Inside the Minds of CRO Leaders: CRO’s Best Practices for the Future

All right, everybody. Here's what's going to happen. We got my friend John McDonald over here, who I've known for a couple of years now. We're going to be talking about all things CRO and the future of CRO, so conversion rate optimization, but we're going to wait maybe another minute or so for people to kind of trickle in. So wherever you're watching from right now, whether it's YouTube or LinkedIn or whatever channel it is exactly, Leave a comment where you're coming from exactly, or leave a reply. Always good to see where people are coming in from. And also tell us what you want to learn more about. So we're restreaming this right now to LinkedIn, X, Facebook as well, YouTube. And I think it's also going to restream as well, the platform. So that's what we do for webinars. So yeah, leave a comment, tell us where you're coming in from, and we'll get started in about 15 minutes. But John and I, we've known each other for how many years? 6 years?

At least, yeah, right?

Something like that, right? Yeah. So John and I met at MIT class that we went to for about 3 years or so. It was like an entrepreneur's organization thing. And John's also very tall too. He's a former basketball player. But yeah, great guy, very smart guy. And we're just going to have a conversation here. We'll probably go for 30 to 40 minutes or so. And my hope here is that you get at least one actionable takeaway. And without further— and if you guys have any questions, go ahead and leave it in the comments as well and we'll try to pick it up. But John, I guess to kick things off here, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself first and then I'll get going and we'll get started with this thing.

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, Eric. John McDonald, I'm the founder of The Good. We are essentially a conversion optimization firm. So we help brands to convert more of their visitors into customers. We do that by helping you understand every click and movement that's happening on your site. diving deep into understanding not only what they're doing, but why they're doing it. And yeah, like you said, we met at MIT Entrepreneurs Program. We ended up in the 5-year program, right? Because of COVID So we ended up getting a few extra years out of it, which was great. And yeah, excited to be here. Cool.

All right. So thanks for that, John. And on my end, so my name is Eric Siu, and I have an ad agency called Single Grain. And I do a podcast called Marketing School and another one called Leveling Up. And We do these webinars to try to educate people and inform people on the future of marketing. That's kind of what I'm most interested in. So I guess, John, what are you seeing right now? I mean, you guys work with a lot of clients right now. What's kind of the bread and butter that still works? Like what's the old stuff that's still good? And then I think we can kind of move into the future. So let's start there first.

Well, I would say the old stuff that still works is psychology. And what I mean by that is understanding what consumers are going through on your site as you are trying to improve that digital journey, right? You and consumers, both the brands and the consumers want the same thing. That's to quickly understand if you can help them and then to convert as quickly and easily as possible. And the understanding of what they're going through is where I've spent the majority of our career, right? We've been doing optimization for almost 16 years now. And so one of being one of the early players, where, you know, A/B testing was just taking off, Optimizely had just gotten started, to now it's almost a commodity, right? Anyone can A/B test. There's so many tools out there to do it and make it pretty easy for you that really what has worked has been the psychology, understanding consumers, and that's really our superpower more than anything else.

Cool. And so I guess How do people get better at psychology? Because I think marketing is just psychology at the end of the day, right? So I guess we'll go theory first, and then I know people want the tactics, they want the dopamine hits and everything. We'll get to the tactics, everyone. But why don't you go ahead and start off with psychology? Because I think you guys do a pretty good job of that.

Yeah. Well, actually, I think that's a great segue to the latest book I wrote called Behind the Click, which is basically covering all of these psychological principles that That we work with on a daily basis. The first to really understand is just the theory of heuristics, right? Heuristics are shortcuts. It's a fancy word for mental shortcuts. These mental shortcuts are really the understanding of, you know, if I want to contact a brand, I'm going to scroll down to the footer and look for their phone number, right? Or I know a chat icon is going to be in that bottom right-hand corner. Right? And the idea is your consumer has all these preconceived notions about how your website should work based on the training that they've had in using the internet for all these decades now. And so the reality is you need to pay attention to these heuristics and you need to utilize them to your advantage. And if you break those norms, a lot of brands think, oh, I'm going to have the best design site. It's going to look awesome. It's going to You know, stick out and really, there's a difference between great branding and being understood before somebody gets to your site, right?

Right.

I'm a firm believer that once somebody gets to your site, marketing's job is done. Marketing has won. They're at your site. It is now time to serve their needs. And the best way to do that is to meet their expectations. And get them from point A to point B as quickly and easily as possible.

So let's— how do we make this a little actionable for people? Yeah, and I'm sure you've got some stuff in the books that you can pull out.

