Podcasts about visual website optimizer

In Episode 39, we've covered the basics of funnels. Now what? How exactly do you leverage funnels for more profit?Welcome to the 40th episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.Aidan is joined again by Allison Hoyt for the second episode of our two-part series on million-dollar funnels. With the fundamentals out of the way, we now take a higher level view of how funnels can help scale your business from just a trickle of subscribers to making millions of dollars per year.Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you're in the right place.Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!Timestamps:00:00 Intro02:09 Scaling with Funnels04:49 Affiliate Marketing 06:20 Tracking Metrics11:00 Episode Sponsor11:41 Tools for Split-Testing18:00 Email Sequences24:56 How Many Subscribers Do You Need?31:33 OutroLinks and Resources Mentioned:The Mind Game - https://thegrowthbooth.com/mindgame Google Analytics - https://analytics.google.com/ CAKE - https://getcake.com/ EverFlow - https://www.everflow.io/ TUNE - https://www.tune.com/ Optimizely - https://www.optimizely.com/ Visual Website Optimizer - https://vwo.com/ About Our Host:Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler. Let's Connect!●  Visit the website: https://thegrowthbooth.com/ ●  Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aidanboothonline ●  Let's connect on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aidanboothonline/ ●  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheGrowthBooth Thanks for tuning in! Please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe!

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!

How can you prepare your businesses for operating in a future that has yet to be determined? Today, Jon explores the future of CRO. With such a high volume of transactions happening on Amazon and Shopify are we nearing the end of incremental improvement from CRO? For help with your CRO visit: https://thegood.com/ TRANSCRIPT Ryan: All right, Jon, as a business owner and strategist, I'm constantly thinking about the future and how I can prepare my businesses, my teams, clients for operating in a future that has yet to be determined. For me, it's just kind of fun to think through. Recently, one of the things that's been on the top of my mind has been the future of CRO and how do we continue moving the needle to improve our sites, but doing that like five years in the future, what is that going to look like? With such a high volume of transactions happening on Amazon and Shopify, are we nearing the end of incremental improvements in CRO? That's kind of the thought that's going through, and I guarantee you have some serious opinions on this that I have no idea about. So I'm excited to learn from you what you're looking for in the future. But it also came top of mind because of a recent Google announcement that they're going to start including site experience into their organic algorithm. And so let's just start with that. Based on what you've heard and what you know about Google, what do you expect this to look like when it rolls out? Jon: Well, I think that the biggest concern for brands and the biggest concern they should have is that if you haven't been optimizing your site's consumer experience, it's going to severely impact your rankings, and thus your organic traffic is going to go way down. Google was kind enough to tell us now, even though it's not going to roll out until 2021. So we're recording in mid 2020. So they have given you a six months heads up, which is very nice of them. They also have provided all the tools you need to be able to improve your site experience, including one of my favorites, Google Optimize, which is their A/B and multivariate testing tool set that they've released that's great. So they're not only just giving you the tool sets, but they're also giving you the guidance on the fact that they want you to have a really great consumer experience. Say when they go to Google and search, and then they end up on your site, that they have a great experience and that they love the search results that Google is producing. So that's what Google cares about right now, is they're saying, yes, everybody knows if I need an answer, I can go to Google. But a lot of those sites that rank first have made the experience so poor in an effort to get listed higher that they don't have a good experience on those search result pages. Ryan: How much in your opinion, and maybe you can assign a percentage, is the actual act of converting on a site the experience? Can you break that out into its own piece, you think? Jon: Well, without question, I think Google has been very upfront about this. Normally they'd never release a specific percentage that anything weighs into that algorithm, but they are saying that it's going to be one of the top factors. Ryan: Is the rate of conversion on a site? Jon: They can track conversion to some degree, but I think what they're looking at is how long are people staying on your site? How many pages are they looking at? Are they converting is definitely a factor in there, but are they bouncing right back to Google? And I think they're looking at a lot of other metrics too. They're looking at page speed. They have a whole bunch of algorithms and artificial intelligence, AI, that has gotten really, really good at telling things like, do you have a popup on your site where it, as content loads on the screen, that popup kind of moves around a little bit, and just because the page loads slowly and you have this bad user experience, and now people are trying to click buttons and the button keeps moving as the page loads. Ryan: I hate that. Jon: Exactly. That's the thing that Google does not want, that experience, what you just had, that emotional reaction. If you had clicked on the first item in a search engine result page, and you went to a site, and you had that reaction on that site, Google now knows that that's what's happening, based on their AI, because they can test for those type of experiences. And so really what they're advocating for here is the consumer experience on your site, the user experience. And they're asking you to make sure that you have a consumer friendly experience. And I think that's really what's going to matter. Now, the outcome of that is naturally going to be higher conversion rates. So I've always been a proponent with CRO that says the goal of the brand is to convert higher, almost always, right? The goal of the consumer is to have a better experience. Those are actually very much aligned, because if you have a better experience, you're going to convert more. And I think Google is recognizing that now, too. Ryan: You could take the stance of maybe some of the conspiracy theorists out there, that a higher converting website in the eCommerce space could hurt Google's revenue, since people don't have to go back to Google to keep researching. They're just going to find it, buy it, kind of like how I usually convert, versus my wife, who's all over the place in her conversion path. What would you say to those conspiracy theorists? Jon: Well, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's, you know, Google's pretty upfront how they make their money. It's what the ads on the search engine result pages for the vast majority of their revenue. So yeah, they want people to keep coming back to Google, but I can promise you that if I keep searching Google and I keep getting a search engine result as the first second, third, which are the only ones people are really clicking on for the vast majority of times, and the experience is crappy, I'm going to stop going to Google. So they must know, because they've factored this in as one of the top ranking items in their algorithm, they must know that this is causing a concern, and they're feeling a lot of pressure from tons of other search engines out there right now. I mean, you've probably heard of, what is it, DuckDuckGo. There's all of these other search engines that are way more privacy focused right now. Windows, any Windows laptop comes with Bing as the default search engine, Microsoft search or whatever they're calling it these days. So I think they're feeling that pressure of making sure that people have a great experience, so they continue to come back and search on Google. That's why they're making it such an important factor. Will it cost them some money? I don't know. I think they must've done that math, but I will tell you that I'm excited that this is new and that they're making a big stance for this, because it's needed. It's really needed. Ryan: Speaking of competitors to Google, Amazon controls over 50% of the online transactions in the world. And how much in the future do you think Amazon is going to impact the way we view a checkout or a conversion process? If we play it out, say, let's just say Amazon is going to continue increasing in dominance. You can't do much with their checkout. So are we going to be so conditioned as Amazon Prime members that anything that deviates from Amazon's checkout process is going to throw us for a loop, and we're not going to know what to do? Kind of like the idiocracy model, where we just get dumber, because it's so simple for us? Jon: Well, I think that's the internet. The evolution of the internet has been that way for years. And I think we did a prior episode where we talked all about how eventually what's going to happen, are we going to totally optimize ourselves out of optimization, right? You're going to have done so much optimization that every experience is going to be the same. And I don't think that's going to happen. But I do think, I mention this book all the time, it's called Don't Make Me Think. And the whole point of that is that as consumers get used to conventions, it makes it easier for them if you follow those conventions. It's so true today that people are used to Amazon checkout. They're used to the Shopify checkout. They're used to these platforms that have grown to be the monsters in this space. And if you really deviate from those best practices, then you are potentially creating a barrier. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't areas that can be optimized in those. There most certainly are. But at the same time, looking at Amazon as an example, in terms of how to convert better and not just on the checkout, I think Amazon does a lot of nice things. But you know what? It's akin to when a small footwear brand comes to work with The Good, and they say, "I really like what Nike is doing. I want to do what Nike does. Can you help me do that?" And I say, "Well, but you're not Nike. Think about this. Nike has hundreds of product lines across all these different sports. Their marketing is based on the celebrity of getting athletes to market for them. And you don't have the money to go out and get LeBron James to market your shoe. You are fighting a 10,000 pound gorilla here, trying to fight a gorilla fight when you're not a gorilla. So think about having the better consumer experience." Nike can get away with having a worse consumer experience because of how ubiquitous their brand is. It's the same thing with Amazon. I go to Amazon to buy something because I know they're going to probably have what I want. And it's a quick and easy way to just go there, type in what I'm looking for, get a handful of options, do some research, and buy something at a decent price point. And I know I can get it in a couple of days. But if I really want to find a particular item, I don't go to Amazon to buy that particular item. I'll go to the brand website to do that research, because I know in my research it's going to get way, way deeper, even though maybe the consumer experience isn't going to be as good. Maybe I won't get it in two days. However, I know that I'm going to have more content and I'm going to have a better research path on that brand site than I will on Amazon. Amazon is great for not going very deep, but going very wide. Looking at tons of different products, but not going very deep into the research on each of those individual products. And a brand site is different. It's going to help me go real deep on products, but not very wide on competitors. So I think they serve different purposes. And it depends on if I'm looking for a commodity, right? Like, I was looking at ethernet cables yesterday. I needed a 50 foot ethernet cable. I just ordered it off Amazon, because it doesn't matter. It's a commodity. I can get an ethernet cable anywhere. But I know I can get it in two days. I needed it quickly. In fact, they dropped it off the next day and it said, have it by next day. And I was like, perfect. That's what I need. So I didn't even look anywhere else at price. It was fine. It was like a $10, $15 cable. It's not going to break the bank to do that. If I saved two bucks going someplace else, it didn't matter to me. But I think that's where Amazon has its place. And I don't want people to get confused by thinking we have to meet Amazon's experience, because they're doing a lot of things that I would not recommend and do not test well. Their navigation is a mess, but it's like walking into one store, in a retail store, versus walking into your local mall that has hundreds of stores. And Amazon is trying to be that mall, when you're trying to just be the retailer. And you really need to take that approach a little differently. Ryan: Looking forward a couple of years, and maybe the physical checkout process on a site is pretty standard across a lot of things. I mean, there's Bolt right now. There's even Shopify checkout that's been very simplified. So CRO, I would assume over the last five to 10 years that you've been doing it, you've had to educate some people on just the basics of checkout. Like, why are you doing checkout this way? So if that goes away, it sounds like you're saying CRO becomes more of a brand experience on your side rather than, okay, you changed your checkout button from pink to purple, and then look at that [inaudible 00:12:29] type thing. Jon: Right. I mean, look, I think CRO has evolved over the past, we've been doing this 11 years now, but over the past five years, it's become something that most people know about. If you're on the eComm side of any reasonable size, you're looking at and doing some CRO. I think the biggest difference here is that you're right, that there are areas that are transactional that just need to be transactional. And then there's areas of a site that are going to have a better consumer experience, that are going to then reflect better on the brand. And I think that's what you mean by branded experience, where if I go to a site and I just have a poor experience, then I am at that point going to have a bad reflection of the brand. And I think that's exactly what Google is trying to prevent here, is saying that you need to have a good reflection of your brand so that people don't just equate that Google, where you started, gave you a bad experience, as well, by sending you someplace that has a bad experience. Ryan: Got it. Okay. So if you're looking five years into the future and making some crazy predictions or looking at, what are you preparing your agency, The Good, for in the CRO space? What are you maybe not doing now that you think you will be doing in CRO in five years? Jon: I think that what needs to be happening is a way to make this more accessible to brands of all sizes, first of all. I think CRO, just like most technologies and consulting and things of that sort, it's for the elite when it starts. You have to be able to afford it. It's a competitive advantage. And so you're looking at the top one percent is able to take advantage of it. Then it starts filtering down. And that's what we've seen over the past five, six years, has been really the first five years that we did CRO, it was only for massive brands. And then it started getting to the point where those mid market brands really knew it was something they needed to do, and it became more available, and the tool sets got more available. We went from having just Optimizely, which is a great platform, but it's $10,000 a month to use, just the platform, to having Visual Website Optimizer, which was a couple hundred dollars a month, to now we're at Google Optimize, which is just as good as VWO, and it's free from Google. We've kind of run that whole gamut, and each of those tools have their space, don't get me wrong, and they're good at individual items. But my point here is we've gone from $10,000 a month to free over a span of a few years, and I think we're going to see that democratization of CRO continue to happen. So what needs to happen is that it needs to have these methodologies, and the strategy behind them need to catch up with the tool sets and need to be accessible to brands of all sizes. And right now that's not the case. The only things that are out there are eLearning, where you as a small eComm owner, and you're wearing tons of hats, you don't have time to sit down and learn for 25 hours and watch videos and then figure out how the heck do I apply this to my site specifically, and pick and choose, and then still act on it, right? So you've invested all this time and you still haven't made any changes to your site. So there's some ways to fix that, and we're working on that at The Good, but really I think that democratization of CRO is where this needs to go. And I think in addition to that, I think we're really going to see tool sets continue to evolve, and I think AI is going to play an even bigger role. As you know, we've been proponents of that for years. We do AI eye tracking heat maps, which is our way of dipping our toe into that. And we've been tracking it for years, and looking and testing at those algorithms to the point where we wanted to make sure it was something that worked before we heavily invest in it. And we're ready to heavily invest in it and go all in. Being a data driven company, we're seeing a lot of artificial intelligence with big data sets really start to pay off and make this successful to brands of all sizes. Ryan: That's [inaudible 00:16:46]. I think that is going to be phenomenal, when these small companies that we know of that need the CRO services are able to get those at a point that makes sense for them financially and for the improvements that'll make. That'll be cool. Okay, here's a fun one. Besides the death of the email capture pop up that you're so advocating for and the death of Wheelio spin-to-win, do you see something that we all currently expect on an eCommerce site to not be a part of an eCommerce site in the next two or three years? Jon: Yeah. I think putting your credit card in is going to go away. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm fully in on the Apple ecosystem. And if other ecosystems catch up with this, I know Google has done a lot with this, with Google Pay, but Apple Pay, I will now, if I'm searching online to buy something, I will use Safari just so that on my phone or even on my laptop, I can just do Apple Pay and not have to go get my wallet. I don't want to have to memorize my credit card. I don't want to have to deal with any of that. And in fact, it's just like retail. If I have the option to use Apple Pay and not touch anything and not give somebody my credit card to swipe or even have to touch the screen to do it myself, I will do that. And I use Apple Pay every single time. I was even in a drive thru getting food the other day and I used Apple Pay, and it's just like that's my first question anymore. It's like, do you take Apple Pay, because I don't want to touch anything. And it's so convenient. So same thing online. Everyone expects to have to put in their credit card. I think we're going to see that go away. Shopify has taken a big leap in that direction, by making it, you can put in your phone number and then it will auto fill out your information. It'll send you a text and confirm, and then you can auto fill all your information in. I think there's a lot of things like that that are going to start happening, just as a way to make this process way easier. Ryan: Yeah. I'm excited for that. It's during this pandemic, where we're not going into an office or commuting, I found that I don't have my wallet on me. And so when I'm off somewhere else on our property and I want to transact, I don't want to go get my wallet. So if it already has my information, I'm more than likely to go to that site, and I may pay an extra dollar. But for me, it's like, nah, it would have cost me 10 minutes of walking somewhere on my big property. So I'll pay the premium to use, so that it's already stored. Jon: That's exactly it. Ryan: I didn't even think about that, but that's very true. I may be lazy sometimes. Okay. Jon: Sometimes. We'll leave it at that. Ryan: Sometimes. Yes, sometimes. Is there something out there that you see that if just something on an eCommerce site that if a brand adopted it now, they would have a pretty significant advantage over competitors in the next couple of years, if they really took a leap of faith? Outside of using our services, because we're so amazing, what would that look like, do you think, if you had to pick one thing? It's like, yeah, most people aren't using this yet, but I think if they do, they're going to have a big advantage in a couple of years. Jon: I think that it's not just one tool, and I don't even want to go to a hundred percent to tools, because I think that's the first spot that every eComm owner looks to, is like what's the new greatest and hottest tool that I can deploy on my site and be ahead of everybody else on that? A tool is only going to do one of two things. It's either going to help you do something better, or it's going to expose a weakness. And what we see is a lot of brands jumping into tools. And what I would like to see these brands doing is using tools like Klaviyo, for instance, to do email followups post purchase. We have a whole episode, go back and look for post purchase emails and what people should do for post purchase optimization. I talk about all the different email flows that you should be thinking about post purchase, and there's so many things like that that brands right now just aren't doing. And I'm not a big proponent of just having a best practice checklist, but I will tell you, there are a bunch of items that when we jump into work with a brand, we just immediately look at and evaluate and figure out what are the top opportunity areas here. And I'm always surprised, no matter what the size of the brand is, that there's almost always things on that list. And one of them is, as I mentioned, post purchase followups. One is definitely the checkout. Are they optimized around that? You mentioned Bolt and Shopify and things like that. And I think there's a lot of great optimization happening in check out right now. I think there's also a lot of optimization that can be happening in just assets on the site. What do I mean by that? Well, like product photos. You and I have talked a lot about 360 photos, and the revolution that's coming with that, in the past. And I think that that's, you know, having better product photos as more people are going online to purchase, is really going to matter, because you can't touch a product right now. So making sure that you have a way to see every angle, to really understand what you're buying, is going to be really important. And I think reviews and social proof is a huge one that people miss out on. And I'd be shocked if more brands don't do that in the future, because there are right and wrong ways to do that. But it is something that if you don't have reviews on your site, people start getting suspect about trust. They don't trust your brand as much. They're wondering why you're not sharing reviews or collecting them. And we've seen time and again, consumers trust what other consumers have to say more than what a brand has to say. Ryan: That's awesome. So thank you for all of that information. That definitely got my mind going, and some of my brands and what I should be doing that I'm probably not, because I'm stuck in the minutiae of the business myself. So thank you for all those insights of what we're going to be looking for in the future of CRO. Any parting thoughts or words on the future of CRO? Jon: Well, I think the best way to stay ahead of the curve is to start tracking your data today. Understand how people are engaging with your site. Make sure you're tracking every click and movement. And if you do that now, no matter what tool you deploy, no matter what you start doing down the line, you will have more data to make informed decisions, because you're going to have a longer timeline to look at trends. You're going to have a longer timeline of data to look at what potential changes you made and when, and what the impact of those were, so that you can skip having to collect all that data and wait around before you can take action. Because the biggest issue I see with brands who aren't collecting data when we start working with them, is they start getting anxious, because they say, "Hey, we're just sitting and waiting right now." And I said, "Yeah, we need to get all this data that you weren't collecting forever, so we can make informed decisions. And then we can act." So it's this whole issue of eComm brands who come to the table ready to act, but then they don't have the information or data to do it, and then they get anxious because they were so ready to act. They made the decision to act, but then they can't do anything yet. And so they have to fill that gap somehow. And I think that's a big concern for eComm brands, and I think we're going to see more and more brands collecting data. And I think it's becoming a lot more popular and easy. The tool sets are so easy right now. But just get some data collecting every click and movement. Set up Hotjar and just let it run. Even if you can't do much else, just set up heat maps and let them run for a while. Do some session recordings and let them sit there. Google analytics, of course, but there's even tools like Glew, G-L-E-W, that is amazing for helping you understand your consumer audiences. All of that data is really going to be important. So that's what I would recommend. If you want to be able to take advantage of what's coming down the line in the future, start collecting data today. Ryan: You heard it here first. Jon Macdonald says collect data. Do it. Thanks, Jon. Appreciate your time. Jon: Thanks, Ryan.

►Marketinghope: https://marketinghope.net/►SEO Content, Foren Links & Outreach Links: https://marketinghope.net/seolab/►Die Marketinghope SEO Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/marketinghope/—Show Notes:[00:08] Intro[00:30] CRO für Affiliate Seiten[01:40] Meta Verständnis über CRO[05:00] Das CRO Problem für Affiliates[07:25] A/B Testing 101[09:55] Hypothese festsetzen[10:55] Single Variable Tests[12:15] Was soll man eigentlich testen?[16:00] CRO Tools[16:35] Bigger Picture CRO[20:15] Amazon Affiliate vs. Komplexe Affiliate Seiten[22:08] Fazit & CRO mit AMP[24:45] Outro—Erwähnte Tools & Ressourcen:[06:00] Google Optimize: https://optimize.google.com/optimize/home/[07:50] 80/20 Prinzip: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paretoprinzip[13:45] Komplementärfarben: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komplement%C3%A4rfarbe[16:20] Visual Website Optimizer: https://vwo.com/[16:23] Optimizely: https://www.optimizely.com/de/[16:45] Hotjar: https://www.hotjar.com/[21:35] Google Analytics: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/[22:20] AMP: https://amp.dev/—Weitere Playlists:Marketinghope SEO Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_v5LFkdKNPuVsuWSIWypZZ06ctBqxJsBMarketinghope Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_v5LFkdKNPtst_tn-nNCJ78nZ0K6lR5fMarketinghope Community Projekt: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_v5LFkdKNPt9CFKAASpokjPeUiGd_Tx3Marketinghope SEO Audits: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_v5LFkdKNPsdqD6M0k-foy3Z3nZZV4as—►Hier kannst du mich abonnieren: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLiYL3I6ZQThiWqSQjZOyKw?sub_confirmation=1

