, you want to follow all of that. But if you look at a global digital marketing game, it changes every single day. And there's a lot of marketeers that suffer from shiny object syndrome, I guess. And you see something, you want to try it out, whereas I believe that you got to be consistent and try to find what works and give it a real shot because don't try it just today and then give up tomorrow. Sometimes you have to make a choice and stick with it for a while. So I suffer from that myself, shiny object syndrome. So I try to stay away from too many things that distract me from the real path that I want to walk on. Joris: I think in terms of getting new trends, LinkedIn is my source of information. If my network shares, it's probably going to be worth reading. So that's where I spend most of my time, is on LinkedIn. And that's where I discover. And then when I see there's a topic that really is important to go deeper, I just buy a course or read a book. So I stay away from too many blog posts because it's so fragmented. You don't know who wrote it. You don't know if they know what they're doing. And when it comes to courses, I think CXL Institute is a really good source of high quality courses. So that's where I look first as really... Yeah, CXL for me is benchmark when it comes to marketing courses. Kathleen: Well, I am a huge fan of Peep Laja, so I definitely agree with that. He was an early guest on the podcast too, and he's doing great work and, in fact, when it comes to message testing has a really neat new platform called Winter, W-I-N-T-E-R, that if you're listening and you haven't checked it out, you should, for sure. Joris: Yeah, absolutely. For B2B, it's a great tool. Kathleen: Yeah. I found it really useful in my experiments. Actually, it's funny. I recently interviewed Chris Walker from Refine Labs, and he talked about how at a certain point in your career, you really can't rely on outside educational materials to stay on top of your game. At some point, it has to be about doing your own experiments and doing the work and testing. And so I feel like as somebody in the field of conversion optimization, you have a leg up because that's literally what you do for a living. So that's great. Well, if somebody is listening and they're interested in connecting with you or learning more, what's the best way for them to find you online? Joris: Yeah. So on LinkedIn, I'm pretty active there. So just to add me on LinkedIn. And then you can also email me, joris@dexter.agency. And if you want to learn about this yourself, you can download the free PDF version of my... You could buy it on Amazon, but you can download a free PDF version on dexter.agency/free-book. And there, you can get a free PDF version of the book. If you want to get started yourself, just check a few things, like what are best practices about A/B testing, what we talked about. So that's all in there. Kathleen: That's great. And I will put those links in the show notes. So if you're listening and you're interested in connecting with Joris or getting a copy of the book, just head there, and you can hit the links and get all of that information. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, you learned something new, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving a review. That's how other folks find us. And, of course, if you know somebody doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @WorkMommyWork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you for joining me, Joris. This was so interesting. Joris: Thanks for having me. It was great to be here.

In Part 2 of The Top Tech You Need to Scale series, we're taking a look at all the tools you need to build a stunning website, create and test content, and optimize your site for a top-notch customer experience.Sophie is sharing a dozen of the top-rated options for web-builders, testing tools, and optimizers. You'll get the important details of●        Webnode●        Weebly●        Jindo●        Webit●        Unbounce●        Oracle Maxymiser●        Optimizely●        Visual Website Optimizer●        Crazy Egg●        Hotjar●        Lucky Orange●        MouseflowListen now to discover your new favorite website tools!

We are so happy to have with us today, Jason Wright on the EcomXFactor Podcast. Jason is an author, entrepreneur, consultant, and digital marketing architect with a passion for helping other startups and small businesses with their sales funnels. Jason prides himself on his ability to connect with people and speak to them in a language they understand.  In this episode, Yaron and Jason covered a lot of amazing stuff about the importance of having the discipline and being consistent in your business, list size VS quality, building and automating lists efficiently, and other automations that can be very beneficial for store owners and entrepreneurs. Without further ado, here's Yaron and Jason! And if you like what you hear, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major streaming apps. Connect with Jason Wright: Intentionally Inspirational -  https://intentionallyinspirational.com Funnel Building For Profit: Learn How To Build Complete Sales Funnels - https://www.facebook.com/groups/funnelbuildingforprofit Books Mentioned on the Episode Think and Grow Rich Rich Dad, Poor Dad How to Win Friends and Influence People Apps and Tools Mentioned on the Episode Klaviyo Lucky Orange Active Campaign Show Bullets (00:00:41) What is Intentionally Inspirational all about? What do you guys do and who do you serve? (00:02:50) What are the benefits of using Active Campaign? (00:10: 20) Frontend vs Backend profitability (11:04:00) How often do you send newsletters, giveaways and promotions if you don't hire an agency?  (12:34:00) - Does the size of the list matter? (00:14:39) - What about list health? How do you manage and keep your list healthy? (00:15:47) - What about some split testing? How important are split testing on emails? (00:17:42) - Short-form vs Long-form content on emails (00:19:31) - Why consistency matters more than content (00:20:05) - How do you utilize SMS? (00:22:05) - Sending SMS to customers and driving them to a calling center (00:24:07) - Email as a foundation regardless of someone's age (00:25:11) - Oher automations that can be very beneficial for store owners and entrepreneurs. (00:27:05) - How people underutilize Google Analytics's heatmap (00:28:04) - Viewing session recordings using Lucky Orange (00:28:56) - Building and automating lists efficiently (00:32:31) - Jason's secret in producing more than consuming (00:33:32) - Why consistency is very important (00:36:06) - Is thinking too far ahead good for your business? (00:41:12) - Book and App recommendations from Jason (00:42:38) - Jason's favourite quote (00:43:38) - Jason's contact details

Los mapas de calor son una herramienta muy poderosa para mejorar la conversión de tu eCommerce. En este episodio te cuento: Qué son los mapas de calor. Tipos de mapas de calor. Beneficios de los mapas de calor. Herramientas de mapas de calor: Hotjar, Crazzy Egg, MouseFlow, Lucky Orange, Google Page Analytics.   Accede a mi masterclass gratuita y descubre Las 5 Acciones que te van.a permitir conseguir una tienda online rentable   Si te gusta el podcast de eCommerce Efectivo, por favor no olvides dejarme una reseña, valoración, comentario o Me gusta en el canal desde el que me estés escuchando (iTunes, iVoox, Sprikel, YouTube...) ¡Mil gracias! Únete a la comunidad de eCommerce Efectivo en www.ecommerceefectivo.com  y recibe más contenidos, recursos y formación de marketing online para conseguir una presencia en Internet lo más efectiva posible.   Commerce Efectivo Plataforma online para emprendedores donde puedes encontrar contenidos y recursos gratuitos sobre eCommerce, Marketing Online y Emprendimiento y conseguir una presencia en Internet lo más efectiva posible.   Contacta conmigo: info@ecommerceefectivo.com  

This week, Gabriel sits down with Danny Wajcman, COO & Co-Founder of Lucky Orange, to discuss the importance of website optimization. Lucky Orange is a tool that can help you understand how users are interacting with your website and Danny points out the many benefits Lucky Orange can provide.

In this episode, our Creative Director Megan sits down with Lucky Orange's Bradley Friedman to discuss the importance of Optimizing websites for user experience. Whether it's a lead flow, an email, or a contact form, or a CTA, there might be small room for improvement to increase conversions.

Are you trying to find out what users are doing on your website? In this week's Coffee Talks, Megan Sullivan, Creative Director at Nextiny Marketing, and Bryan Gorman, Senior Account Manager at Nextiny Marketing, discuss their tips to analyze and optimize your website user experience using tools like Google Analytics and Lucky Orange.

Danny Wajcman, co-founder & Chief Operations Officer of Lucky Orange, explains what sets their product apart from Google Analytics, illustrates how this helps the product onboarding process, and shares his tips for scaling your business.