Sure. Yeah, well, I think, you know, first of all, you know, understanding your customers is really the first step, and that is just talking to them. Okay, so, so many brands make assumptions. I like to say it's really hard to read Read the label from inside the jar. And what I mean by that is a brand, you are so close to your products, you're so close to your website, you probably had a hand in designing it or developing it in a lot of cases. And the reality is that a new-to-file customer, then an ad or a referral or a Google search, something that landed them, or ChatGPT, they asked, you know, who What is the best brand for X, Y, and Z? And they ended up at your site. That's all preconceived notions that you need to be able to address, right? And what I mean by that is have segmentations, have landing pages for each of those audiences so that when people get to your site, you can meet them where they're at. And really at that point, have a good understanding, not only of what they're going through, But also be able to communicate your messaging. And that's the biggest issue is so many brands want to just continue to talk at customers when the reality is the customer who's at your site is there to get a job done, right? They're there because they think you can help solve their pain or need, and then they want to convert if you can as quickly and easily as possible. And most brands want people at their site to Tell them more about the brand, right? That's usually how that starts. And it's unfortunate because most consumers aren't there for that. And, you know, you really need to understand what mental state they're in, what they're going through, what their job is that they want to get done. And that's really hard for a brand to do who, who knows everything about the website. Knows everything about the products.

Okay. So what are some things people can do to understand their customers?

Yeah. Okay. So we'll start from small brands to working up to larger brands. How's that? For smaller brands through midsize, I love what I call the coffee shop test. Take a laptop and go to your local coffee shop. Go up to people in line who are waiting to order a coffee and say, you know what, I'll buy your coffee. If while the barista is making it, I can show you my website and ask you to complete a simple task while you talk out loud about what you're thinking as you go through that. No hard feelings, say whatever comes first to your mind. Do 3 to 5 of those and you'll learn so much so quickly because you're going to have an outside perspective. And these people don't even have to be squarely within your ideal customer profile. Right? And then as you kind of mature as a brand, you could start moving into doing something like user testing, right? User testing is where you're going to send people to your site who clearly match your ICP. You can segment and filter these people. There are services that help you do that, companies like The Good that can help you do this. But the reality here is you're getting people to your site and you're asking them to complete tasks and talk out loud about what they're thinking. As they go through that. You're recording their screen and their audio, and really what you're looking for here is the similarities across all these conversations. So you're looking for how many times do the same issues come up over and over again. And, you know, easy things like, hey, I'm trying to filter and find every product that's in a certain color, and I can't figure out how to do that. Right. That creates a big challenge that a brand probably hasn't thought about. And there's lots of instances of improvements that can be done there. But again, it's talking to consumers, right? And it's a fairly simple way to start. Cool.

So here's what we're gonna do. I wanted to take the first 10 minutes to kind of do an intro with you, John, and then we'll kind of go back and forth here and share things that we know from both sides. So I'll— what I'll recommend to everyone is go read the book, The Mom Test. It tells you very specific questions to go ask people, right? I wanna be more prescriptive. here, and I want people to go think about, hey, like, what questions should I be asking? Why am I asking these questions at the end of the day, right? And because the, the thing is, like, um, I think we can, we can talk theory all day, but, um, you know, if we're not giving people kind of like those dopamine hits, uh, you know, they're gonna leave disappointed at the end of the day. So do you have anything like that?

Yeah, so, well, The Mom Test is a great place to start, right? That book, he specifically says a couple of things in this book, and I love that he wrote this and called it out. And it's called the mom test because he says you should never ask your mom for feedback. Don't take your website to your mom. Actually, it's don't take it to anybody who knows you because you're not gonna get raw feedback. So instead, you wanna ask questions of people who don't know you personally. Ideally, they don't even know your brand, quite honestly. And the idea behind that is ask them very simple, high-level questions. Right? You don't want to lead the witness. What I mean by that is you don't want to ask questions like, tell me what you think about this specific feature or functionality. Instead, you say you want to lead them to using that specific feature or functionality. Say, go find a t-shirt in the right color for you, right? As opposed to saying, go find a white t-shirt, right? Because they're going to start looking for how to do specific things.

Mm-hmm.

That you already know are possible. And instead, what you want to do is you want to find the world of possibilities. Maybe they can't even find the filtering, right? So the specific tactic here is to, you know, ask people who don't know you for feedback so they can be honest, right? And real. And then on top of that, ask them very high-level questions as opposed to very specific questions where you're leading them to get to the answer that you want to hear.

Cool. So I'm gonna give some specific examples here. So bad examples would be, would you use an app for a cookbook? Or would you pay for this? Do you like the idea? Okay. So good examples would be, when's the last time you used a cookbook? Why did you use it? Have you tried other methods?

Yeah.

Why do you bother? How do you currently deal with this problem? And I think on a broader level too, thinking about what are the jobs to be done? Everyone here needs to understand the jobs to be done framework because At the end of the day, you're solving a problem, right? John kind of brought up marketing. With marketing, you're trying to bring people to the point of sale, and that's what the job is ultimately, right? Sales' job is to close them, right? So jobs to be done, go understand that. And then The Mom Test, definitely read that book. And at that point, you're going to understand not only how to build a good service, but how to build good products too. I think the problem with a lot of CROs or people that attempt to do CROs, they don't think about these things. And they just start thinking about how can I change the color of a button or how can I change the headline? And that's all I got at the end of the day. But let me ask you this, John. What do you think is one of the highest levers, the biggest levers you can pull with CRO? So I want to get to AI in a second because everyone's waiting for the AI stuff, but what do you think is one of the biggest levers that you can pull with CRO?