I don't think there is a topic we're more passionate yet equally in the dark about as CRO. For every dollar a business spends on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) they get nine back – which is a staggering statistic. You immediately see ROI if you use a CRO expert who is good at what they do. There is an entire user journey that happens with CRO, and those businesses that embark on the journey can massively grow their business quickly. Jon MacDonald is the CEO and founder of The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization firm. The Good uses data science to help brands turn their traffic into customers by tracking everything on their site and using the data they collect to come up with solutions for growth. Some of the world's largest companies convert their website visitors into buyers through their services. Jon is here to talk to about this little known powerhouse toolkit for both buyer and sellers. Episode Highlights: What Jon looks at before starting a CRO project for a client. Where CRO fits in for buyers and sellers in the e-commerce space. The four key areas of data to be looking at to optimize e-commerce conversions. Why CRO gets ignored so often. Helpful dashboard elements for the three types of online businesses: e-commerce, SaaS, content-based sites and how those elements improve business. How microgoals can add incrementally change your flow. What CRO advice Jon has for someone who may be getting ready to sell a business. Where The Good gets their information and what they do with it. AB testing tools Jon recommends for a new business owner getting started. How much time an entrepreneur should spend studying and preparing for a good CRO approach. How CRO practice can increase asset value exponentially for sellers and buyers. The benefit of working with an outsourced CRO team. Transcription: Joe: Mark, one of the things that we see happen often is people—we go to these events that we sponsor, meet some amazing entrepreneurs, and sometimes in little pockets of them you hear people talking about their top line revenue. It's really not what the focus should be. In many cases, it should be about their gross profit, their processes, and what they do to optimize and maximize their bottom line revenue. Because ultimately that's what the value of these businesses are based on. And as I understand you had Jon MacDonald on from The Good talking about CRO; Conversion Rate Optimization and how important it is to drive that up and what a great return on investment that can be. Mark: Yeah, that's right. I don't think that there's a topic I'm more passionate about yet equally horrible at than I am CRO; Conversion Rate Optimization. It's such a phenomenal field and when we look at what you can do using CRO techniques and methodology with a business it's rather remarkable. In fact, Jon quoted me a statistic in here that for every dollar a business invests in conversion rate optimization on average they get $9 back which is really, really amazing. I know that in the past I've hired a conversion rate optimization expert. And they cost a lot of money, right? So I was paying out I think like $2,000 a month. But you know what the first thing they did was? They saved me like $6,000 a month in advertising costs. Joe: That's incredible. Mark: I mean it's a net win. You're immediately seeing an ROI if you have somebody good at what they do. And when we think about CRO oftentimes we think okay we're going to change the color of this button bar, we're going to change the title on this, we're going to increase our sign-ups. What Jon and I talked about quite a bit more is the fact that CRO is much, much bigger than this. There is an entire customer journey, there's an entire user journey here, and there are all sorts of points along the way where this journey can be optimized and can be made more efficient for our clients. I know I've talked to clients in the past who have grown businesses massively by just spending literally years doing this and their traffic doesn't substantially change. But their revenue changes and their bottom line earnings change as well. It's a discipline that most of us ignore; low hanging fruit for almost all of our businesses. We should be doing it. Jon and I got to talk about some of the methodologies that you need to implement in order to really get going with some CRO optimization of any business for that matter. Joe: I think it's going to be a fascinating podcast. I'm going to listen to it myself. Before we jump to that folks be sure to tell us what the movie quote is. Send us a note so we can give you a shout out on the podcast. Alright, let's jump to it. Mark: Jon thanks so much for joining me. Jon: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Mark: If you could can you provide a quick background on yourself to all the listeners? Jon: Sure. So I am CEO and founder of The Good. We are a conversion rate optimization firm. Now what that means is we help brands to convert more of their existing website traffic into customers. So we do that through data science. Helping brands to track every click and movement that's happening on their site and using that data to understand where people are dropping off in the process, why they're not converting, what's engaging and not being engaged with, and how to solve those problems. Mark: That's great. CRO is something of a—I wouldn't say a hobby of mine, I'm not very good at it but it's something that I'm fascinated by. I love the idea of being able to grow and sometimes pretty significantly grow a business without adding more traffic and scrapping forward for that more traffic but basically by improving that customer experience to the point where everything just kind of smoothens out and it just opens up more traffic internally but with the revenue of course; the conversions and everything else. Now in my understanding with your firm you guys have done some work with private equity firms as well that are coming into an acquisition of a web-based company and want to find some of those opportunities. Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe some of the scenarios that you've looked at there? Jon: Yeah. So typically when you're buying an e-com company the first thing you're looking to do is optimize the return on the investment you've just made. And that's why a lot of folks end up with us. Typically these brands have a lot of traffic coming in already. They're spending a bunch of money to drive traffic to the site but perhaps that's just not converting at the level they'd liked or they're not seeing as high of a ROAs or return on ad spend as they would like to see and they see that that's an opportunity for optimization. And that's typically how we end up starting those conversations. It's not unfamiliar with us. A few brands we've worked with have increased their conversion rates, gotten their ROIs up and then made an exit right after. So it happens on both sides. Brands who are looking to make a purchase and or have made a purchase come into us to help them to kind of optimize a little bit and then also companies who are looking to improve their site and optimize it as they get ready to sell and want to increase the value of their company. Mark: I often think that the CRO portion of a marketing mix is one of the items I think it's ignored the most often and is often one of the lowest bits of hanging fruit. And one of the things I think people forget about; I forget about it myself but CRO actually has kind of a double whammy effect for you, right? I ran an experiment on another business that I owned outside of Quiet Light Brokerage for getting people to sign up and I know my numbers pretty well. I know that every person that signs up even though they're signing up for free the value of that client is about $10, right. So I said okay I want to increase these free sign-ups more. But the result was I did increase the sign-ups, I did increase that conversion rate pretty significantly but the other benefit of that is that my cost of acquisition dropped. So not only was I getting more out of what was being sent to me but my advertising dollars dropped at the same time. And so I had this double effect of seeing an increase in my ROIs on both sides just from focusing on one thing. When you're talking to somebody who is preparing to sell; let's say it's an e-commerce business, what are some of the areas that you start to look to see where can you—what are you sort of tracking at a CRO project? Jon: Well, the first thing is are they tracking the right data? True conversion optimization should not be about going down a checklist of best practices. You can find those and Google those online and I can tell you that really the most effective way to optimize a site is to base it on every click and movement of your specific sites visitors and to make data back decisions on those actions that are being taken. So the best way to do that is to make sure you're tracking the right data. Now, of course, you want to follow GDPR and all of the other privacy regulations that are in place. So all the types of data that you really should be tracking are done in aggregate meaning it's not personally identifiable information. And really you don't need personal identifiable information. But there are really four key areas of data that you should be looking at. The first of course is Analytics. If you're looking to sell you're likely going to have Analytics and the buyer is likely going to dive into those Analytics. So if you're looking at something like Google Analytics out of the box let's be honest here it's meant to help you buy more Google Ads. So it's not that helpful in terms of optimizing your site. Now the best way to do that is to build some dashboards in Google Analytics that are more focused on conversions. And also make sure that you're tracking the right events on your site to get that data in. So that's one of the first places we look. The second pieces of data are interactions on your site in terms of content. So looking at things like heat maps; where are mouse movements happening around the site, click maps where are people clicking on a page, perhaps they're often—we almost always find that people are clicking on things that aren't clickable, and that's a good indicator that they should be. So it could be as simple as that. You know we also want to look at scroll maps; how far down the page are they going. We do eye tracking as well to understand what people are looking at and how long they're looking at that content. Lastly—well third I should say you want to do what's called user testing. So we've just talked about all these quantitative pieces of data that really tell you what people are doing. But it's really hard to get the why behind that from all of that data we just talked about. So user testing comes in and helps us understand why. Now, this is where we send people to the site who match the ideal customer profile and we ask them to complete tasks. And while they're completing those tasks we are recording their screen and their audio and we also have trained these people ahead of time to talk out loud about the experience that they're having. So they're going through a site and they're saying hey I'm trying to find this page and I can't find it in the navigation or understand how to get to that content that I'm looking for, I don't understand what the value proposition is here, or just common struggles that they might be having. And that really kind of coincides with the numerical data to tell us not only what they've done but also why they're doing that and it gives us some context behind that. And we really we do what's called remote unmoderated user testing. And what that is is a software tool we use usertesting.com most often. And what that means is it's a piece of software that lives on their home computer that allows us to collect all this data so they can do it in the comfort of their own environment as opposed to somebody standing over their shoulder. Now we've done both. We've been optimizing sites for over 10 years now and we've done both. And what we found is that we get much better data when its remote unmoderated. The people are comfortable and they don't feel pressure to come up with something on the spot and always be telling us what they're thinking. We just find it naturally happens when it's remote and unmoderated. So that works a lot better. The last piece of data is A-B testing or multivariate testing. This is where you say you have 100 people coming to a site, you can segment those visitors and show 50 the current version of a page or even small change on the site, maybe moving content around on a page, or adjusting some headlines things of that sort. And then you would show 50 the alternate page and you test some metrics out of that to understand which one is doing better; the page that exists or the changes that have been made. And we can get really large tests like changing entire pages or we can go really, really small like just changing one headline and seeing what the differences would be and then stacking a lot of those tests and the variations of those tests to truly understand how to optimize each step of that funnel again based on data. So instead of just guessing and launching those changes with this piece of data you're actually letting the consumer's actions, your specific sites visitor's actions and tell you what should be done to permanently change on your site. Mark: Okay. So I think that explanation was just great. I love the framework that you set up here but I think you just explained why CRO gets ignored so often. And that is there is a lot of stuff to set up here and to configure and I just let's start right at the beginning with Analytics. You're right right out of the box how useful is Analytics. It's interesting. You get to see how many people are coming to your site. You can see what pages are popular and some decent information out of the gate. But really Analytics starts to blossom when you start building dashboards and segments and everything else. But getting into that; I mean that's kind of a discipline in and of itself. Jon: Of course. Mark: I know we could probably talk about this all day and different dashboards for different types of businesses, what are some things that are some useful elements with a dashboard that somebody might want to consider building? And I want to break this up into maybe three different types of sites. And if you don't work with any of these types of sites that's fine, just let me know. But e-commerce would be one, SaaS would be another, and then content-based sites that are really looking more for that user engagement and reading and how much are they digesting the information. So what are some dashboards that you would recommend people look into for each of these? Jon: Well, there's a couple built into Google Analytics that get ignored pretty quickly. On all three of these sites it would be helpful. But the first is page flow. What is the flow that people are taking through the site? And most people ignore this because in Google Analytics the view is one where it shows the funnels but then has lines drawn between them and it looks extremely complicated at first. So most people see that, they get overwhelmed, and they leave and don't really pay attention to the data. But there's so much rich data there you can dive into. And you don't have to do anything other than have the snippet on your site. So it's not requiring you to set anything else up necessarily. So that's a great place to start. For e-com businesses we often find one tidbit; a lot of companies no matter what their size is when they first come to us one of the first things we always check is do they have the e-commerce tracking engaged. It's one button to turn on and off. So many brands don't have that turned on and they lose so much rich data that Google automatically starts sorting through and looking for. So for e-com just having that turned on could be amazing. And it's so easy. Now in terms of metrics that we're looking for on e-commerce conversion rate in terms of to purchase but also what are the other metrics that you're looking for? We call them micro conversions; things that you know people are doing that influence that purchase. Is it signing up for an email? Is it where they visit certain pages on your site? So we know that if they are visiting or even just like a great instance of this is if they're visiting a product detail page but then they click to read more of the user reviews. That's always a great indicator because what we find is consumers who read reviews convert much higher. Because often consumers are going to trust the content that's in reviews much more than what the brand even says about their products because it's coming from people like them. They also; for a clothing site for instance or shoe site, it's really helpful because they will use that to better understand sizing, especially relative sizing. So a medium runs a little larger you're probably going to want a small things of that sort. That's really, really helpful for people who are really there to dive deeper and answer specific questions that are all buying questions. Mark: Let me stop you on that real quick because let's say that you start measuring these micro goals. What does that give you? I mean I would imagine a lot of the people that are taking those actions already have a high user intent. Jon: Right. Mark: In my head I'm thinking okay let's say sizing options, you said I want to increase the number of micro-goals of people checking out the different sizing options. Does that really increase each individual user's intent or you're really just more making the flow easier for those that are already there? Jon: Both. If you're finding that out of 100 visitors that 50 of them are looking at sizing and of that 50, 25 convert you really want to try to influence that metric. So if you know that people are looking for sizing then make that information surface at higher so it's easier to find. Now people only visit websites for two reasons. This is outside of Facebook or anywhere that you're just trying to maybe perhaps spend some time; kill some time. Now they are there because they have a pain or a need and they think that your website can help solve that pain or need. And two once they realize that it can or they believe that it can, they want to do research on how to convert as quickly and easily as possible. And that means that they've done that research and now they're ready to purchase. So you need to make those two things as easy to do as possible. Now it sounds pretty simplistic but understanding as you go deeper on those what people are looking to research and then surfacing that information as high as possible is really important. So making that as easy to find and do that research. So if you know that people who convert always are looking for sizing information but they have to go into the reviews to find it. That's a problem. So instead make it easier for people to understand what size they should wear. And if that's the case they're going to convert much easier. And then when they're ready to convert it'll make that checkout flow, that conversion process as easy as possible. And when you look at lead generation sites which is the second one of this one that you've mentioned, it's the same thing with form completions. We often work with companies who have made it very easy for somebody to come to the site and do research about what particular products or offering that that company has that aligns with their need. But we also see at times the consumers come to the site and they're looking at the home page and the value proposition is not clearly stated. And so how many times have you been to a B2B service page website and you look at it and you said I have no idea what these people do. So that can be a big challenge; just understanding is the consumer in the right place and allowing them to do that research. But then once they get to the form they're asking for a ton of information that isn't really necessary at that first step. So they might be asking how many employees do you have, or what industry are you in; all these things that could have been filtered prior to them filling out a form by just saying this product is best for people who have this many employees, this much revenue, this industry, and things of that sort. So trying to help people understand if they're in the right place and how to convert as quickly and easily as possible can apply to both e-com and lead gen. Mark: That's helpful. Let's go on to one of the other ones here and that's the scroll maps and click data. A, where do you get this sort of information? Do you have any servers that you recommend? And then B, once you get in what do you do with this information once you start to get it? Jon: Yeah. So Hotjar is likely your best fit. Now there are tons of different heat mapping softwares out there right now. Crazy Egg is another good one. There's a few of us who—we find Hotjar has the most reliable data and also for the cost has the best benefits. So I believe it's about $9 a month and it's totally worth the data you get back for $9; easily a large return on your investment there. Now, what should you do with that data? Well, Hotjar will let you track again all the mass movements that happen on your site and give you a heat map of those. Now for those people who aren't familiar with the heat map it just shows you from red to—and then cools off from there; so red, yellow, green, blue, and then the lack of colors where people didn't use their mouse at all on a page. So it allows you to really look at that and say where are people interacting. Now, a quick tidbit on this; on desktop, your eye will follow your cursor. So heat mapping is not so much about the cursor movement as it is about a good indicator of where people are looking and what they're engaging with on your page. Understanding just where a cursor is going on a page is not as helpful. So that's a better way we think to look at it is what content are people engaging with. And that's what's really helpful there. Now, what can you do with that data? Perhaps you find that there is a piece of data that you had found earlier that people really engage with every single time they purchase. Well it's really helpful to surface that content up higher on the page and then track whether or not people are engaging with that over time; so testing that by understanding what content to engage and moving that content to a different area of the page and then looking at the heat map to see if it's being engaged with. Mark: So let's move on then to A-B testing and this is a personal pet peeve of mine because all the tools out there just feel—at least that I've used feel expensive and kind of shoddy and maybe I'm not using them right. Are there tools that you particularly recommend? What do you think about let's say Google Optimize as a free option there? And we'll start with that. I would also like to get into setting up experiments that actually make sense. Jon: Right, of course. Mark: Let's talk first about the tools. Jon: So there are a numerous number of tools for optimization as you mentioned. It's pretty common now to try to sell a whole optimization platform; so one tool that can do everything. The great thing about Google Optimize is that it doesn't do that. It focuses just on running those tests. And it also integrates extremely well with Analytics so you can pull segments out of Analytics that you've set up and run tests just for those segments. Now it is free and it does have some limitations in the sense that you can run a limited number of tests at the same time. There are some ways to get around that. I would be happy to chat about that with anybody at some point but really the idea here is Google Optimize has come a really long way over the past year. It has in terms of pure testing the same functionality as a platform like VWO or Visual Website Optimizer which is another one that I would tend to recommend if you want to get over the number of tests limit that Optimize has VWO is a great tool. It works extremely well for the testing side. It has a whole bunch of other functionality that at The Good we don't typically use. But if you're looking for a full platform it could be okay. And then if you're in the enterprise space Optimizely is really the gold standard. They were the first really solid tool. They made a shift about two years ago to focus exclusively on the enterprise side. So we still have some clients that are on their legacy plans from five to six years ago that are paying 200 bucks a month. They don't offer anything like that anymore. It's now probably closer to 10,000 a month just for their platform. But if you are looking to optimize every experience; your mobile experience, and your app experience, and your desktop or web experience as well Optimizely is really where you'd want to play. But you need to have the budget and the traffic levels especially. This is another thing and I think most companies tend to want to jump into running testing but they don't have enough traffic to do it. And they sign up for something like VWO and start paying the fees for the platform and they aren't seeing the results very quickly. That's where it can get frustrating. You really need to make sure you have enough traffic to be able to see statistically significant results in a meaningful timeframe to get the return on that investment. Mark: What would you recommend for sites that have low traffic amounts? Jon: I would recommend playing around with Google Optimize but running bigger tests. So what do I mean by bigger tests? Try changing an entire page content; don't just change one piece of content on a page. So the bigger the test the quicker you're typically going to see some results positive or negative. Now it's hard to get fine-grained but testing even bigger tests like that you will see increases in the key metrics that you should be tracking like conversion rate, average order value, things of that sort that really are going to drive impactful meaningful improvement for your brand. Mark: Yeah, that's great. I've noticed the same thing in the testing that I've done there where—and this leads to the next segment that I wanted to talk about that and that is saying that meaningful tests where the whole sale page changes. I just ran a test on another business I own where we did a whole sale page difference and the lift was significant. It was almost definitely the conversion rate on a completely different page design. When you're setting up a new test especially if you're coming in cold and say that you bought a business and you're now working on different ways to be able to grow that business that you just acquired, where are some places that you would typically start with testing? Let's assume that there is enough traffic there to be able to run more of this fine-grained sort of tests. Would you recommend some of these bigger tests to begin with or maybe a more nuanced approach? Jon: I would typically recommend a little more nuanced approach that is based on the results from that user testing. So by starting; I mentioned four areas and I mentioned the A-B testing last because the other three are really going to help you determine what you should be testing. And that's almost as important as running tests at all. So if you are going; there are so many brands that we see that just sign up for these platforms to run tests and start running tests and they just randomly cherry pick ideas to run but they don't have any hypotheses behind them or data to back those up. So really again understanding the data has to come first so that you can make some data back decisions about what to test. Now, what's going to be impactful? I'll tell you that if you start reading general articles online about testing the first thing they're going to say is things like button colors, or maybe a headline change, or image change. Those very rarely actually move the needle. So you need to find that balance between a whole site or a page change and changing one small element on the page because it's in the middle where you're really going to see the results. But also the best way to be thinking about this is the testing needs to be a three or six-month plan. So that doesn't mean that you should expect one test to run that long but you should be thinking okay I'm running this test to make what learning do I want out of that test; positive or negative change? That's fine but you should always be learning something. In fact when a test doesn't have the outcome that we want here at The Good or that we were expecting I should say we don't call it a failure; we call it a learner. Because we're always learning something out of that. That will influence what the next test is that we want to run. And then you continue to stair step that. Conversion optimization should really be thought of as an iterative compounding effect over time. There's nothing that you're going to change on your site that is going to double your conversion rate overnight short of massive discounting. And I just call that margin drain. That's not an optimization. So you really want to be thinking about this in small incremental gains. That each test is going to help you get that will have a compounding effect over those three to six months. And so impactful tests are ones that you know are building the foundation for a larger change that you would like to see. Mark: Talking to about this it seems so clear that you're setting this up into almost two distinct steps, right? The bulk of what you suggest of these four suggestions really relies and rests first on having good data and a good data framework for understanding your site and your business and knowing what sort of metrics you want. And once those metrics are set up then you can take a look and say okay well let's look at this or what would happen if we were to change this micro goal? Does this micro goal really have a correlation with revenue or is it just something that we're kind of seeing right now? Maybe there is no correlative effect. Maybe we can increase a micro goal and it doesn't change anything at all. But I think the challenge then becomes not necessarily how do you run a really great A-B test but how do you set up a really good framework of data and data collection and those dashboards as well. What advice would you give to an entrepreneur who's thinking about their business and saying okay I know I need to get data on my business, I know I have Analytics set up maybe I turn on the e-commerce tracking but I've not ever created segments. I don't really know how to use segments; 10,000-foot view, what's a way that we can instruct the entrepreneur here to just start understanding what they need to start setting up for a good data framework? Jon: Well I mentioned the other three areas besides A-B testing and you don't have to go super deep on those. I know there's—you could. As you mentioned earlier we could spend a whole hour just talking about each of those individually perhaps. I think you need to start somewhere but just having that data tracking in place and then paying attention to it; look at it once a week spend; set an hour side on your calendar, just spend an hour once a week looking at that data. You will start to see trends. You will start to see things that help you to better understand how people are engaging with your website. And just giving that that hour per week will put you miles ahead of the competition because you're going to start to see those trends and the actions that people are taking on your site. And you'll start to have empathy for how they use your site. Now I often like to say that it's really hard to read the label from inside the jar. So many site owners or brands or e-com managers what they do is they build the site and all the content and the navigation for them because they know the product. But what happens if somebody comes in via Google to search in a topic. Google thought that site might be the best answer they send them there. They're missing all of that knowledge about the products they sell. So when they go to the navigation and if it's not set up appropriately the consumer has no idea what they're looking at or how to figure out what product is the best one for them. So that's another way that user testing can really kind of help. It's brief empathy for the end user and helps you see it from that perspective as opposed to somebody who built the site or is on the site every single day. So I think two things; one, just have the data and look at it and you'll start to build up that empathy. And that's really going to help you understand what you should test and where you should go from there. Then secondly you can really start to dive deeper. You can then say oh I want to run scroll tracking on these pages because I'm finding that people aren't reading this type of content that's further down the page and I want to verify that. So you start to post questions. It's not about the data; it's really about asking the right questions once you have that data in place. Mark: You're echoing exactly what I heard at Traffic & Conversion this past year. I went to a CRO talk and one of the bits of advice that he gave was to start with the questions that you want answered because then the reports will build themselves. If your question is how many people are signing up for this email list and then taking a second action well now you know the report that you need to build there is a report that shows just that information. The other thing that you're saying that I think is fantastic and this is the trend in marketing in 2019 and frankly it started I think as early as 2017 and has been building steam and that is this personalization; both of the user experience but also in the way that we think as far as marketers and the internet is no longer just a big cold faceless place. Let's start putting a face to those numbers that we're seeing in Analytics and understand those are real people, real eyeballs and what is their experience like. And what you said you have some empathy for the user and what they're going through because then you can start asking those questions and building the reports. And then once you build the reports, you've answered the questions, now you can start forming the thesis of okay this is what we're seeing as far as the answer to this question. Now finally once we get all this in place lets A-B test. Does that summarize it? Jon: Yes; very, very well. Mark: Awesome. Alright, let's talk about wins. Jon: Yes. Mark: I could do your job. Jon: I'm looking forward to it. Mark: I know that for a fact. Let's talk about wins. Let's talk about some of the—without getting and divulging clients or anything like that, let's talk about this is what you want to put on your site as far as the testimonial because it's eye-popping and then also the realistic sort of wins that you would see say over six to 12 months from a CRO campaign. Jon: Yeah. You know on average we see about a 9:1 return on investment. So for every dollar that's put into conversion optimization on average, you're going to see about a $9 increase in revenue. Now there is not one single metric that you can do that's going to have a bigger impact on your site than focusing on conversions. But I think the industry of conversion rate optimization gets shoehorned often into that one factor which is conversion. We've talked about a lot of different metrics today that really need to be improved and optimized and that all goes back into conversion optimization as a whole. Of course, average order value, cart abandonment rate, we talked a lot about ROAs and return on investment of ad spend. I think in a lot of that is what needs to happen there. Now specific wins, I have a bunch of case studies up on our site. They're public so I'm happy to talk about some of those. For instance, Easton Baseball; if you don't know who Easton Baseball is they make aluminum baseball bats mainly and softball bats. About 99% of college swings are done with an Easton baseball bat. They pretty much own baseball bats for Little League. And if you're a Little League player you're going to use one of their bats. Now, having empathy for the consumer; what we found when we came into their site was you go to their product page and it would be a wall of bats. Now if you imagine what a bat looks like online and you see a whole bunch of them. You have no idea what the differences are, right? And they're just maybe different colors but you really don't know because you can't feel the weight difference or really see how the size differences of the bats online that well. And especially if you're a parent with a kid in Little League, you have no idea what bat you should be buying. And we did a bunch of user research and what we found was that consumers were coming to the site to buy a bat for their kid and they would buy the bat take it to practice and had spent a couple of hundred dollars on this bat and then the umpire tells them they're not allowed to swing with that bat. Now the reason is that all these different Little Leagues have certifications for their bats and if their bat does not have that certification stamp on it you can't use it. Also, either your kid swings for the fences or he's just trying to get on base. And there are different types of hitters, and different bats fit with different types of hitters. There are also different price points that parents want to spend. So there's some that might want to spend $100, some are willing to spend 500. It really varies. Using just those three metrics what we found was that so many parents are buying the wrong bats that they were getting frustrated and there was a high return rate. They were calling customer service quite a bit. Well, what we did after learning all of that is we built up bat finder. So instead of having parents navigate through all these bats and look at all of them and spend time trying to figure that out, they simply just answer three questions and those three questions kicked out three or four bats for them. And so these are the ones you should really look at. Now once you got to those bat pages they often had; Easton had put in a ton of technical terms that were branded around what the bats did. So I can't remember the names exactly but instead of just saying this bat reduces sting because with an aluminum bat if you hit it really well and you're hitting for the fences you can sting your hands really bad. And Easton has some wonderful technology that eliminated that bat sting and still let you get the great pop of the bat to hit it over the fence for a home run. Well, what we found was they had branded that term instead of just saying it reduces bat sting they came up with some random term for that. And consumers didn't know what it meant. So we helped them solve that problem. And that was found through user testing and just having empathy for what the consumer is going through. So we fixed those two things on their site and they saw over 600% increase in revenue year over year and their conversion rates skyrocketed. I think it was 187%. And you know when you think about it just having a little bit of empathy and making those two small changes can have such a big impact. And that's really what conversion rate is about. It's understanding what people are doing, what they're not doing, and how they're engaging, and using that data to then inform what should be changed and tested on a site. Mark: Yeah. And just to put this in terms of acquisitions; bringing it back to really the subject of this podcast here, I want people to think about this in terms of what I mentioned earlier on the podcast. If you're seeing a 600% increase in your revenue which is phenomenal you're also seeing a reduction in your cost of advertising to acquire a client which means your bottom line margin is actually probably improving more than that 600%. And that's an assumption on my part. But let's for the sake of argument just say that it also is increasing by 600% at a minimum, it might be even increasing more. And now you're taking the multiple approach of maybe for an e-commerce business 3, 3.5, maybe 4 and you can start seeing how much you're growing the asset value of a business that you own; maybe you acquired or you're preparing to sell. You are seeing significant gains in that asset value of what you're hanging onto to the point where the numbers really become kind of silly to even say it because it doesn't sound believable. But that's the low hanging fruit of CRO is the money that you said 9:1 investment to payback ratio. That's phenomenal and for preparing to sell or buying and trying to grow a business asset value you're not only getting that 9:1 you're getting the multiple on top of that as well. That's phenomenal. Jon: Yeah. And I've specifically mentioned Easton because it's a public knowledge but after about 18 months to two years after we helped them optimize their site and then moved in and help them optimize their mobile as well for even larger gains there they did sell to another private equity firm and had a very good return on their investment there overall and that was almost entirely fueled by the digital side and the effort they'd all put in there. Mark: That's awesome. Where can people learn more about you and more about your company? Jon: Sure. Yeah. So The Good you can find us online at TheGood.com. That's just TheGood.com and you can sign up for our insights there. So if you liked a lot of the tidbits and helpful tactics I talked about today we do produce one great article per week about learning. There are no sales pitches involved it's truly just educational content about conversion optimization; things that you can take home and do to your site and start thinking in this way. We fully recognize that it is really hard for one person to have all of the skill sets at their company to do conversion optimization. I think you talked about this earlier when you said hey you just mentioned all these things and that's the challenge most people have around optimization. It's true. It's really hard for one person to do all of that. And so we try to help educate as much as we can around all of this type of things. But TheGood.com is the best way to get a hold of us. Feel free to email me directly if you have questions. I'm happy to answer questions that come my way it's just jon@thegood.com. And I do try to read and respond to every email. So I will do my best. Mark: Yeah. That's great. And as far as the task list, I mean you're exactly right. The fact is CRO is a mix of being somewhat of a data scientist and there's also a technical side to it as well being able to get all the integrations right and then there's also the creative side as well to understand how to really understand the user testing and how that empathy and then be creative with the tests and ask the right questions. It's very difficult to find somebody who can master all three of those skills and those abilities. So working with an outsourced team; I think CRO is one of those things where doing it alone is probably not the best approach unless you're just really, really some sort of a renaissance man who can have these multiple disciplines. Thank you so much for coming on Jon. This has been an awesome discussion I'd begin maybe because I just love CRO but I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of the tips. Jon: Well, thank you so much for having me, Mark. I really do appreciate it. Links and Resources: The Good Jon's Email Hotjar Optimizely

