Podcast appearances and mentions of shai schechter

Shai Schechter chats with Benedikt and Benedicte about his journey with RightMessage and what he's been up to these days.Feelings WheelFollow Shai on TwitterCheck out Shai's websiteExplore Shai's reading listBoth coming from software backgrounds and coming into the online marketing world, Shai and Brennan created RightMessage to have marketing sites become a bit more dynamic and change based on who was visiting. Shai exited the company in 2023 after working on the product for six years. Since then, he's been taking it slow and steady while he figures out what to do next.Shai, Benedikt, and Benedicte talk about the lessons he learned in his SaaS journey, why it's important to be honest with yourself about your current realities, and more.

Anna Maste is the founder of Subscribe Sense, a business she started after exiting Boondockers Welcome. Subscribe Sense — Anna's new business  Boondockers Welcome Music video fun Follow Anna on Twitter Smart Subscriber — Shai Schechter's email tool RightMessage — Brennan Dunn's & Shai Schechter's email tool Deploy Empathy — a book by Michele Hansen Benedikt and Benedicte host Anna Maste, founder of Subscribe Sense. Subscribe Sense is an email tool created to ensure subscribers to your mailing lists are confirming their subscriptions with a double opt-in. Before exiting her previous business Boondockers Welcome, Anna realized that she had leads who had not confirmed their signup to her lists. Subscribe Sense aims to increase confirmation rates.Benedikt and Anna talk about some of the opportunities and dangers when working with email providers. Userlist has had to ask similar questions about handling emails and user behavior. The three discuss how Anna's previous exit played out, what her expectations are for Subscribe Sense post-exit, how she delineates development and marketing work, and how education and software stacks play a role in getting to an MVP.Not to mention, Anna can make a killer parody music video!

Shai Schechter, co-founder of RightMessage, has been hustling since he was 11. He believes that what's practical is very different for different people. If you see a task through a particular lens (e.g. tech) then that's the way you should do it. Do what comes naturally. For show notes: https://justtheusefulbits.com/jtub/shai-schechter/

A healthy co-founder relationship is the foundation of a good business. How can we prevent conflicts and alleviate friction? Our guest today is Shai Schechter, co-founder of RightMessage. You'll learn the story behind RightMessage, how to navigate co-founder relationships, how to leverage different skills and personality types, and more.Download the MP3 audio file: right-click here and choose Save As.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.Show NotesRightMessage — Shai's product with Brennan DunnDouble Your Freelancing — Brennan's Previous BusinessThe story of Userlist, Inc. — Jane's co-founder storyThe only wrong answer is 50/50: Calculating the co-founder equity split — an article by Dan ShapiroCasey Graham — the growth coach who helped Shai and BrennanThe Synergist Quiz — the test to figure out your personality type (Visionary, Operator, Processor, Synergist)Rubber Duck Programming — arriving at solution after problem explanationFollow Shai on TwitterSign up for Shai's newsletterToday's Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Around — video calls designed for collaboration, not meetings. It's perfect for design sessions, brainstorms, and crits. Here's a recent tweet from a designer about Around: "I love Around so much, it physically pains me to use Zoom or Google Meet. Around makes meetings so much more enjoyable." Try it out for free at around.co/uibreakfast.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

Show Notes In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob talks with Shai Schechter of RightMessage, about his amazing launch and then finding himself near bankruptcy and how he was able to right the ship. Items mentioned in this episode: RightMessage RightMessage.baremetrics Shai.io MicroConf Europe Transcript Rob: In this episode of Startups […]       

We’re joined again today by Shai Schechter of RightMessage. In this episode, we continue talking to Shai about why and how to personalize your website’s calls to action in order to improve response rates among your visitors. We also talk about how to make this personalization task manageable for small teams without enterprise resources, and […]

Today, on Rogue Startups, Craig has a conversation with Shai Schechter from RightMessage. Together, they discuss how Shai and his team got started, acquired funding, and then later pivoted their business. Tune in to hear about all of this and more! Topics: How Shai’s team got started with RightMessage Raising capital for RightMessage When and […]

Today we’re joined by Shai Schechter of RightMessage. We talk to Shai about his background in entrepreneurship, then we discuss the surprising affect that personalization had on his website visitors, how that grew into the founding of RightMessage, and how we can use personalization to improve engagement with our own website visitors. Release Notes 2019 […]

How can eCommerce businesses reduce their time to first purchase by 10X? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, WordPress developer and eCommerce expert Jason Resnick shares the process he uses to help eCommerce businesses dramatically reduce the time from first touch to first purchase. And while Jason works primarily with eCommerce businesses, the advice he shares is equally applicable to businesses in other verticals. From visitor segmentation, to behavioral analytics and content personalization, Jason goes into detail on the process he has used to help one client reduce time to first purchase from 40 days to 8, and for another client from 9 days to 1.  Some highlights from my conversation with Jason include: Jason is a WordPress developer and eCommerce marketing expert. According to Jason, one of the keys to reducing the time to first purchase is to capitalize on the positive emotion that a visitor feels when they discover your site for the first time and get them to explore further. One way to do this is by adding a widget to your site with related blog articles. Asking your visitors a qualifying question is a good way to learn a bit more about them and then use that information to tailor what you show them. With these types of questions, and then behavioral information like the articles and pages your visitors are looking at, you can create a lead scoring model. Based on the topics that a visitor is consuming content on, you can use that information to change the copy on your CTAs to make them more relevant to your visitors' interests. In eCommerce, the first 90 days are crucial. If you can't convince a new contact to purchase something with the first 90 days, the odds of ever selling to them drop dramatically. When Jason works with new clients, he begins by taking baseline measurements of how long it takes for a new contact to go from first touch to first purchase. By using segmentation, intent awareness, and personalized copy, Jason has been able to reduce time to first purchase for one client from 40 days to 8, and for another client from 9 days to 1.  When it comes to converting new leads into customers, Jason says it all comes down to trust, and you need to build trust into every interaction you have, from your website copy to your email marketing. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Rezzz website Follow Jason on Twitter Connect with Jason on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn exactly how Jason helps his client shorten their sales cycles - and how you can too. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Jason Resnick, who is the founder of Rezzz. Welcome Jason. Jason Resnick (Guest): Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Jason and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Tell my audience a little bit about what Rezzz is, and your background, and how you came to be doing what you're doing now. About Rezzz Jason: Sure. Rezzz is my business, it's what I've been doing for, this August will be nine full years, full time for myself. I am a solopreneur. I don't have a team behind me, but it's a web development business. I've always loved the eCommerce space, and the human behavior behind all of eCommerce. Where most developers and designers shy away from eCommerce so early on when eCommerce was ramping up in the early 2000s, I flocked to it, I was attracted to it. I built my business around helping online businesses, and I call them eCommerce, it could be anybody taking a transaction. I have nonprofit clients. I have online coaches. I have clients that sell physical products. Basically anybody taking a transaction, to help them get anonymous visitors into being customers, and then customers into repeat customers, and then repeat customers into raving fans. I do that through a number of different strategies and tactics, which most of them revolve around what's called behavioral marketing, or email automation, but also a mix of onsite personalization, that's where my skillset as a web developer come into play. Kathleen: Yeah. You know, it's funny that you say that about marketers shying away from eCommerce, because I've worked with a lot of marketers in my time. I was an agency owner for 11 years, and of course now I'm at Impact. It's true, I know a lot of marketers, and a lot of them say, "I don't touch eCommerce." It's almost like they're afraid to. I know one or two who do it, and the ones I know who do it have like gone deep, I think because there's such an opportunity, or a vacuum left by everybody else. Why do you think it is that marketers shy away from it so much? Jason: I think it really stems from there's so much tech involved with it, and it's so close to the bottom line that it's easy, I mean, and this is going to come out bad, but because there is a direct correlation that business owners see X dollars coming in per month, per day, or whatever it is from the site, when you say that you can affect that, they're going to see that result immediately. Most marketers, and obviously when we build campaigns sometimes those things take some time to build up, and sometimes you have to have those difficult conversations with clients a little bit earlier on in the eCommerce space than, let's say nonprofits, or standard brochure type websites, those things. I think that because of not just that, those difficult conversations that you might have to have, but also the tech side of things, if something goes wrong, if you're the point of contact and you don't necessarily know at a deep level what those technical bells and switches are, then you're going to be like, "Uh." With your hands raised and saying, "I'm not