Well, I think the biggest lever that people forget about is higher up in the funnel, right? And what I mean by that is working on those initial landing pages. And a landing page is anywhere that a consumer comes in. The too many people in CRO focus, as you said, on getting people to take a specific action further down the funnel. Everyone's worried about checkout. How do I optimize checkout? Right? How do I get them to click that buy button or add to cart button? The problem is too many people in CRO forget about everything before that, and they leave so much opportunity on the table. Because they're just concerned about getting that 1 or 2% bump from the people who are already on that product detail page or in the cart. The reality is the journey starts way before that. The journey starts in the ad. It starts in the referral. It starts in the Google search. And then making sure that there's a connection between that, whatever somebody searched for, and where they end up on your site. And that connection is so often missed. If you look at small brands versus enterprise brands, enterprise brands do this really, really well. They'll have hundreds of landing pages and AI makes that super easy now for any brand to do. And the reality is too many small brands just run an ad campaign and send everybody to one page or everybody to your homepage. That's a huge missed opportunity or everybody to just a product detail page. Where they miss so much context that could be inserted into that page.

So I would say probably one of the highest levers you can pull when it comes to increasing your conversion rates is your offer, right? And so one of my friends, Alex Hormozi, wrote a book called $100 Million Offers. Everyone just go read that. There's actually a workbook that's tied to it as well. I would encourage you to workshop with your respective teams, but your offer, forget about all the other stuff. If you have an offer that says, hey, if you try out our product, I'll give you $1 million, people would be stupid not to take that, right? So then you can work backwards from that and then figure out, okay, how do I make a really good If you have a really good no-brainer offer, then your conversion rates are just going to go up at the end of the day. The problem with most people is that they look at other software and they just copy other people, right? Same thing with other agencies too. They just copy other people. It's the same boring stuff. It's no wonder why they're in debt. It's no wonder why they're falling behind. A lot of them are failing right now, right? Because not even just agencies, but just companies that aren't doing well, it's because they don't think about the offer. So let me ask you this, John. What's the no-brainer offer you have on your website?

Well, we offer what we call a score. You can go and score your site and get a really good understanding of where are the 5 most impactful areas that you can improve to boost your digital journey and ultimately your conversions in the end. So we offer that where people can go and get that score, get actionable information. About their specific site and understand not only learn about us, but also be able to deploy those, get some easy wins, and then say, hey, you know what, The Good helped me do that. I want to take this another step. I bet there's more here.

Got it. And then so I'll give people a sense for what our offer is at Single Grain. So there's this one-on-one AI consultation, right? One-on-one. And sure, it's fine. And I, you know, just to be direct with you, John, like, I think our offers are fine. They're not great by any means, right? I think your offer is like, you know, it's seen out there, like our offer is no No more special than yours at the end of the day. So let's workshop this in front of everyone right now. How would you make your offer a no-brainer? Like if I look at your website, I would be stupid not to take it.

So one of the things we used to do and should probably get back to doing is you talk about one-on-one, everybody will do these one-on-one audits, we'll audit your site, we'll give you these tips. I used to sit down with any brand who wanted And in fact, I— we have a link you can book with me today for 15 minutes, and I'm happy to sit down and do this with anybody. But to just sit down and tear down your site and share 16 years of experience about what we've learned, look at every single bit of your site and say, here is specific things that we've seen work in the past that you should try. And if these work for you, We can deep dive into the data later and get more specific actionable items for you. But here is the teardown of your site. And one of the things we always do is actually, we use AI heat tracking— eye tracking, excuse me. So it's AI that's been built upon thousands and thousands of AI heat maps, right? And we create an eye tracking heat map for every page as part of this and share that with you to help you understand Where people are looking, where they're not looking, what information is getting missed. Are they even reading all of this, right? So it's something that they can't get without having the proper enterprise-level tools that add up to be quite a bit for eye tracking. We're able to give them that using AI and share that information and then tear down the site with them.

So just so everyone can see over there, there's a QR code that you can scan if you actually want to meet with John at the top left. So we'll leave it up for, you know, I'm gonna We'll kind of talk a little more about John's offer, then we'll switch to our offer. But John, so yours, I think that's a pretty good one, right? Because it's taking up your time at the end of the day, it's 15 minutes, and it's these website teardowns. So are you saying that you're doing it again now? Or what's the deal?

Yeah, for your listeners today, I'll definitely do that. That was part of why I provided that link ahead of time. Stopped doing it mainly because the folks who would come in from that were always interested in best practices. And I'm a firm believer that best practices are for beginners. As you mentioned earlier, there's— you could go Google best practices in CRO and get a bunch of checklists. Okay. The problem is that the way we want to look at this is data-backed, right? And that's why we provide those AI heat maps based on eye tracking.

Yeah.