Today's Flash Back Friday comes from Episode 194, originally published in April 2015. Jason Hartman invites Brian Gruber President of Lucky Orange to the Speaking of Wealth Show. On today's episode, Brian talks about the customer data you can get from heat mapping, polls on your website to find out how to make your customers purchase your products, and the beneficial ways of using Lucky Orange's product. Key Takeaways:  2:14 – Heat mapping can show you which pages are the most visited and which ones are not. 3:13 – A poll is a quick question that can help you find out what your customer is thinking. 5:47 – Brian explains how the privacy of their product works. 7:56 – Brian explains more about different types of heat mapping.  11:45 – Lucky Orange has a feature called Behavior Tagging which segments the recordings of people by the actions they take on your website. 13:59 – Lucky Orange has another feature called Form Analytics that allows you to see people in real-time and see where they're stuck on your forms. 15:00 – Brian's advice is to get information from your customers by watching their movements on your website and asking them questions.  16:56 – Listeners of this podcast can get an extended free trial on Lucky Orange's product via email. Mentioned in this episode:   www.LuckyOrange.com

Rev.com's Head of Growth has tripled the company's landing pages conversion rates across all major products. Here is how he did it... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Rev.com Director Growth Barron Caster talks about the company's process for conducting audience research, and how the insights gleaned from that process have enabled them to triple their landing page conversion rates.  If you like detailed, actionable takeaways, this episode is for you. Barron is sharing his exact process, right down to the nine questions he has his team ask when conducting audience research interviews. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Barron include: Barron runs "growthproduct" and marketing at Rev. Marketing is focused on website traffic and growthproduct is about conversion.  Barron believes that the best way to improve your marketing results is to learn from your customers, so he tries to speak to at least one customer every month. In addition, the team at Rev uses Net Promoter Scores to track how their customers are feeling about the company's products. He also has a requirement that everyone on his team meet with at least two customers per quarter to conduct audience research, and they have a stipend to support that effort.  To ensure that the information gathered during customer interviews is accurate, Barron has created a one-pager that details exactly what should go into it, who they should be talking to, what questions they should be asking, etc. The one pager details the nine specific questions (shared in the transcript below) that his team must ask. All of the team's audience research interviews are recorded and transcribed using Rev. There are a dozen people on Barron's growth team and they meet for a half hour every week. During this meeting, they share the findings from their audience research in a "quickfire round" format. They pull key insights from this research and use the actual words of the customer to update copy on their website and landing pages. This has resulted in a 3X improvement in the company's landing page conversion rates. Another trick that Barron uses to understand customers is listening to what they are asking on the company's website live chat.  Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Check out the articles that Barron has published on Medium Read Barron's article on how he tripled Rev's landing page conversion rates Visit the Rev.com website Listen to the podcast to hear Barron's process for gathering audience research and using the findings to inform Rev's conversion rate optimization strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Barron Caster who is the Director of Growth at Rev.com. Welcome, Barron. Barron Caster (Guest): Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Barron and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode Kathleen: This is such a cool interview for me to do because I use your product every single week. And so for those listening who don't know what Rev.com is, Barron can give a more complete description, but I will just say I do this podcast. If you listen with any degree of regularity and if you visit my show notes, all of the show notes are transcribed using Rev. So I send Rev, through the cloud, I send my audio file, and then usually within a few hours it comes back, and it's this beautifully transcribed, written version that I don't have to do myself. So I love Rev.com, and we use it for other things too. As a team we create the SRT files, which is what we use to caption our social videos, and many other things as well. So I'm really excited to have you here for that reason. Barron: Thank you. I'm excited to be here and excited to talk about what you just did for us, which is using customers' words to inform and educate other people, and to show the value of the services you provide. So thank you for the glowing introduction. Kathleen: Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. There's nothing better than talking about a product you actually use and love. Barron: Totally hear you. Kathleen: Speaking of which, though, I know I only use certain parts of your product. So before we dig into the actual meat of the conversation, can you just take a minute and tell the listeners a little bit more, first of all about yourself, because you have an interesting background. You've been an entrepreneur. You've been a venture capitalist. You've done a lot of different things, and so I think that's kind of interesting as far as how it influences the work you do now. And then also give us the quick spiel on Rev and all of its different products so that people listening have a sense for the full breadth of what the company does. About Rev.com and Barron Caster Barron: Cool. Thank you. Yes. I'll give a quick introduction on myself. I started with an education in mechanical engineering. I got my undergrad and master's from USC in Los Angeles. And then I promptly threw my degree to the side and became a venture capitalist looking at the wearables, healthcare, and mobile spaces. And I worked at a firm called General Catalyst, evaluated early stage investments, and realized that before I wanted to spend more time investing, I really wanted to get operational and figure out the inner workings of a great company and see what that looks like. So I joined the fastest growing company at the time. It was called Zenefits. Kathleen: We are also a customer of Zenefits. I love them. Barron: You're a customer. Rev is also a customer of Zenefits. It was the fastest company at the time to go from zero to $60 million in AR, and I was there at an incredible scaling time of the company, saw a lot of incredible things there, met tons of amazing people, and then after being there and seeing this crazy scaling period, they started to have some issues, but I saw a future for myself in product, which I was not doing at Zenefits. So then I moved to Rev, which I'd never heard of at the time, to join as a product manager. And at the time, Rev only had a few services. I joined as a product manager on our core transcription service. The one that you just talked about so gracefully. Thank you for that. And then I started our growth team. I've been at Rev now three years, and I now run all of our growthproduct, and marketing. So "growthproduct" is one word and then marketing. And growthproduct is a few product managers working on products that once people are actually on our site, convince them to use our services and marketing as all of the things that inform customers about our services. So you also think about it in terms of traffic and conversion. Marketing is the traffic and brings people awareness and educates them, and then conversion is once they're actually on Rev properties, how do we convince them to buy from us? Kathleen: Great. And one of the things I thought was so interesting about your background, and I'm kind of jealous I have to admit, is that I have always wanted to go through Brian Balfour's Reforge program. Barron: Oh yes. Kathleen: I follow him really closely online. I love every single thing he writes about growth and product market fit, and all of that. You've been through that program, so I'm kind of excited to see how that comes into the conversation, or if it does. Barron: Brian and everyone from the Reforge program are incredible. He leads the thinking in a lot of ways and has helped define what growth teams look like. I went through the program when we didn't have a growth team at Rev. I think it was a month old, and I was the first person on it working with one of our co-founders trying to figure out what should the growth team look like longer term and what should be build towards. So by looking at all the frameworks and ways it's built at different companies, that helped us inform what it should look like at Rev because growth teams are going to look totally different based on the company and the people within the company, but it's really good to talk to other people who have done it. And we do that for all of our learnings at Rev. We try to talk to industry experts and figure out how are the best people doing it. How Rev.com Conducts Audience Research Kathleen: Love it. So when you started talking about how you kind of handle marketing and you handle growthproduct and you think of traffic and conversion as those two sides of the coin, and when you and I first spoke, you talked about how a big factor that influences how you approach these things is the audience research that you do. So maybe we could just start out there and you could talk a little bit more about audience research and where that fits within your strategies. Barron: I think it should help inform almost all strategies at the company, not just on the growth team but in pretty much all the things that we do. And I think there's just a number of ways that you can do customer research. One of the best is talking to them. So, take it a step back. A lot of marketers really love... They work for companies. They know what their company offers, and they love talking about all of the things that their company does today because they know the features. They talk to the people that are building them. They hear a lot of about why they're great. But what you really need to do is get out of the building, talk to your customers and understand why are they actually using you. What value does your service provide? How do you change their lives? What do they like, not like about it. What they want to improve, to really narrow down what is special about your product and service. How are you differentiated? We do it in a number of ways. I think talking to people is always great. I try to have at least one very in-depth customer conversation a month, even though I'm not even working day-to-day on specific channels or features, just to help inform the sorts of things we're doing. And then we also have a lot of other inputs from customers, whether it be Net Promoter Score, online ratings and reviews, and reading where people are talking about you online, emails to support, talks from sales, all of these different places are ways to get as much feedback as possible to help inform what you're doing. Kathleen: And I like that you try to do it once a month. That's something that I'm kind of working on too which is when you're in marketing, you're not always in a position where you have direct customer contact, but it is so important to come up with some kind of a cadence so that you don't become so out of touch. Barron: 100%. And I've actually... on my team started creating requirements that people get out of the building, we have a stipend for it, talk to customers, meet them in person, hear about their journey, how they found out about us, what they're using us for, what they love, don't love, all those sorts of things for at least two customers per quarter. It's a requirement even though many people will never have customer interaction in their day-to-day. I think it's essential to have that empathy and understand what are we actually trying to do here. Kathleen: Oh, I love that. Let's actually get a little bit kind of down to brass tacks here. You're requiring your team to do these customer meetings or conversations. You're doing some of them. Do you have any kind of guidelines or framework that you use or that you ask them to use for those conversations so that there's some degree of consistency in the information you're getting? Barron: Yeah. I'm a huge documentation nerd across the board, so whenever I have an idea for a project or things that I want to work on, I write out a document to explain my thinking very clearly and get feedback on it. I think it's extremely important. So I have a one-pager about the homework, exactly what should go into it, who you should be talking to, what questions you should be asking, all of those kinds of things. And then everyone shares it back in their own format, and then we discuss it as a group. And I have the questions if you would like to hear them. Kathleen: Yes. Of course I would like to hear them. Rev.com's Audience Research Questions Barron: Great. I like to break it out into almost like the moment before discovery, and then questions around discovery, and then about the service itself. We have nine key questions and then a couple bonus questions, but they are how did you know that you needed a transcription service? Before Rev, were you using a different transcription service or doing it yourself? So those are kind of how did you know had a need, and what were you doing? Then how did you find Rev? How did you evaluate Rev, or which transcription service you wanted to use? Those are kind of on the once you've discovered it, how did you actually evaluate it? And then more into the use case. So what do you use Rev for? What does that process look like? How has Rev changed your life is a really interesting question because it forces them to think about the value you provide and quantify it, which can be very hard for marketers at times to figure