sure. Let's go see what we can find out from the tech team." I think at least from my experience, that's what customers tell me when they come into my ecosystem. They want somebody that, they may not know all the technical aspects of things, but they do understand that some things do take time, and they just want somebody that can take care of all of it for them. They don't want that ping pong match like, oh this is the host, and this is the developer, and this is the marketing side of things. They don't want that ping pong match, and they kind of just want that holistic point of contact person to be able to say, "Yes, there's a problem." Or, "Yes, this is what we need to do." At least from my experience I think that that's the reason why a lot of people shy away from it. Kathleen: Yeah. It's interesting because web design, development, et cetera, in general comes with a lot of high stakes, especially in this day and age when so many people find your business by your website. With eCommerce, as you rightfully pointed out, it's like way, way, way higher stakes, because your business is your website. Jason: Right. Kathleen: Your website is your business. Either way you look at it, if you break something, you're breaking the entire revenue stream of the business, not just like, oh our customers couldn't see our website today, or we didn't get another form fill. Jason: Right. Kathleen: Yeah, it's not an inconvenience, it's a major, major risk. I can totally see that. Now, and I should say, you came with very high marks, because I met you through one of my past podcast guests. This is one of my favorite ways to get new guests, is when former guests reach out and say, "Hey, I have somebody you should talk to." That actually happened in your case when Val Geisler, who I interviewed a few months ago, wrote to me unsolicited and said, "I really think you should talk to this guy." Val, for those who either didn't hear her episode or don't know, is an amazing email conversion copywriter, mostly for B2B SaaS companies. I have a tremendous amount of respect for her, and as soon as she wrote to me I said, "I'll talk to anybody that you think I should talk to." Jason: Thank you very much. Kathleen: Yeah. No, that was a good introduction. You do a lot of work, because you're in eCommerce, and what is interesting to me about you is that you're not just a web developer/designer. You work on some of the other aspects of eCommerce businesses, personalization, conversion optimization. How did you get from web design and development into these other areas? Jason: I think actually it, well my career took me in that path, but I think as a person it was the other way around. I've always been interested in human behavior. I got a minor in psychology in college. For me, and I went to college in the late '90s, and that was the advent of the internet. I mean, I remember going to the computer lab and building my first webpage. That was in like '96. Kathleen: I remember learning Basic. Jason: Right. Yes. Me too. Kathleen: I'm not going to say any more, because then that'll really date me. Jason: For me, when the advent of the internet came along, that was intriguing enough, because I was actually going for computer science at the time. At that time it was a lot of compiling code, and waiting for things to happen. Yet the web was like, I put code on a screen and I hit save, and I refresh and boom it's there. Hey, that's pretty cool. That intrigued me, but also my human nature side of things, just being perceptive of the world around me and kind of how people interact with certain things, and why they do what they do, and why they don't do what they don't do, always intrigued me. When the eCommerce world hit, pre Amazon, all the rest of it, people were afraid to put their credit cards in. Even online, let alone cellphones weren't even really a thing at that point in time. I was working for a consulting firm at that time, and we dealt with a lot of startups, and all of them wanted some sort of eCommerce in some sort of fashion. For me, it was always interesting to say, okay, if we use certain buttons in a certain way, and certain text in certain colors, we could create this, I don't want to say an artificial, but a perceptive environment of being safe. Where they can submit their credit card and not feel that they are sending it over and somebody's copying that down and running away with their identity. For me, that was the genesis of where I am today. I've always just kind of had that snowball effect, and really focus in on that specific part of my development skills. Because as you said, a lot of people were shying away from it, and I always knew that I wanted to work for myself. I had to find that niche, if you will, that sweet spot to really plant my flag in, and fit into a market that I could become known for. That was how I started all that. Just as the web evolved, now with email marketing, and how much data you can collect on somebody just by asking them a few questions, you can segment, you can promote certain things based around where a person is in their journey and their awareness. You can do all these things and marry things like your email marketing platform with your website with a little bit of code. Now there are services out there that can do this too, that your website can look completely different with two different people. It's all based around what you know about that person, where they came from, demographics, or even just what you know they clicked on in your last email. That's always been interesting to me because that's like the mom and pop of like the early 1900s, where somebody would walk into the store and you would have all your stuff ready because they knew you came in every Thursday. They knew who you were. For me, having that personalization and segmentation is what allows you, as the business owner, to know where your potential customers are, where your customers are, where your repeat customers are, and know how to cater to them in the best way possible. Kathleen: You know, it's fascinating that you just brought that up, because I literally just, as we're recording this, this morning published my latest episode, which was a conversation with Shai Schechter, who's the founder of a company called Right Message. That's exactly what he talked about, was his platform that he's built lets you ask your visitor a simple question like, what brings you here today? He actually equated it to the conversation you have when you walk into a shop. Like nobody is saying, "What industry are you in?" It's, "What brings you here today?" Jason: Right. Kathleen: Based on the answer to that, you can dynamically then update the copy on the page. He was seeing like 10x improvements in landing page and CTA conversion rates from that kind of like small amount of personalization. I definitely think there's something to it. Jason: Yeah, absolutely. I know Shai, I've known him for a couple of years. We've met at some events and things of that nature. Yeah, he's built a great platform. His platform's called Right Message, and I use Right Message as well for some assets of my business. Yeah, I mean it's that idea of, we've gotten away from that broadcast everything to everybody. Now we want to really cater to the one on one. That is what's going to increase conversions, and that's what's going to help you convert non customers to customers as quickly as possible. The more you know about them, the more that you can speak their language, the more that you're serving up the thing that they want at the right time, that's going to help you with your conversions. Reducing The Time to First Purchase Kathleen: Yeah. Now you, as you said, you do a lot of work in eCommerce, and one of the biggest areas of opportunity for optimization in eCommerce is how long it takes from first touch, if you will, with a lead or a prospect, to getting them to purchase. Time to first purchase. You've done some interesting work on shortening that time period, can you talk a little bit about that? Jason: Sure. Yeah. As you said, any time somebody sees you for the very first time, there's this innate human factor inside of us that, hey, we like this thing. This is awesome. There's this emotion, this euphoria that you get on the human side. What you want to do is, from a technical perspective, is to be able to capitalize on that euphoria, that feeling of good that somebody sees in you. What you can do nowadays is just ask them a couple of questions, or in the behavioral marketing side of things, see what they click on, what is interesting to them, what do they not click on? Those kind of things, prior to them even being in your email list. When they're in your email list obviously there's more details that you can get to, but with code snippets and things of that nature you can actually change your website around what they're reading on your blog. What you can do with your own blog, if you will, and I'm sure many of you have seen it, is that you have this "widget" that says, "You may also like ..." Or, "Here's other content that might be interesting to you." Because what you're on, the article that you're reading at this point in time, there is related articles in that same category on that same website. What they want you to do is, hey, if you're interested in this, then go check out this as well. They're trying to move you along in that journey to know that if you have a specific problem, well we have some resources and we know how to solve your problem. What you can do in the background of things is you can do "lead scoring". If somebody, let's just say on your website you have a bunch of articles around pricing or things of that nature, pricing, let's say you also have things on sales, or marketing. If somebody hits a couple of articles on your marketing side of things but they never look at pricing, then you could potentially change your website around that a little bit more. Make your calls to action to talk about marketing versus pricing. I do this on my website plenty of times. If somebody comes to me from, because I specialize in convert kit and drip, if somebody comes to me from the convert kit consultation, or convert kit experts they call them, if that webpage, then my services page gets reflected on that. I don't even mention drip, I just mention convert kit, because that's where they came from, so I'm assuming, based on their behavior, that that's what they're interested in. They're not interested in anything else that I do. You can be mindful of these sort of things, and just talking their language allows you to then get them to the next stage faster. Because if I can echo what they're saying to me, based on their actions what they're saying to me, then just us as humans we're going to say, "Hey, that's what I'm looking for. You know what I'm talking about." What I'll try to do in that respect is to be able to then grab their email address, and then market to them in that end. Talk to them about convert kit. Talk to them about potentially segmentation and those kind of things, or automated workflows if that's what they're looking for. All of this data really just gets passed over into my email marketing platform and my welcome sequence tailors to that. What that does is, like for my clients, is to be able to then baseline how long it takes for someone to first opt into your email list and then buy from you, because that window of opportunity is finite. Once you go past about 90 days, and obviously this depends on the type of product or service that you're selling, but on average 90 days, then you're not going to convert, or you're a lot less likely to convert. You want to be able to then, especially if you're selling multiple things, sell quickly. You want them to get that first purchase because that's always the hardest, and then get them to repeat buy after that. With just some small tweaks, and some small segmentation, and intent awareness, because we can dive into that a little bit more. Just based around some of those things you can then shorten that time frame greatly. I have some results where I've done for my clients, take their baseline of 40 days to the first purchase, and gone down to eight. I've had another client where it was nine days down to less than a day. Kathleen: Wow. Jason: It's just a matter of knowing and understanding the actions that somebody's taking, and then putting the right promotion, if you will. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be a buy, it could be an email opt in or whatever. Putting the right promotion in front of them. How To Measure Time To First Purchase Kathleen: Let's wind back a little bit. Let's say I come to you and I'm an eCommerce company, and I'm interested in focusing on this time to first purchase kind of metric. You talked about how the first thing you have to do is establish a baseline of how long is it actually already taking people to get from first touch to first purchase? Walk me through exactly what you're doing to measure that. Are there certain tools that you put in place? Tracking tools, what is it you're looking at in order to determine that? Jason: Sure. I think only one person was tracking this that came to me, which makes my life easier. Most times what I look for is really I look for obviously their customer list, and I take their email addresses. Then unfortunately there's no tool to marry this stuff. I basically take a spreadsheet, an export of that, of all their customers, and then I go to their email service provider and I see when they opted in. Then I try to figure out, based on the dates around them becoming a customer and when they first opted in, and I kind of take a baseline, if you will, "baseline", on what their metric is. Then I have a conversation with the business owner to kind of gauge what their sales team sees, if they have that data, and try to come up with the best possible estimation that they have for this. A lot of times, I mean there's obviously a percentage plus or minus, but a lot of times it's pretty accurate if you know the data that's there. Because we all know when they purchased their first thing, we all know when they came onto the email list. If it happened to be that ... I try to discount those that have zero day initially, because a lot of times people in the email marketing world, and I'm sure a lot of your audience knows this, a lot of times people will opt in with a different email than they'll actually pay with. Kathleen: Yeah. Jason: If they opted in on the same day they purchased, for the baseline I take that away. Kathleen: Yeah, there's a lot of XYZ@123.com. Jason: Right. Kathleen: Don'temailme@pleasestop.com. It's amazing how creative people get with those fake email addresses. Jason: Absolutely. Obviously there's some experience factor in there for where I try to come up with that baseline. Then what I do once I have that, then I go into their email marketing platform and I essentially create rules that store when they become an opt in, but also when they actually purchase. Which is just a custom field that really just does some math to say, okay, they subscribed on this date, they became a customer today, let's minus the two, how many days are there? Over the first month or two of doing that, I kind of gauge whether that baseline estimation that we first did is accurate enough to go off of. Then we move from there more into the optimization, asking certain questions, things of that nature to try to shorten that time. Jason's Process For Shortening Time To First Purchase Kathleen: Let's talk about that stage next. I've come to you, I say, "I need help with this." You calculate those initial baseline metrics. Then what? It sounds like you're using personalization and targeted offers in order to pull people through that customer buying journey. Is there any kind of like discovery process or research that you're using in order to determine what the right offer is, or the right way to persuade them? Jason: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of it is, in my own research anyway, is looking at their analytics first. Seeing what people are actually looking at on the website, because a lot of times it's not what the owner thinks. I want to make sure that I have the data, because for me, I'm a data geek and the numbers don't lie. If the business owner tells me one thing and the data tells me another thing, then we have a conversation to try to reconcile it in some way. That's first things first, is really looking at Google Analytics, or any other metrics that they could possibly have. A lot of people use Hotjar and some of these other tools out there that help you with the customer interaction on your website. I start there. Then I have conversations with the business owner as well as certain key members on their team, if they have those kind of people. People like marketing, sales, people that are closer to the customer, if you will. Support teams, those sort of things, to really start to get an understanding of, and it's not even technical, it's just what kind of words do you hear all the time? What pain points people are struggling with. What opt ins do you have on your site that actually can map to a product? Because a lot of people, especially in the eCommerce space, they say, "Hey, we had a discount for this. Sign up on your first purchase." Is that working for you, or is something else working for you when you run a holiday sale instead? I try to gauge what that customer is thinking. Because we can assume that we're putting the best foot forward, but if the customer is coming to you depending on the product or service obviously, they're coming to you with two things in mind. One is their intent, they're intent on solving the problem. Is the page that they're on, or your product, or service, actually going to solve their problem that they have right now? Two, what's their motivation behind solving that problem? I really want to get down to those two things. It's not scientific in the way where there's actual numbers, at least initially. I want to make assumptions on that, and put campaigns out, look at welcome sequences. Look at all of these kind of things that they're already doing that we can inject some questions, or inject some relative links to blog posts, or products, or whatever, os that we can get a better gauge on what their intent is and what their motivation is without actually asking them. Kathleen: Now you talked about nurturing sequences, and onboarding workflows, and things like that. I do find it's very easy in this day and age to overwhelm audiences with email particularly. Do you have any rules of thumb that you use as far as like, how soon do we email them and how frequently do we email them? Anything as far as even style of email, because I know there's a lot of different opinions on very designed emails versus plain text. I'd love just on the topic of email to hear your thoughts. Jason: Yeah. I mean, that's a whole nother episode. Kathleen: I know. Jason: Yeah. To answer the first part of the question about how often, frequency, those kind of things. First I have to know what they're doing already. If you came to me and said, "Look, I do a once a month promotion." If you just switch that up to a daily, then your list is going to be obliterated and they're going to be like, "I don't even know who this person is." They're going to get high on subscribe rates. If you have a pretty regular cadence, say once a week or something of that nature, it's really just throw it out, if you want to add another email. Because for me, my business when I send emails, I get paid. I will always try to mix in emails where I can. For how I like to do it, I try to do it in a human way, not just like let's just keep sending links to podcasts and blog articles, or products, or services, or stuff. I try to have the subscriber opt into those things. You can do that in a way where if you had, let's just say you had a cadence of every single week on Tuesday you send out an email to your list. You could just send out an email on Tuesday saying, "Hey look, we're going to add another email, or two emails, we're going to have it on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday now, and we're going to talk about this. And if you're interested in that, just click this button." They're automatically opted in. You could do things in a more human way, and it goes back to that whole mom-and-pop philosophy is, I want the subscriber to tell me. All of this stuff allows you insight into them, into the subscriber at an individual subscriber level. If they're excited to hear more from you, then you know that, hey, well they may be interested in a product or service that I have that's outside of the free level. You could do those kind of things. You can surely incentivize people with discounts and all of those other things. While that stuff does have its place and works, for the long term, creating those raving fans and repeat buyers, it's all based on trust. The trust factor comes in where you're actually genuine with them and, "Hey, I have an offer, I'm going to do this. If you're interested, all you have to do is let me know." Kathleen: You talked earlier about some examples of results in terms of shortening that time span. I would love to hear a little bit more about that. Do you have a couple of maybe specific examples of it started out at this long, went to that long, and like what led to those key changes? Jason: Yeah. I mean, specifically with some of those results, the one that's interesting is that one that was almost two weeks and I shortened it to a day, inside a day. That was really based around, it is a digital product company, but they also had a service on the back end of it too. What it was, was the funnel was very