That is really where we're providing some actionable data and that's tailored to your site. You mentioned copying people earlier. This is a huge— I have a huge soapbox I can get on about that, but I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't pay attention to competitors. There's a reason that racehorses wear blinders. The minute you start looking to the sides and looking at your competition, you're going to get left behind. You really want to be out there innovating and trying to stay ahead of them. And in CRO, you never know if what they have deployed on their site is working for them. Maybe you got opted into an A/B test and you have no idea. You wouldn't know. And maybe they don't even know if that test is working yet, right? Also, I hear things about conversion rates all the time in copy. Oh, my competitor has a 2% conversion rate. Ours is lower than that. We just want to get to 2%. Well, do you think your competitors incentivized to be honest about their conversion rate in the public? Absolutely not. There's no reason for them to go out there and just say our conversion rate is X. And how do you know, even if they are being truthful, that you're measuring it the same way that they are? Right? There are lots of ways to measure conversion rates. You could look at their specific pages. You could measure who just gets to the cart versus who clicks a button.

Right.

Thousands of ways to measure that. So the reality is you don't know if you're measuring the same thing. So is it apples to apples or not? And you don't know if the tactic that they even used was something that they're testing and that they know works for them. So I'm a firm believer you should iterate on your own digital experience using customer data from your specific site visitors. That is the best way to do it.

So, Jono, let's go back to your offer real quick and then we'll come over to my offer and then kind of do the same thing, but coming from your opinion, right? So I think your offer is, it's gotten a little better, right? It went from whatever it was before and then it became like a 15-minute consultation with the CEO, right? One-on-one where you do a teardown. Now I still don't think that's unique enough yet, right? Because there still are other people doing it.

Yeah.

So my opinion, I'm like, okay, well could you offer them $100 to get on the call? Right? And so what else can you do to make it such an enticing thing where they feel stupid not to take? Because right now I'm thinking about your offer. I don't feel stupid not taking it because what if I don't know who you are? So what else do you think you can do to make it a no-brainer offer before we move to mine?

Yeah, well, I think not giving them $100. I mean, I don't think I just want to hand out $100 bills plus my time. But I will say that I think, you know, what I could do potentially here is to, you know, maybe come prepared with an actionable report Give them, you're gonna walk away with 5 items to fix. And here's some wireframes on exactly what you should do. Right? So not only point out where all the issues are in a teardown, but actually give them the actionable items that they need to go deploy and say, hey, here it is wireframed, go make it happen.

Okay. So I'm curious, guys in chat, how would you rate that offer on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best, right? So we'll have this be like a A little engaging chat over here. And then what we'll do is we'll talk about the offer that we have right now. So it's the one-on-one AI consultation for Single Grain, right? Because we're mainly known for SEO. And so there's this one-on-one AI SEO consultation. And so that's actually increased our conversion rates. I forgot what the numbers were, probably 25, 30% or something like that, which is pretty decent. And we get a good amount of conversion. Oh, look, there's a— if you look at the top left, there's a Meet with Eric as well. So you can scan that one to nerd out on the AI SEO stuff, but I don't think it's good enough yet, right? Because right now it goes to our head of SEO. Even we tried my face, it didn't convert better or worse. It was the same thing. But again, it's not necessarily saying we need to give $100 or whatever. It's like, how would we make it such a no-brainer where people would want to take it, right? So for example, if I said, hey, you're going to have myself, other SEO experts in the space, all the SEO experts I know in the world, right? that will appear on the call. So maybe my podcast co-host Neil will appear in the call, Neil Patel, right? You'll have Gaetano who's really good at SEO. Maybe I'll have Kevin Indig. And so all of a sudden it's like you have 5 of the best SEOs in the world or something like that. And then they're going to do an audit on your thing. And also if you feel like you wasted your time on that call, we'll give you $500, right? But then that means we have to heavily qualify it at the end of the day. So to John's point, you can't just give $100 to everyone. But it's like, hey, we're going to qualify the hell out of you and we're going to put this A-team on the call. And then if you don't like the call, you felt like your time was wasted, boom, $500 comes back to you, right? So I think you can play around with it. John and I are just giving you different options here.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that actually of, hey, if you don't feel like you got your return on investment of your time here, I'll just PayPal you some money. You know, I think that's great. Easy. And it's on me then at that point on my team to deliver the value.

John, we would be remiss not to talk about the AI stuff going on. So actually before we do, John, what's in your CRO stack right now? Like what do you guys use over there at The Grid?

Well, we work with a lot of enterprise brands, so often they'll bring a stack for A/B testing to this You know, to the engagement, but really love Convert, convert.com for A/B testing. We use Optimizely quite a bit and Adobe Experience Manager. Those are the 3 big ones. They're mainly in the enterprise space. Convert is great for smaller brands and mid-sized brands. It is most cost-effective we found, has the newest toolset, and works extremely well. In addition to that, we love Hotjar. Yeah. So for heat mapping, if you're looking for on-site heat mapping, doing surveys, etc., Hotjar does a really good job with that. I know that Microsoft Clarity is out there. There's a whole bunch of other tools now that are really inexpensive, but you have to really kind of weigh what's the value you're getting versus the price you're paying, right? Usually pay for what you're getting, and when you're not paying, you're the customer is the old saying, right? So think about that with Microsoft giving Clarity away. What data you're providing them. But I will say in the end that really what we're focused on right now when it comes to AI—

Hold on one second. So we're gonna go with my stat too before we move into AI.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Love that. Yeah. So I was just gonna give you a plus one on the Convert piece. That's what we use internally too. And a lot of CRO agencies use. By the way, I'm gonna rewind this. So Convert's good. Hotjar's good. You can use Clarity as well, but we don't To John's point, you are feeding the Microsoft machine and we have a good relationship with Microsoft. We actually know the guy that was running Clarity. And so what I would say though is actually, John, there is a CRO agency out there where they do have a no-brainer offer where it's pay for performance.