out the specifics of value that you add to people. What is your favorite part about Rev? Least favorite part about Rev? This one is a personal favorite. How would you describe Rev to a friend? What is your service from their perspective? And then who else do you know that might benefit from using Rev? So what other use cases can they think of top of mind that would be relevant? And then my two bonus questions are what other product app services do you use and love? So you're usually talking to someone who is not like you but they use your service, so what is the typical person that uses your service? What else are they doing? What other things are they reading online? What other actions are they taking to try to see if there are any nuggets in there about other things that you could be doing to get in front of other customers and users. And then also what are your favorite newsletters, podcasts? Like what information do they consume on a regular basis? Kathleen: I love that. And I really like that you ask that question about how would you describe Rev to somebody else because what's that famous quote they say that, "your brand is what people say about you when you're not there?" Barron: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: That's really what it is. You're finding out what your actual brand is out in the marketplace, as opposed to what you want people to think your brand is. And hopefully- Barron: I totally agree. Kathleen: ... those two things match up, but they don't always. Barron: You want them to, and then if you don't, then you can dig into why. Deriving Insights From Audience Research Barron: And then another big requirement around this homework assignment is that all of it is recorded and transcribed using Rev. So another big piece of it is dogfooding, which is another thing that marketers sometimes don't always do. They take their products at face value instead of really using it, understanding the nuances of what actually looks like for a customer to be spending money on this, and what is the value that it adds back to their life. So when I ask people what are the insights from it, they actually have to go back, read through our online, easy to use, interactive transcript viewer, and highlight things, comment, do all of those sorts of things, but it really gets them in the mindset of dogfooding and what is the user experience. How should we be talking about it? Rev's Transcription Services Kathleen: I'm going to digress for a minute because you as a company have two different transcription options. There's the one that I have always used which is $1 per minute. Really reasonably priced in my opinion, and it's very accurate, so I don't have to spend a ton of time cleaning up the transcription after I get it. But then I saw that you recently released, and I'm not sure if it's still in beta or not, a new option that is going to be 10 cents per minute. It sounds like it's AI powered, and it's a great option for people who want like really quick results. Could be a great application for which could be exactly what we're talking about right now which is audience research interviews. Can you just talk about that for a second and then we'll pick up where we left off? Barron: Definitely. Rev historically has had a lot- Rev.com has had many human services. We have human audio transcription. We have English captioning for English videos. And then we have foreign subtitles for English videos, and foreign document translation. And it's always had these human services. But over time we have served many transcription customers, and... over 100,000 transcription customers, and we have all of this information and data about accurate transcription. So we decided as a company to make an investment a few years ago in speech technology. And we said we have the world's leading English dataset around English transcription. We want to create a speech engine around this. And we have and we launched a consumer version of this under a separate beta brand called Temi.com. For a number of years it's been incredibly successful. So now we're going to put that automated service that has industry leading accuracy because we have top speech scientists working on our incredible data to make the best engine out there, and we feel like it's in such a good place that we're going to serve it on Rev.com. So we've been doing it under a separate brand name for a number of years, and we feel like it's more than ready for prime time, so we're bringing it to all of our happy Rev customers who may have always used our human services, and we feel like this will be a great option in addition to our portfolio for certain types of audio. As you were saying, you don't always need perfect transcription. For this podcast, we're going to have perfect transcription because we want to know exactly the things that were said, but in certain cases, you have tons of interviews and you really just need to know the gist of what people were talking about or pull out some key quotes here and there. And that's when the automated version is ideal. So right now it's still in early access and we're rolling it out for prime time for all new customers starting in a couple weeks. Kathleen: That's great. Barron: And we're really excited for that. And then we also serve it directly to developers through an API as well under a brand Rev.ai. Kathleen: Neat. That's going to be a game changer as far as I'm concerned because I have no problem paying $1 per minute for the podcast as you said because it's important. I'm publishing that text. And it's for a variety of reasons, for accessibility, for somebody who wants to read and not listen, it needs to be legible and accurate. But it would be cost prohibitive if I were going to use that service to transcribe every sales call my team did, every meeting we had, every audience research interview. That could get expensive. And so this makes it so... I love that it makes it so accessible and you almost don't have an excuse not to do it, right? Barron: 100%. And we at first, when we launched our own automated version, we were a little bit worried about cannibalization. We're saying, "Are we disrupting ourselves too much?" And when we started giving it to customers, we saw no, instead of switching from human to automated, there were actually just recording more and getting more things transcribed. So we saw a lot of lift instead of shift. So we're really trying to broaden the market and make transcription more accessible to a wider audience. Kathleen: Well, and I can say just... Here's a little bit of audience research for you. Again, we've used it extensively for podcast transcription. I haven't used Rev for transcribing audience research interviews. I will now. It just is... It's so simple. Not trying to do a commercial, but I do love the product, so I wanted to say that. Barron: I knew you'd turn this into a commercial. Kathleen: You guys... So you do these interviews. You have the question set. And then I think I heard you say that everyone shares the results of the interviews in their own format. But part of that format is having the actual transcription, correct? Barron: Correct. We share the transcripts and Rev invests heavily in our online transcript viewer so when you get a transcript back from us, it doesn't just come in a Word doc. It used to, and we realized that people wanted to collaborate around them, so sharing learnings around a transcript. So we invested heavily in making a very simple, easy to use but robust online editor that people can share with teammates, make comments on, highlight key things, take notes around. Almost like a Google Doc where it's like a online viewer that a lot of people can share and look at together. And that's... yeah. So everyone shares the transcript with other members of the team. How Rev's Team Uses The Insights From Audience Research In The Company's CRO Strategy Kathleen: So you're having periodic meetings. How often do those take place where you all get together and review these findings? Barron: I do quick-fire rounds so we do those like once a quarter based on recent findings, but I encourage people all the time to talk with customers, and we have a budget for that where people can go out and get them transcribed no problem. And I urge people to always share learnings in a transcript back whenever they have them, and then we have a more formal meeting around it once a quarter. Kathleen: Tell me more about what a quick-fire round is. Barron: Oh, well we have almost a dozen people on the growth team, so we have a half hour meeting every single week to talk about different key topics. So when I say quick fire it's just everyone talking for a few minutes about the key findings that they had or any interesting insights or use cases that they discovered that weren't on our radar before. Kathleen: So you're sharing all of this feedback with the team. The team's sharing it with each other. Can you talk a little bit about then how you actually incorporate this into your marketing and your CRO strategies? Barron: Definitely. Each person on the growth team is working on a different project. So for the marketing team, we're much more channel focused, so we have someone who runs our paid marketing, someone who runs content, someone who runs SEO, someone who runs influencers, and social, and PR. So whenever you hear a customer insight, people on the team try to think about, "How can I incorporate that into the things that I am working on?" And CRO at Rev lives under the product side of things, and I did CRO for my entire time at Rev. Almost my entire time at Rev. So when we were working on conversion in A/B testing, we used customers' own words to inform the tests we were doing and actually use it as our own copy. Because we believe that customers understand the value of our services a lot more than we do because they proactively sought us out, started using us, and find value to keep coming back. So they really understand what value Rev has to offer, and we want to use those insights to help inform the next batch of people that may come across us. Kathleen: So it's true like voice of the customer application, you're pulling quotes out. You're using those quotes... Or is it full quotes, or is it just instead of calling it a transcription, we call it X kind of thing? Barron: It's a combination. We have customer testimonials on our website as well, and we also have a Twitter feed that shows real tweets from customers, just more forms of social proof, so that's actually using their own words that they have written. But then we also just use it to inform the landing page copy. Like what are the types of things that customers say about us? And I could pull up an example. Let's see. Kathleen: Let's do it. Barron: On our website, Rev.com/transcription, Audio Transcription Made Simple, that's been a tagline we've had for a while. That's because all of our customers say we're so easy to use. And I manage our entire self-serve business so it's my job to make sure it stays that way, as easy to use as possible. But then under the fold, and under the main call to action, we say, "Rev's transcription service help you capture more value from your recorded audio." That came about from me from a customer interview. They said that. They said, "You helped me capture more value from all the things I'm recording." Kathleen: Great. I love it. Barron: And we used that, and now we put it smack dab on the page, and people relate to it, and they understand exactly what it means because that was a real problem that someone had. They said, "We're recording all this audio. We're not sure how to get value and insights from it." And they used us, and they said, "This is incredible. You changed the way I work," and I said, "That's amazing. Everyone needs to know that." Right? So that's one example. And then throughout the page there's other pieces that we've gotten from customers over time. Kathleen: Great. I love it. And so it sounds like the key to what's making it successful for you guys is having a very systematic approach of everyone's getting out there and doing the interviews. Everyone's having them transcribed. They're coming back. You're all sharing the learnings, and then that can easily be applied. The Results That Rev Has Seen From This Process Kathleen: Can you talk a little bit about some of the results you've seen from the experiments you've run using the voice of the customer? Barron: Yes, I can. And I read a post about this on Medium as well, but in using customers' own words we have managed to triple the... landing-page-to-paid conversion rate for three of our services. So for the audio transcription, our main service on mobile, we managed to triple the conversion rate, so that means tripling the effectiveness of your ads because you're paying for every time someone comes to your page and you want each of them to convert. So we've done it for our main transcription service. We did it for our automated transcription service. And we did it for another Rev side project that we ended up actually shuttering a year ago because Rev always tries new ideas and businesses, and we experimented with one that ended up not working, but it wasn't because of our acquisition. It was because of other issues with the business. Kathleen: Wow. That tripling of the conversion rate, is that kind of an average across the board, or... and are there some pages that have had amazing results and some that are smaller? Or is it usually quite a big impact that those kinds of experiments have? Barron: We experiment on our main service landing pages. We spend a lot of time and energy getting people to understand what the service is and what value it provides. I will also say it's easier to test on your highest volume pages because you have more data to make more informed decisions. And you have more customers that you can talk to and learn from as well. So most of our work usually starts on our highest volume services, and then we transfer those learnings to lower volume services as well. The lion's share of my work has been on our transcription businesses because those are Rev's most mature businesses. How The Rev Team Conducts CRO Tests Kathleen: And can you just talk me through how you manage those experiments? Are you starting with a