linear. It was somebody opts in and we promote this product to you, and it was a flash sale. It was like within 24 hours you can buy this for 99% off. That kind of thing. If they didn't take you up on that, then you go into this long term nurture sequence, which was basically two emails a week. Out of that it was pitching that same product over and over again, but at full price. It was, I call it a soft pitch. It's more like, hey, you've seen them in the bottom of your emails I'm sure, like in the P.S., like hey, we also if you're interested in this, we have this product. Which worked fairly well, I mean, nine days to opt in to convert to a customer is good. What they wanted to do was they had a lot of different products that served a couple of different audiences. Immediately when they opted in, unless they opted in via a specific opt in, they didn't know which audience they were. What I wanted to do was I wanted to basically put that front center. I mentioned it a little bit earlier on beforehand, is we can know before they opt in what they've already looked at, through JavaScript and cookies and local storage on their browsers, and that's all in the tech world. If we know what they looked at, then we kind of know what audience they're in. Instead of just pitching them that one thing on the back end of the opt in, let's pitch them the product that makes sense to them. That was the first step, was to really try to put that in place, which made a huge impact. I mean, that was just, that initial just, hey, let's look at the blog posts that they're looking at, and store that data. How many did they look at? How frequently did they look at? Based on that, let's position that product offering that's that tripwire product, if you will, for the next 24 hours at that discount, that's the product that makes sense for that audience. That shortened it almost to three days immediately, because people were more receptive to that offer because it made sense to them. Then there were some tweaks we made to the landing page, to the copy, based on some feedback that we got from those people that actually bought the product during that time. We made some optimizations, and that even shortened the time to first purchase. Kathleen: It's interesting to listen to you talk about this, because obviously the examples are eCommerce, but in my head I keep asking myself, is there anything here that doesn't apply to another type of sale? For example, like a complex B2B sale. I'm not hearing anything that's so specific to eCommerce. It's really just, if I'm understanding you correctly, it's really just about looking more closely at their behavior, and using that behavioral information and those patterns that are created to serve up information that's more directly relevant to their interests. Is that right? Jason: Absolutely. I mean, it just goes back to business in general. If you go to a conference, let's say you go to a conference with all colleagues of yours, they're in a similar business or industry than you are. You're going to talk to them in a different way than if you're going to a higher level conference where your customers might be. It's also a matter of awareness of the person that's viewing your online store or your website. Have they never seen you before, or are they intimately familiar with you and they know your name, they know your services? It's that buyer journey that happens with everybody, whether they're buying a pack of gum or they're buying some service that's going to cost them $10,000 a month. Obviously there's sales cycles, and that all comes into play, but it's the same business. You want to earn that trust. You want to speak their language. If you know the problem that you're proposing a solution for, then that person's going to be more receptive to hearing you. When you hear, that's where the conversion is. It's a matter of just taking them along that journey in a proper way, whether it is a complex B2B or whether it's a transaction where you just pull out your credit card and put it in. How Difficult Is It To Implement? Kathleen: This sounds straightforward on the one hand, the concept is straightforward. Then on the other hand it sounds really intimidating in terms of being able to execute it. Can you talk through how complex this is, and is this something that the typical business needs to hire a developer to do for them, or are there tools out there that make it really easy to do this? Jason: Yeah. I mean, it's as complex as you want to make it really. I like to try to keep things as simple as possible. I mean, I even, I have a thing on my white board, what would this look like if it was simple? Because we can over engineer everything. Once you start thinking one thing, it leads you to another thing, and you're going down this long rabbit hole, and you're like, "Oh my god, I don't know how I'm going to even do this thing." What I try to do is, if you come to me and you have decent enough traffic, you have decent enough sales, and we can have a conversation that's around potentially segmenting your audience better, if you don't do all that already. By segment I mean more so than customers versus non customers. If you're actually doing anything in regards to helping your customers move along the journey, meaning are you doing regular email sequences? Are you blogging? Are you doing these other things? If you are, then it's as simple as starting to think about what problems or what products are related? Let's just say you have a product that solves a problem that, let's say a developer has. As a developer I might have a problem where I need more RAM, or more compute power. If I go to a website and it just says, "Hey, buy this hard drive, or buy this RAM, or buy this monitor." Okay, but if I clicked on a blog post of theirs that talked more about compute power for my computer, and then I went to their product page and then it gave me three products that could help me there, I'm more likely to buy from there because they've already positioned a couple of things based around what I know, and I didn't sign up or anything. You can just start thinking about the product that you have and what problems that solves. That will help you start to build these things out. Keep it simple. Write it down in a notebook, or write it down in a document. You don't need a overbuilt tool to do all this stuff, at least initially. We mentioned Shai before. Right Message is a tool that you can build these. You don't need code. They give you a piece of code to put on your website, but you can build these in a visual editor. There's other tools out there as well. Initially it's really just even that widget we talked about earlier about, hey, you might like this content. On a lot of WordPress websites you can build that. There's plugins out there that would help you do that stuff. You don't necessarily need the code for that either. Keep it simple if you haven't done it yet, and see what sort of results you get. I mean, if you come to me, and usually people that do come to me, they already have this idea, they have the traction. That's why I said it earlier on, it's an established online business that I help, because they have the traction, but they want to increase more sales, they want to increase better brand relationships with their customers. They kind of have an idea that they can do this, they're just not sure what the strategies and the methods to go about doing it. What Kinds Of Results Can You Expect? Kathleen: Yeah. Are there any rule of thumbs that you use for like what kind of improvements that, on average, you think businesses can expect to experience if they go from not being contextual or using personalization to once they've done it? Jason: Yeah. It's hard, it's really based around what the price point is, to be honest with you. I feel like if it's a sub $100 product and/or service, people are more impulsive and you could probably see a quicker uptick in the percentage based around that. If it's north of $100 thing, then it's going to be a slower growth. You kind of need a little bit more time and data to see what's actually going to work and pull the triggers. On the other side of that is that those that are north of $100, you could ask existing customers certain things, which I would suggest things like, where were you when you bought this? What problem did it solve? How has it been since? By asking those questions of existing customers, you can help shorten that on the front end of it. I mean for me it's such a general rule, but I always say you could get 3% to 5% of anybody you talk to, to buy something. Obviously that's a very general rule. I always want to push that a lot higher than the 5%. What I try to do is I try to get the pages in which people are landing on for the purchase like 30% or more. Trying to get the messaging right, trying to get the distractions away from the page, because that's what a lot of eCommerce sites do. Just case in point, look at Amazon, they don't do a lot of that. Once you start going into their checkout process, the closer to your wallet that you get with Amazon, they remove everything. A lot of people don't even realize it. A lot of customers anyway, don't realize that the navigation goes away, continue to shop goes away, contact us goes away. All of these things go away as you start moving closer and closer to actually paying. Who better than Amazon to follow? Because they have the traffic, they have the data, and they publish a lot of these experiments for people to look at. I always try to, obviously depending on the price, I try to figure out what their baseline is. I want to always try to 10x the ROI that they put into me for their business. Kathleen: That makes sense, yeah. I kind of figured the answer when I asked that question might be some form of, it depends, so thank you for humoring me and answering that. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Well I'm curious to hear your answers to the two questions I usually ask my guests. When it comes to inbound marketing specifically, who do you think is doing it really well right now? It could be a company or it could be a person. Jason: Yeah, I mean, as far as inbound marketing, I'd have to say somebody that does it really well is Chris Marr. He runs the Content Marketing Academy, and he's a marketer that obviously he runs workshops for larger companies. What he does well and how he talks about what he does, it's always it's like the softest sell possible, and then you're just like, "Hey, yeah, I want to go to Chris, because he knows what he's talking about and he gets great results." His methodology and everything he talks about, it makes perfect sense. For me, I've known Chris a few years now. I've had him on my own podcast. It's just, I don't know, it's simple but yet so highly effective that it's sometimes like, hey, this is easy. Kathleen: How did I wind up buying from him? Jason: Yeah. You wonder what's going on. Yeah, if it's somebody, I would recommend checking out Chris Marr if you haven't already. Kathleen: That's a good one. I'll put that link in the show notes. Then with digital marketing changing so quickly, and especially the field that you're in, it can be very hard to stay up to date on all the new developments. How do you personally stay educated? Jason: That's a tough one. I try to, because I toe the line between tech and marketing, there's a lot of noise. What I try to do is I try to curate a lot of what I see. For me, Twitter is my home away from home, if you will. I get educated through Twitter, and who I follow there, and really put together lists on my profile that are really targeted to specific people that are knowledgeable in the space. I'll go to Twitter first to just see what people are talking about, and things of that nature. If it comes up one, two, three times more than the first time that I see it, then I'm like, okay, let me see if this is something of interest. Then what I'll do is I'll sign up to specific newsletters. Some of the newsletters that I sign up to, I may only sign up to it for a month or two and the unsubscribe, but it'll get me the information that I really need at that given point in time. I really try to reduce the amount of noise and distraction, and so I kind of use that just in time learning strategy where, okay, Facebook's changing something in their ad algorithm or whatever, now while I don't do that, my clients do, so I want to be up to date on what they're doing, at least knowledgeable to have some sort of conversation if they ask me a question. I'll go check out that for a little while. I'll talk to some people that I know in the industry, say, "Hey, what's going on over here? Is this something I should pay attention to, or is this just noise?" It's really curated, and it's more outreach for me than letting it all come to me in a flood. Otherwise, I would never get any work done. Kathleen: Yeah. I hear that. Who are your top, let's say three favorite people to follow on Twitter? Jason: Well, that's tough. For business and products, I would say Justin Jackson is probably, he's always interesting to follow because he learns out loud. He tries things. He owns a product business himself, and he's been in the product game for a long, long time, and he knows about that space. In the online world for me, business wise, as far as product goes, Justin Jackson. Chris Marr I follow. He shares a lot of interesting content, marketing links, and strategies, and that sort of thing. I follow him. Then one that I've always followed for a long, long time, probably since day one of me signing up to Twitter, is Paul Jarvis. I've tried to model my business after what he does, which is I'm small potatoes compared to what he's able to do at this point. He's always remained small, and he's built his business designed around him and his lifestyle. That's how I've built my business over the past nine years, is around the life that I want to live, and so if I start going down the rabbit hole of thinking of scaling up, and hiring, and agencies, and growing in that world, while it's attractive, it's not actually what my long term game is. Seeing Paul saying, "Hey, I'm going offline for a couple of months. I'll see you in December." Whatever it is that he does, it's like, oh yeah, that's why I do what I do. He's kind of almost like a grounding rod for me. Kathleen: That's interesting. I'll have to check him out. Any particular newsletters? You mentioned that you subscribe to a few newsletters. Are there any that have stood the test of time, that you haven't unsubscribed from, that you really love? Jason: Val's is one. Kathleen: Yeah, Val's great. Jason: Yeah. She's one. Another one that I really like is Margot, what's her last name? (Margot Aaron) She's a straight shooter. She kind of pokes, she's a marketer herself, she's a copywriter, but she pokes fun at marketing. She's one that I follow because it's like, hey, here's a headline that you're supposed to read, and here's a button that you're supposed to click, but if you don't really want to, you don't have to. It's kind of like allows me to inject my own personal brand into what I do. Because as a business owner, I know that my customers come to me, they could get what I do by going to anybody that does a similar thing, but they come to me and they become a customer of mine because there's something that I'm putting out there that they jibe with. My personality comes through in a lot of what I do, my website and all that. I wear being a New Yorker on my sleeve. I'm a pretty straight shooter too. I try to over communicate in some respects with my clients. They sort of appreciate that, and so I call my clients on certain things, I wrangle them in when they need to be wrangled in, and I challenge them. That is what most of my clients have said that that's why they stay on with me, is because I don't just do what they ask me to do. I help them along the way. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. If you remember Margot's last name, let me know, because I'll put that link in the show notes as well. Jason: Will do. Definitely. You Know What To Do Next Kathleen: Sounds like a really good one. Well if you're listening and you like what you heard or learned something new, of course I always love it when you leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. If you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because they could be my next interview. Thank you so much Jason. This was really interesting. Jason: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.  

Personalization can improve conversion rates by, on average, 10X, but only 4% of businesses say they're using it. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, RightMessage founder Shai Schechter talks about the lessons learned from his review of 500+ landing pages and calls to action and why personalizing your website copy can dramatically increase conversion rates. Shai's process for personalizing is simple. Ask your visitor a question, and then use their answer to deliver website copy that speaks directly to their needs. The results are conversion rates 10X higher. Sounds simple, right? So why are so few businesses doing it? In this week's episode, Shai shares a simple, straightforward, and easy solution that makes implementing personalization - and getting crazy good results with your conversion rates - a no brainer. 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 HubSpot Co-Founder and CEO Brian Halligan, 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 Shai include: RightMessage is conversion optimization software that helps people get more email subscribers and sell more via their websites. It does this by allowing the user to create a popup on their site that asks a simple question of the visitor, and then use the answer to that question to dynamically deliver personalized content on their website. It can be used on any type of website and is installed by simply pasting a line of javascript code into the backend of the site. Shai worked with more than 500 websites to test out different approaches to personalization and learned that by personalizing calls to action, he could improve conversion rates, on average, by 10x. There is a long list of variables that can be used to drive personalization, including both implicit and explicit data. The process that RightMessage uses to personalize content begins with a popup that asks the visitor a simple question. In Shai's experience, "What brings you here today?" is the question that performs the best. He suggests that the best way to get started with personalization is to target website visitors that have not already subscribed to your email list, and use what you know about visitors to customize the value prop on your call to action for subscribing. On average, Shai said that 20 to 30% of visitors answer the question in the popup, and then 20 to 30% of those who answer the question convert on the follow on offer. Data shows that 94% of customers think personalization is critical to the success of their business and only 4% of businesses say they're doing a lot of personalization. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the RightMessage website Check out RightMessage.com/impact for a special offer just for Inbound Success Podcast listeners Follow Shai on Twitter Connect with Shai on LinkedIn Email Shai at shai@rightmessage.com  Listen to the podcast to learn what Shai learned from analyzing more than 500 landing pages and CTAs, and how those insights have helped him 10X conversion rates. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Shai Schechter who is the founder of RightMessage. Welcome, Shai. Shai Schechter (Guest): Hi, thanks for having me. Shai and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Yes, I'm happy to have you here. This is such an interesting case of how you came to be on the podcast and it's a first for me. I got you as my guest via a tweet. You had tweeted out that you had learned a lot about what makes a great opt-in form and CTA and that you had worked on more than 500 websites and had seen conversion rates of up to 10X and I was literally just browsing Twitter and saw this and thought, "I need to talk to this guy." So, the power of Twitter, right? Shai: Right. I don't know what made Twitter show it to you. Maybe we'll never know but I'm glad you saw it. Kathleen: It's the black magic that Twitter does behind the scenes but it happened and that's all that matters. Before we get into that actual story of what you did and what you learned talk a little bit for me about your background, about what RightMessage is and what led you to start it and what the company does. About Shai Schechter and RightMessage Shai: Yeah, sure. RightMessage is essentially conversion optimization software. It's something that people use on their websites. It helps them get to more subscribers to their e-mail list and helps them sell more to those people. But what it's doing differently and what's making it prove quite effective for the people using it is that it's all about kind of saying, not everyone in my audience is going to be the same so how can I segment them a little bit? How can I understand the different kinds of people coming to my site? How can I learn who's coming to my site and then use that to pitch more appropriately to them. And so to say, not everyone who comes to my site is looking for exactly the same thing and the same copy isn't going to resonate with all of them. So maybe we can ask them a question. Maybe we can learn something about them. Maybe we already know something about them because of how they've been interacting with our site or with our company and use that to really say, "I'm not going to just blast every possible call to action at you at once. I'm going show the one thing that's relevant to you right now." Kathleen: If I understand correctly, is it looking at information on visitors and I presume that those visitors will have been cookied in order to deliver that information? Is that accurate? Shai: Yes, the absolute ... So we don't do any of the kind of ... We don't do the stuff that Facebook's doing where they're following you around the internet, none of that. It is literally maybe, "What are they reading on my own company's blog right now?" Or, here's a question to them like, "What brings you here today? Why have you come? How can we help?" And they give you that little bit of information and you can then help them. You can then give them a better experience because of what they've just told you. Kathleen: Then that information is used to effectively dynamically update the information on the page? Shai: Yeah. Kathleen: Correct? Shai: Absolutely. Kathleen: Okay. Shai: And that may just be the call to action itself. It may be ... You know, if they tell you that they're really ... If you sell courses to help people get started with business and they tell you that they are really struggling with finding out what their audience needs then right there and then let's say to them, "Here's my course that helps you with that exact thing. I've got a whole suite of e-mail courses that could help you or I've got a couple of ... there's a webinar coming up that would be perfect for you. I'm going to suggest you do that. I think that's going to help you the most right now." Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, does it work on any website regardless of how the site is built? In other words, if my site is on WordPress versus Drupal versus custom html, can I use RightMessage regardless of platform or CMS? Shai: Yeah, absolutely. It's like it's one line of Java script you put into your site, so pretty much any website, or landing page builder or whatever, lets you do that. We don't replace your website builder and we don't replace your e-mail list. We essentially just tie the two together and say, "Now your website can do the same kinds of things that maybe you're already with your e-mail marketing where you're sending different campaigns to different people. Now you can do that on your website or any website. Kathleen: Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. What led you to create it? Shai: I am a developer by craft. I'm a software person and so to me when I started ... I was consulting a few years ago and I'd had a couple of software products in the past as well. So when it came to kind of saying, "Right, I need to grow this consulting business. I need to learn how to market this business. I'm not going to rely on word of mouth any more." It wasn't for me a reliable way to grow a business and I started learning more about marketing. I started doing ... I had my website and I was learning how online marketing kind of worked and because I had this software background, to me a website was something that ... Most websites that I dealt with had been web apps, right, where everyone sees a different experience because you log in and then you see something. I see something different on my Facebook then you see on yours, right? So I was making these marketing websites for myself and for clients and to me it was like, "Why would I put an opt-in form to join my newsletter at the bottom of a blog post to somebody who's already on my newsletter, right?" Kathleen: Yeah, correct, 100% Shai: Right. It's not good for me because that's a bad thing. If someone's on my newsletter the last thing I want to say to them is, "Join my newsletter." That's a wasted opportunity to say something more effective to them and it's very unfair to them. They don't want these pop-ups in their face being like, do this thing that you've already done. To me it was really common sense to sort that out. It seemed like a very natural thing to do but I think that's because my understanding about websites is that website changes. It's different for different people. So I started doing this stuff and marketers around me were like, "How the hell did you just do that?", right? They had no idea it was possible. When I was speaking to developers they were like, they saw it as an obvious thing to do but when I started helping marketers do this on their own sites, then developers would be like, "Why is anyone paying you money for that?" The marketers are like, "I had no idea that you could do this." Kathleen: That's so great. I feel like some of the best ideas in the world are the things that for some people have been staring them in face forever, but for other people, it's like revolutionary, right? Shai: Right. Yeah, it's just we're like in two separate worlds and if you can intersect them a little bit. Then a friend of mine, a man called Brennan Dunn, he's kind of come to the same realization on his own. He had kind of an educational product website. He was selling courses to help freelancers. He came from the same background as me. He also worked in software and then moved heavily into marketing and he was doing the same thing I was helping my clients doing. He was doing it on his own sites and he was also seeing these amazing results. When someone started his on-line course, his free e-mail course, he'd ask them a question about themself and that was very easy for him to do because he's just wrote some custom java scripts on his marketing site. Then later on after they'd been through his free e-mail course he would promote his paid course using different language depending on what they had said when they started the free course. So based on why they said they wanted the free course he then pitched how the paid course could help you do that exact thing. He was also tracking results and those kind of results we were both seeing these really high, really high conversion rates. We ended up, he was the one that kind of said, "Why are we sitting here helping marketers do this one by one. What if there was something where they could do this themselves?" So you don't have to write any code. You can just point and click and set this up for your own sites and we can help you make it easy as possible to see these same conversion rates that we were seeing. Kathleen: How old is the company now? Shai: What I've just described was all happening about two years ago, a little bit more. In the end, we officially launched this product a year and a half ago. Kathleen: Wow. Shai: It was never meant to be ... we didn't go all in on this right away. It was meant to be a little evening project and we'd kind of throw it together. He had a bit of an audience for it. I would build it over the course of a few days and it kind of ended up growing a lot bigger by accident. Kathleen: Which I suppose is what happens when you have product market fit. Shai: I guess so, yeah. Shai's Review of 500+ Websites (and Lessons Learned) Kathleen: Well, that's great. Thank you for sharing that story. Now you mentioned when you sent out your tweet that you had worked with more than 500 sites and were able to glean some insights from that. Can you talk a little bit about what led you to look at those? Are these sites that are using RightMessage? Shai: A lot of them are. What really happened, when we started, when RightMessage started it was less about the opt-in forms and the calls to action on your site and it was more about you can personalize everything, right? You can change your headline. You can the testimonials. You can can make your entire site dynamic to who someone is and that does really help conversion rates. It's also really overwhelming to get started with. When its like, "You can change anything on your site", people were overwhelmed. So what we started doing is kind of working really closely with people who were ... Some of them were customers. Some of them were people who had been customers but they had decided they weren't ready for it yet, as returns. Some of them were people who we thought this would work really well for but again they kind of saw it as overwhelming and what we wanted to do was find out what is important to them right now? What would they want to ... What are the metrics they're trying to improve on their website? And what it came back to time and time again was by looking at the data of what personalization was working really well for the people who were doing it and looking at what it was that people wanted to be doing better on their site, all of it pointed to it's the calls to action. It's those points, those make or break point where you're saying to someone, "Now I want you to do something. Now I want you to sign up for my e-mail list" or "Now I want you to take a free trial of my product" or whatever that next action is. Those were the trigger points where the people who were doing a little bit to make those dynamics, make those personalized we're seeing 10 times higher conversion rates than the people who weren't. That's why we need to focus. Kathleen: Can you talk a little bit about ... You talked about how you could either use data, it sounded like data on their behavior or answers to a question to fuel the personalization. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what have you seen in terms of that initial collection point of information, if you will. What is most effective? Shai: Yeah, absolutely, and that's the important part, right? If you don't know something about somebody there's nothing you can do to talk to them in a way that's going to resonate. So we split into the two that you've just described there you've got the explicit and the implicit. So you've got the explicit profiling which is asking them a question and we've started to gather a lot data about what the best questions are to ask. A lot of it boils down to it's really common sense stuff in the sense that it's exactly what you would ask them if you were chatting to them face to face, right? And that might not just be on their website either. That might be questions that you've asked them in a survey that you sent out to your list, for example. Anytime where they actively tell you something in a form or in a survey. Then you've got all these implicit things where, which are things like, "Have they already bought from me?" "Are they already a subscriber on my e-mail list?" They didn't have to tell you those things, you can see those already. Kathleen: Yeah, the latter sounds like they're more kind of where they are and which stage they're in of their buying journey, if you will. Shai: Yeah, absolutely, the stage that they're in. If you've got a blog and it's got different categories what you'll often find is that somebody is kind of binging articles on one specific category because it's the one the care about right now. That again can tell you ... They're answering the question of which category are you interested in without being asked