Mm-hmm.

And I've talked about it on the podcast, but basically it's like, oh, you can choose to either pay the retainer, 10, 20, 30 grand a month or whatever, or if we hit, If we increase your conversion rates by 0 to 9%, you're going to pay 10 grand a month for that. 10 to 20%, you're going to pay 20 grand a month for that. And 30 plus percent, you're going to pay 30 grand a month for that. And maybe it's retroactive. So that's an example of an offer that works well. And I know with them, I spoke to them, but a good chunk of their retainers, 30 to 40%, are pay for performance. And when I think about the best marketers out there, a no-brainer offer is pay for performance. And so take that and apply to whatever industry that you're in. But okay, John, let's move to— you look like you want to respond, so you go ahead and respond.

Yeah. Oh, well, I was just going to say we have done pay for performance in the past. It's not something that we promote because of the fact that enterprise-level brands, as soon as that gets up to the high-level executives that are approving larger engagement contracts, they look at that and they say, whoa, whoa, hold on. There's a big upside that I can't calculate right now. Like, you know, 100% say without question, this is what the line item's gonna cost me. And so they just wanna lock in that price. And so often every time I work it out to have a pay for performance with our direct level, uh, of engagement, unfortunately it works its way up.

You can't do it with enterprise. All the other things, enterprise, enterprise is looking for stability. Yeah. Something like this is like they have the money anyway, so they might as well pay it. I think you're better off. Pay for performance with a company that where you're working with a founder or it's a smaller company, not enterprise. Yeah.

Yeah. Big upside, right? Yeah. Yeah. Those that are growing, right? And you know that you can attach to that and propel it and that's really a no-brainer.

So let's talk about the AI stuff now, John. So what are you guys doing that's kind of cutting edge and what are you guys doing around the AI stuff right now?

So when it comes to AI, we're using it a lot to do a couple of different things. One is to Understand all the data we're coming in, right? So instead of sifting through Excel sheets and running formulas on stuff, you could just feed it to AI and have it kick back, you know, okay, here's all of the customer service chats. Give us the top 5 complaints that consumers have, and then we can go and address those in the content on the site, for instance. Or give me the sentiment of this entire user testing studies, right? Upload all the chat transcripts from user testing recordings. And then it can kick out what is the overall sentiment, what are the commonalities between them, right? So what we're using it really as more often than anything else is a research assistant, right? Is that low-level role that we would have a junior strategist doing that really can pull everything together very quickly and give us, you know, the commonalities, the themes. I mentioned we're using it for things like eye-tracking studies where we upload a website image or, you know, if we're doing like a wireframe of some sort, or we can just give it a URL and it will spit out within seconds a heat map. Those type of things are really where we're finding we're saving a lot of time and a lot of energy. And I know there's a lot more we could be doing. And I'd love to hear where you're taking it too, because You are really the AI person that is really innovative.

I wanna go a little deeper on your stuff first. So you talked about, it sounds like you are, is everyone on your team trained with this stuff right now? And are they all using, what are you guys using? Claude? Is it ChatGPT? What are you guys doing exactly there?

Yeah, so I'm doing a couple of things where I've been playing around with Claude a lot more than any, than ChatGPT. For a couple of reasons. One is, you know, the fact that Claude can write a lot better. So when we have found that when you want it to have natural language, it can write a lot better than OpenAI does, and it just doesn't sound as much like a, like a bot. So if we want it to put together a report or actually kick us out some insights that we can really share with a client, of course we human validate everything, but Mm-hmm. You still have to do that, but it does save a lot of time. But we prefer cloud now for calculations, etc. OpenAI ChatGPT works really, really well for that. It's pretty quick. But yeah, I think we're using—

What are some prompts like? What are like maybe your top 1 or 2 go-to prompts for doing this?

Yeah, so I have one that I've done that is a In ChatGPT, I call it like a mega prompt, right? So what I did is I took a ton of information. I call it like the brain from The Good. Basically, I fed it all. We've been writing content for 15+ years, you know, several thousand words a week. It's all up on thegood.com. If you click on Insights, you can— there's a whole encyclopedia of optimization there. We give away all of our thinking. If you want it applied directly to you, then that's when we start talking about a specific engagement. But Yeah. Happy to give all that information away. I've written 3 books. We do webinars like this, podcasts, et cetera. I took all of that content, everything I could find, and I fed it into ChatGPT. And I said, here's all this content. Here's hundreds of podcast links. Here's PDFs from my books. Here's all these insights. Go scrape the good, et cetera. And then put together where we can ask it any question we want. And basically say at that point, here is anything that the good would kick back. So instead of having— it's our own personal search engine, but it takes it a step further, right? It takes a step further in telling us, okay, well, John has said this line before, so maybe you could use that. Or here's some case study that maybe you forgot about when you ran this particular test with a client. You could reuse that here. Or here's some resource you could reference. And it's all content we've produced. So it's in our voice, it's in our tone. It's things we've already said.