hypothesis and just choosing one variable at a time like classic A/B testing, and how long do you let the experiments run? Is there a defined time period or does it just depend on volume of sessions to the page? Barron: Those are both great questions. So the first question was how do you run experiments, and it's very hypothesis driven, but I would say you can't start with a hypothesis. You have to start with learning that helps inform what your hypothesis should be. Right? So for our website, we realized that... I watched a lot of user sessions. I talked to people. And I realized they weren't actually reading the words on the page. We had so much copy on our website... this is two and a half years ago, and people just weren't reading it. We had all the information there; it just wasn't packaged in a way that people could digest. So we made it a lot more digestible, and we saw that it was working. But the hypothesis was people aren't actually reading even though the content is there. We need to make it better. So I'd say start with learning that will help you develop your hypothesis. And then in terms of how we test, yeah. Sometimes we'll package a couple ideas together into one bigger test, but it will always be testing a singular hypothesis because if you just make a bunch of changes that you're not sure will be beneficial, you could end up hurting things and you wouldn't know. Another thing is once you have a certain number of... Actually, I'll say really quickly that Andy Johns who is a venture capitalist at Unusual Ventures, and he was a founding member of the growth team at Facebook. He's worked at Twitter as well, I believe, Quora and Wealthfront. At Wealthfront, I believe, he was the VP of Product and Growth, and now he's a venture capitalist. He has a great framework for thinking about experimentation as a size of the company and your maturity level. When you are a small business you don't have a lot of data so you have to spend tons of time and energy working around crafting the hypothesis the right way. Is this the right way to test it? Being very, very thoughtful around each test because you don't have enough data to move quickly with. So you have to be very, very thoughtful before putting it live. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you have people that have tons of data such as a Facebook or a Pinterest, and they are well known, their growth teams, for testing so many things as quickly as possible. Because they have all the data in the world, so they can run an A/B test statistical significance- Kathleen: In like hours. Barron: ... in minutes. I think faster than hours at times. They just... So they test as many things as possible because they have almost unlimited data. Whereas a lot of people listening to this podcast are probably trying to figure out how do I make the most with what I have? And it's around being incredibly thoughtful for how you do things. And then you asked how long you test for. We've had A/B tests... So it's always important to set like a minimum bar before starting the test because once you launch a test, emotion will come into it and it looks like something's really hot out of the gate, you said, "Let's call it right now. This is amazing." And then things normalize. So I've gotten really, really good over time in not checking results early because although it's tempting, it can definitely skew your emotion and your emotional state. Kathleen: It's like confirmation bias too sometimes when you see- Barron: Yeah. Exactly. So setting a baseline is good, and there's a lot of articles out there about statistical significance and the sort of time you should wait, but we did it anywhere up to months for statistical significance on key changes because data was limited on certain services, or certain pieces of the funnel. Kathleen: And I was reading the article that you wrote on Medium where you talked about this, and one of the things I thought was interesting, we spent a lot of time talking about customer interviews and audience research, but I thought it was really interesting that you also look at chats, for example, on the site. I think you guys use Intercom. Is that right? Barron: Yeah. Not only do we look at chats, I ran Intercom for months on the site myself so that I could fully understand what questions customers are having and what they wanted to see. By seeing the high volume of people in real time through whatever chat widget is hot these days, whether it be Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, there's a number out there, but getting in touch real time with your customers when they're making buying decisions is hugely important. So yes, we have a number of ways we're learning from customers, and another very popular tool, and I have another article about different tools out there, but full story, in session viewing, and I know there's tools like Hotjar are out there that do the same thing, but seeing how people are interacting with your site is extremely powerful because you can user test all day long and it will not give you real data what customers are doing. Seeing it live is almost magical. It's really cool, and it will help you be a lot smarter about your decisions. Kathleen: We use Lucky Orange for the same thing and it's amazing how it also can help you find bugs on your website that you would not have ever realized existed. We found this weird bug on mobile that was just on like iOS tablet versions X, Y, and Z, and it was because we were seeing, we saw a really strange change in the time on page and the bounce rate for that very specific device and started going into Lucky Orange and looking at user sessions for people using that device, and I was like, "Of course. There's a pop-up that's messing things up." And it's just amazing what you can learn the more you dig. But it is a- Barron: That is spectacular. Kathleen: It's a rabbit hole though. It's a deep one. Barron: I love that. The only other source that I'd say is... sources that are amazing are your support and your sales team. Your support team knows what the biggest customer issues are because they talk to them all the time, and sales is trying to convince people to use your products so they know what the biggest questions are from people when evaluating. And to help inform that, I've done rotations on both of those teams in the past. If your company would allow that, I highly suggest it because it just helps you understand what the problems are a lot better. Kathleen: Amen. I was on our sales team for six months before I took on this role as head of marketing, and it was hugely valuable. And we record all of our sales calls, so I still think listening to those is so important. Barron: Amazing. Yes. And getting them transcribed so you can read them easier. Kathleen: Exactly. Using the new 10 cents per minute tool. No, this is great. You have so many good articles on Medium. I'm probably going to put a few of those links in the show notes, so if you're listening and you want to see more of what Barron has written, check out the show notes for sure. And you are @BarronCaster on Medium. I'll put that link in as well. Barron: Thank you. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: And a couple questions for you that I ask all of my guests. I'm curious what you're going to have to say. First one is when it comes to inbound marketing, which is really what this podcast is about, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now? Barron: Yes. There are many people I think that are killing it. Kathleen: You can give me multiple names. That's fine too. Barron: I will. How deep do you want me to go on how I think they're killing it? Kathleen: Oh. Fire away. I'll stop you- Barron: Great. I think- Kathleen: ... if I need to. Barron: Okay. I think the first name that comes to mind is Neil Patel. I think he's done a great job of building an incredible content library that is extremely extensive, and he touches people on all different sorts of mediums. He's active across all social channels, and he's built up a personal brand that is extremely strong. And what he's done more recently in the past couple years is layer on tons of free tools that incentivize people to come to his domain to evaluate their website, and see what their SEO is, or look for keyword ideas through his Ubersuggest tool. And I know he's focused on acquiring these different tools to help bolster his audience and provide value to people. So he always leads with value which I think is incredibly important. So as an individual who is a brand, he stands out amongst the crowd to me. And then another company that I think is doing really well, is this company called Animalz which is a B2B, content marketing agency that I love and I've been in touch with recently because I subscribe to their newsletter and all their content was incredibly thoughtful and informative around content marketing. So I could tell they did an incredible job because I loved reading and opening their newsletter, and it led me to reach out to them about their business. So because I'm a converted customer, I am a huge fan of the work that they've done in being able to show their value to me. And then- Kathleen: And that's Animalz with a Z, right? Barron: Animalz, yeah. Animalz with a Z. And then the last company that I'm not a customer of but I really like what they're doing is G2 Crowd. Ryan Bonnici over there who used to be at HubSpot has created a content engine that is unparalleled, I think. And they're just producing a high volume of high quality content, which is very difficult to do, and I know they're investing heavily in doing that. Kathleen: Ryan's been a guest on the podcast. Yeah, he's a really smart guy. And you're the second person to mention Animalz, so I'm going to have to reach out to somebody there and get them to come on now, because that's- Barron: If you talk to Jimmy, he's great. Kathleen: Jimmy, I'm coming for you. Barron: Great. And what they do is they... Most agencies will shop out a lot of their work to other freelancers, and they believe in value and quality so hugely that they only have in-house writers. They only staff in-house people, which is difficult to do as a large agency, but it helps you keep quality consistent across the board. Kathleen: Interesting. Well, those are great examples for anyone who wants to check them out. Again, links will be in the show notes. Second question is with digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? What are your personal kind of go-to sources for great information? Barron: This is an amazing question. My first answer is that you shouldn't be looking for the latest developments. You should start by going back to the classics of marketing because a lot of the classic principles don't change. It's more of the mechanics that change. So like the people I love and refer to commonly are Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, like Robert Cialdini. These like great marketing minds and advertising minds where the principles last forever. Like I created a robust A/B testing program at Rev, and then I read Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising, which was written 100 years ago, and he had all the same principles. I was like, "Oh my God. I would have saved so much time by visiting this first." When before I had been reading all the blogs and trying to figure out what the best tech companies were doing. A lot of the principles are the same. It's more of how you actually bring them to market that's changing. And for that, I really loved Drift as a brand because I think that David Gerhardt, who runs a lot of their marketing over there, subscribes to the same philosophy. He constantly revisits the classics and then figures out how does that work in today's modern world, but he starts with principles. And I think the principles are extremely important. And then my last favorite, more general growth newsletter that touches across product development, entrepreneurship, marketing, and growth, is Hiten Shah who's actually related to Neil Patel, and he has a just incredible newsletter that's very informative, and he does deep dives on businesses and their go-to-market that will help inform you about how great brands that you know today actually made it, and the evolution that they went through over time. Kathleen: I love it. So many good suggestions. Lots of reading ahead. Barron: I don't mean to overwhelm, but- Kathleen: No, this is great. I think- Barron: ... if you have limited time, start with the old stuff and then work your way forward. I'm also a big fan of Nassim Taleb and Antifragile as a book, and he has this thing he calls the Lindy Effect. The longer something has been in existence, the more likely it is to exist for a long period of time. So these older principles still hold true in today's modern world. Kathleen: I can't wait to check some of those out. One thing I've noticed from doing so many interviews with different marketers is the best marketers are just these voracious learners. They're always wanting to find something more to educate themselves with. So lots of recommendations. If you're listening, go get all the books. How To Connect With Barron Kathleen: Barron, if somebody wants to learn more about you, or has a question, or wants to learn more about Rev, what's the best way for them to get in touch or find you online? Barron: You can check out my Medium that you will post later which is great. You can send me an email directly. It's my name barron@rev.com. Please reach out if you have any questions about anything, or if you have ideas of articles that you want me to write, I would love to hear that as well. I'm always looking for ideas on things that people are curious about so I can answer a question for a lot of people. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Love it. All right. Well, thank you so much. If you're listening and you learned something new, which I'm pretty sure you did because I feel like there's a lot of good stuff in this one, I would of course love it if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody else who'd doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @WorkMommyWork because they could be my next interview. Thanks, Barron. Barron: Thank you so much, Kathleen. This has been incredible.