Data Driven Daily Tip 291. As a marketer, haven't you ever wanted to make your content more personal to your audience? The data says that the more you can personalize your content and make it relevant to the user reading it, the better you can increase your engagement and conversion rates. As, such, I've found the least complicated way to display unique content to your audience based on geolocation. In the past, this would have either had to have been done via some complex coding or via an expensive third party tool like Visual Website Optimizer. Now, using WPEngine's GeoTargeting Capabilities, you can create an account with WPEngine and upgrade your account for $150 for the year, to get access to a premium plug-in called WP Geo-IP, that allows you to use shortcodes to only show content to particular geographic regions such as cities, states, zips and countries. In this video, I break down exactly how to do this, and use an example where I only want to promote the Nashville Voice Conference on our website to people in the State of Tennessee. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/paulhickey/support

In episode #838, we discuss ways to make your SEO 10x more effective. Tune in to hear the one thing you may not be doing. We have committed to throwing a FREE Marketing School Live Event in Los Angeles, once Marketing School reaches 1M downloads in a 30 day period. Take action: Rate, review, subscribe, and SHARE. Check the progress here! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:27] Today’s Topic: How To Make Your SEO 10x More Effective [00:48] Conversion rate optimization is the thing to do. [01:35] It’s the one thing in marketing that, while unpopular, is the most effective. [02:40] Conversion XL is a great blog for ideas and inspiration. [02:46] Conversion-Rate-Experts is another great resource. [02:57] Quicksprout is a third resource to check out. [03:08] If you are looking for a paid solution, look at Visual Website Optimizer. [04:00] Quantitative data will be helpful in determining where you lose people. [04:20] Using SurveyMonkey, you can get feedback you wouldn’t get from data. [05:35] You’re going to have to run a ton of tests to get statistical significance. [06:15] If you don’t have a ton of traffic and you’re in the B2B space, you may not want to optimize for sales, but rather for leads. [06:46] That’s all for today! [07:14] Go here to see how many downloads the show is getting. Also rate and review to help us meet our goal of 1 Million downloads per month. Hopefully, we’ll see you at the live event in L.A.! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In episode #838, we discuss ways to make your SEO 10x more effective. Tune in to hear the one thing you may not be doing. We have committed to throwing a FREE Marketing School Live Event in Los Angeles, once Marketing School reaches 1M downloads in a 30 day period. Take action: Rate, review, subscribe, and SHARE. Check the progress here! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:27] Today's Topic: How To Make Your SEO 10x More Effective [00:48] Conversion rate optimization is the thing to do. [01:35] It's the one thing in marketing that, while unpopular, is the most effective. [02:40] Conversion XL is a great blog for ideas and inspiration. [02:46] Conversion-Rate-Experts is another great resource. [02:57] Quicksprout is a third resource to check out. [03:08] If you are looking for a paid solution, look at Visual Website Optimizer. [04:00] Quantitative data will be helpful in determining where you lose people. [04:20] Using SurveyMonkey, you can get feedback you wouldn't get from data. [05:35] You're going to have to run a ton of tests to get statistical significance. [06:15] If you don't have a ton of traffic and you're in the B2B space, you may not want to optimize for sales, but rather for leads. [06:46] That's all for today! [07:14] Go here to see how many downloads the show is getting. Also rate and review to help us meet our goal of 1 Million downloads per month. Hopefully, we'll see you at the live event in L.A.! Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

After 10 years in the music industry, Dustin Ray started to hear about entrepreneurs in the tech space and felt the pull towards the flexibility that the online entrepreneurial field had to offer. As Dustin points out, there is no ceiling in the industry – as long you can build something scalable, you can take it as far as you want. The notion that you can create a value and see return relatively quickly was also an intriguing concept to Dustin. Dustin's company IncFile, specializes in the formation of business entities. Since starting, they have assisted more than 150,000 entrepreneurs and small business owners form their businesses. When Dustin got his start with the company they were not thriving but he and his team managed to grow it into an 8-figure company in a relatively brief amount of time. Today he's here discussing how modifying funnels and honing customer acquisition strategies allowed for that growth. We also touch on the challenges of scaling a team to that size in a short time span and navigating the growing pains that inevitably pop up. Episode Highlights: How Dustin got into IncFile. The processes that Dustin and his partner put into place to ensure the rapid growth of the company. How IncFile is filling a gap and taking care of the stuff that no entrepreneurs want to deal with. Through streamlined tactics and low costs, IncFile has become the leader in the industry and has continued to grow despite increasing competition. Dustin shares the key elements to a good sales funnel and the tools his the team uses to work and refine their funnel. Dustin shares his a 3-point strategy for finding a good starting point to getting into entrepreneurial tech. How Dustin's company was able to pass those pivotal “choke points” that many growing companies experience. Scaling doesn't necessarily equate with hiring. Hire slow and get the right people. The importance of worrying about what you're good at and building on that rather than trying to improve what you are not good at. Double down on your strengths. Buyers who are often the most successful in their acquisitions are those who hone in on what they are good at. Transcription: Joe: So it amazes me, Mark, the people that we meet at these different events and that are just laid back casual seem like just good guys you want to go hunting or fishing with … not that I hunt or fish, it's been a long time. I live in a lake but I haven't gone fishing for a while or I haven't caught anything for a while. Anyway, Dustin Ray strikes me as one of those people. I met him at Rhodium a few years back; totally laid back. I think you introduced him to me and surprised me later when you start talking about the numbers and what this guy is doing and so humble yet doing such incredible numbers. You had a chance to have him on the podcast recently. Mark: Yeah I did and Dustin is one of those guys whenever he and I talk on the phone and you know it's not as frequently as maybe I would like but whenever we talk it ends up being like an hour and a half conversation. Rest assured this is not an hour and a half long podcast but it could have been because he's got a ton of information. His background is fascinating. He started out in the music industry promoting some of the biggest artists that we know. He was telling me that when he was driving down through Las Vegas and seeing some of the artist's stuff on the board that are coming in, I mean these are … he knows who's behind these things. This was his industry for a long time but he decided to leave that industry and was really drawn to the internet world and got his start with a company that was not doing that great at the time. He didn't know it at the time but didn't know at the time and he's now a partner of that company. And really under his guidance and some of the other work his team has done they've grown it into an eight figure company relatively quickly. And really just through being able to modify their funnels, understand better customer acquisition strategies, and get that conversion rate as high as it can and really make it a product that works well for his customers. A really cool discussion about modifying those funnels, modifying your customer acquisition process but also we touched on and I want to have him back on again. I say this with a lot of guests but I definitely want to have him back on again about some of the challenges as well of scaling a team when you go from this one million in revenue up to five million in revenue, up to ten million in revenue and then beyond that as well. There's always this natural choke points where it's not as easy to scale that team and they've been going through that. They've been going through some of those growing pains but doing it really really well. So we talked about a little bit of that as well in this episode. Joe: Well Dustin's much more interesting than the both of us so let's jump right to the podcast. Mark: Sounds great. Mark: All right Dustin hey thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. Dustin: Hey thanks for having me, Mark. Mark: I know you're a loyal listener like you don't miss a single episode of this thing so you know what we do. We know that we'd like you to introduce yourself. Why don't you give just kind of a quick background on yourself? Dustin: Sure my name is Dustin Ray and I'm a co-owner at the IncFile.com. We're an incorporation service that services all 50 states. We help people form LOCs incorporations. We've been in business for a little over 15 years now and we've helped over 150,000 entrepreneurs get their business launched. Mark: You didn't start in this though, I mean this is … you have a background beyond that and you … full disclosure you and I met at Rhodium. What was it three years ago now I think? Dustin: Yeah. Mark: Yeah and we talked over dinner a little bit and you shared some of your background. You have a background in the music industry as well. Dustin: That's right so I kind of accidentally fell onto the tech space I guess you could say. So I grew up playing sports, going to school. I kind of grew up in the music scene and that meant recording stuff with friends and then throwing parties and club promoting and working at eventually a managing company, a record label, and then I went over and launched the hip-hop division for music marketing nationally for Monster Energy Corporation. So I was in the music business for about 10 years and it was ironic that we're here talking on the podcast because literally as I'm in the music business I kind of stumbled upon entrepreneurship in a podcast about it and that was kind of how I got introduced to the whole tech space. And when I was listening to just the different entrepreneurs … you know I didn't have any friends around me in the tech space. I didn't grow up coding. I'm not a coder. I'm not a technical person. So it was very much like an outer space experience when someone mentioned something tech. And so for me, it opened up a whole new world for me and it started speaking to every existence in my body about it. I love the fact that it was flexible. It's not like a physical store that you're at every single day. You need your laptop, you need your phone and you could be anywhere in the world. So I like that flexibility and I like the fact there wasn't a ceiling. As long as you can build something scalable you could take it as far as you want. And then the other thing, of course, is the trading was I mean the value creation right? It was like you would read an article and it was like how in the world would somebody build something in 18 months and then they're selling it or it's getting acquired for millions of dollars. Like how is that even possible? That was like a foreign concept to me. I thought you got work hard, put in the time, be a savvy investor and when you have a lot of white hair then you have your money. So that was kind of how I got introduced to the tech space and then I'll let you take it from there if I'm not rambling on but that was my introduction into the tech space. And then I found my way in through Incfile. Mark: Cool. Yeah, I want to get into that but I just made a quick observation and something I've noticed over the years is that people who come from outside of the tech world depending on your background it's fascinating to watch what you're able to bring in. The music industry and the entertainment industry in general and you can correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure this is accurate; crazy competitive space right? You've got to be top of your game if you're going to be promoting artists and I mean everybody wants to be a music star of some sort. So if you're in that promotions game you've got to be on top of your game there. I mean- Dustin: Yeah just like a lot of businesses I mean competition is fierce. You got a singer or a rapper or something on every corner and just like really in any other businesses it's how are you going to stand out? How are you going to break through? It's not always just talent. That's where it starts but it's really the first events that really … it's what separates an entrepreneur, a musician, an artist, a rapper from the next. So yeah it's completely … and it's not a pretty industry either. I mean you hear some of the horror stories. I mean you've got to fight and claw your way to just get the money that's even owed to you. It's not like we have this automatic draft where if you owe me it's got to be paid or this automated payments like we do in the tech space where it's automatically … an invoice comes in and it's paid. I mean in the music industry you have to have some fight in you. You have to know how to do all of that. Navigate and fight your way through to survive. And that does translate into any business but in tech space too I mean super competitive. Anybody can come in and make you either irrelevant with new technology or they could come in with more resources and push you out. So you still have to have that the same perseverance inside. Mark: That's fantastic and I have a story to tell but I'm not going to tell it right now. Maybe you and I can talk about this another time or anyone that's listening if you meet up with me at a conference I'll tell you the story about the time I sat on an airplane and sat next to a multiple gold album recording artist who was sitting back in coach and had made millions and millions of dollars at the music industry and had almost none of it to his name because of managers and stuff like that that were taking the money from him. A fascinating conversation, a spoiler alert he was crying by the end of the conversation. So fun story but we would definitely go down a rabbit hole I don't want to get into right now. I want to talk about Incfile. I want to talk about kind of your background there, how you got into it and also the scalability and some of the challenges that come along with scaling a business like you have with Incfile. So that's about 15 years old, how did you get into Incfile in the first place? Dustin: So I've been with Incfile now for 4 ½ years in all in perspective. So the way I got in was a good friend of mine and business partner for a time; we had a graphic design company. And parlaying into the music conversation we were working with record labels in designing all the marketing packages for some of these artists that they have. You know the album covers, [inaudible 00:09:31.3], mind spaces at the time, anything graphic design wise. And ironically through a mutual friend, my business partner now at Incfile who grabbed me in, co-founder Nick he liked for what he saw out there as far as one of the designs we have put out. And by way of a mutual friend, I got introduced to him and we started working in a design capacity for Incfile. And at the time Incfile was much smaller than it is today and so there was ups and downs and I started kind of building rapport and Nick and I shared a lot of the same philosophies on business and perspective. It was interesting for me at the time because just like I mentioned I was listening to podcast and super fascinated with this world at that time and this is back in 2009 probably. You know we started working, Nick was open to new ideas and I didn't have experience but I was just kind of sharing thoughts and experience because when you think about design you think about user experience at that time. I didn't have any training but a lot of it is just psychology. It's human behavior, human nature, kind of how people operate. And so Nick and I would collaborate on these efforts and be speaking late until the night and then into the early morning building that rapport. So at the time Incfile really needed to kind of turn a corner and so I started consulting with Nick. He asked me to help him to kind of redefine our sales funnel and our work process. And at the time it was a big deal, I didn't realize how big of a project it was for Incfile it was … there wasn't a lot of business coming in at the time so it was a kind of critical moment but I didn't know that at the time or there would have been more pressure. So I started helping Nick and we started collaborating on redefining the order process and it really was our big sling at trying to turn a corner. And luckily enough through the efforts and months that we put in doing that it started to turn a corner and things started getting better and Incfile started growing. And we kind of continued helping each other out over the course of the next few years and it just finally got into a point where we're saying look what we could do part time what could we accomplish together if we are both all in? And then that's when I'd left Monster Energy and jumped in all in with Incfile at the time. And that was in 2014. Mark: That was in 2014. I don't want to get into specific numbers and ask you to be sharing numbers but you guys have been growing pretty much consistently since 2014 right? Dustin: Yeah. We've been steadily growing year over year. Our business has been growing at a healthy rate as well. So anywhere between 50% to 80% year over year and that's both top line and bottom line. And so we really are at this point we're focused on growth. We're a growth company. And we're just constantly trying to redefine and push the anvil up to continue that growth. Mark: Yeah. So let's talk about the funnel work that you did when you first came on. Did Incfile have funnels in place before that or did you come in and tweak what was already existing or did you have to kind of rewrite that book? Dustin: Now we had to rewrite the book. And I mean, to be frank, this is both from Nick who's at Incfile and started the company and then myself coming in and helping. You know these are two guys that are just figuring out at how to go. He didn't have previous experience in the tech world or building an online business and neither did I. So it's literally just two guys figuring it out. So there wasn't any specific processes in place or any sort of funnel analyzation or anything like that going on because again it's back in '08, '09. Things are a lot more sophisticated now in terms of analytics and marketing and tools and things like that. But we were literally just figuring it out. We didn't … we weren't … at the time we didn't have a lot of data to kind of drive some of the decision makings. So we just figured it out as we went and that's why I think I said luckily we did something right and it started turning around. And to be frank and to be honest I mean we're still figuring out as we go. We've been growing and I guess part of that is intuition with part of the strategy that we're deploying. The other half is having a phenomenal team. We have great team members to help. I mean everybody is … it's an understatement to say everybody is working hard because it's beyond working hard. Everybody is really pushing a full play and we've been able to grow but literally, we're starting to figure it out and getting a little bit more pieces in place to be more strategic and more structured. But up until really recently I mean we've just been figuring out as we go. Mark: One of the things that I love every time that we talk you're always talking about tweaking and finding other things of that sales funnel that you missed before. I absolutely love that because I tend to set and forget. A lot of times I'd get a sense from you guys that you're always looking, always experimenting with your funnels. Dustin: Yeah and that's a good point to touch on because one characteristic too that Nick and I share is that we have this obsession with a fish in sea and process. And so tweaking it is really the game that we like to play. So we like to be building the product. We like to be refining it. We take pride in trying to be innovative and have the best product in the industry. Not even as a strategy but just more of a personality and characteristics traits. That's what we've been doing since day one. It's just constantly keeping our head down focusing on the product and making it better every single day. Mark: Yeah and obviously having a good product helps quite a bit. And we've talked a little bit about your product privately and what it does. I mean some of the services you guys offer are phenomenal. Making sure things are kept up to date and having that subscription portion of it as well. People can literally not worry at all about their filings. It's a really cool service because I know I had to file actually in Texas for a company of mine and I started getting these notices and I'll tell you as a business owner and entrepreneur you get all these things from the government all the time and you're like I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to have to spend an afternoon trying to decipher all of this. And so you guys are really committed to filling that gap which is cool. Dustin: Yeah and I'm sitting in the same seat as you. Having private companies to even working at Incfile same thing, I didn't know even what a registered agent was or what a franchise tax report was for the state of Texas. Somehow I must have put myself or something down for it but it wasn't until I got to Incfile where I actually even understood it. And that's where I think we fill a big void in the entrepreneurial journey. It's just taking care of that stuff that really no entrepreneur wants to take care of. It's not a sexy business in terms of like the way we might talk about the music industry or celebrities but it's a fundamental core piece of running a business. If you're going to be an entrepreneur and you're going to be in business you're going to have to take care of these things that we offer. So we try to make it … we streamline the process and make it easy. So we're constantly innovating to make things faster and at the same time, we're the low cost leader in the industry so we drive the price down. So where most people that may go to … historically speaking it's a little bit more out there now because a lot of people are comfortable with doing business online now versus 10 years ago. But it really was the kind of fundamentals where people would know that they need to have a registered agent. There's this state mandate that's saying you have to do these things. But like I said it just frankly isn't fun or people don't want to deal with it. When you're starting a business you've got 15 hats you're wearing and you're putting out fires, and you're worried about sales, and doing all these other things. So we've really drove down the prices well to make it convenient and affordable to where a lot more entrepreneurs these days. It's just part of starting a business nowadays. Nowadays it's like okay I know I don't want to worry about that it's only going to cost me this much money so let them worry about it and they can deal with it for as long as I'm in business. Mark: Yeah, that's cool. I want to go back over to the funnel stuff and ask you kind of a basic question. What in your opinion makes up the key elements to developing a funnel, a good sales funnel? Dustin: One is always … I mean some of this stuff may sound rudimentary but simplicity, right? Because in an industry like ours where things are very technical, you've got secretary of state, you've got government agencies, and the IRS and a lot of formalities with these bureaucracies that it could become intimidating and cumbersome when you think about legal services in general. So us not being attorneys for one has kind of served and helped us in a lot of ways as well. We are entrepreneurs our self so we can put our own hand on and think about how would we want this to work and simplicity is number one. I mean don't make me think is the philosophy. If I had to think about something it's already too difficult, too hard, and our sales funnel isn't as fast as like selling a t-shirt. I mean you still … even though we've simplified and streamlined it you're still going through in some cases depending on which package you have you may go up to 15 pages to get through the end of the funnel. So it's very important to be fast. Just ask me the basics of what we need and in some cases, we'll [inaudible 00:19:15.7] process where we will gather additional details that may be needed. But if you frontload your funnel that's a recipe for disaster because people get exhausted and if you get in too many decisions you give them too many chances to change their mind. And really they want to get it done that's why they came there. So if you can make it a simple process to go through and then worry about making the connection and introducing yourself and working one on one if need be to solve the rest of the information gaps. But we see a lot of our competitors … I mean it is very word heavy and very cumbersome to go through their cellphone. So we just try to streamline that. Mark: Yeah, keep it all simple. When you say front loaded you mean asking all the questions on that page one and somebody sees this big huge form and they have to get through that he would form it with complex language? Dustin: That is one but also I mean front loaded just meaning the entire funnel. So if once you get to the back end of our system, if there's additional information or if there's something that is unique to your business that we may need additional information on those are emails and conversations that we can gather afterwards. But I mentioned we may have a funnel that could be 15 pages but if we put everything into the funnel they may need … it could be much longer and people don't want that. They want to get in, they want to pay, they want to have information; know that we are taking care of it and if you need something let me know but I'm already … once I click pay if you're handling it and I'm off to the next thing. Mark: What are some of the tools that you use to really work and refine that funnel? I mean it sounds like you're trying to gather some intelligence from your customers and watch their behavior to see where is the sticky points, where people are tripping up, do you guys use different tools to be able to collect some of that information and figure out hey you know what this is just not working? Dustin: We do not. Like I said we were just figuring it out and working along intuition for years. It's kind of how you are where any business is focused on sales, you're focused on sales and then you're focused on servicing those sales. So years go by and business grows and at some point, we're like man it's a lot harder to implement these processes now that the train is moving at 120 miles an hour to implement the process. So that's been an extreme challenge for us for the past couple of years. But we're at the point now to answer your question about tools where we now have complete tracking setup for all engagement. So a lot of it goes through GA but we're using a lot of different … whether it's a UDM code or whether it's an event tracking code on the website to understand where people are coming in and coming out. We're using user testing on the back end so things like VWL for user testing and constantly refining that. Just tinkering with every page or basically not everybody married to anything on the page. So it's kind of a philosophy where hey just because we've stared at it so many times for so long don't get stuck in it. Everything is fair game, anything can go. And now we're using VWL and Google Analytics and a lot more tracking into Google Analytics to tell us some of that data behind what's happening in there. And we just started doing live user testing as well. So besides the quantitative data we're using web services that actually have live users coming in that aren't familiar with your page and then going through and giving you kind of like we are with this podcast a stream recording with their … they're speaking while they're going through it and giving you all the pitfalls and challenges and get things that they like and don't like about it. So marrying that quantitative data with qualitative has really helped us just in this year alone. Mark: Yeah and just to be clear GWL being Google Web Optimizer I would assume right? Dustin: Yeah we use that as well, the search console but VWL is a— Mark: Oh VWL. Dustin: VWL. Mark: Okay. Dustin: In other words, it's a Visual Website Optimizer; VWL.com for user testing. There are other competitors for that but that's worked for us so far. Mark: If you can answer this … don't feel like you have to but how many experiments would you say that you guys run in any given month? Dustin: Not that many. Because we were running at least … or I should say we wanted to run five to 10 in a week and just kind of push it up, push it up, push it up. But now we're content having more patience and so we want to get it right. So we're not being short sighted with it and now we're really trying to really just run things that don't interfere. It may just be one test a week, two tests a week at the most that we're introducing only because we want to compare apples to apples. So if we make too many variable changes then the numbers and the statistical significance get kind of skewed and then assumptions come into play. So we limit it to one to two now. Mark: All right so you're throwing around words statistical significance and you're looking at biases and you're looking at all these different assumptions that are coming into it but you started off on this without really any background in CRO and kind of this funnel optimization. Somebody listening to this that they just bought a business or maybe they're looking to do something similar on their own, what's a good starting point in your opinion for somebody that is just starting out in this area? Or maybe somebody that's intermediate and knows a little bit about it but hasn't really seen the returns yet from focusing on this continual tweaking and improvement? Dustin: Yeah I mean and you're right I didn't know anything coming in. So for me literally not having friends in the industry, peers of any sort, nobody around me locally, I rely heavily on podcast. You know podcast people speak freely, it's a casual environment, people want to help other people, like minded individuals and I benefited tremendously from podcasting just from learning. And of course now with hands on training, being … working in an environment in the tech space you're learning things every day. So one, learn by doing. Two, reach out for the resources like podcasting. And then the third thing I would say too that is when you reach a point when you could come up for air I would encourage to try to go to different networking events and meet other individuals and just get their perspective outside of your own that they might share that maybe you wouldn't hear at podcasts. It might be more frank or direct or they might have encountered a situation that they can actually help you … give you advice for a scenario where as a podcast it's more educational and you're listening but you can't just jump in and ask the questions so to speak. So those are the three areas that I would focus on. Mark: Okay, cool. I'm going to change gears completely here and spend our last 10 minutes or so. I want to talk about the growth with your company. And in my experience, because I watched a lot of companies grow, you know people that I'm just friends with and we talk about the challenges. But then also people that I have been advising as well. And I tend to find that there is this … there are certain choke points with companies where they have troubles turning certain corners. You know when you're first starting up a company oftentimes that's when your revenues start hitting 250 300,000 and then there's another choke point once you get to about seven figures and trying to get up to the higher seven figure range so on and so forth. What's been your experience? You came on at a critical point with this company when you guys weren't really sure about the future and then you've been able to grow it since. What has been your experience with some of these choke points within the company's growth, the company's culture and I guess I should probably ask instead of assuming I mean have you guys experienced that? Dustin: Absolutely. You know it's funny because… and this is a great topic. We should spend some time on this. As an entrepreneur or as a small business owner on the startup of a small company and I kind of am speaking more in the vein of like bootstrapping because we've been self-funded from the beginning. We've never taken any rounds of funding so I don't have experience to speak on there. But as far as doing it yourself one thing I can say is focusing on … or I usually think that hiring people right is going to solve your problems. And it does … that comes into play later but it comes in very strategically later but what I figured out was that … like for example our biggest our advantages when we were smaller became our biggest challenges as we try to turn corners. And I'll elaborate a little bit on that and so for example in our industry we were bootstrapped, we're a small team, we're still a small team. We're competing side by side with companies that are Goliath's in the industry that have either been acquired or have raised funds and are billion dollar companies. And we're competing with these guys directly and we're a very small team. So we're probably 15 people in our office and then additional people in terms of remote resources outside of that. But what I'm getting at is that that worked into our advantage when we were small. So when you think about it we were able to think about it and have a conversation today and then we could start building it tomorrow. And we could … we were very efficient and we push and we work hard so we could roll things out at tremendous speed. And that kind of led some of the innovation that we now have that's really industry leading now at this point because we were small and we can move fast. We're still small but now that we've grown in size it's … you face new challenges right? And so the challenge for us now is now it's our disadvantage being this small. Because now we need to accelerate growth beyond where we are and our capacity is limited in terms of what our team could do beyond what they're doing now. Because as I mentioned earlier everybody is pushing, everybody is already at capacity. And so even though you feel like conceptually okay well I … we're managing the advertising so to speak, all the PPC and all that stuff. It's been self-managed all the way up until this year. We had to bring on a team to help manage that. We've had to bring on team members to help us in different areas from SEO, content marketing, we've expanded our dev team. So the other things that we're doing now to help turn the corner but what you realize is that you could keep iterating and moving but when your smaller you can solve problems quickly. Because the problems you have are generally something that can be solved quickly. When you grow, the challenge has become not overnight fixes. So you're going to spend a longer time fixing it and then for your growth, there's a reason why not everybody grows to be giant companies it's because it gets harder, it doesn't get easier. And so what we've realized too is we could see an opportunity and seize it and go take that hill so to speak and then we experience growth. We open up a new channel and we experience growth. Where we are now is we actually have to have a strategy and team to forecast ahead six months or more so we can invest in that today and then experience that growth hopefully six months, 12 months from now. So that's one area that we have certainly run into a wall on and had to figure out how to maneuver around it. Because you get used to thinking that your core strength and your competitive advantage is always your competitive advantage. So it's something like we've got to always be objective and look in the mirror and say oh wait a second is that now [inaudible 00:31:10.2] is this now the one thing that's holding us back? Maybe it's not so great. I need to think that was like what we hang our hat on but now you really got to think how to move forward and you have to remain objective about it. Mark: Why do you think that is? I mean why do you think that as companies grow … and this sounds actually by the way very similar to the same conversation I had with Rob Walling from Drip because they were the same sort of environment. A few dabs working together and they had an idea for something, they rolled it out and coded it out and pushed it out within a day and that was it. They were able to do that and then as they grew the same sort of challenges. Why do you think that is that as you grow it's not as easy to just flip out new solutions? Is it because there's more people involved or is it because the growth and the changes that you need to make are more sophisticated or … I mean what's going on there? Dustin: I think it's competition. Because once you kind of turn corners or try to go to the next level it's a new game. You're playing against different competitors and their strengths and what they do best and why they were in the top positions that you're taking market share away from is because they're doing something really well. And so you have to be able to then compete directly with them and do what they did well and take market share from them. So you have to constantly evolve. It's not just internally what's happening but just in the industry for competition, nothing in business is just standstill. So you're in the gaining realm or losing realm and when you reach new heights or next levels the competition gets more fierce and you have to have even deeper strategies. You have to be thinking future, you have to have more of a focus because we could cover a lot of ground and a lot of places and growth but it might be more short sighted. It might be just low hanging fruit and we're catching that. But at some point, you're going to run out of low hanging fruit. And so once you run out of low hanging fruit it becomes all about strategy and long term strategy because you have to build things that are scalable and you have to compete against these guys in the course of six to 12 months and beyond. So it really takes a different mindset to turn the corners. I mean you can operate in the same manner as the same culture and the same type of people and teammates but the game and the rules become more fierce. Mark: You said something a little bit ago about you used to think that the scale you just hired or something to that effect but then you kind of learned that that wasn't the case. Why is that? I mean obviously you need to hire to scale at some point but— Dustin: I think a lot of people try to scale too fast and I don't … I mean some people can do it and some people are that experience so they can pull it off. For us, if we could have hired earlier then we potentially could have got further faster. We were reluctant to hire rapidly because we knew we were growing but we didn't want to take the growth for granted. Expecting the growth to come so we would make sure that we had the business, captured the business and then when the need was dire we bring somebody in. But honestly, if we would have brought somebody in and forecasted at six months in advance we might have been able to keep the momentum going faster. But looking back in hindsight I do think there was some benefits of not hiring faster because again we focused on product and we focused on our customers. And so the product was constantly improving and essentially when you think about scaling what are you really scaling right? You've got to have a strong foundation to scale or build on top of it. So not hiring people at that time … I mean the last several years and the investments we've made and you know we weren't … in our industry we were known but outside our industry, it's not like we're flying on anybody's radar. And that's because we have our head down and we were just building the product. And now that the product and the machine and so on is really strong in terms of foundation now we're hiring rapidly in a sense. We're really trying to accelerate it and bring on very strategic hires to fill specific niches or voids that we need to fill in terms of areas of expertise. And so it's working for us now in terms of hiring for your right and not to hire to scale but at the same time if we wouldn't have focused so much on the product and building the foundation that is … you know everything innovative and automated that we have it could be the death of us. We could grow too fast and then if the machine doesn't work then you got sizable problems and when you're talking about thousands of users and thousands of people on your platform, it's not just two people calling and saying [inaudible 00:36:02.9] we're talking about your phones ringing by the thousands and people trying to get those needs resolved. Mark: It's fascinating. With culture and when you're growing a company like that and you're bringing on people and hiring quickly after a certain amount of time because you need to be able to support that growth. Have you guys been able to keep that kind of grinder spirit that you seem to exude with every time I talk to you? You know it's that classic entrepreneur hustle. Have you been able to keep that culture with your company? Dustin: We have. So that's a big deal for us too. I mean the people that you worked alongside with and the people that you entrust in helping to make decisions and contribute they kind of have to be in line with your philosophy and with the rest of the team. Otherwise, they're searching between team or there's a conflict of philosophies. And it's a lot easier if there's a culture fit to be able to rally everybody together for the common good and push forward. So in a lot of ways … in our case we certainly want people who are capable but if we had a scale of one to 10 and the most talented person was a ten we would still rather work with eight. Let him come on to the team out work everybody, fit with the culture and then we're not going to have the kind of pitfalls or speed bumps that we may have if we have friction with somebody. So we definitely identify and work better with those types of folks and at the same time, I think that they appreciate that about us as well. Because depending on what environment they came from if they had the same spirit or they're a fit for our culture generally it's a place they like to work and with an environment people that they want to invest their time with. So I think that's been huge for us and up until this point it's work and as we continue to scale and grow it becomes more of a challenge to try to keep everybody in the same culture fit. But it's important to hire slow and make sure you get the right people than to hire fast and then be reverse engineering that and figuring out how to let them go and get somebody else then. It's counterproductive. Mark: Right we've gone a little bit over time but mainly because it has been a fascinating conversation so any last bits that you would want to put in or if anyone wants to reach out to you are they able to do so? Dustin: Yeah, absolutely my e-mail address is ray@incfile.com I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, my name is Dustin Ray or my handle on Instagram or anywhere else would be drayonline. But if I was going to leave any other nugget of information with folks just from our experience or my experience one thing that people kind of find interesting but I think is very important is that a lot of people in our society try to focus on self-improvement. We all work on self-improvement but I think it kind of gets lost in transition with entrepreneurs because we're constantly … we're builders and we want to improve but society kind of teaches us in a way to work on our weaknesses. If you're already good at something don't worry about that, you've got to worry on what you're not good at and improve in that area. And really just through experience life not just business, I kind of think it's more important to focus on your strengths as for a self-improvement and be self-aware to say this is the area that I'm good at let me build you, fill gaps, and bring on people to help me execute whatever the task at hand is. But I think too many people focus on improving on what they're not good at. Like for example, we ran a graphic design business for a while, okay I was interested in design. I like design. If I stuck there and invested my time into getting better at design and using Photoshop yeah I'm going to improve. I'm going to get better. But at the end of the day, my best is going to be mediocre. So I'm never going to be able to compete with the guy who's a phenomenal designer. So rather than focusing on your weaknesses just be mediocre at them, I think you got to double down on your strengths. Be self-aware and know what you're good at. And I think it kind of encompasses more of a positive mindset when you're focusing with confidence on what you're good at. You know even when you're trying to improve on what you're not good at it's kind of a negative feeling right? It's kind of you know you're not good at it and you're kind of getting down about it because that's human nature but if you … you know the entrepreneur journey is tough so if you focus on your strengths and bring people on to help you where you need I think you could get further faster. Mark: Well, don't tell my kids that because I keep telling them to work on the stuff that they're struggling with in school. But I think when you are applying it where you're applied it you're 100% right. Dustin: Your kids they're learning right so they don't know exactly what they're good at and what they're not so I do the same for my kids. Mark: Right. Dustin: You're teaching them to work through the problems. More problem solving than self-improvement at this point. Mark: Right. Exactly and also if you want to become an all-around good person work on finding those things. But you're right as far as with your business and entrepreneurs and we see this with buyers all the time. Buyers that just kill it are the buyers who come in and they know their strengths. They might be CRO gurus, they might be SEO gurus, they might be really really good at just setting up operations or what have you and they look for the businesses that are deficient in those areas so that they can take them. And those are the guys that come back with two X, three X, five X businesses in a few years because they've taken their strengths and they're not going to bother trying to work on the stuff that they're bad at. They're going to outsource that if they have to, make sure that somebody else is taking care of it and they won't deal with it and it works. Dustin: That is so true. I gave up Mark … I gave up on trying to be smarter. I said well I'm going to self-improve but I'm not going to get any smarter so now I tend to focus more of my time on becoming a better leader than trying to get smarter. And so you can only build a company so big on your own so if you want to get smarter you're only going to get it so big, you're going to have to work with more people and bring in people to grow a sizeable company. So for myself today I try to focus on being a better leader and working with people and empowering them to be the smartest person in the room. Because their areas of expertise, they are always going to be smarter and better than I would be in that space. So I just try to focus on becoming a better leader and I gave up on trying to be smarter. Mark: I love it. That sounds like a great way to end this episode of you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on this has been awesome. Dustin: No, I can't thank you enough for inviting me. I hope your audience gets something from it and I'm looking forward to catching up with you soon. Mark: Sounds good. Links and Resources: IncFile Dustin's Instagram Dustin's LinkedIn