Love that. And so it sounds like, I know for Claude, you basically create different workspaces, right? You can upload all this stuff. It sounds like you're continuing to work in that workspace. And whenever you have a new client, for example, that you wanna work on, it takes all the information from, for example, maybe you don't have to write a book, right? Books are a very thankless job. You've done 3. That's amazing, right? But, you know, you can take from your— the podcast that you've done or like any of the blog posts that you've done in the past and just make it a brain that really understands you. And then it sounds like maybe, John, are you having your team use that as well or is it just you?

Well, right now it's just me because I've been testing it out to make sure that it's going to produce stuff that is of quality. And the number one issue I'm finding with this right now Is that our thinking over 15 years has evolved, right? So we often will go back and reference something from a decade ago that maybe doesn't hold true anymore or isn't as valuable today as it might have been in the past, right? 10 years ago, very few people were doing CRO, right? Now it's ubiquitous. So it's a little different situation. Some of those tips back then were huge and now they're just standard practice. So what I'm finding opportunities out of that is to go back to our marketing team and say, hey, we should update this post because there's information's updated, you know, changed, etc. So now we're refreshing content using it, right? But right now, it's mainly been me using it, using what I'll call the good brain, if you will.

Cool. I love it. The good brain. Maybe we'll make a single grain brain too. That's cool. So I'll talk about what we're doing on the AI side and then we're going to open it up for Q&A. So you guys can start dropping your questions into Q&A and then we'll go from there. So I'm going to share my screen with you all. John, tell me if you can see this. So this is what we're doing on the Single Grain site. You can see this? Yes? Yep.

Good to go.

Okay. So usually this is one of our programmatic SEO pages. Is it still showing right now? I think it is, right? All right. So you can see here, the call to action here says optimize your conversions. Now, usually there should be a call to action here. I actually don't know what happened, but usually there is. But usually the call to action says work with us. And so what we do with AI is we just scan the entire page and it creates this new call to action based on the content on the page itself. And then also, it adds a frequently asked questions portion, right? And what we also try to do too is We try to adjust the logos based on, if we're talking about e-commerce CRO services, the logos will adjust to e-commerce. And so this basically increases the conversion rates, at least the clicks onto this call to action by about 50%.

Mm-hmm.

And then the conversion rate goes up about 20% or so. And so we do this because we have an SEO background as an agency. So we create a lot of these programmatic SEO pages. And then it's like, okay, well, if you created all these pages, how do you optimize these pages at scale? And this would make more sense if you're optimizing for a page, even a site that has a couple hundred or a couple thousand pages, this would work. It just, your mileage may vary depending on your lifetime value and your average order value. But this is an example of something that we're doing.

That's great. Yeah. Using AI to personalize is really a huge opportunity. And I think that's where CRO is going in the end. It's all about creating those custom journeys.

Yep, totally. And there's actually one more thing I wanted to show and then we'll get over to Q&A. So guys, start dropping your questions into the Q&A. We already have a log to go with, but I actually just posted this today and it's on X, but let me share my screen. This will be a preview. We'll cover this more in detail maybe on the next webinar. You can see the screen again. Yes. Okay. So this is an example and I'll try to make it a little bigger. So on LinkedIn, you cannot do this right now. You cannot do LinkedIn account-based marketing, meaning that you can't create these campaigns at scale. So for us, for example, let's say we want to target 500 accounts on LinkedIn. Usually if you're doing LinkedIn ads, you would have to make these one by one, right? And now, so what we do is we can make, like for example, if we're targeting Amazon, should be doing this. Salesforce should be doing this, right? So we can add in these custom variables and we can make these campaigns at scale and we can personalize these ad creatives at scale, right? This is— we talked to a LinkedIn rep last week. They manage ABM software like SixSense, Demandbase. Nobody can do this right now, right? So my point of showing you all this is, and by the way, maybe you can scan the QR code afterwards if you want access to this, but we're only testing this with a couple people right now. But the reason I'm showing this, how does this relate to CRO, is because This is an irresistible offer. We can give this away for free. And we know at the end of the day, some people are going to need managed services. And then we can see who's growing. We can enrich the customers in here and we can track them over time. Once they become a really good size, we can work with them. And the thing is, anybody that's doing account-based marketing at the end of the day— oh, look, there's a little QR code. You can scan it again if you want to talk about this. But anybody that's doing account-based marketing, these people They are targeting enterprise companies, right? And so if I'm who we are, my thinking now is like, okay, with the advent of AI and using products out there like Bolt.new, I can create a frontend for a product in 5 to 10 minutes or so. That's 60 to 70% of the work.

Right.