This is a perfect time for us to look ahead at season seven and beyond.  We will continue providing content for advancing your career starting with a deep dive into the book.  Each chapter will get a few episodes and will be expanded upon with those.  This season will be a cross between an audio version of the book (abridged of course) and an addendum to it. More To Come For Advancing Your Career As we look ahead to the blog posts, podcast episodes, and presentations for this year we will stay focused on how to become a better developer.  We will be cutting back on the weekly blog posts in the first quarter.  Thus, there will be roughly two a month and we will be focusing on the tools we use for this site and the production of content.  Why not start with the things you know best?  Be on the lookout for an article on Buffer and Lucky Orange to start the year off right. We are trying to reduce our time commitments to producing content this year.  However, we will still be turning out three podcast episodes a week.  Our streak has continued to nearly two hundred episodes and we do not plan on letting that lapse. Meetups and Classes Our Launch Your Internet Business class passed its second birthday and will not get an annual touch up.  Instead, we will be looking for some more classes to create this year and may even do them as a meetup as well as the recordings.  More to come on that front. As always, your feedback is invaluable in providing content you can use.  Please contact us with any questions, suggestions, or requests.  That is the best way for us to help you advance your career.  

A few years ago I stumbled across the ideas of heatmaps and recording for websites.  This is one of the most potent user experience improvement tools available.  The ability for visitor recording alone brings the task of watching a room full of users to your fingertips. Visitor Recording If you have not experienced this sort of tool, it is a game-changer.  The way visitor recording works with these tools is that you place a javascript snippet on your web page.  That is it.  The code is typically only a line or two, and it sends information back to the tool for you to see what users do.  You can see where they come from, what browser they use, and even where they move the mouse.  You can also see this in real time.  That allows you to see where users get "stuck" figuring something out or spend a lot of time with something on their screen.  You can take this data to develop incredibly accurate A/B tests or tweak your calls to action.  If you are not using these tools, then I highly recommend you try them out. The List Here are the tools we cover in this episode.  Take advantage of the free trials and memberships to get the best idea for which tool is best for you. Crazy Egg: crazyegg.com Great heatmaps and $30/month (billed annually) FullStory: Fullstory.com $199/month.  It has a huge amount of functionality.  The free option is limited to one thousand sessions/month. Lucky Orange: luckyorange.com $10/month. It has several useful features and tracks mentions.  The dashboard is excellent, and it is easy to add multiple sites to the membership. MouseFlow: https://mouseflow.com $29/month.  The free option only allows one hundred sessions/month.  However, the interface for recordings is one of the best. Hotjar: www.hotjar.com $29/month.  The free option allows two thousand pageviews per day.  They have several features included with free including user polls, surveys, and instant feedback (which provides for rating with an ability to select parts of the page). Inspectlet: https:inspectlet.com $33/month.  The free allows one thousand sessions and roughly ten thousand page views each month. SmartLook: www.smartlook.com 10 day trial.  $32/month.  The limited free option is not bad.  It allows three heat maps, up to one hundred thousand monthly visits, but only three days history of history.

Catch our final #INBOUND18 wrap-up episode for day 4! In this episode we summarise Bradley Friedman's presentation on increasing website conversions. Bradley Friedman is from Lucky Orange, a platform that records heat maps, website recordings, conversion funnels and form analytics. We also caught the 'Queen of Facebook', Mari Smith and her presentation about Facebook Marketing! Choc full of new stats, insights and recommendations. PLUS: Don't miss out interview with HubSpot's Michael Redbord, General Manager of Service Hub at HubSpot. Michael talks about what problem Service Hub addresses, Service Hub features and it's relationship with the new flywheel model of growth. Catch the video interview with Michael and complete show notes @ www.redpandas.com.au/INBOUND18

Brian Gruber, He is the co-founder and technical creator of Lucky Orange, a software as a service for website owners, that let's customers quickly visualize how people are using their website through screen recordings, heatmaps, analytics, chat and more. So they can make meaningful changes to their website and increase conversion rates.