it. So the categories do that and that also includes things like ... You've also got if somebody clicks through to your site from someone else's site, what does the site that they clicked through from tell you about who they are? Kathleen: That's interesting, yeah. Shai: So yeah, you've got little insights like that as well, but if you're just kind of getting started asking them works really well. I think it also helps, it makes for a softer pitch, right? If instead of saying immediately, "Join my course", "Buy my thing," if you first ask something you're getting that, it's kind of that easy yes. Then you can use that immediately to say, "Right, based on what you said, here's what I think you should be doing." Kathleen: Now I'm assuming there are, some questions are better than others in the sense that it could be tempting, for example, to say, "What's your budget?" That's a very bottom of the funnel almost, like, sub-funnel question. Shai: Yeah. Kathleen: Have you seen the most success of much more top of the funnel, kind of softer questions? Shai: Yes. "What brings you here today?" is essentially the softest and best performing question. The first question that we see. You can follow that up with something that's more about the person, maybe their industry. It depends what's going to be relevant based on the field that you are in, but yeah as a first question, it's like the, "What brought you here?" "How can we help you?" kind of question works really well. It makes sense, right? If you're in a store in the real world and the shop assistant comes over to you and they start with, "What industry are you in?" That's a little bit harder, harsher. Kathleen: Awkward. Shai: Yeah, it's kind of like, "Why do you want to know?" Kathleen: Exactly. Shai: Where as like, "What brought you to the shop? What are you looking for?" Okay, I immediately ... I know why you're asking. It's clear how that's going to help, it's going to be in my interest to tell you. That works really well as the first question. Kathleen: Are the questions generally, well I guess this is a two part question. Let me ask you first, does RightMessage have a feature that allows you to create and present that question or is that something that you have to do for your own website? Shai: Right, yeah, no, so that's what RightMessage'll help you do. Kathleen: Okay, and does that manifest as a pop-up? Shai: Yeah, so you choose. You've got a whole suite of ... If you think of any opt-in widgets at all, it's essentially the same options, right? You can show a sticky bar at the top or bottom of the page. You can put a pop-up module in the middle of the page when they, if they go to leave the site. Or it might just be in-line, kind of an embedded widget at the bottom of a blog post or a little slide up toaster widget in the corner. It's all of those things. It's whatever you want to be doing, probably whatever you're doing right now. We're just sorting those out. Kathleen: At the risk of getting super technical and a little too technical even for myself, you know I've had varying experiences with pop-ups. I know that there are some that Google doesn't like because they create a poor experience and there are some that because of the way that they load can slow page load times. Can you talk a little bit about the way you built the product and how it impacts those two factors? Shai: Yeah. We're very much about ... I don't know if you've seen, there was one of these little fake gif video things going around recently. It was like the state of marketing in 2019 and it was just these pop-ups everywhere. We're trying to do everything we can to be the opposite of that. A lot of that does come down to ... A lot of the reason that you have all these competing pop-ups everywhere is because you're not sure what to pitch someone, right? You've got your e-mail opt-in but then what if they're ready to start a trial? Okay, so we've got to put a pop-up for the trial over here. Then at the end of the blog we're going to put something else. You've got all these ... Often the reason you have all these competing, all these different pop-ups is because you've got all these different things to offer. One of the things that we're trying to make really easy to do is to say, if you know which one thing this person needs right now you don't have to go bother them with so many touch points, right? You can be consistent with it. It doesn't have to be from a pop-up. You might just want to do one pop-up. You might want to do no pop-ups at all. It might just be that you have a soft pitch at the end of your blog article, right? In terms of the Google thing we don't ... Google, especially on mobile really doesn't like the 'in your face' pop-ups. If you're on mobile then automatically they overcome a much softer, it's a little trade right at the bottom so it's not in the way of the content at all. We're not doing that because of Google. We're doing it for the same reason as Google, which is that it's a bad user experience. For instance, when someone has come to your site for content and then you put something in their face that interrupts that content, yeah I understand and agree with why Google doesn't like those things and we're trying kind of do the same. Kathleen: Does the pop-up load asynchronously? Shai: Yeah, so it won't slow down the sites or anything like that. How To Get Started With Personalization Kathleen: Okay. That's great. You ask, you present ... to go back to what we started with. You present the visitor with this question and it's a soft kind of introductory question that allows you to learn something about that person and then RightMessage then gives you the ability to begin to customize things. I imagine knowing, like, I'm a marketer. I know marketers pretty well. I imagine that the temptation as a marketer would be to go down the rabbit hole and spend a lot of time trying to personalize too many things. My guess would be that there are probably a few small things that you can do. It's that 80/20 rule, right? What are the 20% of things that will give you the 80% of results? If somebody was to just dip their toe in the water at this do you have typical advice you give them about what the few low hanging fruit things that they should start with that are going to give them their biggest bang for their buck? Shai: Yeah, absolutely. We actually just this week started this recipe book of really simple and high converting things that you can do. But at it's core, so yeah, if you're just getting started I would say wherever it is right now that you're pitching that first thing to people which may be an e-mail course or joining your e-mail list or some other thing that probably isn't your kind of main end-of-the road, ultimate most expensive product or service, where ever you're doing that right now on your website just switch that to ask one question first. Then if they are anonymous, if they haven't joined your list yet then pitch that list. Pitch it exactly like you were doing before just change the working to describe the benefits and one of the benefits of it as being related to the things they just answered. So look at your list and look at what are the main reasons that people might want to join their list. Or if it's an e-mail course, what are the main reasons that people join it? If you don't know that yet then maybe it's time to survey people who have already done it or ask them just after they've joined, "What was it that made you join?" You can then feed that back into what your multiple choice answers should be to the question. Once you know that, ask the question and based on the answer pitch your entry level product or e-mail list or whatever it is in a way that describes how it helps with that thing that they just said. Kathleen: That's great and it's pretty simple and straight forward. Shai: Right, and the conversion rate increase even of that, I've seen people go from 2% opt-in rates to like 20% opt-in rates. What Kind of Marketing Results Can Personalization Deliver? Kathleen: That was going to be my next question. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the results you've seen for companies that use this? Shai: Yeah. You do see some variant. It depends on where people are doing these pitches and who their audience is as well but a lot of people, when they set up the basic thing that I just described, it's fairly typical to see something like, and it's hard to give typical. Depending on where you're doing it you might get 1 or 2% of people answering the question but it's also, it's very common to see 20 or 30% answer, especially with a question like, "What brings you here today?" So yes, 20 or 30 and I've seen it higher than that as well. I'd say 20 to 30% I would not be surprised if somebody set this up for the first time and was seeing that kind of answer rate. Then the pitch that comes after it, that kind of initial opt-in pitch, you might see the same again. You might see something like 20%, 30% act on that. It depends. It depends on the audience but something like that is not at all unusual. Kathleen: Which is a very strong conversion rate. I mean, most companies that I see, their conversion rate, their visitor to lead conversion rate, is usually somewhere around 1 to 3% on their website. Shai: Exactly, exactly and it depends. It depends where it's coming from. It depends, you know, is this brand new to a blog? It depends where the traffic is coming from. It depends where this traffic has come from. It depends where you're doing this pitch and all of those things but yeah, if somebody was getting a couple of percent opt-in rate before I would be very surprised if they didn't see that more than double when they start doing this. I think it kind of ... It almost makes sense when you stop and think about it, right? If someone is on your website they're trying to figure out whether you can help them and anything that you can do to make it easier for them to translate from what they're reading on your site to have that apply to their own life, is going to make it more likely that they ... If someone's not sure that you can help them they're just going to bounce. Kathleen: Yeah, I mean fundamentally we're all lazy, right? Shai: Right. Kathleen: We just are, all of us. As a business the more you can cater to that and hand or spoon feed the answers that somebody's looking for the better you'll do. Shai: Yes. Kathleen: It's just the truth about human nature. Shai: Yeah, it's the difference between the sales person who reads off a script versus the sales person who finds out a bit about you and what you need and then tailors everything, explains how the product can help you specifically. Or like the real estate agent showing you around a house. They either just describe each room or they find out what kind of person you are and then they paint the picture for you of how, to help you see yourself living in