Whether you have a website or landing page or are about to build one, now is the best time to start optimizing for conversions. Data scientist and conversion rate expert Brian Massey is here to talk about the latest tools and methods to turn your landing page into a money making machine. Thanks to new tools, apps, and computing power, there is no excuse not to optimize your website. These tools can help you truly understand the user experience and how to get the outcomes that you desire. We talk about new tools, smart tactics, and how data driven design is the future of digital marketing. Find Out More About Brian Here: Conversion SciencesBrian Massey on LinkedIn@bmassey on TwitterBrian Massey on FacebookYour Customer Creation Equation In This Episode: [01:29] How Brian began in the conversion world. He is a computer programmer by training, but he was drawn to sales. [02:06] He got involved with semiconductor sales after college. He then moved to coding and started his own business in the 90s. [02:33] This was a time when he worked with Internet graphics with a dial-up connection. [02:47] He then started using his own analytics package to help companies build out their lead generation platforms. [03:06] In 2006, Brian saw the Wizard Academy presentation. For him, this put language to conversion optimization. [03:45] With Brian's varied background as a computer programmer, corporate salesperson, corporate marketer, and entrepreneur, he knew being a conversion scientist was right for him. [04:07] Why Brian wears the lab coat? He has always been a science geek and loved Bill Nye the Science Guy. [04:40] He wanted to introduce some kitsch and some camp. Introducing science into his work added fun.   [05:27] How we need to stand out and be remarkable in the real world and the online world.work makes it fun. [05:54] The worst mistake happening these days with conversion optimization. Moore's law of doubling transistors every year. We have amazing tools from the cloud to mobile. It's easier now than ever to test. [07:50] When data was hard to collect in was expensive. Then assumptions had to be made. [08:20] Now data can be discovered for A/B testing to usability. [08:48] People who are still using the old “Mad Men” design process are in trouble. [09:35] How agencies have the option of creating data based designs based on real user based data and tool sets. [10:11] A well executed strategy for using your data. [10:35] A Landing page example. The page needs to keep the promise that was made and get the visitor to do something. [11:24] At the beginning, we might take a guess. Then we can look at popular email subject lines, PPC ads, and data that has been converting. [12:39] Also check out mobile visitors click to call. [12:50] The copywriter needs to understand the visitors and build the personas and get the message right. [13:08] Run your images and headlines through something like Usabilityhub. [14:23] Use eye tracking studies like Sticky.ai to make sure that your users are actually looking at what you want them to look at. [15:06] You can also use heat map reports and watch session recordings. Also run analytics and implement A/B traffic testing. [16:01] Brian uses these interim tools because they have six months to deliver. They do free unlimited user testing. [16:51] At first, look at other sources of data that aren't part of the landing page. Then move on to monitoring data on the landing page. [17:02] Usability tools like Helio are great for mockups. [17:14] You can do a five-minute test, a quick test, or a question test. These services provide the panels. It's not as good as A/B testing, but it will provide data. [18:42] UserTesting.com is also an amazing tool. [19:20] Once you have your first idea then you can turn to Crazy Egg for heat map reports or inspectlet for session recordings or even Hotjar. [19:55] Run Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics underneath the site. [19:58] Then you can pick up Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely or Omniconvert or convert.com or Google Optimize. [20:31] Sticky.ai uses the camera to see how people are interacting with your web pages. [22:29] With modern tools you can see what information spikes when people are watching your video. This gives you cues as to whether you should place the information on the top or not. [23:22] Facebook can also bring people to ads that are very much like your prospects and customers. You can also see which images and words get clicked through the most. [24:08] This data can eliminate poor options. [26:03] Optimizing a website and mobile versus desktop. Get data from a landing page, and if it's not performing well, check to see if people can see the call to action. You can use something like Hotjar to find out when people are scrolling off of the page. [27:23] You can check the pricing page with a heat map from Crazy Ggg.This tells you where people click and where their mouse is moved. This will show you what features they are interested in and where you should put them on the page. [28:25] Narrowing it down to the ideas that are most likely to move the needle. Real traffic A/B testing is best for this. [28:53] Now put the test on Usabilityhub. [29:30] Once you have an idea of the data then you can have the designer create a page. Once again, it's time for further testing. [30:01] It's an iterative process that expands the testing and development cycle. [30:31] Being underwater is the part of the page that is actually not being seen. [32:53] Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely we are the most common tools that Brian uses. He also uses Sentient for AI. [35:44] Creating an A/B test for a submit button on a lead generation page. Testing images, headlines, and buttons. Address the different kinds of visitors that will visit the page. Action oriented or methodical. [37:51] Are any of these words being tested in ads? Narrow it down to four different words. Then open a tool like Visual Optimizer. [38:56] The test needs to run to statistical significance. Turn off loser tests. [40:02] Testing to statistical significance. Configure the tool correctly using a statistical significance calculator. The transactions determine significance. [42:28] Surprising tests that Brian has discovered. Carousels work against conversions. They tested a client requested carousel and it had over a 30% lift. [43:53] Beautiful pages don't always win against ugly. [44:48] Digital marketers need to use these tools. You can't guess your way to user data anymore. [47:55] Best takeaways from the course. Setting up the digital lab. Choosing tools and free plugins. How the design process has changed and understanding analytics. User testing. Landing page best practices. Choosing copy ,headlines, and images through to A/B testing. [49:34] You can be a scientist and earn your lab coat. It will fundamentally change your success as a digital marketer. Links and Resources: Conversion Sciences Brian Massey on LinkedIn @bmassey on Twitter Brian Massey on Facebook Your Customer Creation Equation The Wizard Academy Gordon Moore - Moore's Law Usabilityhub Bill Nye Clickable Numbers Sticky.ai Helio UserTesting.com Crazy Egg Inspectlet Hotjar Adobe Analytics Google Analytics Visual Website Optimizer Optimizely Omniconvert Convert.com Google Optimize Conversion Science Graphic Sentient Visual Website Optimizer Traffic Estimator ABTestGuide.com Udemy Landing Page Experiment Conversion Optimization Course (FREE CRO Training) Link to the Paid Course (Special Code: Marketing Speak) Ghostery