Welcome to episode 370 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. So recently I was asked to give a 15 minute talk at an event. I was like, "Okay, so 15 minutes, what do you want me to talk about?" They were like, "Oh, well like digital marketing." I was like, "Okay, more specifically." And they were like, "Search engine optimization." I was like, "Okay, more specifically." They were like, "Social media." I was like, "Still gonna need us to narrow that down for 15 minutes." So what we came up with was the one thing you can do right now, to improve your digital marketing, also known as your online marketing, but really this applies to anything marketing. Your marketing in general, your social media, your content, whatever. This one thing will make all of them better, so that's what were going to talk about today. Before we jump into that though, I want to remind you that this show is brought to you by its big brother, its natural upgrade, it's next step, and that's Hit the Mic Backstage. Hit the Mic Backstage is a one stop shop for all things social media marketing, trainings. We also have some email marketing trainings, and video, and we have an entire podcasting course. So it really is the place to be. If you love this show, and you want more of it, come join us at Hit the Mic Backstage. We've got two brand-new trainings that come up every month. They're either updates to previous trainings, meaning that all of the trainings in there are actually reflective of what's happening in social media now, and not two years ago when this community launched, or earlier than that. So join us, hitthemicbackstage.com, we do have a couple spots left for the VIP level, as of the recording of this. That may not be true when it airs. If it isn't true, you can get on the wait list for the VIP option, and join us in the regular community in the meantime, which does give you access to me in the two private communities we have. One right on the website, and one over on Facebook. So there's lots of ways for you to connect with me, and the rest of the Backstage peeps. Also, hitthemicbackstage.com is the place to go. So I will see you there. Let's jump in, and let's talk about this one thing, one thing you can do to improve your digital marketing right now. Are you ready for it? This could be the shortest episode ever. Are you ready? Now? Take stock of what you already have. Seriously, the biggest digital marketing mistake I see people making, social media wise, content wise is, "If I just do XYZ, that'll solve all the problems." So they keep building on this total lack of a foundation. They say, "Oh, I saw at a conference that Instagram Stories, that's what I have to do. So I'm gonna do that. Oh, I saw that Facebook Live is where it's at, I'm gonna do that. Oh, I saw that podcasts are the only way to go. I'm gonna do that. Oh, that's not working, so I'm gonna do two episodes a week. Oh, that's not working so I'm gonna do two episodes, plus a blog post, plus a video, plus a whatever ever, ever, ever else." Here is the real talk. Before you add anything else to your marketing plans, be it online marketing plans in general, be it just your email, be it in person networking, be it any part of your efforts to get customers, look at what you already have. Look at what's happening in those places, right now. Meaning, say okay, so I've got an email list of XYZ. I've got this many likes on my Facebook page. I have this much traffic going to my website. These are the kind of things that people are doing. If you can't tell me any of that information, then you need to take a big step back before you add anything else. If you can't tell me how many visitors you're getting to your website right now, make sure you have Google Analytics installed. If you can't tell me what they're doing on your website right now, make sure you have Google Analytics and something like Hotjar. I use TruConversion, or Lucky Orange, or any of those kind of tools where you can actually see how people are engaging with your website. You can see how they're working their way through these pieces of content, and where they're getting stuck. I love this for sales pages. Heatmaps and things like that, I love them for sales pages, because I can see where people stop. So I know exactly where I lost you, if I lost you. That's really powerful. If you podcast, make sure you're looking at your download numbers. If you have an email list, which if you're listening to this show, I'm assuming you have an email list. Don't just look at how many people are subscribed. How many people are actually reading your emails? How many people? And not just opening, because that can not always be 100% reliable. I'm talking about clicks. How many people are actually going, "Oh, this is really great information. I'm going to engage with it." That gets really tough if you don't have any clicks. This is why I don't put the entirety of my content in an email, because I don't want you to read it in your email. I want you to read it on my website, because then I know you're actually consuming the content. So that's why there's a click, because I want to see a click. An open, it's a grayer area as far as the stat. If you click, I know you actually clicked. Then I can see what you are doing on the site. I can see how long you're there. I can see, again, are you reading the podcast show notes, or are you listening to the episode? I can find all that information out. So look at what you already have. Now, when I said this was going to be the one task, I did not say it was going to be an easy task. This one task really is a lot of little tasks, but it's the most fundamentally important part of your marketing. Again, I don't care if you're talking about email, or content, or social, or whatever else. You have to look at what's going on right now, before you can build on it. Before you can improve it. Before you can make it better. Before you can evolve it. So take stock of what you have right now. When I'm talking about looking at these numbers, when I'm talking about looking at your email list numbers, and your website numbers, and your social media analytics, I also want you to look at what pieces do you have already there. Do you have an email list? What kind of content are you putting out? What social media channels are you already using? So actually make a list of what all of those places are. Then start diving into the appropriate stats for whatever location, or tool, or whatever you want to call it is, and say, "Okay, is this providing value?" If it's not, don't worry about it for right now. If it is, why is it providing value? All right, now how can I utilize the information that's working here, and maybe make some of those places that aren't working work? Or, let me dive into further about why they're not working, because if they're not working because I'm not using them effectively, that's one thing. If they're not working, because they're not the place that I can connect with my community, then I don't care if I can fix it, because if my community is not there, there's not a lot of value. This is something I bring up a lot with our corporate clients especially, because we have a couple of corporate clients who are B2B. We'll have conversations with them and it's like, "Everybody is talking about Facebook. Everybody is talking about Facebook." And I'm like, "Great, no one is buying your, insert really technical B2B kind of thing here on Facebook." Maybe it's insurance consulting. Maybe it's some sort of telecommunications stuff. Maybe it's business based web solutions. The people who are making those buying decisions, are not making those buying decisions when they're on Facebook, even if they are on Facebook in their regular life. So spending a lot of time on Facebook, not a hugely beneficial activity. On the flip side, if you are selling baby carriers to stay-at-home moms, LinkedIn is probably a colossal waste of your time, when it talks about going directly to consumer. Now there may be a value there when you're talking about building relationships with retail people, retail distribution, or event planners who do baby gear events, those kind of things. But when we're talking direct to consumer sales, no. That's not the best use of your time. So then you look at what are your goals. Right? So you kind of see what I'm saying here. I want you to take stock of exactly what you're doing. This is a really great time of year to do it, because we're kind of coming off that summer slowdown, going into the fall pickup, before we go into sort of the holiday season, and things like that. So now is a really good time to take stock and say, "What do I want to do differently in Q4? What do I want to do differently in Q1 of next year? Where do I want to be spending my time?" When were looking at things that work, that are just on point, "Well great, how can we replicate that, and if it's not the best use of my time to do it, how can we outsource it?" So again, we're just taking stock of what's already there. We're not looking for the newest, greatest, latest, hottest, sexiest, cure all, silver bullet, magic pill solution. We are looking at what we already have built. This is something I'm actually working on in-house right now, is a content review. We're looking at, so what episodes do you guys really love? What episodes did the people who listen to the show really not seem to care about? The reason the three things episode has lasted so long, is because they're one of our most downloaded episodes. We have a lot, a lot of people who only listen to that show everyone, which is fine, but they're missing this show. So I like you better. So know that it's about figuring out what is going on right now. Initially, and for a lot of you, it will literally just be about figuring out what are you doing right now. You would be amazed by how many conversations I have with people, where they can't tell me if they have a specific schedule for email. They can't tell me how frequently stuff gets posted to their Facebook page. They can't tell me if anybody has used their Twitter account in the last month, 6 months, 12 months. 24 months in some cases, because at some point it was handed off to a VA, and it kind of fell through, and I think she still does it, but I'm not sure. No, that's a solution. That's not gonna get you to where you need to be. So again, taking stock of what's happening right now has got to be the first step. From there, looking at how is it working. Or, is it not working, and how can we change it? So that's it. That's the one digital marketing thing I want you to do right now, to improve your marketing. Again, I think digital marketing, because this applies to social media. It applies to email. It applies to your content. It applies to your Facebook groups. It applies to your Twitter chats. It applies to you, "Should I have a LinkedIn profile?" It's the first step. It's why when clients, if you book a one-on-one call with me, if you go to thestaceyharris.com/1on1 and you find a time on my schedule, and you go to book it, I ask you for the URLs for your major social media channels. I don't ask that just because I'm gonna go look at them, although I am gonna go look at them. They're a key part of me researching before the call. But it forces you, before our call, to take stock on what you have, and where it is. I am constantly, constantly surprised, by how many people tell me, "Oh, actually have three Instagram accounts." Or, "Somehow I have four Facebook pages." Seriously guys, regularly this happens. So taking stock can be a really valuable thing, to make sure you're streamlined. To make sure everything is updated. To make sure everything is current. To make sure everything is working, and if it's not working, what needs to happen to let is go. Or make it work, whichever one you choose. Okay? All right, that's it. Again, if you want more of this kind of content, if you are looking for more support when it comes to social media, and email, and podcasting, and content, and blogging, and video, and all of that stuff, if for no other reason than accountability, than someone saying, "Hey, how's that going?" Be sure to join us inside of hitthemicbackstage.com okay. I will see you Backstage, and I will see you next Tuesday for another episode of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Have a great week.