that house. "You have kids? This room would make an amazing playroom." Kathleen: Right. Shai: That would be ... they're not going to say that. Kathleen: There's your man cave, right? Shai: Right. Exactly, exactly. The other thing was, so I was just listening to your, you had an episode with Rev.com, with Barron a few weeks ago and when he was talking about the audience research they were doing, that really resonates with me because that's the same kind of thing. They were going and asking their audience all these kind of questions about why they had used the product and what they were doing before and all those kind of things and they'd taken that and used that in their marketing. They'd taken those phrases and that became the subheading on their website. Other people would come and read that and they were like, "Yeah, I certainly ... This really resonates with me" because it was real language from customers, from other customers who were like them. So we're just doing that in real time. Kathleen: It's so simple and it seems so obvious just to use the words the customers use but it's amazing how few companies actually do it. Shai: Yeah, I saw a statistic recently that 94% of customers think personalization is critical to the success of their business and 4% say they're doing a lot of that. Kathleen: That's an incredibly wide gap. Shai: Yeah, and the mismatch, then they dug deeper and they're like, "What's stopping you?" It was all like, "It's hard to know where to start" and "We don't have the tools. We don't have the technical capability to do that." How Hard Is It To Implement Personalization? Kathleen: So to that exact point, how technical do you need to be to set this up, to use it, to run it, et cetera? Shai: You don't. You need to be able to install a little java script or have a developer who can do that. Kathleen: I was just going to say, so if you can't do that, if you have somebody who runs your website for you, whether that's in your company or an outside contractor, this is what, a five minute job? A one hour job? Shai: Yeah, that part is like a one minute job. It's copying and pasting. It's the same as if you were installing Google analytics on your website or any of these other things, that is you copy this and you paste it into your website builder. Then from there it's literally a point a click kind of, "Here is a ..." It's a flow chart builder, right? You start building out these parts. Is the person on my site anonymous? Yes? Let's ask them this question and then let's pitch them this offer. Kathleen: A series of if/then statements kind of. Shai: Essentially, yeah, with questions along the way and an offer at the end to buy it. Then you hit, Publish in the corner. You press the Publish button and whatever you've set up will immediately go out and be live on your site. Learn More About RightMessage Kathleen: Great. Well, if someone's interested in learning more about RightMessage, what should they do? Shai: They should go to RightMessage.com. In fact, they should go to RightMessage.com/impact. I'll set something up there that will get them something that the ordinary folk don't get. Kathleen: Aaah, special offer. I will put a link in the show notes for that. Shai: Yeah, I'll sort something out for your wonderful listeners. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Great, thank you for that. I'm curious to get your take on the two questions that I always ask my guests. Company or individual, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Who do you think is doing really great work with inbound marketing right now? Shai: I like this question. It's a difficult question, you know? Kathleen: Well, there are so many possible answers. I'll just preface it with, it's interesting to see the direction that people go. Some people provide answers that are within the marketing world of marketers doing inbound marketing really well. Others come with these examples that are just from out in the wild and both are equally fascinating so I always love hearing what people say. Shai: Yeah. For me at the moment kind of the inbound, kind of the good inbound marketing is the non-obnoxious, not in your face, the softer marketing, the educational marketing. I think everyone is starting to or a lot of people are starting to move that way. They're kind of tired of the in your face stuff. When I think of who's really good at that it's people like, I keep getting e-mails from Ben Orenstein at Tuple who just every e-mail I get from him I'm like, "He is not trying to sell me right now" but it makes me want to buy. It's so, here is tons of value and here's some cool stuff. You're learning about the product along the way but it's not a hard pitch. We love that. Kathleen: It's interesting that you say that because I'm, somebody once said to me and now I've become a big fan if it and I wish I could remember who first said it, that the best sales people do not sell, they help people buy. It sounds like that's exactly what he's doing in those e-mails. Shai: Yeah, and it's also, it's people that aren't afraid to say, "Maybe it isn't right for you." The assumption of marketing is that, 'You should buy this" is flawed, right? It's, "We're going to help you figure out whether you should buy this. If you should then I want to explain why it would be good for you. If it is ... but it might not be and I'll take you too." A lot of our customers are really good at this at well and it's kind of what brought them to us is that we also don't go for that hard thing. So Alex Hillman, Stackingthebricks.com and Pat Flynn I think is doing some really amazing marketing at SmartPassiveIncome. Josh Duty, Fearless Salary Negotiation, he's doing incredibly at SEO and then leading from that to courses in coaching and so on. Yeah, I'll stop there. Kathleen: That sounds like some great examples. Shai: Yeah. Kathleen: Well, I'll definitely put those links in the show notes because those are some new ones that I haven't heard before and that always makes me excited. Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly how do you personally stay up to date and educate yourself? Shai: Yeah. So much of what I'm learning about marketing at the moment is just from interacting with our customers. I don't have ... There are very, very few websites or podcasts that I subscribe to and listen to every one. I wait until the smart people I have surrounded myself with recommend something or start talking about something. That's when I take note. That's also my hack for not getting overloaded by all the new information. It's just ... Kathleen: It's easy to do. Shai: And it also, it means you're getting so many ... You're learning so many strategies from people who aren't quite in your realm. Like we were saying at the beginning, right, you take marketing and technology and you put them together. Of course that happens. When we start working with our customers who are like in the Bee photography world. That is a real thing. Yeah, they take photographs of bees and and honey and it's like the stuff that they're- Kathleen: That is incredibly niche. I love it. Shai: They're going to have totally different kinds of conversations than I am and learning stuff. So yeah, just surrounding myself with really different people I found far more effective than following one source. Also, just there's so much of these new marketing developments aren't new at all. It's all just kind of ... It's the old school marketing and then translated then now into the online space. A lot of that's what we're trying to do is taking stuff that makes sense in the real world and bring it on line. I find it's easier to learn about marketing from the old school. I try not to- Kathleen: A few people have said that to me, that some of their favorite marketing books are the ones from 40, 50 years ago. Shai: Hmm, 100%. It's the same in software. It's kind of the same in programming as well. There's these new technologies coming on the scene every week. Sometimes it pays to be just like, "The old stuff can work." Keep an eye on the new things but don't jump on them immediately. Will this really work in my business? Reason it out for best principles. Kathleen: That's great advice because I will say I think one of the weaknesses of most marketers I know is they fall very easily for shiny penny syndrome where there's that new thing. They want to try it but it's easy to get distracted and spend a lot of time and resources chasing that new thing as opposed to investing in things that are going to deliver for the long term. Shai: Yeah, especially when, like in the feedback look from trying sometime in your marketing to know whether it's working can sometimes be quite long. It can be really hard. You can try something new and you may not see results from it immediately depending on what it is but it may be working well and it may be about to work for your future. To that same thing is like, you start to see your metrics creep up. It could be from the thing you just did this week. It could be from the thing you did a few months ago and it's just taken time to really kick in. Kathleen: Yeah. Shai: So yeah, if you're immediately, it's like, "Oh no. I've tried this for week. It's not working. We've got to go and try something else" you're never going to, it's never going to work. How To Connect With Shai Kathleen: Well, it's so interesting hearing what you've learned through this process of looking at all these sites and I'm fascinated by what RightMessage can do and the fact that it's easy for anybody to use. If somebody wants to, has a question about what you talked about and wants to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way or them to do that? Shai: You can always ... My DM's open on Twitter @ShaiSC. Kathleen: This is how we met. Shai: It is, exactly. S-H-A-I-S-C. Yeah, that's going to be the easiest way to get a quick reply from me. Kathleen: And I can testify to that. It was very fast. I DM'd you and you responded right away. Shai: Yeah. Kathleen: Great, well I will but the link to your Twitter handle on the show notes and if you're listening and you enjoyed this, liked what you heard, as always I would really appreciate a five star review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. If you're listening and you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, Shai. Shai: Thank you for having me.

Today, on the Early-Stage Founder Show, I'm talking with , the co-founder of , a SaaS tool that looks at browser, email, and other data to make it easy for you to personalize your marketing to give every user the right message. In our chat, we dive into why personalization is so important, how to get started, and Shai shares some advanced tactics he has experimented with that are sure to improve your conversion rates. If your website is serving all of your visitors the same, generic content, then this is the episode for you.