In episode #27, Wilco will share his split-test geekiness with all of you. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:25: You better get ready for some marketing geekiness. 00:55: Converted 83% better than my original version of that page. 02:55: Now, the first tip I want to give you is that you should not start running a split-test. 03:22: First, I’m just throwing something out, see if something even has potential. 04:16: My point here is that I only start split-testing once I know if something kind of works. 04:47: Now, the second thing that you need to do is to aim for big differences. 05:37: The main headline is like what really draws people into it. 07:00: You want to make sure that you have enough traffic. 10:30: My point here is that when you are doing a split-test, you need to know what you’re optimizing for, what your end goal is because sometimes, you’re looking at the wrong goals. 11:20My point here is that you need to make sure that you have the right goal in mind. 11:40 You need to have patience 13:00 Keep track of all of your results. Transcription:                   You better get ready for some marketing geekiness because today, I’m actually sharing my split-test geekiness with all of you. Hey, it’s Wilco de Kreij here. Just this morning, I wrapped up a split-test that I actually had forgotten about, so this split-test has been running for a while. I didn’t even look at the stats until this morning, and when I checked the stats, I noticed that the winning one, the variation that I was trying out actually converted 83% better than my original version of that page. This is on a money page, right? This was a page where I’m actually selling something, so 83% higher conversions, that’s actually insane. It’s almost twice the amount of sales for the exact amount of traffic, right?              Obviously, I figured like, “Hey, I need to record something about split-testing to my audience because it is so, so important. It can be the best thing in your business. For those who already know me, I’m a bit of a marketing nerd. I actually like doing split-test, so I’m running split-tests on a lot of things, right? It all starts, obviously, with like things like the ads that I’m running, but also on like opt-in pages that I’m running. If I’m using UpViral, for example, I always split-test the opt-in the page. I split-test all my sales pages. Like you have no idea how much I split-test. I just do it because … not just because I like doing split-test, but also because it is the best way to learn, right?              It’s one thing to learn from others to see like, “Hey, what are they doing?” but it’s another thing to actually try different things out yourself and actually knowing like, “All right, so I tried out these three things, and from these three things, number three actually works best. Now, why is that? Why is that?” So then, I’m diving in. I’m going to break it down, and that’s actually … like that’s been probably my main way of learning things, just by seeing what works instead of guessing, right?              For that reason, I wanted to talk about split-testing because there are some things you need to do while doing a split-test, but more … Perhaps, even more important is there are some things you should absolutely not do because if you do these things, it’s wrong. Then, you’re basically doing … Like instead of like improve a conversion, you might actually be breaking them or you might not even get any results because of it. For that reason, I wanted to talk about five tips that I think you should be doing or should not be doing when going to run a split-test.             Now, the first tip I want to give you is that you should not start running a split-test and like that sounds right, right? I’m just saying that split-test is the best thing ever since … the best thing since sliced bread, and now I’m saying you should not be running a split-test. That’s right. You should not. You should not start out running a split-test. Like on most of my campaigns that I run, I don’t immediately start creating a lot of different split-tests, right?             First, I’m just throwing something out, see if something even has potential, right, because like if you’re going to split-test everything that you create right from the start, it’s going to slow the whole process down. Let’s say you have a new product in mind or you have a new service in mind and you want to bring that out to the market. You could either create multiple sales pages, multiple opt-in page. You could make everything perfect, perfect, perfect, and plan it all out, and after a couple months, release it, or you can just … right away like start a webinar. For example, get people to sign up. Introduce your product that you have even if you don’t even have a sales page yet. Like just get the word out as soon as possible and see if people even respond to your product or service.              That is just an example, but my point here is that I only start split-testing once I know if something kind of works, and from there, I start improving, but I don’t start out running a split-test usually because it just slows the whole process down, and I prefer to move fast. If something isn’t even remotely working, then why would I split-test that? Like if something is not working at all, then the best case scenario of a split-test is finding something that doesn’t work at all and almost doesn’t work at all. I hope that makes sense, so don’t start split-testing right from the start, but wait until you have something that you feel that is going to work. From there, you can actually find and improve your winning variation, for example.              Now, the second thing that you need to do is to aim for big differences. Don’t go split-test to see what color of your button would be best, whether it’s yellow, green, or blue. At some point, it will make sense, right, to split-test that, but initially, you’ll always want to go for the biggest differences, so look at your page. Whatever you’re split-testing, whether it’s an opt-in page, whether it’s a sales page, but what would be the biggest … like what could have the biggest impact, the biggest different change, right?               For me, like I have a certain process. I always start with like the biggest change first. For example, if I’m split-testing an opt-in page, like the biggest change is going to be the hook, right? What is it even about? In my design, it’s usually the headline, for example. The main headline is like what really draws people into it, right, so I first do a split-test between that, and I don’t test out anything else and only after I find the right hook.             Like if one of those titles is actually the winner, then I go and tweak other things like maybe the sub-headline, or maybe the text on the call-to-action, or maybe if the design is a big part of the landing page, then maybe a completely different design. I’m not going to make small tweaks. I do it like completely different, and the reason why is because I want to have big changes, right, because if something is … If you’re just going to change the color of your button, like that’s going to maybe improve your conversion rate by 2%, and not just that like it’s not just the small difference. That’s not even the problem, right?             If I can get a 1% or 2% improvement every single day, I’d sign for that, but the problem is that because the difference is so small, it’s going to take a long time before you actually know for sure whether it’s converting because up until that point, you just … like it could be up and down like there’s too much variation. You’re just not going to know which significant certainty whether something is working best. The bigger the difference between various things you’re testing out, the faster you will get results, and that’s really what I’m after, right? I want to make fast changes. The bigger the differences, the faster you will have a significant data to know which conversion … which variation actually converts best.              Thirdly is also you want to make sure that you have enough traffic. It isn’t always easy. I know. If you don’t have enough traffic, then it might be difficult, but like especially if you do not have a lot of traffic, then do not start a split-test where you’re testing out six different things. Then, in that case, you just have two variations, right? You can test out multiple things, but in order to do that, you will need to have a lot of traffic in order to make it worthwhile. Obviously, I could go into the map, but I think for now, I just want to keep things simple.             It really comes down to like the more traffic you have, the faster you will know with a significant certainty whether something is actually converting better or not. If you do not have a lot of traffic, then that’s a problem. Like if you only have like … I don’t know, 50 visitors a day, then that’s going to be a problem, right? It’s going to be so much faster if you have more data, and that’s also one of the reasons why I spend a lot of money on Facebook ads, for example, because basically, I’m buying data. I’m buying to see what works and doesn’t work instead of waiting around. Once I know what works, then I can tweak that and send more traffic into that with auto-traffic streams like UpViral and content marketing. All those other kinds of things. I hope that explains this well. Make sure you have enough traffic before you start split-testing.             Number four is going to be maybe the most important one actually because … and actually, the case study, the results that I just shared with you that I figured out this morning is actually super, super, super relevant for that. With that split-test, a while ago, when I set it up, I actually set up multiple goals for that split-test, and this particular split-test, I’m using … I’m running it using Visual Website Optimizer, VWO.com.             What that tool allows me to do is I can actually set up multiple goals, so I can, for example, set up a goal saying like, “Hey. If they click on a button on that page, if they visit my thank-you page, so that I actually know that they made a purchase,” and the third goal of like how many revenue it would actually generate, so it also takes into account which package someone actually bought, whether someone bought a monthly package, a yearly package, et cetera.             Now, what I’ve done for this particular campaign is I’ve created multiple goals. One-half was the main goal that I was tracking, but I added multiple goals. I remember when I started this out, I didn’t have enough data. It didn’t have enough data, right? After the first couple days the test was running, I didn’t have a lot of data, so the easiest thing to look at was the click-out, right, the click rate because basically, it was a replay page for a webinar, and I looked at the stats saying like basically, “Which of these two variations triggered people to click on to the checkout page?” Right?              There was one variation out of these two that was the clear winner. Everyone … like not everyone obviously, but almost twice as many people … at least one and a half. Initially, it was twice. Later on, one and a half times the people clicked on the button to the checkout page. If I was looking at that data, then I would have picked that as the winner right away. It was clearly performing better in terms of click-throughs to the checkout page, but after I let the campaign run, after I let the campaign run, I actually noticed that the other page converted way better in sales, right?              My point here is that when you are doing a split-test, you need to know what you’re optimizing for, what your end goal is because sometimes, you’re looking at the wrong goals. Like if I would have looked at the amount of click-outs to my checkout page, to my page where people could actually make the purchase, then I would have picked the wrong one because the page that actually get people … Sorry. The page where people did not click as much as often to the actual checkout page, that one ended up converting better overall, right?             Even though a lot of people didn’t actually click on the link, those people that actually did click, they converted way better, right? My point here is that you need to make sure that you have the right goal in mind, and if you don’t have the right goal and you’re going to focus on, for example, click-outs while that’s not your end goal, then a winner which may seem like a winner could actually be your loser. If I would have went with that, I would have just lost the 83% conversion improvement that I just found this morning, right? It’s really important to pick the right goal, and that actually brings me to tip number five. Actually, I’m going to share six tips because I just remembered a very important one as well.             Number five is that you need to have patience. Like if you’re getting initial data, and you’re just having a couple sales, and it’s not significant yet, then do not stop the test because sometimes, initially, you might see like, “Oh, this is actually converting 40% better,” while it’s actually not like … There’s no way you can actually say something about the test because you haven’t had enough patience. You need to be patient in order to let the split-test run for a while.              For those of you who were asking how long should the test run, that totally depends on how much traffic you have, what the difference is in terms of the conversion between the two variations, how many … about the conversion rate is like, “Is it 2% to 3%, or is it 20 to 30%?” Think like that. Once again, I’m probably not going to go into the math right now, but let’s just say that you need to be patient. Obviously, I encourage everyone to … If you really want to dive into the stats, you can probably google for that, or if you ask me, maybe I’ll shoot another episode later on, but for now, I think I want to cover the basics.             So far, I’ve covered five, and that is to do not start split-testing right away. Aim for big differences. Have enough traffic, obviously, right? Test the right conversion. Make sure that you’re testing the right conversion. Number five, make sure you have patience, right? Number six is actually an important one as well, and I recently started doing that in a more detailed way is to keep track of all of your results, right?             I’ve been doing split-tests for years, and years, and years. A lot of the split-tests that I’ve been running like three, four years ago, I didn’t actually stored that data in a good format, so I don’t have access to all of my split-tests from like three, four years ago, which is weird because it’s actually the best learning material you can have, right?             All we’ve been doing for the last year or so is we’re actually documenting every split-test that we’re doing so we can actually draw conclusions like, “What do we expect to get out of a test? When did this start? How much traffic did it get? What are all the variations with like screen tilt and all that, and what’s the conclusion? Like what conclusion can we draw?” Based on that, we can learn, and learn, and learn. No, not just me, but the whole business as well because my team has access to that as well, so that’s my sixth tip.             If you are doing split-test, create a Google Doc. Create something. It doesn’t really matter what it is, but create something where you’re keeping track of all of the split-tests that you are running. I just wanted to share that with all of you. I hope you appreciate that. Let me know if you are running split-tests as well so I know I’m not the only one geeking out on this kind of stuff, and I hope you have an awesome day.            

In episode #15 Wilco talks about on how to get more than 50% conversion rate on your opt-in pages. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:29: I got some pretty awesome stuff for you prepared, If you want to convert more traffic into leads and customers. 01:05: It's not easy to go offline. 01:51: I want to talk about is your conversion rate or pretty much how to get 56% or 55% conversion rates on your opt-in pages. 02:52: I actually convert, I think it was about 54%-55% of all traffic entered their email address. 03:36: Often we would start split testing. 04:01: I created five different pages, and every single page had the exact same copy. 04:30: First round is we split tested the design. 04:42: Second test, based on the winning design we then create five different ones, all with the same design but this time just a different title. 05:02: We try not to go for similar ones, we really try to go for big differences, a different kind of hook. 05:38: We actually got 54%-55% conversion rate. 05:57: Because that's usually what I do, I look at the page, and I think which factor is going to be the biggest influence. 06:06: Right now I'm looking and considering to change the opt-in button. 06:22: A page only converts well if you're getting the right kind of traffic. 06:43: For example, with Facebook ads, what I always make sure of is that I pretty much use the same wording on the actual ad versus what's on the landing page. 08:34: If you're doing online marketing it's the best thing ever that you can track everything you can. 08:44: One tool that I really recommend, is called Visual Website Optimizer. 09:01: Inside of Google Analytics you'll find content experiments. 10:24: Never ever run traffic without using it for split testing as well, because that's just as valuable as the actual customer that you're getting as well. Transcription:                         Hey, it's me Wilco de Kreij here, and I'm happy that you're tuning in today because I think I got some pretty awesome stuff for you prepared. If you want to convert more traffic into leads and customers. Right now it's Thursday, while I'm recording it. It's Thursday, so I've got one day left before my trip. On Saturday I'm flying out to Ecuador, which is pretty much the other side of the world for me. It's a 12 hour flight. Me and my wife are going to travel around, we're going to Ecuador as well as the Galapagos Islands to dive and see the turtles and whatnot.             As you can imagine, especially with a business like this ... Right now we have 15, 16 people or so in the business. It's not easy to go offline. It's not easy at all actually, and when I say offline I literally mean offline. For the first week or so, the first four or five days we're going into the jungle, and there is no electricity there. There is no nothing. There's just ... Complete detox from all the online stuff. Which, to be honest, scares the heck out of me. I'm just a bit of a control freak and I'm so used to be continuously online. Every single day of the week I'm online, so it's actually a good thing. I really don't want to, but at the same time I know that once I'm going to be offline for a while it's going to be a good thing. It's good to take a step back and look at the grand scheme of things, to work on strategy and move forward.             Today, what I want to talk about is your conversion rate or pretty much how to get 56% or 55% conversion rates on your opt-in pages. I remember when I saw other marketers in the past, when I was still starting out, I saw other marketers post statistics on Facebook or on Twitter or wherever, they were talking about their results. That they had opt-in pages converting at 55 or 60% and those kind of numbers. I always thought, Wow, that's like ... That seems like impossible, or maybe just with a small volume." So I was like, "How can you get 50 or 60% conversion rates for your opt-in page?" To me, I knew it was possible because I saw how all these other people talk about it, but I just wasn't able to do it.             Fast forward a couple of years. Obviously I learnt a lot, and I want to share my experience with that, because originally I posted on Facebook one of the results of one of our funnels, one of our opt-in pages. On that opt-in page I actually convert ... I think it was about 54%, 55% of all traffic entered an email address. Which I think is pretty sweet. Obviously that didn't happen overnight, so on this podcast I want to give you the backstory of how that's happening.             Obviously, if I would be able to create an opt-in page that would convert that good right away then I'm a magician or I'm very lucky. Usually it's not like that. There has to be a certain formula in place or certain things that you need to do. What I did, and it's basically what I do for every single opt-in page that we create if we're planning to drive a lot of traffic to it, is often you would start split testing. That shouldn't be a surprise, but most people, they just do one split test and that's it, or they don't really know what to split test.             Now, in this example what I did was ... First of all, I created five different layouts, completely different layouts, and the reason why I did that ... Normally that wouldn't be my first step, but I just wasn't sure whether the layout was any good, in the actual design of the page. I created five different pages, and every single page had the exact same copy. The exact same text, just the design was different. I created five, because I just wanted to have some good numbers and we have a decent amount of traffic to go through. If you don't have that much traffic, I recommend to just go for two or three, because the more options you add the more difficult it's going to be before you have any significant results.             First round is we split tested the design. After we got some traffic coming to the door, we then knew which design was converting best. All right, sure, awesome. What most people do, they do a split test and that's pretty much it. That's not where you should stop. Second test, based on the winning design we then create five different ones, all with the same design but this time just a different title. I just wanted to test out which title actually worked best. Which was the main headline on top of the page.             Because of that we had five completely different ones. We try not to go for similar ones, we really try to go for big differences, a different kind of hook. If you just change a few words, the difference is not going to be that big. You want to test out completely different hooks of how you could describe what you are offering, to see what works. Once you know which hook works best, then later on you can start tweaking the actual title and see if you can get it to convert even higher.             Like I said, we split tested five different designs, then we split tested five different headlines, and from that test we actually got 54%, 55%-ish conversion rate. Obviously we don't stop there, so right now I'm setting up a new split test based on the winner of those two tests. Now I'm actually deciding what factor I think will the biggest influence from the page, because that's usually what I do. I look at the page, and I think which factor is going to be the biggest influence. Where can I have the biggest gain or the biggest win. Right now I'm looking at and considering to change the opt-in button. The button that people actually click before they opt-in. I will be probably creating three or four different variations. I will continuously be split-testing it.             Now obviously it's not just your split test. A page only converts well if you're getting the right kind of traffic. In this case we're driving Facebook ads to this page. What's really important with this, is that wherever your traffic is coming from, there should be synergy between where they're coming from versus where they end up on. For example with Facebook ads, what I always make sure of is that I pretty much use the same wording on the actual ad versus what's on the landing page. If, on your landing page you're going to say, "Hey, download this checklist" for example, then on the opt-in page you're going to say download this Ebook, then some people might think "Hey, wait a second, I was here to download a checklist. Where is that checklist?" So you're going to lose them. You're going to make sure that whatever you're promising them in your Facebook ad, that you're pretty much using almost the identical same text.             If they click on your ad it means that that text that you wrote, the ad copy that you wrote on your Facebook ad, for one reason or another it attracts them. They had the urge to click on that ad based on what they read, so why would you try to change that and then test again whether that other description that you have would also interest them. What you should instead, just use the exact same wording. Of course you can make little tiny tweaks in order for it to make sense, but in general what you should have on your ad on Facebook should be similar as what you have on your opt-in page. So there's one smooth ride from the moment they click on the Facebook ad there should be no thinking. They should be like, "Yeah, I just have to do this and then I'll get whatever I'm promised." They shouldn't ask themselves, "Hey, do I want this?" Because they should make that decision before they click on your Facebook ad and from that point onwards they just need to continue without making it more complex than it should be.             I'm not sure if this helps you, I just want to share this with you, so that I give you a bit of an insight. A lot of people, they see these kinds of numbers like, "Aw, yeah. Awesome conversion rates." And I ask them, "How's it going for you? What do you do?", like "Yeah, I don't really split test."             To me, that doesn't make sense. If you're doing online marketing it's the best thing ever that you can track everything you can. If you were looking for split testing, you don't don't know how to do it, one tool that I really really recommend, I use them a lot, is called Visual Website Optimizer. I use it a lot. If you don't have the budget, you can even use Google Analytics. It's not as user friendly in my experience, but it definitely works as well. Inside of Google Analytics you'll find content experiments. If you search for content experiments you'll find it and it's actually free, which is pretty awesome. To me it didn't seem as accurate as Visual Website Optimizer, but sometimes we even just do it manually. Just keep track of the numbers manually.             We just literally, for every single opt-in page, as well as how many people actually opted in, I just put it into Excel and then based on that I check which one actually wins. It doesn't even have to be super complex. Sometimes the old fashioned way works as well. No matter how you do it, the important thing is that you should do it. If you want to get epic conversion rates, and obviously that doesn't just go for your opt-in page but also for a sales page and whatnot. If you're not running split test then you're wasting traffic.             In fact, right today we're actually firing up new Facebook ads and I'm pretty sure that the initial round of Facebook ads, it's not going to be profitable. The funnel is not that good yet, but I wanted to run it anyway and the sole purpose of that is to gather data. I want to split-test which Facebook ad works best. I want to split-test which opt-in page works best. By the time we get the rest of the funnel done, I already have data to see which opt-in page converts and whatnot. I already have a better understanding of what moves my audience. What triggers my audience to opt-in and to take action and whatnot. Even if it doesn't make me any profit right away I have that data. Never ever run traffic without using it for split testing as well, because that's just as valuable as the actual customer that you're getting as well.             That's what I wanted to share with all of you. Like I said I have one more day left before I start my trip. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to record more episodes during my trip. If not, I'll get back to all of you by the end of February. For now, I want to wish you all an awesome day. Bye bye.      

In Episode #141, Eric and Neil discuss the ways you can make changes to your website without the help of developers. Tune in to know that you do NOT have to be a technical person to know the ways around your site and to use the tools that can help you make the changes you need. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Make Changes to Your Website Without the Help of Developers 01:06 – Google Tag Manager allows you to make adjustments to pixels 01:46 – Segment.io is a paid alternative for Google Tag Manager 02:09 – The key is to make changes without having to wait for your developers 02:42 – Neil wants to make a few small changes without having to rely on developers 02:49 – Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer and Crazy Egg have A/B testing with WYSIWYG tools 03:57 – Google Tag Manager allows you to use other tools within your website 04:16 – Watch tutorials of Google Tag Manager Trainer in Youtube 04:58 – Try to get your developers to use WordPress to put up your content as Wordpress is very user friendly 05:35 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: You do NOT need a developer to make changes to your website. Coding is not necessary to be able to touch up your website. There are a variety of tools available online that will help you become self-reliant in making those changes to your site. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #141, Eric and Neil discuss the ways you can make changes to your website without the help of developers. Tune in to know that you do NOT have to be a technical person to know the ways around your site and to use the tools that can help you make the changes you need. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: How to Make Changes to Your Website Without the Help of Developers 01:06 – Google Tag Manager allows you to make adjustments to pixels 01:46 – Segment.io is a paid alternative for Google Tag Manager 02:09 – The key is to make changes without having to wait for your developers 02:42 – Neil wants to make a few small changes without having to rely on developers 02:49 – Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer and Crazy Egg have A/B testing with WYSIWYG tools 03:57 – Google Tag Manager allows you to use other tools within your website 04:16 – Watch tutorials of Google Tag Manager Trainer in Youtube 04:58 – Try to get your developers to use WordPress to put up your content as Wordpress is very user friendly 05:35 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: You do NOT need a developer to make changes to your website. Coding is not necessary to be able to touch up your website. There are a variety of tools available online that will help you become self-reliant in making those changes to your site. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Today I'm joined by a man who envisions a world where every business tests their ideas. He formed his own conversion optimization agency ‘Dayley Conversion’ - in 2014, which later became part of ‘Disruptive Advertising’. Welcome to DMR, Chris Dayley. On this episode of Digital Marketing Radio we discuss split-testing, with topics including: Should every business be split-testing the performance of their web pages? From the businesses that you talk to, what percentage would you say are carrying out split tests on a regular basis? What’s wrong with just launching a new version of a page and comparing the results with previous conversion rates? What if you’re a busy marketer with little dev resource. Should you still be doing split testing? What kind of tests are really good to get started with? What would you say to someone who said to you that they’ve tried split testing before, and they didn’t notice any difference? What changes that you’ve made in the past have resulted in big improvements? Is it possible to make mistakes with split testing and actually make your conversion rate worse - if so, what kind of mistakes have you seen? [Tweet ""Do #ABtesting on your site. If you've tried it in the past, try it again." @Chrisdayley"] Software I couldn't live without What software do you currently use in your business that if someone took away from you, it would significantly impact your marketing success? Hotjar [Webiste visitor testing] Optimizely [Webiste visitor testing] Visual Website Optimizer [Webiste visitor testing] Adobe Target [Webiste visitor testing] What software don't you use, but you've heard good things about, and you've intended to try at some point in the near future? Adobe Recommendations [Tweak automated product recommendations] My number 1 takeaway What's the single most important step from our discussion that our listeners need to take away and implement in their businesses? Do A/B testing on your site. If you've tried it in the past, try it again. Think bigger. Think more dramatic. And if you need to, get some outside help to get additional ideas. But if you're not testing on your website, then you are missing half of the digital marketing pie. You're just sending traffic to a site that you assume is working.

Iedereen wil A/B testen tegenwoordig. Maar helaas is het niet altijd zinvol. Het kan zelfs een enorme verspilling van je tijd (en bezoekers) zijn. In deze aflevering ga ik in gesprek met Joris Bryon. Met zijn bedrijf Yorro helpt hij bedrijven bij het optimaliseren van hun conversies. En begrijp me niet verkeerd hij is gek op A/B testen en doet het voortdurend maar wel alleen als het echt zinvol is. Ik vraag Joris wanneer het zinvol is. Zo zegt Joris dat het vooral nuttig wordt bij veel traffic maar ja, wat vindt Joris veel traffic? En wat nou als ik wel wil A/B testen maar ik heb minder traffic? Joris legt uit waar je op moet letten als je start met A/B testen en welke verwachtingen je mag hebben. Ook deelt hij een aantal handige tools. Én aan het einde van deze aflevering een nieuwe rubriek: De Bloopers. Vele plezier met deze nieuwe aflevering van de Frankwatching podcast. Contact met Jelle: WhatsApp: +31(0)6-19900000 Twitter: http://twitter.com/jelledrijver YouTube: http://youtube.com/jdrijver SnapChat: snapchat.com/add/jelledrijver Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/jelledrijver Instagram: http://instagram.com/jelledrijver Contact met Joris: https://be.linkedin.com/in/jorisbryon http://yorro.co Tools: https://vwo.com/ (Visual Website Optimizer) https://www.optimizely.com/ http://changeagain.me http://effectiveexperiments.com Artikel op Frankwatching: https://www.frankwatching.com/archive/2016/10/03/wanneer-en-waarom-ab-tests-zinloos-zijn/ Zoekwoorden: Joris Bryon, Jelle Drijver, Frankwatching, A/B testen, split tests, split testen, splittesten, conversies, conversie optimalisatie, conversions

In this episode we're diving into conversion rate optimization with our special guest Momoko Price of Kantan Designs. You'll learn why research is key to any CRO activity, why elimination testing is awesome, what tools you can use to split-test your pages, and how to plan the entire testing process. Podcast feed: subscribe to http://simplecast.fm/podcasts/1441/rss in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes or Stitcher. Show Notes Momoko's company: Kantan Designs Copy Hackers by Joanna Wiebe Hotjar — tool for heatmaps Respond — one of Momoko's clients acquired by Buffer ConversionXL by Peep Laja Optimize Smart by Himanshu Sharma Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik Voice Of the Customer (VOC) by iSixSigma Message mining: G2 Crowd, Merchant Maverick Rev.com — good transcription services Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer — testing tools Evan Miller's Sample Size Calculator Email Momoko: momoko@kantan.io Leave a Review Reviews 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. Don't Miss the Online Workshop In case you missed it, we're starting a two-part online workshop today! It's called Fundamental UX Practices (private beta). The first part will take place today, August 17th, from 11:00am to 1:30pm EST. Tickets start at $69 per seat. Learn more and book your tickets here.