Welcome to episode 362 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. We are celebrating. Yes, that's right. This month marks two years since the launch of Hit the Mic Backstage, so we're starting the whole month celebrating the anniversary. I wanted to talk about what I have learned and has taken for me and the lessons I've had in running this community for the last two years and in continuing to run this community. I see a lot of the membership sites that started just after I launched or in the year after I launched, a lot of them aren't around anymore. I think a lot of that comes from not really being super clear on what it takes to maintain a membership site. We spend a lot of time curious about what it will take to launch, what tech we need to build it on, and how big our list size needs to be and how to process recurring payments and all of those things. Sometimes, I know this was definitely true for me, I didn't think nearly as much about what it would take to run a membership site. That's one of the things I love and you're going to hear me shout these guys out probably several times during this episode, The Membership Guys, who have a great podcast. Mike and Kelly are fantastic. They have a great membership site I'm a part of. They also have done masterminds that I've been a part of and live events that I've attended and they're friends of mine. They're just fantastic people who genuinely know their stuff. They spend a lot of time in their community and in their marketing talking about not just what it takes to launch, but what it takes to run. They're doing a really good job of educating us on this stuff. I wanted to tell you from somebody who doesn't teach this day to day what my experience has been, my lessons have been, maybe a couple of things I wish I would have known earlier. We're going to focus on three or four main areas and we'll dive in in that way. The first thing I want to talk about though is commitment. You really have to be committed to growing this membership site. One of the things that I had to choose very early is if I wanted to have launch periods and I wanted to launch multiple times per year or if I wanted to have it open all of the time. I chose to have it open all of the time, which basically means I'm always in some way in launch mode. Instead of having the collective stress of a very intense launch over a week or two weeks and the work it takes to do that both before the actual two week open period and then during that two week period, I have a slightly lesser version of that all the time. I'm always selling the membership site. We have put in place a lot of pieces so that the membership site can always be in launch mode. It can always be in sales mode. That means little stuff like budgeting for Facebook ads all the time, meaning I don't have a launch budget that's XYZ and it scales down for the month afterwards. No. I have a budget for 12 months and there's a monthly budget for Backstage. In addition to that, there's a monthly budget for anything that I do have a launch period around. Earlier this year, we launched the Backstage Amplifier Mastermind, which I will talk more about later because we're changing it up a little bit. That was a more focused launch period. It had an open and it had a close. In addition to my always going Backstage budget, I needed an additional budget for that. That's something to consider if you're going to have a membership site that sits alongside more traditionally launched courses or programs or opportunities. That's something to consider, but also things like my sales funnels. Being aware of having to keep those both working but also fresh. We've got a Facebook ads training that we do, which full transparency here, guys, sells Hit the Mic Backstage. Shocker. As much there's value in there, the next steps are in the membership site, right? I have to keep that fresh in the sense that I have to keep it updated. That's something to consider. It's not a set it and forget it, it's got to get revamped. Same thing goes for the courses inside the membership site. I built a membership site largely because I was selling programs that I was having to keep updated. However, I had charged one lifetime price, meaning I was no longer getting paid but I was still having to basically completely redo those courses at least once per year. Again, that's at a minimum of once per year. Having a membership site, I'm able to monetize that redo over and over again. That's helpful from a business model perspective, but again, that takes commitment. I'm committed to keeping that stuff current, to keeping that stuff going. That's something to really, really consider when you look at, "Is this for me?" Number two, and it's in that same vein, this is not passive income. 100%. Passive income for me honestly is affiliate revenue because I don't do a ton to sell it and then I don't have to deliver anything. Now there are absolutely exceptions to that rule like all of the others. For example, sometimes I'll go really into a launch as an affiliate. A great example of that is Denise Duffield-Thomas launched a new course over the summer which I was a part of. Because I was going to be doing this live course in there, I really wanted to get some of you guys in it with me. I had a really solid email series and I ran some ads for it. That wasn't 100% passive, but nine times out of ten, my affiliate revenue really comes from, I've talked about it in this podcast and there's an affiliate link, or I've got a resource page with affiliate links. You guys will find what you need there. Click on it, purchase it, and then I get a check. That's, for me, passive income. The membership site is not. I spend a ton of hours every month not just engaging with community and monitoring things that way, handling customer service issues, but also creating content. We have two trainings, one live, one recorded every month. I'm revamping old trainings, I'm redoing funnel videos for the sales process, I'm revamping the website. The website has looked different. We've had a website redo I think three or four times in two years because I'm always trying to make that community better. I'm always trying to grow that community from the sense of a user experience. I want it to be better all the time. It's not perfect now. Full disclosure, I'm not entirely sure it will ever be perfect because there's always something that I want to make better. You know what? Partially The Membership Guys are to blame for that. Kelly and Mike put out some amazing content and have an amazing community. They always have me thinking of ways that I can make the experience better for my community and for my membership. Again, this is all about growing and helping my community get from problem to solution like any offering we have is. I want to make that better and better and better and better, so again, this is something that is not passive. I spent a ton of hours. I think that's one of the most common reasons when I've talked to membership site owners who have ditched their membership site, who have closed it out, the most common reason why is "I thought it would be passive income." "I was looking for something to add passive recurring revenue to my business and that was not what that was." Again, there's exceptions to every rule. There are absolutely people who build 100% or 95% passive revenue in a membership model. Congratulations. I have not yet figured out how to do that, nor is that something I really have an interest in. For me, I would like my membership site to be taking up more and more of my time as far as the time I spend in my business, a percentage of time I spend in my business. As it grows, it becomes more and more of the primary offering of my business. That's what it's structured to do. That's what it was created to do. I spend less and less time working one-on-one and that gets more and more high level which, again, we'll talk about very soon. It becomes more the way I work, so it's instead of being a passive, it's a one-to-many. It is leveraged time in a way that one-on-one isn't, but it's not passive. Number three though can help that, which is automation helps, so does a team. We have a team in place that helps and that role will be growing more and more over the next, I don't know, several years. Definitely this year over the next several months. We've got Charles and me and the VA team we have. They help me with everything from customer service to some of the tech stuff. We also have contract people who come in when there's a tech issue that I could maybe someday figure out, but I'm not going to very quickly. Even once I figure out what the problem is, I probably don't have the expertise to solve said problem, so I have a team. On the flip side of that, I have automation. There is a sequence of things that happens when people sign up for a training to be sold into Backstage. I'm not doing this through sales calls. I'm not doing this through cold calling or something like that. There is an automation sequence in place. Again, I'm leveraging my time by leaning on these tools and these team members to help me get to more people, to help me get more results from my time. Again, like when we're talking about passive income versus leveraged time income, I'm talking about leveraging these tools to help make more of my hours. Automation helps in a big, big way. It also helps the deliverability standpoint. When I think about what I am trying to do with this community, when I think about what I am trying to serve people and what I'm trying to change for them, I think about things like instant access. I think about things like fast responses and an easy, easy access. I have to have automation in mind and I have to have team members in mind so that I can, ensuring that they're getting what they need right when they need it, not two or three days later. One of my big goals with Backstage was replacing Google as your default, "Is this new? Where do I need to have ... Where do I find ..." I want to make sure you're getting accurate information when you need it and so things like when you purchase, you are automatically sent your login information so you can get in right then. When you request to join the Facebook group that we have as a part of the community, someone will let you in relatively quickly. If it's not me, it's a team member. Someone's paying attention to that, not 24 hours a day because we don't have a global team. All of our team members are here in the States. If you request to do it at 2:00 a.m. my time, then yes, there will very likely be a delay before you are given access. You will be given access as soon as somebody is awake and online the next day. I have to lean on these support systems, these support pieces, again, whether that's automation or whether that's people