And what happens now is I can hand it off to a developer and we can build these products and give them away for free. Because here's the thing, if you're an agency that's watching this right now, 99% of the agencies that are in our agency owners group that Neil and I have, they struggle with leads. It's ironic to me because all these people are marketing agencies, but they all suck at lead generation. How is this possible? Right? So all that to say is like, okay, cool, we have this. Our thinking in the future is like, how do we build more stuff like this? What can we give away for free? Maybe we'll have a lot of freemium versions of it. And then how do we build more tech-enabled services into the company? Because I think that's where the world is going. But John. Do you have anything else to add before we get into Q&A?

No, I would just say go buy the book if you're interested. Actually, I'll give everybody— here's an irresistible offer. Free copy of the book for anyone who's here today. Go get your digital copy. You can scan that QR code that's right there or use code Fireside. Go to thegood.com/fireside. BTC for Behind the Click and use code Fireside, you'll get a free copy. So, oh, BTC, Behind the Click. Yeah, I guess so, like behind the click. Um, so yeah, actually, uh, this book spurred from one of our classes, uh, that we took together at MIT with Nero. Um, so, uh, he's, uh, he reviewed it for me, did a, a great intro.

Cool.

And, uh, Wow.

You have 9 people scan the book. So 10 people now. Cool.

Awesome.

So everyone scan the book, go get the book. And so we got a question here. I'm going to scan up and then I'll read off these questions. And so Harish says this. He says, hi, Eric and John. I'm from Dallas, Texas. I want to learn more about how to build CRO like Single Grain Site. Well, I guess we talked about that already. So from Jonathan, I would want to hear more about results and guarantees or other risk reversal tactics to get this growth. Okay. So here's the context. So they're rating our offers, right? So we got a 5, a 6, a 4, and a 6. And so I want to hear more about results and guarantees. We kind of talked about that, right? But John, do you have anything else to add there?

No, I love the— my big takeaway was telling people, hey, if I don't give you your time, I'll just pay you for it. If you don't get a return on investment.

Which we talked about, right? So, and then we got Haley. Here asking, what are you using for eye tracking? I haven't found an option that's expensive and reliable.

Yeah, Haley, go to userinput.io/heatmaps. This is a tool I talked about, the predictive eye tracking technology. It's a tool that I set up to be able to sell this for smaller e-com brands specifically, but any brand can benefit from this. But The idea is to bring that price point way down, get that valuable insight to anybody. So userinput.io/heatmaps is—

There it is. So that's in private chat. We'll move it over to— there we go. There we go.

Yeah, cool.

Okay, so Jonathan has another question here and I have the tool for you. Maybe you know it too, John. So is there a tool or approach for something like Mutiny but for B2C instead of B2B, possibly segmenting customers by different variables, or is this just an awful, horrible idea that's doomed to fail in a ridiculous spectacle? So look, I think you're looking for an enrichment tool, but there is, I will say there's retention.com, which can be used for, you can use it in the United States. You can't use it in Europe, which will kind of identify customers that are hitting your website. It's not quite as, it's not like an all-in-one personalization tool, like a Mutiny, for example. But you can combine that API with other tools that you're using and that could get you there. But John, maybe you have something better.

Yeah, I've had a lot of success in using RB2B, which is retention.com's B2B version. So retention.com is really great for e-commerce brands specifically. RB2B is the exact same tool that they kind of tweaked a little bit in marketing towards B2B. So we use our B2B to track who's coming to our site and it gives us all profiles. We feed that into Slack. We then have a whole automation setup that allows me to click a specific reaction emoji to that particular visitor that kicks off an automation that then we use Clay. I don't know if you're familiar with Clay to do a whole bunch of automation around finding the best content to share with them. So then we're providing value when we reach back out. Based on what they looked at on our site. So Clay now knows everything about our content. I kind of talked about the GoodBrain. I've used that as well. That was the first proving ground for this whole methodology where I would feed that URL in and then it would give me out what other relevant content I should send to that person. So providing a little bit of value in the response of, hey, I saw you looking at this content.

And John, what's been your response rate on that?

So what we like to say here at The Good is real friends don't use templates. And what I mean by that is we reach out personally to these people. We don't use it. We don't use Clay to send the email or the outreach on LinkedIn. We use it to form what should be sent. And then we look at that content and send something a little more personalized. That gets a really good response rate. Usually we do 2 things in that kind of workflow we've set up. The first is I go and I connect with them on LinkedIn, but I don't actually send them a message, just connect. Then a few days later I'll say, hey, I saw you on the site. That's why I connected. Here's another piece of content I think you might like. That gets probably about a 60% response rate, which is amazing for LinkedIn DMs. Because it's personalized and they know it's not some machine sending them that message. Cold email, you know, if you send that email to them, because our B2B will give you their email address, gets like maybe teens percent, like 10, 15%. It's really, really low response rate.

And it sounds like you're doing this. So our B2B will help you with that automation. I know, kind of set you up. It kind of sets the ball up, but you got to spike it, right? So it sounds like you're doing it manually still, correct? Which I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think it's great.

Yeah. No, I do it manually because the response rate— we tried to run letting Clay write the emails. And honestly, it just didn't, didn't work. And it actually got my LinkedIn account suspended for a few weeks as well. So it's like, why even bother?