Hi, my name is Jeremy Reeves. Through my various products and services, I help business owners increase profits, gain more time freedom and get more consistent cash flow (among dozens of other benefits) by building sales funnels. I've worked with the worlds leading entrepreneurs, adding literally tens of millions to their bottom lines... I've been asked to speak at private, "invite-only" marketing events for industry leaders... I've written for the top blogs in the marketing industry such as Visual Website Optimizer, KISSMetrics, CrazyEgg, Social Triggers and countless others... But but before we get into that, let's start at the beginning... On the day after I asked my wife to marry me, I sat next to her and made a promise. I promised her that no matter how hard I had to work... no matter what it took or what we had to go through... I was going to become successful enough to support her so she could raise our future children. At this point - I had NO idea how I would do it. We were flat broke. We could barely afford to put food on the table, let alone have kids and let her stay at home to raise them. But I made her a promise... and I keep my promises. She's worth every second of struggle we went through in the early days... Since I had a degree in human psychology, I realized that wouldn't cut it. I've always been fascinated by how the mind works and why people make certain decisions, so wrapping my life around that strength seemed like a good idea. So I Became A Direct Response Copywriter... My typical day looked like this: Get up at 5:30 a.m., working on my business until I had to leave around 7:30 for work. Work all day, bringing salesletters with me so I could edit them during down times Get out of work, shower, and leave for job #2 Work until about 10 p.m., again working on my business during down times at my day job Eventually I left my job and made the leap to making my business full-time. Within my first full year as a direct response copywriter, I was outperforming people charging 5x what I was. Within 2 years I was outperforming people charging $15,000, plus royalties, for a single salesletter. Needless to say, I fulfilled my promise to her. She's able to stay home and raise these amazing little boys below (and the crazy dogs) and focus on THEM, with zero money worries But Becoming A "Copywriter" Was Just Step 1... One day after analyzing my strengths and weaknesses - it clicked. I realized that my strength wasn’t just keeping people glued to my writing, it was combining innovative marketing strategies and positioning tactics (like building a sales funnel) with world-class copy. While most "copywriters" focus on writing - I focused on the things that made more of an impact. The big ideas. The positioning. The congruency between products. The back-end. Simple followup systems. Today, I'm considered one of the worlds leading authorities on building sales funnels. Some most well-known marketing blogs in the world ask me to write for them about building sales funnels. A few of them include Visual Website Optimizer, KissMetrics, CrazyEgg, BidSketch, Social Triggers and many others. I've been asked to speak for private, "invite-only" marketing events... I've worked with some of the world's leading entrepreneurs (listed below) and have a blast doing it. I run my own side business - www.Kinowear.com - which gets over 500k visitors per year and is ranked 1 of the top 10 websites in the industry by one of my own competitors. So the question is... can I help YOU grow your business? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Ben transitions from Upcase to Formkeep, so too will the podcast transition to an open discussion around growing thoughtbot's internal projects and maintaining them as businesses, highlighting our hopes, experiments, tactics, failures, and success along the way! Today Ben and new co-host Chris discuss finding that magic feature or metric around which to structure pricing, selecting the right framework for your app, and customer acquisition tactics. Formkeep Upcase Price Intelligently Audience Ops Bootstrapped Web Podcast Middleman Traction Wistia Turnstile Rob Walling on Giant Robots Visual Website Optimizer Mastering Git course on Upcase Chris on Twitter

Stephen is the CEO of Predictive ROI and host of the Onward Nation podcast. He is the author of two bestselling books, speaker, trainer, and his digital marketing insights have been featured in SUCCESS, Entrepreneur, The Washington Post, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, and other media.   Good Morning Onward Nation...I’m Stephen Woessner. Since the advent of the commercial Internet, I have collected tens of thousands of data points that have given me the ability to identify what I call the 8 Money Draining Mistakes. These are the things -- the simple mistakes -- that can cause of business to leak serious money every single day. Cash being sucked right out of the company. I devoted last week’s solocast...episode 127...to taking you on a deep dive into the 8 Money Draining Mistakes. But say you studied last week’s solocast -- and have taken corrective action and you have plugged all of the holes in the bottom of the boat. All of the leaks -- the money draining mistakes have been solved. Awesome! The next step is to master and apply what I call the 8 Money Making Opportunities. These 8 opportunities are like a big outboard motor that you put onto the backend of the boat you just fixed -- and then you can zoom across the lake. These 8 opportunities are where ROI in your online marketing gets turbocharged. So in today’s solocast, I am going to take you on a deep dive into the 8 Money Making Opportunities. But why take you on that journey? On the Predictive ROI side of our business, I see it all the time: many business leaders feel overwhelmed by digital marketing or the strategies being applied by the people within their company. Business owners have told me that they often worry they’re not keeping up with the latest advances but fear looking foolish if they ask for help. After 20-years of academic research and private sector experience at Predictive ROI, we’ve developed proven and reliable ways to increase website traffic, leads, and sales. I am going to share the best of what we have with you right now. And if you go to predictiveroi.com/3download you can get access to a private VIP video training series that I created -- it walks alongside of this solocast and provides and even deeper step-by-step process to follow. Each video is 100 percent free training -- I am standing at the whiteboard -- sketching out the recipes so you can put that into practice in your business straightaway. So let’s dig into 8 Money Making Opportunities. Money Making Opportunity #1: HARMONIZE OFFER WITH NEED. The first money maker is adapted from what SUCCESS Magazine publisher Darren Hardy calls “the white knight strategy”. Essentially, you take your X-Y-Z statement (for more on the X-Y-Z exercise, see Money Draining Mistake #2 in last week’s solocast) and then blend it with what you know about your client avatar (again, see Money Draining Mistake #5 for more on the client avatar strategy), and create a statement that shows prospects you have the solution to all their pain points. That makes an empathetic connection with your clients and prospects. Serve up your offer in a way that will inspire an emotional response from your client. For example, many of our clients have been burned by so-called experts, so we include a money back guarantee in our statement. This gives people a sense of relief at the low risk involved in their decision to engage our team. Use your new white knight statement in presentations, articles, proposals, books, training videos, or wherever you make an introduction to your company’s value. Money Making Opportunity #2: BUILD YOUR LIST. The most valuable asset of any business is the client list. To build your list you’ve got to develop a screaming cool offer, such as a free pdf, video series, or exclusive audio insights podcast. The value you create must be massive. Don’t hold back. Share your expertise and keep it focused in the area of your XYZ statement. Then, feature this offer throughout your site for maximum distribution. One of the best tools for maximizing distribution is WP Popup Magic. It's very simple to use. If your value exchange is truly valuable enough, 6 to 13 percent of the visitors to your site will give you their email address just to access what you’re offering. Money Making Opportunity #3: NURTURE RELATIONSHIPS AND INCREASE SALES. Once you have someone’s email, you can guide them into what John Jantsch, in his book "Duct Tape Marketing," calls “the know, like, and trust funnel.” Email marketing is the most effective way to build trust relationships with prospects. By giving, giving, giving to your list through content distribution, you create well-prepared prospects. Then when you offer something really awesome, like a discounted training program for a very limited time, you get immediate and intense conversions for huge revenue. Make your list members feel like they’re in on an exclusive conversation, like they’re sitting around a campfire among only a select few. When you send these Campfire Effect Emails™, you’ll be amazed at the response. Be sure to base your content on your client avatar’s pain points and your white knight statement. Money Making Opportunity #4: NO-FRICTION LEAD GENERATION. The form that visitors use to enter their email addresses needs to be in an environment that encourages trust. What is your form next to on your homepage? Ads? Your blog roll? Put that lead generating form next to a value exchange, such as an offer for a free download or video. You can even put your credentials adjacent to the form to help instill a sense of security in your qualifications as prospects hand over their contact information. Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, my guest for episode 41 of Onward Nation, taught me a very valuable lesson about friction and lead generation. Flint is the director of MECLABS and Marketing Experiments -- the leading researchers in online marketing for the past 15 years. During our interview...he explained that in your optin forms -- every field you include beyond just email -- will reduce your conversion rate by 50 percent. Every field, Onward Nation. Money Making Opportunity #5: CREATE ANTICIPATION. You need to continuously seed and open loops to your sales message within your email funnel, blog posts, webinars, and presentations. Within value based emails, be sure you’re not trying to sell anything. Just offer a tip—for example, one of 47 tips you have for increasing the value of your home. Deliver awesomeness one small piece at a time while mentioning that there are 47 tips total. That opens a loop in their minds, and they’ll be more inclined to read your email next time to learn the next tip. You can also tease your upcoming events, planting a seed that you’ll expand on in a later email dedicated to promoting the event. Money Making Opportunity #6: SOCIAL MEDIA DONE RIGHT. When visitors come to your website from Facebook, Twitter, or other social network, your conversion rate increases dramatically. In fact, social media visitors are 780 percent more likely to buy from you because they’re already social followers. This remarkable finding was part of my thesis at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. I later took the data set, methodology, and result outcomes and had them published in the Journal of E-business...a peer reviewed academic journal. And then I included it in my second book, "Increase Online Sales through Viral Social Networking." But why 780%? Because your connections -- your social media followers -- are further along in the know, like, and trust funnel than someone who finds you through a Google search. We’ve found that if you post twice a day, morning and afternoon, you’ll get and retain the most followers. Use our six to one ratio for posts: six professional or life posts for every one product or sales post. So create six posts related to events you’ve attended, awards you’ve received, blogs you’ve written, or vacations you’ve taken with your family. Let people get to know you. Then write one post that invites followers to buy now, download an offer, or attend a webinar. Our studies show that this strategy will increase site traffic by 23 percent. Money Making Opportunity #7: MULTIPLY CONVERSION RATE BY 200 TO 800%. We strongly encourage our clients to use Adroll.com, the leaders in ad retargeting, or re-marketing as it’s oftentimes called. Retargeting your site visitors means that after someone has visited your site but not converted, they’ll see your ads as they click around to other sites. These retargeted ads increase your conversion rates by 600 to 800 percent because they build on the familiarity prospects already have with your website. But here is the most often made mistake when marketers create a retargeting campaign. Don’t use retargeting to sell. Instead, use retargeting to give! Promote the screaming cool value exchange that leads to an optin. You will experience a much higher conversion rate and your list will grow so you can develop a relationship over time. Money Making Opportunity #8: AND FINALLY…CONDUCT A/B TESTING TO FURTHER INCREASE CONVERSION RATE. Before you make any major change to your site code, conduct A/B testing to see which changes produce positive results in your conversion rate. Online programs like? Visual Website Optimizer help you create a test in a few minutes. We have increased conversion rate by 200 percent through one A/B test. Remember to make one improvement at a time and see how your results change. By incorporating the 8 Money Making Opportunities, you’ll increase leads, conversions, and revenue. A consistent, test-as-you-go method will allow you to see the power of various strategies and start seeing results right away. None of these strategies require specific expertise—you can do this. So with that... I want to say again, thank you for taking the time to be here with me today. It is an honor to have you here -- thank you for tuning in -- your time is sacred and I am delighted you chose this episode to be what you listen to, study, and take with you on your morning run, or maybe Onward Nation has become part of your daily commute, or in some other way has become part of your morning routine. However our daily podcast fits into your daily routine -- I want you to know how much I appreciate you sharing some of your invaluable 86,400 seconds you have in your day with me and the strategies we learn and share each day from today’s top business owners. And please continue to let me know what you think of Onward Nation...good or bad...I always want your feedback. My direct email address is stephen@onwardnation.com -- and yes -- that is my actual Inbox. No fancy filters or filing system and I read and reply to every single email. So please let me know how you think we are doing. I look forward to hearing from you. I will be back tomorrow with my interview with Monica Wofford -- another one of today’s top business owners. Until then, onward with gusto! You can also find us here: ----- OnwardNation.com -----

Paras Chopra is the founder & CEO of Wingify, which makes Visual Website Optimizer, a market-leading A/B split testing tool. Paras launched and bootstrapped Visual Website Optimizer as a one-man software company in 2010 and within 2 years had over 1000 paying customers. Currently, Visual Website Optimizer is driving over $8M in annual revenue. Links & Resources Mentioned Wingify Visual Website Optimizer Paras Chopra - @paraschopra Omer Khan - @omerkhan Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to the podcast Leave a rating and review Follow Omer on Twitter Need help with your SaaS? Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support. Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue. Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Paras Chopra is the founder & CEO of Wingify, which makes Visual Website Optimizer, a market-leading A/B split testing tool. Paras launched and bootstrapped Visual Website Optimizer as a one-man software company in 2010 and within 2 years had over 1000 paying customers. Currently, Visual Website Optimizer is driving over $8M in annual revenue.Links & Resources MentionedWingifyVisual Website OptimizerParas Chopra - @paraschopraOmer Khan - @omerkhanEnjoyed this episode?Subscribe to the podcastLeave a rating and reviewFollow Omer on TwitterNeed help with your SaaS?Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support.Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue.Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Today we're talking with Nick Disabato of Draft, a small interaction design consultancy in Chicago. His previous clients include Gravitytank, New Music USA, Chicago Magazine, The Wirecutter, and too many other attractive, intelligent people to count. We spent quite a bit of time talking about his work designing a delightful user experience for Cards Against Humanity. We discuss... Cards Against Humanity marketing strategy Split-testing Conversion rate optimization And more Links: Cards Against Humanity - http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/ Cadence & Slang - http://cadence.cc/ Draft: Revise - https://draft.nu/revise/ Nick's newsletter - http://eepurl.com/vqJgv Visual Website Optimizer - https://vwo.com/ PS: Be sure to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and write a review. iTunes is all about reviews! Transcript Recording: This is the Unofficial Shopify Podcast with Kurt Elster and Paul Reda, your resources for growing your Shopify business, sponsored by Ethercycle. Kurt: Welcome to the Unofficial Shoplift Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster and with me today is Nick Disabato from Draft. Nick, how are you doing? Nick: Doing fantastic. How are you, man? Kurt: I'm well. Where are you at? Nick: I live and work in Logan Square, a neighborhood in Chicago and have been here for the past seven years. I've been independent for the past 3-1/2. Kurt: That's good. I'm about right miles from you in Park Ridge. It's funny we're doing this over Skype but we're like a bus ride apart. Nick: We are. We're probably a short L ride apart. Kurt: Tell me, who's Nick D? Nick: Nick D is me as I exist on the Internet and I run a small design consultancy called Draft as you mentioned and we do a lot of things. I publish books. I do monthly A/B testing for people. I run the world's stupidest newsletter but what I think we're here to be talking about is my one-off interaction design product, just more typical client work, more consulting work. I've done it for a variety of e-commerce clients and solved a lot of really interesting problems for both mobile and desktop and I think about these sorts of things a lot. That's kind of ... Kurt: For the lay person, what's interaction design? Nick: Interaction design, it's the process of making something easier to use and it involves hacking out the layout and behavior of a product. That can range from prototyping something and running it by users to see how they enjoy using it or whether they're successful at completing goals within it. It can range from promoting certain design decisions and hacking out functionality. It can involve figuring out edge cases like if you type in a really long response that doesn't belong in a certain form field, what happens? If you click here, what happens? It's figuring out to choose your own adventure capacity of going through a technology product of any type. I've worked... Kurt: It sounds like you're a problem solver for your clients. Give me a good example of a problem you solved with interaction design. Nick: We'll talk about e-commerce stuff. One of my biggest clients over the past few years was a board game company called Cards Against Humanity. Kurt: I dearly love Cards Against Humanity. Tell us about it. Nick: For your audience, if you do not know Cards Against Humanity, it's similar to a card game called Apples to Apples where I'm a person judging a card and everybody else plays another card only it's usually quite inappropriate. You have weird poop jokes or [scathalogical 00:03:03] things. Kurt: The favorite combo I ever got, the winning combo I ever got out of Cards Against Humanity, I will never forget. It was "Santa gives the bad children genital piercings." That was genius. Nick: My personal favorite is 'What's the last thing Michael Jackson thought about before he died?' and somebody played Michael Jackson. Kurt: That one is layers on layers. Nick: Oh my God, I still think about it. It's amazing. I've worked with them to define all of the layout and behavior for their e-commerce system. They now have, in addition to Amazon, you can buy stuff directly through them. You go through and they run through Stripe. It's not through Shopify but it's entirely independent and entirely custom. What they wanted was something that worked pretty well on mobile and they wanted something that was a little more unconventional to fit their business's needs. Cards Against Humanity, for those of you who don't know, they're a relatively unconventional business just in terms of their tone and in the way that they carry themselves and the way that they deal with their customers. Kurt: That has totally differentiated and set them apart. Nick: Yes. I think a large part of Cards Against Humanity's success is their marketing and their outreach. They do a terrific job of both of those but they do a very ... Kurt: I've seen their marketing and it's amazing. They do one-off promo cards. I've got their House of Cards promo set that they did co-branding with Netflix. What kind of outreach do they do? Nick: They do a lot of ... They'll reply to people on Twitter. They'll follow along with people's activity. They'll pay attention to what people are talking about and they'll try and be a little bit proactive about it. As far as their site is concerned, their tone is very distinctive. It's ... Kurt: Absolutely, it irreverent. Nick: Yes, it's irreverent. It's a little bit standoffish, a little bit jerk but fun jerk. It's like [inaudible 00:05:09]. Kurt: Yeah. You love them for being mean to you. It's like Ed Debevic's.. Nick: [Crosstalk 00:05:10]. Yeah, it is like Ed Debevic's a little bit which is a diner in Chicago that ... Kurt: Right, [inaudible 00:05:15]. Nick: It's definitely one of those things where they own their voice and they know how to do it. If you go through the prompts on their Website, if you go to ... I believe it's store.cardsagainsthumanity.com. You can go there and buy stuff and they ask you what country you're from right away. We can go to a UX teardown of why that is but I'll give you the high level. They go to country [crosstalk 00:05:40] right away. Kurt: I'm already there. Nick: If you choose I live in the rest of the world like not US or Canada or UK or something like that, they'll be like, "Begone foul foreigner" or something like that." They'll just make fun of you. "Send us an e-mail for when Cards Against Humanity is available in your inferior country" or something like that. They're just totally blanked up. UI Copy was definitely an enormous component of it. It's part of why I'm getting to this because I wrote a fair amount of the UI copy that is still on there right now. Another thing that you'll see on the page if you go through it while you're listening to this podcast is you'll see a row of information at the top of it. You'll go and buy something, you'll hit Pay Now and you'll see country recipient, e-mail and shipping and what it says is ... It says USA. It'll try and geolocate you and then it'll say, "Not right." You can tap back to that and two things are happening there. You can edit your order as you're going and it reads the order back to you. One thing that you see in Shopify in particular or in e-commerce in general like Amazon or anything like that, it reads your order back to you before you hit Place Order. That's an extra click that you don't necessarily need because you could get this kind of inline feedback. There's no reason why you couldn't get inline feedback. I built the interaction model to fit that and people liked it. There were two things that people called out – the way that the feedback was being read back to you and the way that it was auto-correcting as it goes. If you type in your zip code, it autocorrects to your city and state and is usually accurate. That's pretty cool and it does have for both USPS and Canada Post. It requests little information from you, moves you through the process as fast as possible at the minimum of clicks. I wrote a book that called about interaction cycle, Cadence & Slang. One of the things I say is reduce the number of steps to complete a task. I tried to make this kind of exemplar of that principle by making it as efficient as humanly possible. The other thing that people talk about is when you actually go buy something, which I see you're tapping through that right now, Kurt, that I would ... Once you finish the transaction it says, "Now, go outside" and makes fun of you about the fact that you're on the Internet and it links ... Kurt: It shames you for your order. Nick: It already has your address and if you click "Now, go outside," it searches on Google Maps for parks near you. Kurt: [Crosstalk 00:08:07]. This is incredibly clever stuff. Nick: It's thinking like, okay, I'm on a computer and I'm refreshing it whenever an expansion comes out or I'm doing all these other things and it just wants ... It's like, "Oh, by the way, you're on the Internet. Now, you don't have to be on the Internet anymore. You gave us money. Just go away." That's most of the design decisions behind this. I feel like a lot of people just reinvent the wheel with e-commerce. They want to do something safe. One of the great things with Cards Against Humanity is they don't want safe. They don't care. They want to get the orders okay but if you're messing it up, it's not their fault. It's your fault for this particular organization. [Crosstalk 00:08:56]. Kurt: Yeah, like the whole ... the entire experience ... Like it's easy to use and it's great but at the same time the game ... It starts with a product. You've got this incredibly irreverent game and then that gets extended to the messaging and the copy and the positioning. Then amazingly where everyone else would have stopped, they moved it into the actual user interface. The interaction itself is irreverent. Nick: There are a couple of people at Cards that handle a goodly amount of the logistics in getting the cards printed and shipped and everything. To use a developer term, they are a full-stack operation. They deal with the printer. They deal with Amazon. They deal with the warehouse. They want to build a vertically-integrated system for [crosstalk 00:09:40]. Kurt: I was going to say that sounds like a vertical integration. Nick: They're a good enough business and are popular enough that they can get away with it. They could ... If I did that ... Kurt: It's a great product. People love it. It's a catch-22. People love it because of these irreverent decisions but at the same time, are they able to make those irreverent decisions because people love it? It's like where do you start with that? Nick: I would be putting words in their mouth but I suspect it's kind of a feedback loop. They make these decisions and they realize they're getting rewarded for it by having more business and so, they end up making more irreverent decisions in more irreverent ways. Kurt: Why, yes. You're right. It does. It rewards itself. Anyone could start trying this and if it doesn't work out, you shouldn't do it. Nick: Yeah. I run a large part of my design practice as A/B testing. You could build this and run half of your users through it and if your conversion rate drops, either try and tweak it or throw it away. That way you're not losing an insane amount of sales on your testing idea. You're vetting whether it works for you. I suspect at least certain conceits of these like auto-complete and providing this feedback. I don't see any personal reason why that couldn't exist in other e-commerce context. I really don't. Kurt: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned split testing. Tell us briefly, what is split testing? Nick: It's essentially you have an idea and rather than fighting about it internally about whether it's a good idea, you let people decide and you're letting real customers decide. This can be anything. This can be a call to action button. This can be a headline. This can be a person on your homepage selling the thing. It can be whether a video autoplays or not. It can be any design decision you want and you have a control page which is your original page. You send that by 50% of your users and then the other goes to the other 50%, whatever you're varying and you're measuring success in sales, signups for your mailing lists, whatever have you. It can be anything that you want. Kurt: As long as it's a measurable goal. Nick: You have a goal, right. You can do this with multiple variations. Most of my A/B tests are in fact A-B-C-D-E tests where I'm vetting many different variations of something and many different permutations of something and testing it with real-life people. It reduces risk because you're running many variants. You're optimizing the page slowly and you're throwing away what doesn't work and learning what does work and where you want to be putting more of your efforts. Even a failure, which is a plurality of your tests are failures or inconclusive, you're still learning where you don't want to be putting your efforts, like you don't need to be fighting over that link, that sort of thing. I always try and frame it in a very positive way. Kurt: It's interesting. The way you brought it up is you don't have to fight about it internally. It's a great way to talk about it because in our design practice that's generally how I bring up the idea of split testing is when the client pushes back on something or they attribute some loss in sales to a change and I say, "Actually, we don't have to guess about it. We could split test it and know for certain." It's usually how I introduce that concept. Nick: Yes. Kurt: As soon as you say, "We can know for sure and we can know scientifically," then people become very interested in it. What's your favorite tool for split testing? Nick: I give all of my clients ... I have a monthly A/B testing tool or a service called Draft Revise where you pay me a certain amount every month and I run tests for you and write up reports and that's it. You never have to worry about the practice of doing this. I use something called Visual Website Optimizer. It shortens to VWO. You can go to vwo.com. For a few of my clients, I use something called Optimizely, if you go to optimizely.com. Both of those are terrific. They have very small differences at this point. It's like Canon and Nikon. They're just snipping at each other and it's making both of them much better. Kurt: I've used them. I've personally used VWO. I really liked it. I used the Google split testing tool. That thing's a nightmare. Nick: Yeah, it's changey. I would pay the money for V. If you have enough scale to get statistical validity out of the A/B tests which typically you need at least 3,000 or 4,000 [uniques 00:13:53 ] a month to be doing that for whatever goal you're measuring, usually it's more, you're probably making enough money that you can afford Visual Website Optimizer, no question or Optimizely. Don't do the free Google stuff. It just sucks. Kurt: The amount of time I wasted messing with that wasn't worth it. VWO is so much easier. Nick: Yeah, don't bother. Kurt: The support is really good. I'm not condemning Optimizely. I've literally just never used Optimizely. That's a good way to get into it for our listeners. If it's confusing or they don't want to deal with it, your service is great. I've seen the reports you run and I'm not even plugging it. It's just genuinely good stuff that you do. Nick: Thank you. It's one of those things where a lot of people don't know how to start and they don't know how to do it and I have two different offerings. One of them is a one-off like I give you a guide and I give you a lot of suggestions for what you can test and what you can change things to, things that I would change. You're getting a UX teardown and a write-up of how to put into practice but I find that a handful of those come back to me and they're like, "Can you just do this for us?" Kurt: Essentially, what you've said to them is like, "Here's a plan for immediate success based on my vast experience and you could do whatever you want with it." I imagine a lot of people are going to be, "All right, fine. You know what you're doing. You just take care of those for me." Nick: Yeah, and they're already used to paying me and I give them a discount on their first month. If they pay me $900 for Revise Express Report and then they sign up for a 2000-dollar plan for Draft Revise, you're paying only $1,100 for the first month which at that point you're not getting charged twice. You're able to hit the ground running. I signed up a Revise Express client recently for Draft Revise and it's been going well. We went from not having anything together to contract signed and A/B tests running on their site in three days because I already knew it. Kurt: That's good. Nick: I wrapped my head around it. It was great. Kurt: When you're wrapping your head around it, how do you approach optimizing a site? Nick: It depends on the site. Let's say it's like a typical SaaS business. I look at the things that I know changing them will yield a lot of fruit and that can be common elements to optimize like your headline or your call to action or testimonial quotes, stuff like that which is very optimizing 101 type stuff. Or I'd look at things that I see are clearly bad like if you have an e-mail list signup form and the button says Submit. Unless you are [crosstalk 00:16:39]. Kurt: I look for the stuff that just like, "This is painful. This goes against every best practice. Let's fix this first and get our baseline back to zero." Nick: Yeah. I break things into two categories. One of them is one-off design changes which are beyond the need for testing. Things like if you make your button Submit. Unless you're an S&M site, you have no business making your buttons Submit, all these other things. Then I also look at things and suggest "Let's test this because I'm not sure." The difference between those two is confidence. I'm still changing things. I'm changing elements on the page but I'm not fully confident that changing your headline to this one thing is going to speak to your customers effectively especially because I've been working with you for only three days if I'm doing these teardowns. It's very like intuition at that point. I will check everything within ... If you're a SaaS business, call your conversion funnel like your homepage to your pricing page to your signup page to your onboarding to all that and then you get converted from a trial into a paying customer eventually. There are a bunch of pages that you have to go through in that flow to actually figure that out. I try and vet all of those and figure out if I were building your site and figuring out your marketing page and trying to figure out a really good way to speak to people, would I do this? I bring in my experience working with dozens of SaaS businesses and e-commerce sites to bear on that and eight years of interaction design experience. That's often something that they can't get internally because I don't know any actual fulltime UX employees who've worked for as many individual clients as I have. Kurt: They couldn't possibly. Earlier you had mentioned to me the other day that you're working on something with Harper Reed. Nick: Yeah. I did it for six weeks. It was a one-off project with Harper Reed. For those who don't know, he elected the president at the beginning of ... starting at the beginning of last ... No, two years ago. It was 2012. Kurt: The way I view it is Harper Reed personally defeated Mitt Romney. Nick: His tech team certainly did. He built the team that ... It almost feels like that. If you read the teardowns of it, they're amazing but he has a startup now which is essentially a mobile e-commerce startup called Modest. It's at modest.com and first project that he did was a storefront for a toy and game manufacturer called [Choonimals 00:19:04], if you go to Choonimals Website. He's a friend of mine. He works and lives in Chicago. He works in Fulton Market. They had me come on and just be another pair of eyes on their UX. They already had a lot of interesting UX ideas there. I'm not going to take remote amount of credit for some of the most novel and fascinating parts of it but I agree with the conceit. A lot of the things were already coming together like scanning your credit card with the iPhone's camera is one of them and Uber does that. There's a JavaScript library called card.io that lets you do that where it just turns on your flashlight and lets you take a photo of your credit card and it scans your number in so you don't have to manually type it and reduce the error [inaudible 00:19:52]. He has a thing where you can buy stuff and it's basically buy with one touch and then if you ... You get a grace period where you could undo that. You can un-buy something and then ... Kurt: The easier you make something to buy, if people aren't used to that standard yet, I think there is a lot of that ... I wouldn't call it cognitive dissonance. Nick: I think you're just thrown off expectations-wise. There's a mismatch. Kurt: Yeah. Or it becomes too easy and suddenly, it's frightening. You have to have that grace period, that undo. Nick: I did not come up with these ideas to be clear. I helped refine them and offer my own ideas about them which is just like fit and finish. The idea of un-buying, you might tap something and it says Buy. It's very clear you're buying something but you don't even get an undo button in the app store if you buy something. You tap it on your iPhone. Kurt: Yeah. I bought a lot of silly things. I wish there was an undo button in the app store. Nick: I don't let myself check the app store while I'm drunk anymore because I just threw up and buy some 30-dollar application that's just ill-advised but this is like they're not going to ... It's a physical good usually. They're not going to ship it for another day at least or five hours if it's [overnighted 00:21:08] or something like that. At which point, you have a chance to take back that notion and edit your order. You barely get the chance to edit your order or merge orders on Amazon as it stands. Kurt: With Amazon, it's a scam. You could cancel an order while it's in progress but once you put cancel, it says, "We're going to try to cancel it" and it's like less than 50% of the time that it actually manages to cancel it. Nick: Right and if you're Prime, they probably already have it sent on a drone to you so you don't even know. It's one of those things where it just seems obvious that you should have an undo button when you're buying something. Kurt: Absolutely. You've got a lot of experience with this. Give me one tip for – obviously this is tough because it's general – one tip for an e-commerce store owner who's looking to grow the revenue. Nick: I'm going to drill down into this tip. You need to make it as easy for the person to buy the thing as possible and easy for them to back out of it and so, cutting down the number of steps. If you're asking for any extraneous information, if you are deliberately asking for both billing and shipping address, if you're splitting the person's name into three different fields, if you're not supporting auto-complete, those are all different forms of the same problem which is you're making the person enter more data than is necessary. Make the person input les data. Nobody likes to fill out a form. You don't want to feel like you're in a doctor's office buying a product. That's the one tip that I've got. Kurt: I guess it's pretty common with Shopify store owners. They want to do less work personally. They want like or go, "Can you make it ask them X, Y and Z thing?" and we'd say, "Sure, we could build out these product options for your products." Then when we do it, their conversion rate plummets and they're like, "Why did that happen?" Well, because you just made it really hard to buy from you. Nick: Yeah. Doing this auto-complete ... Going back to Cards Against Humanity, doing the auto-complete for your address and address validation and making it as fast as it is on that site is tremendously difficult. It is not easy programming to be putting in. Doing this focus is really hard but their sales bear out how they're doing. It justifies that decision. It almost says the amount of work that you put into the site and making it smarter, making the defaults easier and making it easier for the person, that's hard work but it directly connects to your conversion rate and if you're delighted about it ... I can't tell you how many positive twits happened when the first storefront came out that talked explicitly about the user experience and shared that out. It said, "Oh, you have to buy something." Who says "Oh, you have to buy something" about an e-commerce store? Kurt: You have to experience this. Nick: You have to experience getting sent to a park nearby you. That's very unexpected. Kurt: People are just ignoring the product itself. They'll just buy it for the sake of the purchasing experience. Nick: Right. Kurt: People don't think ... They would never think twice about someone making the interior of a retail store nice, making it easy to buy something there but as soon as it comes to e-commerce, then suddenly it's like the strange thing that no one wants to spend money on. Nick: It's funny because Apple's retail stores are beautiful and amazing and their UX is incredible. If you go in person, they swipe your card there in front of the computer and somebody walks the computer out to you and ... Kurt: Have you ever paid with cash in the Apple store? Nick: I have not. Kurt: It's same deal but the cash register is hidden inside one of the display tables. Just like the face of the table pops open. The cash box was in there the whole time. It's clearly on remote. They still use their iPhone and then the thing pops open. Nick: Right. Their UX is amazing but I bought an iPhone. I bought the new iPhone from the Apple store online the other day. Kurt: Did you go with the 6 or the 6-plus? Nick: I have 6. Kurt: You don't have monster gorilla paws is what you're telling me. Nick: No, I have normal human being hands and I don't need a Phablet. I have an iPad Mini. Anyway, I was going on it and I was on the Website, not the app just to be clear. I think the app is better but it was not fun. It sucked. It was really flunky and weird and it could be better. You're selling ... You're the biggest company in the world. You can fix that. Kurt: I noticed that they do one clever thing. You can choose multiple payment methods. I don't think I've seen that anywhere else. Nick: Amazon ... Kurt: If you were to max out your credit card and then finish up with a second credit card, they will let you do that. Nick: Or if you have one of those crappy gift cards that you get from the grocery store, like somebody gives you 100-dollar gift card and you have 18 cents left on it and you feel bad wasting that 18 cents, you could put that on the card. Kurt: You could do it. Nick: Right. That's edge [casey 00:25:58], feasible. Kurt: That's an argument I have with people is about edge cases where it's like, okay, we could fix this problem that one of 100 people have but what's that impact on the other 99 out of 100 people? I think Apple has walked themselves into that. Nick: Yeah. They can accommodate edge cases. I know that Amazon used to accommodate that sort of edge case and then they got rid of it for whatever reason. They probably saw that it wasn't diminishing returns or something but anyway. Kurt: That's a thing you could split test. Nick: Right, yeah. I'm sure Amazon does. Amazon A/B tests everything. I get bucketed into A/B tester of their pages all the time. I find it redesigns itself and I refresh it and it goes away [crosstalk 00:26:42]. Kurt: Or open an incognito window and it's a different site. Yeah, I've had that happen. Nick: Yeah. Kurt: If I wanted to learn more from you, the best way would be to do what? Nick: You should subscribe to my mailing list because it's funny. Kurt: I subscribe to it. I enjoy it, lots of good Chicago references in there. Nick: There are a lot of good Chicago ... Kurt: Like the hotdog story. Nick: There was a story ... It's a dog stand that's very popular here. It's closing this week. That is a very good way to get to know me as a person. If you want to know more about interaction design, I would go to cadence.cc which is my book, Cadence & Slang, and grab a copy. It is generally considered one of the more important texts on interaction design by people far more famous and important than me which is terrifying. Kurt: I have read it. It is genuinely good. Nick: Awesome, thank you. That's the best way to get to understand the kind of stuff that I'm talking about with e-commerce. It's applicable to any technological project but the ultimate goal is just to make things more efficient and pleasurable to use. Kurt: Fantastic. That's great. Thank you, Nick. Thank you for joining us and have a great day. Nick: Thank you so much. Take care.