to ensure that I am delivering on that promise and on that expectation that I've set for the community to be easy access, easy to take action on. That's why I spend so much time in our VIP lounge, which is the the forum community we have right on the site and our Facebook group. A, I want it to be accessible in wherever they prefer to spend their time and, B, I want to make sure I'm there when they need me. Again, that's why this is being built and being structured and evolving to being more and more and more of the time spent in my business. I want to be accessible. This is the way for my people, my customers, my clients, my community to get direct access to me as often as possible. That's why it's priced the way it is and that's why we have the options we have as far as membership. I want this to be the way you get help when you it. It's as simple as that. I want it to be something that is there for you when you need it, whether that's through an automated sequence or a direct person, all right? Off my soapbox. I feel like I'm getting all fired up on that one. The last thing I want to talk about and this really speaks to what I was talking about earlier, but change is a requirement. You're going to be spending a lot of time learning as you build this community. That means things may change. A great, great example of that is in the course of the two years, we actually changed how we offer our monthly training. For a long time, we had a recorded training and a live training on totally new content. Then we had two recorded trainings for a little while, again, on totally new content. It shifted to having a recorded training that is either new or a revamped version. Whether it's a completely new training, whether it's something we've ... an updated version of what we did before, for example, we relaunched at the beginning of this year all of the Facebook videos in our Facebook course it's a part of. We have a six module Facebook program that's a part of membership site and I redid that whole program top to bottom. Since then, we've updated videos in there as part of the monthly training. We have a new bot training that went live this month, we have had Facebook ads trainings that have been updated because there have been changes throughout the year. Instead of inundating my audience with just more and more and more, sometimes we simply are updating. Sometimes we are simply making sure that what's there is current and accurate and reflective of what's happening right now and what you need to know right now. I realized that doing more and more and more was not actually better. Doing better and better and better and keeping it updated was a much better way to be of service. Then we shifted to a record, and this is what we do right now, so we have that recorded training that's either new or an updated and then we have a live training every month. That's traditionally an Ask Me Anything, so it's just my audience, my members' chance to ask me questions live on video versus in one of the forums. Sometimes we have extra content in there. We'll dig deeper on one of the things we talked about in recorded training or I'll be working ahead. For example in July on our Ask Me Anything live training, I actually worked ahead a little bit. I primed them for what was happening in August with bot stuff. It was some very basic intro bot stuff ahead of us talking bots in 20, or I'm sorry, in 2017, in August. That varies, but it's always a live training built for me to be immediately accessible to anyone who wants to ask questions in the chat box. Things will change. Again, the layout of our site has changed three or four times in two years. It will change again later this year. More realistically, probably early 2018 because, again, I'm always trying to make it better, make it easier to use, make it more consumable, make it more actionable, make it easier for people to implement stuff. Change is a requirement. Get comfortable with it. Enjoy it. You learn so much about running a membership site by running a membership site. The things that I thought people would find really easy with the first design really stuck people and were like, "I don't know where to find such-and-such." I'm like, "Oh, well, it's right there." No, it wasn't as simple as I thought it was. That's why I have things like heat mapping and I can actually see. I use a tool called Lucky Orange, but you can use HotJar or a ton of other tools to do this. I could really record how people engage on the site. I can see how people are using the, and there's not a name or anything, so I don't know who they are. I could see where they're from, but that doesn't necessarily help me. I can't see what they type in, so I don't see passwords or anything like that, but I do see how they're engaging, how they're moving through the site, what they're clicking on. I can see, is it intuitive? Is it easy to use? Is it structured so it's helping get people from problem to solution? Change is important. Okay, so that's it. That's what I've got. Your four things as a recap. Commitment. Requirement. This is not passive income. Automation helps, so does having a team. Change is also a requirement right up there with commitment, a commitment to make changes. That's what I've learned in the last two years aside from the fact that I really freaking love doing this. It's hands down my favorite part of my business. I have the most fun doing it and the most fun engaging with my community this way. That's why it's growing. That's why we're actually expanding in a little bit. I mentioned earlier that earlier this year, earlier in 2017, I think it was the summer, we launched it originally or early in the summer we launched it. BAM. Backstage Amplifier Mastermind. We opened it up to a few people and it was going to run for six months and that's how it's been structured. I learned that I wanted to shift that a little bit. Now what we're doing is we still have a cap on how many people can be in, but it's no longer a term commitment. People can actually get BAM as a VIP level offering for as long or as little time as they need it. You could join us for BAM level membership or the VIP level membership, which is called BAM again for one month or you could do it full time 12 months a year. It's totally up to you. What's really cool is it's everything in the membership site amplified because you also get one-on-one time with me and direct access in the forum with me, meaning there is a private area of the forum that only you and I can see and you can ask me questions there any time. You can ask questions that maybe you're not comfortable asking in the public forum. They're really specific to your business or because they're based on a conversation we had when we had our monthly one-on-one call. It's really the most direct access you can get from me because it's essentially one-on-one plus. Now what's really cool about this is generally speaking, my one-on-one calls are $297 right now at the time of the recording. That could change at any time. I never know. I mean, I do know how much they are, but that changes from time to time. For me, one-on-one one time, $297. That includes a call recording, but it includes no follow up. You don't have an email access to me unlimited for a month or anything like that and you don't have Backstage unless you happen to also be a Backstage member. With this VIP option with BAM, you're going to get that follow up time, that one-on-one call, and the $40 per month Backstage membership all for, that's right, $350 per month. You're essentially getting the one-on-one call with me and the Backstage membership. For an additional, I think it works out to $10 per month, you're getting unlimited direct access to ask me questions in our private forum that's just you and me. It's an incredible value for this price point. Again, it's $350 per month and it's hands down something I think everyone will love and get from because there's accountability. Yeah. It's not just, "Oh, I signed up for the membership and I'll do it as I have time", no. You have a one-on-one call with me. You have direct access to me, which means I have direct access to you. I can say, "Hey, how is this going? Hey, we tested this. How's it working? Hey, have you implemented that? Hey, you went live on Facebook today. I saw it because yes, I pay attention in a whole different way when you're client like this. How's that going? That looked great. Let's try this next time. Hey, you forgot the call to action." Whatever it is. That's powerful and that's a game-changer. This is going to be a really incredible value for people who join in. Again, we are capping it at a very, very small number. Literally, I only have so much bandwidth because I do still have some one-on-one consulting clients and we've got the management team we're growing right now. I only have so much time. There's only so many people that I can deliver to at this level. There are a limited number of spots, but they are open now. If you join us, go to hitthemicbackstage.com, you'll see all three levels. By all three levels, I mean our monthly level at $40 a month, our annual level at $400 per year, and this new BAM monthly option. Again, that's $350 per month. I'm really excited for this. I hope that a few of you join us. If you have any questions though, email backstage@thestaceyharris.com. Someone on the team will answer it. Probably me for these kind of questions. I look forward to seeing you Backstage and of course, one-on-one through BAM. All right? I will see you very, very soon. Talk soon. Bye.

Jason Hartman invites Brian Gruber President of Lucky Orange to the Speaking of Wealth Show. On today's episode, Brian talks about the customer data you can get from heat mapping, polls on your website to find out how to make your customers purchase your products, and the beneficial ways of using Lucky Orange's product.   Key Takeaways:  2:14 – Heat mapping can show you which pages are the most visited and which ones are not. 3:13 – A poll is a quick question that can help you find out what your customer is thinking. 5:47 – Brian explains how the privacy of their product works. 7:56 – Brian explains more about different types of heat mapping.  11:45 – Lucky Orange has a feature called Behavior Tagging which segments the recordings of people by the actions they take on your website. 13:59 – Lucky Orange has another feature called Form Analytics that allows you to see people in real-time and see where they're stuck on your forms. 15:00 – Brian's advice is to get information from your customers by watching their movements on your website and asking them questions.  16:56 – Listeners of this podcast can get an extended free trial on Lucky Orange's product via email.   Mentioned in this episode: Behavior Tagging Form Analytics luckyorange.com