Yeah, I think it's, you know, for us, it's once we switched off the automations, and we just started doing it manually, we started getting better performance. You know, the way we do it is we kind of— so someone hits our website, we use our B2B, And then now it used to be automated, but now at least we'll set a template up and say, hey, here's a message you should send based on the page that they visited. We'll add them on LinkedIn and then we'll send them a LinkedIn message. Not just like a connect message, but a LinkedIn message actually stands out. And then we just say, hey, saw you were looking at this. Is there something you needed help with? Right? And oftentimes, you know, Yeah. They'll either say, no, just looking around, or it's like, hey, we actually needed help with this. And the good thing for us is we can see if they're visiting an agency page, that means they're more bottom of the funnel. They're ready to take an action. And so, but I like your way where it's manual nurturing. You're not asking for any sale yet. So let me ask you this. How many have panned out into like a deal for you this year?

Well, that's a great question. Enough that we keep doing it. Let's put it that way. I think the return on investment's there. I'd say probably 6 or 8, but you have to understand that our engagements are are much larger engagements. And so the folks that we're reaching out to, the reason we had to go back to manual is they're getting 100 of these emails and LinkedIn messages a day, right? And because the enterprise-level brands, especially this is in e-commerce, even it's worse. Like, I feel so bad for an e-commerce manager role. They must be getting hit up hundreds of times a day with cold messages. It's got to be insane. But the reality is make it a warm message. It does go.

And before we go with the final question here, so how many, so you got 68 deals, which is fantastic from this in the year. In a month, how many of these messages do you think you're sending? Ooh. 100. And then that's 100 opening messages, right? And then you have to nurture all the other ones.

Yeah, well, no, I would say I sent about 100 messages total a month because of the prequalification. So that includes the nurturing. So I'm probably sending 5 a day because I do my homework, right? We're really diving into what they've, what they look like, what content they're interested in, read their profile, et cetera.

Right.

So, you know, the reality is if you want to do this at volume, The first thing we're trying to do is to prove it out and really show, have a good methodology. And as I'm doing that, I'm documenting everything I do. We have a whole what works for outbound page. We use Notion to document everything. Every time I get a response, I log it there. What was sent? What was the response? Was it a positive, negative, etc.? And then we're looking at all that data and now I can train other people with, here are the messages that work, here's how you reach out, here's what you can say. And that's really the goal is not to just have me doing it. My goal is just to prove it out and be able to train somebody.

And so that's basically, look, we'll say it's 6 conversions out of 1,100 reachouts this year. And so that's about a half percent, which is fantastic, right? If we're going up to the 8 or so, you're 7, you know, 70, what do you call that? 3/4 of a percent. That's what it is, which is great, right? And so, John, thank you for sharing that. We have a final question here from Harish. So what are some of the common mistakes that performance marketers make when optimizing conversions? Go for it, John.

Oh, I'd say number one is that they don't consider there's 2 types of people on your site. There's the satisfiers and the maximizers. Now everybody falls into one of these 2. Eric, when you go to the store and you're looking to buy something, are you buying the first thing off the shelf that meets your needs? Or are you doing a ton of research? Right? That's really the difference here is too many brands, what they're doing when they're optimizing for conversion is they give too much information. They just put everything on the page thinking consumers, oh, we gotta address every concern, every objection. The problem is that there are over half of your users are those type that are called satisfiers. The only thing they're trying to do is meet their need and then get on with their lives. They just want to make sure that you can help them. And if you can, they're good, convert, move on. They got other things to do. There are some people who want all that information. So you need to have it available, but you can't get it in the way of the other half.

Right.

And that's the biggest challenge I see is we go to a site and it's just overly complicated because they just tried to cram too much into, into one And when I see that, I realize they've— I usually am like, have you been trying to do optimization in the past? And they said, yeah, we had somebody come in and they optimized our site and we found all these questions and put them all on there to answer. And that's a telltale sign that they just don't know too much.

Cool. So John, I think that's a great place to end. I know Maya, you have this final slide that we can toss up, but John, what is the— well, let's look at this slide over here. So copy of Behind the Clicks on the very left. Okay. You can scan that one. If you want a CRO consult with John, you can scan the middle one. And if you want an AI consult with myself, I guess I'll be on the call. You scan the one on the very right. Just keep in mind we will qualify just to make sure it's a good fit. So we'll leave this up for the next 30 seconds or so. But John, where can people find out more about you? What's the best way for people to find you online?

Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way. I am on there every day engaging. That's going to be your best place to get a hold of me. Um, you know, of course, if you want to chat, scan the QR code. Of course, as you mentioned, we'll qualify, but happy to connect with those who, who are qualified or just, um, yeah, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I try to read every message.

So, right. Great. And, uh, look, if you want to follow me on the socials, just, um, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, it's all Eric O-S-I-U. And, uh, that being said, thank you all for attending. I hope you all have a good rest of your week. John, thank you so much for doing this. Hope we get to do another one soon. And, uh, yeah, take care, everyone.