In this brand-new episode of the Sales Funnel Mastery podcast, I am interviewed by Eric Barton. I guarantee this is one of the most value-packed interviews you've ever listened to. Here are a few things we discussed...1) Why most people talking about conversion rates aren't telling you the WHOLE truth...2) 3 quick and easy ways to increase retention rates...3) How to increase price and skyrocket net profits without dropping conversions...4) A current split-test I'm running which you've NEVER heard of (but must try!)...5) And tons more!After listening, head on over to http://www.JeremyReeves.com   Transcript: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Sales Funnel Mastery podcast. I hope you’re loving what you’re getting so far. I have a ton more content coming up for you. I wrote out the other day about sixty different ideas. That’s not even including interviews, which I’m going to try to do about once every two weeks or so. For this podcast, I have something a little bit different for you. In fact, this is the actually the first interview, except the difference is I’m not going to be interviewing somebody else. I’m going to be giving you an interview that somebody did for me. I’m going be getting interviewed. It was an interview from Eric Barton, from Fast Easy Success. When we talked, we went over a lot of really, really good marketing stuff; including a conversion split test that I’m currently running. It’s still running right now, but I guarantee you it’s something you’ve never heard before. It’s definitely something you want to try because as of right now, it’s winning by about 50 percent over my control. You’ll see in this interview that the percent doesn’t really matter, but it’s winning right now. I think the comp was about 92 percent. Here is that episode. I hope you really enjoy it. Let me know what you think. Eric: Welcome to episode ten of the Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider podcast. I want to thank everyone for tuning into the Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider. A lot of exciting things coming today and in the future for you. Make sure you hit that subscription button right now, so you don’t miss out on the value-packed podcast coming your way as well. Before we dive into our show and our very special guest today, I just want to welcome everyone to head over to fasteasysuccess.com. Go ahead and grab your business building tips sent directly to your email daily. When you head over to fasteasysuccess.com, I’m also giving you your free business cheat sheets. This is going to help you with your websites, emails and writing. Let’s dive in because I’m excited to have this special guest coming on the show today. If you haven’t discovered this man yet, you’re definitely in for a treat today. He’s a direct response copywriter who actually specializes in building very profitable sales funnels for clients. You may even have heard this man referred to as the sales funnel specialist, and really the world’s number one most trust sales funnel authority. Ladies and gentlemen, joining us today, I want to welcome to the show, Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy, thanks so much for taking the time to jam with us today. Jeremy: Thanks for having me. I’m really, really excited. I used to get a little nervous getting interviewed, but I’m actually very pumped to be talking to you. Eric: Beautiful. That’s what I like to hear. I’m sure the audience is definitely, they got their ticket to this profitable thrill ride and ready to jump in. Let’s just ask real quick, for the people who are not familiar with you, can you originally tell people how you started out in the sales marketing or copywriting world or how you really go involved? Jeremy: One thing I want to say, just as everybody is listening at the beginning of the interview, I’ve listened to a lot of interviews. I listen to a whole bunch of podcasts and all that kind of stuff. Personally, I have never been a huge fan of interviews because a lot of people take too long to tell their stories and don’t really give a lot of good advice, just in general. I did want to throw out there that I am really going to give out a lot of really, really good content. It’s not going to be all about me. I’ll give you my quick little story here for about 30 seconds, but then I’d like to just jump in. I like to demonstrate my authority by demonstrating that I actually know what I’m talking about, instead of telling my story. I just wanted to throw that out there in the beginning. I like to do unique interviews. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: For my short little blurb here, I got started as a direct response copywriter, writing sales copy for clients. Right at the beginning of my career with that, which was about, roughly seven years ago, I realized that writing, understanding the dynamics of writing copy and being able to sell on paper and all that good stuff really doesn’t do much if the strategy behind the copy isn’t right. I really started focusing a lot on the marketing strategy and how to write the copy to fit that strategy. If you have bad strategy with a great copy, it’ll do okay; but if you have incredible strategy and okay copy, it can still do fantastic. The strategy really compels it. When you add the really good, hard-hitting copy on top of it, that’s when things really take off. I really started focusing on the marketing strategy behind the copy and that led me down, through working with all kinds of different clients, a lot of the industry leaders that you’re probably familiar with. It really made me specialize and focus on building sales funnels, because I realized a lot of the challenges that people deal with have to do with not having systems in place and not having—basically, not being able to buy paid traffic; which is one thing I really, really focus on. When you have an automated sales funnel in place, you can pretty much look at your sales funnel as a whole and see, I got 1,000 people that hit the first part of the sales funnel. By the time they got to the end, I made X dollars. You know what each person is worth or your earnings per visitor. That way you know what you can pay for traffic. If your average earnings per visitor, for each person that you send to a landing page, for example, the first part of the funnel, if that’s $5, then you know you can pay $2, $3 or $4, whatever you want to keep your margin at, to get new people into the funnel. It really makes your business really, really stable. Then you keep tweaking and testing and making everybody worth more money. That’s where all the fun comes in. That’s pretty much my history. Basically, started as a copywriter, went into strategy. I worked with all kinds of different business owners from internet marketers to a couple celebrities and really high name, high profile clients; to even all the way on the other side of the coin, to people like, dry cleaners and hair dressers and people like that. A pretty big gamut of people that I’ve worked with. Eric: Right. That’s what I was saying, it works with a lot of online and as well as offline. It works with the large and the small businesses. One thing I wanted to ask, it’s been the theme the show, I’m going to ask it in the beginning, because I think if they set up in the beginning, it’s going to help. This goes into what you were talking about, the paid traffic. Really what I’m referring to is the un-sexy sales secret, which is what I call it, is lead generation. I think, unfortunately, this is a point that a lot of business owners get wrong. A lot of people mix up with lead generation with customer generation. A lot of times they want customers instead of leads. Leads are something that you nurture. You can grab the low hanging fruit, obviously, but it’s something you have to build. Can you share your thoughts or what’s your view on the lead generation part of whether they’re starting a funnel or just bringing them to a sales page or website et cetera? Jeremy: Yeah. There’s a lot to go into on that. I’ll just take when I’m working with clients, I’ll go off of that. One of the things that I try to do, a lot of people talk about cost per lead and things like that. That’s good … Eric: Bad? Jeremy: No, it’s definitely good to know and I track that metric and all that, but there’s a big difference in the quality of leads. Let’s just say you have Facebook ads, Google ads and SEO, you’re doing those three things. You might have leads that are worth, let’s say your average lead on Google AdWords is worth $3. It might be worth only $1 on Facebook and $6 for SEO. You really have to look at, I’m getting this amount of leads from this source, but what are they worth to the business? Because everything, the leads coming in, they all have different values. Eric: That’s a great point. I think that’s what a lot of people mix up too. They’re getting in a lot of leads, and they’re like, yeah, I’m doing good. But how much is that lead actually worth, like you just said. That’s a great point. Jeremy: Exactly. You could even dive in more. For example, I have Facebook campaign that I’m running right now. We tag them as Facebook leads and I can track it overall and look at it every month and say, we’ve got 1,000 leads this month and we made $3,000 from that. We spent $1,500, whatever the numbers are. If you want to even take it to another level, you can tag them by the audience that you’re targeting. For example, let’s just say you’re in health and you’re targeting men, 50 plus, and then another group is women, 30 plus, whatever. It could be anything that you’re targeting. You can actually tag them as that, and then track those specific things; so you know, not only do you know how much your average Facebook lead is worth, but you could also say, I have these two segments that we’re targeting. This one is worth this much; this one is worth this much. You can get pretty crazy with the metrics. I usually recommend that for people that are really advanced and trying to take it to a completely new level and gains a huge competitive advantage. That particular one is more for people that are a lot more advanced. Eric: It’s a little more work. It’s more profitable, but it is more work. If it’s something that competition isn’t really willing to do, that’s a good thing for people in our world. This can go into the testing, too, because that’s something that you’re definitely known for is heavy testing. Do you do the simple split, like A, B, split test or really how do you start your test? What’s the best way you start testing where people can do that? Jeremy: That’s a good question. I get extremely mad at a lot of people in the conversion rate optimization field. That was one thing that probably last year, it might have even been 2012. In the last two years, I was really heavily involved in that. I got offered a really healthy, six figure offer by one of the biggest conversion rate optimization companies in the world and turned that down. I’m still really friends with them. I just don’t want a job. There’s so much I can go into here. There’s a lot of things that you need to look out for when you test. One of the things you’ll hear—and I’m not going to give out any names here, because I don’t like to make enemies. A lot of people when they say, “We got an 80 percent increase doing this.” “We got a 60 percent increase doing that.” If you look at the actual stats and sometimes they’ll show you in a video, they’ll show you a screen shot of their stats and all that. A lot of times you’ll notice that the numbers are really small. Maybe they hit 95 percent confidence. If you’re familiar with testing, you’ll know what I mean, but it’s essentially 95 percent chance of that test being a winner. It doesn’t mean that you have a 95 percent chance of that test winning by that percentage. For example, let me pull up a test I have running right now for a Facebook campaign. It’s running to a landing page. The one call to action on there is “give me my free report.” It’s the control, call to action. The one I’m testing it against is “show me your sales funnel secrets.” That’s the A, B test. They get split up. Eric: Sure. Jeremy: Let me go to my results. It just became a winner this morning. The control, which was—I forget it already. The control, which was “get instant access,” I think it was, is converting at 24 percent and the “show me your sales funnel secrets” is converting at 39.68 percent. This is a fairly new test. It’s only been up a day or two. The percentage improvement is 65.34 percent. A lot of times you’ll see a lot of experts showing that, “Hey, I got a 65 percent improvement,” and they pretend they’re big, they know everything about split testing and all that. This one, by the way, has a 98 percent chance to beat the original. Eric: 98 percent, nice. Jeremy: What’s that? Eric: I said, 98 percent? Jeremy: Yeah, 98 percent. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: This one is a winner, right? What a lot of people won’t tell you—and this is something that’s really, really important to understand—is that, right now it has a 65 percentage improvement, but it’s everything always comes back to the norm. Even though it’s a winner, as more conversion data comes in—this is only based off, I have 43 conversions total. As I get up to 100, 200, 300 conversions and there’s more data, that percentage of improvement is going to come down and get closer to the median or closer to normal, where it would be even. Eric: Right. Jeremy: Basically, the thing to take away is that when people tell you, “We did X and we doubled our results.” Don’t listen to the percentage that they tell you, just get the idea. The idea, for my example, so you guys can test this, is test something normal that you would normally use; “get instant access,” “get free report now,” whatever is, versus something that’s a little bit more like a more novel, more “show me your sales funnel secrets.” It’s not something they see every day. Test that, but don’t look at the—when conversion rates experts tell you the numbers, don’t really pay attention to any of that. Just pay attention to what the strategy behind it was, and then do your own testing. Mine is 65 percent now. I’m going to let it run a week and after that, it might only be 30 percent or it might be 20 percent. It should still be a winner. It’s just that the percentage of an improvement is the one thing that—basically, don’t get too excited about it. Eric: Do you have any advice on how long they should let a test run? Is there a certain amount of views or clicks you should let a test, on average, run? Jeremy: That’s a good question. It really depends on a couple factors. What I usually do is look for at least 30 conversions for each of the variations. If you have two variations, wait until you get at least 30 to 50 conversions on each of them. You also always want to make sure that you do it for at least a week, so it can go through. You’ll find that out that some days convert a lot higher than other days. If you really dig into the data, weekends might do really bad or really good or whatever, so that’s the second thing. I use Visual Website Optimizer. Any split testing software you use is going to give you a chance to beat the original. You always want that to be above 95 percent. A little bit of a caveat to that is that if you have a business and you don’t have a lot of conversions, it takes you awhile. It’s really just a percentage game. It’s just a chance that you have. It’s a very high probable chance. This one, for example, has a 98 percent chance to beat the original. That doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely going to beat the original. It means that I have a 2 percent of that actually losing. Don’t think of testing as a definite thing. Think of it is as, this is the most likely scenario. If you’re testing and you don’t have a lot of data, if it takes you three months to get one test done, just go with whatever you’re comfortable with. If you get up to 90 percent chance to beat the original, then go with that. Just go with whatever. I usually recommend 95, but you also have to look at the time factor and the time cost too. Eric: That’s true. Jeremy: That’s just a couple things to think about. Eric: Let’s say you had that definite winner, and that Facebook button was the winner for you, the submit button; would you challenge that to another test then? Do you say, lesson learned for now, that’s the winner. I’ll let that go and move onto the next thing I want to test, whether it be a website or something else. Jeremy: That’s another good question. What I’ll do is this is a winner, has a couple days left. Whenever a week is over, if it’s still a winner, on the page, I’ll change it to the winner. At that point, I’m trying to think. I will probably, on this landing page, I will, I actually might do a little bit more of a big test. The landing page right now is all text based, so I actually might go to an all text, to just a video and an opt-in form, something big like that. Pretty much, when it comes to figuring out what to test next, I look for the things on the page that are going to make the biggest improvements; so going from an all text to all video. The call to action button, believe it or not, it’s a big factor. Eric: No, it is. I think a lot of people miss that. When I changed my opt-in on my site, I tested it all that time. Just simple changing of words can make a huge, dramatic—a perfect example, my Facebook fan page, a client had something like “send my email here.” We changed it to a simple, “give me the info.” It dramatically increased the opt-in that same day. We let it run and that’s what we’ve been using, but just simple, like you said could be huge. A lot of people drop the ball on the simple stuff. Jeremy: Yeah. It really can, especially, the shorter the page, the more that’s going to have an effect. If you have a 15 page long sales letter, doing “add to cart” versus “buy now” probably won’t make a huge difference, but if you have just a quick little landing page, then it can make a huge difference. Eric: Right. Jeremy: Even with that, another cool little thing to try just to get people’s minds, get it creative and going a little crazy, is one of the things—and I might do this for my next test, I’m not sure. I’m excited about the idea because I don’t remember seeing it before. You’re going to get an exclusive idea here. What I’m going to test now is “show me your sales funnel secrets” versus a big, huge call to action button that essentially has 30 or 40 words in it. It’s like, “Give me your secret that you’ve invested or that you’ve got over a million dollars worth of testing research under your belt. This is what you came up with;” something really, really long. Eric: Oh, nice, like a direct response order form button or kind of like “Yes, Eric, I’m ready to invest.” Jeremy: Yeah. Something like that, but in a button form on a regular landing page. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: To be honest, I have no idea if it’s going to work or not. It might bomb horribly. I have no idea. I’ve never seen that done before, so I’m going to do it. I, personally, think that it’s going to work, just because you have to read every word of that. Nobody’s ever seen that before, so the novelty of it, the newness and uniqueness of it. As soon as people hit that page, how do you not read that? Eric: Right. That’s going to be a button form, kind of thing, where they push it? Jeremy: Yeah. Eric: Yeah. I haven’t seen that done. Definitely let me know how that works out for you. That’s going to be interesting. Jeremy: I’m excited. Eric: That’s nice. I know what we’re talking about is once you’re doing the testing, they’ve come to your page or they’ve opted in. This is the thing, like you said, too, that you really work with clients with this, is building their sales funnels. If we could maybe dive into a little bit about how business owners can go out and find the holes currently in their funnels or if they’re starting out, how they can get that process at least started, to make it profitable from the jump. Jeremy: I’ll take that in two different ways. If you’re just starting up, what you want to do is—I’m going to try to make it as generally applicable to everybody listening. When you’re just starting up, let’s say that your order process is, somebody comes into your website, they buy and they get the thank you email saying, “Your order was successful,” and that’s it. It’s not really even a sales funnel, but it’s a way to get them in, I guess. What you want to do and most basic thing that I always try to get people to do is, number one, give away some type of value added thing. It could be a free report, a video, anything that gives value to the people that you’re trying to serve, to get them to essentially raise their hand and say, “Hey, I’m interested in what you’re selling.” You put them onto a prospect auto responder list. The point of that is to sell them your main product, whatever that is. After they buy your main product, you should have—I’m trying to think of a minimum here. I would say probably at least two other, either products or services. One thing is I always try to tell people, if you’re a service business, make sure you have product. If you’re a product business, make sure you have services. It’s really the only way to maximize your funnel and really find those hyper buyers in your list that are going to pay you for anything that you come out with. Eric: That’s a great point. Can I ask on a sidetrack, but related. Do you find that a lot of clients come to you from your products that you release or vice versa, they become your clients and then go after your products? Jeremy: Both actually. A pretty huge percentage of clients will buy a product, and then I hear from them three days later. It’s usually along those lines, for me personally. I mean, it’s different for everybody. My services are really expensive, in the four and five figures, so people want to make sure that I know what I’m talking about. I’ll get a lot of emails that say, “Hey, Jeremy, I just bought X product. Didn’t even go through it. I just wanted to make sure you were the real deal and you actually did what you said you did. That’s why I’m writing to you now and I want to talk about hiring you.” I get those emails all the time because I’m the sales funnel guy and people want to go through my process, and say, “Let’s see if the sales funnel guy has his own sales funnel.” Eric: Yeah. See if he’s just preaching there, exactly. Jeremy: I get a lot of those emails. I also get a lot of people that come in and they become clients or coaching students or whatever, and they want to learn more. These are mostly the business owners that they really love to learn. They just can’t get enough information, so they’ll be working with me as they’re going through my products. Eric: Right. Those are the best kind of clients, absolutely. Jeremy: Yeah. It’s kind of both. Eric: Nice. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to get you sidetracked. I thought it was important to throw that out to the audiences that are trying to get some products. That’s a good way to bring in business as well. Jeremy: For everybody that has a service business. I’m doing this Facebook campaign. It’s giving away a free report, getting them into my funnel. I just had somebody, I think it was yesterday, where I looked at their—I like to look at the—I have office autopilot, I can see, somebody opted in for this and went to this page, and they filled out this form, so I can see the whole process of everything they did. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. It essentially tracks all the pages, and you can see the whole process that they went through. This happens all the time. This one is just one example. They opted in. They’re from Facebook, so they never heard of me before. They opted into the same landing page that I’ve been talking about. Three minutes after that, they went to my services page and read my service about building sales funnels and opted into that. They became a coaching prospect, I guess you could say, or a client prospect. It’s pretty cool. You get ancillary benefits of doing a lot of traffic. You should factor that in, by the way, to when you’re buying paid traffic. There’s always that little side shoe. If you’re selling products, there’s always a certain number of people that are going invest in your services and other products and things like that. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: I forget where I was going with that. Eric: I’m sorry. I threw you off. We were talking about, basically, with everything, that’s part of the funnel process obviously. Let’s say someone has an auto responder set up, someone has a product or services; is there common holes that you’ve found with clients that are maybe just leaking profits for them or something they could do to plug those holes up real quick? Jeremy: Yeah. That’s an interesting one. Holes in their funnels? It usually has to do with the frequency of communication. What that means is, essentially, a lot of people—and I mean, by a lot of people, I mean probably 90 plus percent of entrepreneurs—they’re kind of afraid of communicate with their prospects. Personally, I have a hard time understanding this. It might just be for me. I kind of got my chops reading J. Abraham and strategy preeminence where everything is just, you just start the relationship by adding value. That might be the reason for that. Everything I do, it starts with value. I don’t ever, ever expect anybody to do business with me before me providing them value first. The thing with communication is people are afraid they’re going to annoy their lists. It’s kind of bogus because they wouldn’t be doing business with you, they won’t be on your list unless they wanted to hear from you. If you have a weight loss website or if you’re a dentist and somebody signs up for your newsletter or whatever. They did that. It’s not like somebody is holding a gun to their head and they made them sign up for the newsletter. They did that because they want to hear from you. They want to hear about you, about what you do about how you can help them. About how you helped other people. To see you demonstrate your expertise so they can make a decision whether they should go with you or somebody else. The biggest hole when you’re building your funnel is, make sure that you’re communicating with your prospects as much as you possibly can. That includes auto responder sequences. It includes retargeting campaign, people who saw certain pages and didn’t buy what you have. You follow up with them with banners or Facebook ads, doing retargeting. You can do direct mail, emails, postcard, text messages, voice mails. There’s all kinds of stuff, but make sure that you are communicating with them frequently. Along with that, getting them in as risk free as possible. Usually start with whatever your lowest price product or service is and offer them that, get them into the buying cycle. It gets them used to spending money with you and then just constantly working on taking them up the ladder. Let’s just say right now you have a $37 product and a service that’s $97 a month, just for an example. Once you start getting people that are going to that $97 a month product or service, you should be thinking, what else? How can I add more value to these people and charge a higher price? Usually, that’s a “done for you” thing, or more of a step-by-step process. Coaching, you can do coaching in almost any business. Any business that you have. You want to make things faster or easier for people, and then get creative. Think of new products, new services, that you can charge more money for because there’s just a lot of people. There’s a certain percentage in every audience that will spend several times more money with you than you’re currently offering them. That’s a huge hole that I find in almost everybody’s funnel. They don’t have enough high priced, high ticket items. It really makes a huge, huge difference. If you’re selling $37 products and you have a $5,000 product, you only have to sell—or let’s just say for easy math, a $30 product and a $6,000 really high ticket thing. You have to sell 200 of the $30 products, for one of the $6,000 sales. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: If you’re selling 200 a month, you’re making $6,000 a month. You add in a $6,000 product and you sell one of those to one out of every 200 people, you’ve just doubled your business. It’s really, really important to have those high priced, high ticket offers in there. It really can do some pretty amazing things to your bottom line. A lot of times, if they are services or something like that, they’re higher profit too. Your profit margin is, typically at least, if it’s one-on-one coaching or something like that. Your profit margin is pretty huge. Eric: Right. Are you a big fan of the marketing ladder? Say, moving people up from the $39 e-book or product all the way up to the “done for you” services, et cetera? Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. I actually have tomorrow and Friday, we’re recording this on a Wednesday, tomorrow, Thursday and Friday, I have back-to-back in-person, full day consultations with a client. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: It’s $3,000 a day, so it’s $6,000 in two days. That’s essentially, for me, an upsell from my typical monthly coaching program. It’s essentially doing several months in advance, doing it in one or two days. It’s a way to do everything faster for people. It’s very, very profitable doing that. Definitely, because people want to spend more money with you, it’s just a matter of showing them the value. It really all comes back down to value. I could go out there and have $100,000 coaching program, but if I can’t show people that they’re going to make $500,000 or $1 million, then nobody is going to buy it. You have to find out how much value you can provide to people and then charge accordingly. Eric: That makes sense. I guess what you said before, and I wanted to ask you about this, I know you’ve said before the truth about price; what the main reason people really buy your product or services is? Jeremy: Yeah. A lot of people think that people buy based off price. In some cases, it’s true. Sometimes people literally just don’t have the money to pay you. I was talking to someone who desperately wanted to join my coaching program, but she couldn’t afford it because she was going month to month and she could barely even put food on the table. I was like, “Listen, don’t even.” She wanted to join, she’s like, “No, no, I’ll sell something,” or whatever. I said, “Listen, I’m not comfortable enough. If this doesn’t work, you literally can’t feed yourself. I just can’t live with that.” I guess that’s a good demonstration of my sales funnel selling her on my coaching program. It’s the same way with your sales funnel. You want to make sure that people understand the value that you’re providing them. That’s what it really comes down to. In most cases, like in 90 percent of cases, it’s not that something is too expensive. It’s that they don’t see that the value you’re providing is more than the prices they’re paying. If you’re offering, we’ll go to health, just because it’s easy and it’s relatable. Say it’s $97. If you don’t show the value is worth more than $97, then people aren’t going to buy. Whereas, if you show them that its worth $197, $297, $997, whatever it is, then people are more likely to buy on the higher you show that value, then the bigger gap between your price and the value. Obviously, with the value being higher, the higher your sales are going to be. That’s what copywriters do is, essentially, bring out that value and show the benefits and overcome the objections. That’s why operating it is so important, because when you really boil it down, that’s what we’re doing, is bringing out and showing people why they’re paying X dollars, but the value is X dollars times five, ten or twenty or whatever. Eric: Yeah. Like you’re saying, it doesn’t really have to be what you’re adding to it, you just have to raise the perceived value and that will raise the prices. Maybe a tip you give someone to raise the perceived value without adding more to their product or service or their widget? Jeremy: Yeah. That’s a good question. First of all, before I even get into that, raising your prices is probably the best and fastest way to grow your business. Eric: Right. Jeremy: I wish I could just get paid for saying, “Raise your price.” Because you can go into a million dollar business and say, “Raise your price ten percent,” and they can increase their profit by $100,000. If your margins are low, the lower your profit margin, the more you raise your price, the higher that multiple is. I can’t really do any examples off the top of my head because there’s a lot of math involved. Just basically, before I get into how to raise your perceived value so you can raise prices, make it a point to do a split test and raise your prices. If you’re nervous about it, I know a lot of people are, that’s totally fine. If you’ve never done it before, don’t be worried about being nervous about. Do it at 5 percent or 10 percent or something like that. If you think about it, if you’re selling something for $897 and you go to $997, that’s ten percent higher. People really aren’t going to notice that difference. If you go from $9 to $9.90, that would be 10 percent. People aren’t going to notice that. If you want to do that, number one, is if you can just price test and see if people will pay a higher price. A lot of times you’ll see that you can go up to 20 percent without changing anything about the offer and your conversions stay the same. Sometimes, not too often, but sometimes you’ll actually increase your conversions because sometimes people, if you have too much value and your price is too low, it’s actually one of those scenarios, where people are like, “That can’t be real. There must be something about this. That’s just wrong.” Eric: That’s a great point. That happens all the time because speaking in the marketing ladder a lot of times with a client I’ll do an SEO. From there, go onto the marketing and the copywriting because they need that afterwards, before or during. A lot of clients, a lot of packages, the price, they just couldn’t believe that’s what I was offering. I had a lot of skeptical people because they were coming from other companies that had ripped them off or had bad experiences with them. That’s a great point, sometimes people just don’t believe it if it sounds too good to be true. Jeremy: Yeah, people are skeptical. You kind of have to think as a consumer. Take your mind out of being a business owner. As a consumer, you have this natural sense of what a price should be. You can probably look at things and just line ten items up. You could probably get within 20 or 30 percent of that actually price, just by guessing at what the price would be. We kind of just have that internal filter of what a price should be. If you’re out of that range, people’s flags go up and they’re like, “Wait, something is not right here.” They get that gut feeling that just something is just not adding up. The conclusion they come to is, “Well, they must be lying.” Eric: Right. Jeremy: Going back to the raising perceived value. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. Number one is improve your copy. If you’re trying to do the copy yourself, hire a good copywriter, not somebody from elance or not somebody for $500 for a sales letter; unless you’re just starting and you really just don’t have money. It’s better than nothing. If you have a relatively successful business, number one, is hiring a copywriter or learning copy yourself. Then get some courses and learn how to write really good copy because, like I said, you learn to overcome objections. You learn to gain attention from people. You learn to develop interests and get them engaged in the copy to really showcase the benefits of your product or service. Number one is write better copy. Number two, is show your personality. That’s actually one thing that most people don’t really think of, but I’ve made a big, big shift in the last year, because I see a huge trend in going towards personality and transparency. If you follow my emails, you’ll see how personal I am. I’m always telling stories about my wife and my kids and stupid things that I’m doing, like last weekend I jumped into an ice pond for a polar plunge. It was for charity. I like to talk about that. One guy actually wrote back and told me I had a death wish. It was fun, talking about that stuff. It’s just me being me. You can’t be fake anymore. You have to just be whoever you are. If you’re a big flamboyant really off the wall character, and you’re really loud and obnoxious, then just be that. If you’re kind of quiet, shy and reserved, be that person. You can’t really fake it anymore with social media and all that kind of stuff. Number two is be yourself. Usually that’s done either through emails or videos. In case you’re wondering in your head, “Wait how does that increase perceived value of your product or service?” That really doesn’t increase the value of the product or service. It increases the value of you and the relationship that they have with you. It all starts with a relationship. They have to trust you if you’re selling something. If they don’t trust you, you could be giving away bars of gold for $1 and nobody is going to buy it, because they think you’re lying. That’s number two is build trust by being yourself, being personal, telling stories, and that kind of thing. Another thing you could do is add bonuses. Add whatever your product is, whatever your service, add little extras, little bonuses. If you’re selling an information product, you can have bonuses on little extra videos or how to get faster results; how to get better results with this certain technique or whatever. That’s one that probably most people know. Another thing, make it better risk reversal. Have better guarantees. You could have longer guarantees. You could have conditional guarantees, like a money back guarantee if they can prove that they went through your program or did your service or whatever and they didn’t get the results, then they can double you money back guarantee; something that takes the risk off that person and puts it on you. Another thing you can do is establish—juxtapose your product or service with somebody with an industry leader that they already trust. You can kind of borrow that credibility. For example, you have a course and you’re selling information. It really doesn’t matter. It could be a service, course, whatever it is. If you somehow involve either something in your industry or a celebrity or somebody like that and you kind of juxtapose, which essentially means you tie it into your product, then that increases the value because you get that borrowed credibility. Those are a couple ways to help increase your perceived value. The easiest way is probably better copy, I would say. Eric: Right. I agree. I always say this, but I think copy marketing and sales are the most important skills. The better the marketing, the easier the sales process and copywriting and salesmanship tie together. Jeremy: Yeah. Absolutely. Eric: Nice. One thing I want to ask you, not only to provide value for the audience, but selfishly, as well, I guess I should say. I’m coming out with a new course here. This is about product launching. Is there steps that you, personally, do when you work with clients or start off your launches on the right track? Is there something that you could do or suggest to people? Jeremy: I’ll let you take most of the credit for the product launch stuff. I don’t want to jump on your toes too much. I’ll give one recommendation that reverberates through the whole product launch sequence, and that is, proof. Proof is just everything. When I was launching the funnel formula, which is my flagship product that teaches you how to build sales funnels. When I did that launch to my own list, I didn’t do affiliates and all that kinds of stuff. That’s just too annoying for me. One of the things, I just focused on proof, proof, proof. Every single email that went out, every piece of communication that went out had some type, at least one piece of proof in it; whether it was a result that I got for a client, whether it was case study from a client, or an example of what happened when a client or me built the sales funnel or added a piece of the sales funnel. Telling them things they didn’t know, like, “Hey, in module three, there’s a really cool tip that let’s you do X.” That’s a style of proof, everywhere from there or telling about my past results. I did something that I was a little bit nervous of, but during my launch, and it really only works for selling to marketing people. I’ll give you an example of how you can use it in another niche. What I did was during my launch, I did it—I can’t even remember the dates. It might have been Monday through Friday, I forget. Throughout the week, I was telling my audience and giving them proof on how sales funnels worked, based on giving them numbers of my own sales funnel and how that launch was going. Eric: Nice, so a play-by-play of your launch. Jeremy: Exactly. I had screenshots. I said, “Hey, look, I would have made X dollars if I didn’t have this sales funnel in place.” I didn’t actually say dollars, I just did percentage. It was something like, “I made an extra,” I forgot what it turned out to be. It was something like, 33 percent of my sales were from selling the main product, and 66 percent of my sales came from the sales funnel, after they bought that first product. I said, “Look, I would have been leaving 66 percent of the money I made on the table if I didn’t have this sales funnel.” That was huge. I actually showed even more proof. I showed a screenshot from inside my office autopilot, which is my CRM, so they could see what I was talking about. One thing that you can do, let’s just go back to weight loss. That one is easy. If you’re selling a weight loss course, you can say, maybe you did a two week launch. You could say, “Somebody bought this on the first day, four days later, they’re already down eight pounds. This other person bought it and within two days, they were down five pounds.” Throughout the launch, you can talk about the results that people are getting since the launch started, results that people have done in the past. You could even do things like with scarcity, with deadlines and scarcity. Saying, “We only have 50 left and there are 20,000 people waiting on the list. They’re waiting for the cart to open. Make sure you get there as soon as I tell you it’s open, because there’s going to be 20,000 people that are going to buy this product.” You can do scarcity like that. Make sure you don’t lie. I hate when people lie in marketing. Eric: That’s a good point. My last course I did that too. It was a higher price course. What I did with the list that was on the list for that course was scarcity and social proof. I would literally list the people. I would say, “Jason from California invested today.” I listed the people’s first name and the state they were from of who invested that day during that launch process as social proof as well. I never really tested that, to be honest with you, against not doing that. When I did that, the results seemed to be more dramatic then when I did this before without doing that added factor. Jeremy: That’s one of those things that it’s a given that it’s going to do better. Hopefully, that helps with product launches. Eric: Nice. That’s beautiful. Just to clarify, I don’t know if you misunderstood. My course, it has nothing to do with product launches, but as this launched a new course or product. I know you actually worked with that, but my audience at the end, we’ll give out Jeremy’s website at the end. If you do have a product launch, you can talk to Jeremy as well. Jeremy: I thought you were having a course about product launches? Eric: No. It’s going to be a full marketing strategy, sales copy, the good stuff. Before we wrap it up today, because you shared a lot of good value and I definitely want to thank you for coming on. I know a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs listening may have a continuity service or maybe a continuity or monthly program, or maybe they’re even thinking about starting one, which could be very profitable. Can you share a tip or two before we leave today on how they can increase their retention rates? Some way to make their customers stick with them longer. Jeremy: Yeah. Let me throw out three different things. Number one is one of the things that I really love to do. Again, everything all goes back to value. As soon as they buy something, this is especially true with a continuity program, but it’s also true with any service, any product. I put people into what I call a “personal coach campaign.” Somebody buys one of my products and for the next, roughly 30 days, it depends, but roughly 30 days; they get emails specifically based on that product. The point of that is to get them to consume the product, not eat the product, you know, consume the product. Eric: Right. Jeremy: I guess it could be to eat the product, if you’re selling some kind of food. Eric: That’s awesome. That’s motivating them at the same time you’re there for them, right, supporting them? Jeremy: Yeah. There’s a couple things that it does. It establishes a relationship with them. You already have a relationship with them because they trust you enough to buy your product. A lot of people have buyer’s remorse. They’re kind of like, “Oh, God, I shouldn’t have bought it. Now I’m going to have to return this.” They think that a lot of business owners don’t care. They’re just in it for the sale. If you have a full 30 days of emails or could be a mix of emails, videos, whatever you want to do with it, the media. It really shows people that you care about them. You should care about them, regardless if it increases retention rates or anything like that. You should do this anyway because you care about your customers. The side benefit is that it increase retention rates, reduces refunds, because it establishes and builds that relationship. It all comes down to value and relationship. That’s one thing that, everything revolves around that. That’s one thing is to have a personal coach campaign. It’s just easy. They could be quick, just to say, “I really appreciate that you bought it. I want you to know that I’m here for you. I actually care about you and hope that you get the results that you’re looking for.” It’s not just like, “Hey, thanks for your money. See ya,” and you never talk to them again; which is what most people do. It’s rare that I get emails, maybe out of all the product I’ve ever bought in my entire life, I could probably count on one hand how many campaigns like that that I’ve ever gotten. You stick out like crazy, if you do that. Eric: Great. Jeremy: Number two … I’m sorry. Eric: I just said that’s great. That’s fantastic. I haven’t seen, like you said, I’ve really never seen it. I can’t think of any product or service that I’ve bought where there’s been an ongoing campaign like that. Jeremy: Yeah. For some people, it’s that they really don’t care. They just want your money. For others, they just haven’t thought about it yet. The second thing is send out some type of email. It could be anything. It could be a salesman calling them, a customer support person. It could be a postcard, letter, text message, whatever media you want to use. Essentially, do a stick letter. In direct mail, they do stick letter. That is kind of close to a personal coach campaign, but it’s just one piece, where you just thank them for the order. If there’s any membership details, you can put that in there. Just reassure them that it was a good purchase. They’re going to get value out of it. maybe add a little tip in there to help them get more value out of whatever they just bought, and then sell them another product. Eric: Absolutely. That’s a fabulous way to get your back end going. Jeremy: Yeah. The product should be, if you’re selling a supplement for, let’s just go back to weight loss again. If you’re selling something for weight loss, you can’t sell them a supplement for getting rid of toe fungus or something like that, because there’s no congruency there. Whatever it is, it has to be really congruent, and really make sense to add more value to take whatever results they’re going to get and take them to a new level. That’s the second one, send a stick letter. The third one, I just had it in my mind. The first one is the personal coach campaign. The second one is a stick letter. Third one, another thing you can do for retention rates is get people—this is kind of a mental type of thing. Get people to give you testimonials. You may not have really heard this before, I’m not sure. If you can get somebody to give you a testimonial and cement that idea in their mind that they love this product, it’s helping them. Who do you know that’s going to give somebody a testimonial and ask for a refund? Know what I mean? You can do this in your personal coaching campaign. If you do a campaign and get them to commit to doing business with you and to admit that you’re helping them and you’re doing a good job for them, they’re probably not going to ask for a refund. They’re going to stay with you longer. A fourth bonus thing that goes in with the stick letter is keep selling them additional products. Keep selling them additional services, because as they go down the rabbit hole with you, they’re going to get more attached to doing business with you. The more they spend with you, the less likely they are to ever leave you because you’re now their knight in shining armor that’s helping them fix whatever problem their trying to solve. Eric: Fantastic. Absolutely. That’s great. This has been awesome, Jeremy. I definitely want to thank you. You shared a lot of fantastic value, great value share here. I want to thank you for coming on the tenth episode here of The Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider. Before everyone goes out and dives in on all the tips and takes action on everything we talked about, can you tell the listeners where they can learn more about you, check you out? Jeremy: Two things, pretty easy. My name is Jeremy Reeves. I’ll tell you why I’m saying this in a second. You spell it J-E-R-E-M-Y R-E-E-V-E-S. The reason that I’m spelling it out is because the number one thing that I would recommend is just going on my website, www.JeremyReeves.com. On there, you can see whatever you want. I have free stuff on there. There should be a popup that comes up and gives you a free report up in the navigation bar, there’s a resources section that says “free” on it. There’s different things that you can opt-in to and get a whole bunch of free stuff, interviews and reports and videos and all kinds of stuff. The other thing is I have my own podcast. It’s called, Sales Funnel Mastery. Go into iTunes or whatever you listen to and do a search for that. You can follow me on my podcast. I do a lot of short sections, where I usually cover a single topic in five, ten, fifteen minutes, something like that. Little tidbits of strategy and stuff like that. Those are the two things, www.JeremyReeves.com for my website. If you want to look at any of the free products I have, free services or whatever is right for you, or check out Sales Funnel Mastery. That’s my podcast. Eric: Nice. I was telling Jeremy before the show, I checked out his podcast yesterday. I definitely recommend everybody check out there, and definitely his site. You get some good value. I recommend it. It’s definitely worth it. Jeremy, wow, it’s been an absolutely pleasure with you. Thank you for taking the time and sharing everything with the listeners. All you listeners out there, I hope you enjoyed the show and most importantly, take action on everything Jeremy and I talked about today. Before we go, if you guys could do me two quick favors, I’d really appreciate it. Simply hit that subscribe button, so you don’t miss out on a future business boosting podcast. If you stuck around this far, you obviously enjoyed the value share. Make sure you do those reviews and comments. I need your help in getting noticed and getting the value out to more people. I’m your host Eric Barton, a result specialist, signing out today. We’ll see you next week for another fast easy success marketing insider. Here’s to your success. It’s Jeremy back here again. I really hope you enjoyed that interview. For more information on this podcast and everything like that. A couple things, make sure that you’re subscribed to this podcast to make sure you’re getting every episode. This is the kind of stuff that I cover, everything that we went over in that interview; just really, really solid, insightful strategies for building your business. Make sure that you’re telling friends about the podcast, we can get the rankings up there and get the word out to everybody. Make sure that you’re leaving reviews and clicking the little stars; especially, in iTunes. That helps me boost the rankings and get more attention so everybody else can benefit from this. That’s pretty much it. I will see you at www.JeremyReeves.com. I really hope you enjoyed this. Thanks.