How to Convert more CUSTOMERS - LIVE Q&A - #AWeberChat

And we are live. So welcome everybody to another live Hangout. Super excited to be here with you today to talk about how to convert more of your leads, your prospects into customers and clients. And I'm really excited to have a special guest with me today, Michael from AWeber, who is in charge of all of their data and analysis and helping entrepreneurs basically figure out the science of conversion. Michael, welcome aboard.

Thank you. Listen, I really appreciate you having me.

He's rocking the, the AWeber hat because it's Christmas time. I'm liking it.

I'm liking it.

So we already have a ton of questions that came in, but before getting to the questions, I wanted to just get a quick overview from you, what your thoughts are, what your approach is, how can people get more clients and convert them better by using data and analysis.

Right, I mean, that's what I'm charged with here at AWeber, and what we do is, you'd think that it's almost analysis paralysis type of thing, but really each piece of information that you collect, including every single piece of no that you get, is just another step closer to getting to a conversion. I mean, things we look at are acquisition, cancellations, we use those type of information to help us lead into churn rates, lifetime values, retention rates. These are the type of metrics I'm looking at all day long and other individual KPIs. We break it down by channel, even down to the ad content and the UTM parameter. I mean, everything that we look at is essential to helping us get closer to our customers, understanding what our customers need.

I love it. And, and for those of you who may not be as familiar with AWeber, we've been doing this series for a number of months now. It's an email marketing software. It's a company that I've used for the past 10+ years. For all my email marketing. And so we'll talk about email marketing and conversion and the strategies and the science behind it can apply to any conversion engine. And so we're excited to take your questions and be able to help you work through the process. So let's get to the questions. The first one came in from Dennis. What is the most successful path to take a customer from signing up for your email list to converting them to a paying customer? Is there a certain path or process you take that makes the entire transition simple and painless for the customer?

Wow, that is a great question. And the answer to that is, um, unfortunately, no, there's never one single path that works for everyone. Um, to help you flesh out that path or figure out what that path may be, it takes a lot of testing and it takes a lot of tracking of what campaigns you're using or what channels you're using. So, um, I can tell you from my personal experience, you know, working here at AWeber, is, um, there's never gonna be a single path we consider, you know, our, our A-top number one way of going. What we do is We take different approaches to different campaigns, to different target audiences, to different channels. And what we do at that point is we'll start seeing what the success is based on our acquisition or our churn or retention. So I'd love to say that, yes, this is the path that works best for everybody, but unfortunately, I could never tell that to you. So it takes a lot of testing. It takes a lot of information.

Yeah. And Dennis, thank you for that strong lead opening question there. I feel like so many entrepreneurs are told they need a list. Right? Everybody says you need to get an email list, and it's often one of the biggest regrets for a lot of online marketers is that they wish they had started sooner with having a list. But then you have the list, so what do you do with it? Right? Like, how do you— I think a lot of entrepreneurs just make the mistake of, I'm just gonna blast out promotions all day long.

And yeah, I mean, it's best way— best way to do is actually segment that list, right? So you want to be smarter about the content that you're sending out, the offers. It's not going to relate back to everybody else. So when you're collecting that list, and this is for anyone who's starting with email marketing or looking to start an email list is, um, we have certain features and functions within our product that you can categorize them, right? So you could look at maybe they like a certain cupcake if you're into pastries, or there's certain movies they love to talk about if you're doing some kind of review. Um, that's the best way of segmenting out your list at first and just understanding what their specific interest is and moving from there.

Yeah. And I think just with a general email marketing strategy is providing content and building a relationship first. You don't walk up to somebody who you just met and, you know, ask them to marry you, right?

I hope not.

You develop a relationship, right? You go on dates, you get to know them, and that's what you need to do with your customers too. The people on your email list, they may come because they, you know, saw some free download you had, or they read a post on your blog, or they like something about you, but maybe not ready to buy yet. This is your chance to develop an ongoing relationship with them. And one of the great things about AWeber is the autoresponder sequence, so you can automatically send emails every week or every 3 days or whatever time interval you want to build a relationship with them and offer them lots of value before you start selling anything. So you could test it, obviously, right? That's the point of using data and analytics.

Test all day long. Tag all the things and test all the things, Evan. That's what it is.

Yeah. So if I was looking at a successful path to take a customer, the question was, from signing up to your email list to converting them to a paying customer, I'd look at an autoresponder sequence that was full of value, that established you as the expert, that you know what you're talking about, that you're credible. And then after that sequence is through, you can have a sales pitch, a call to action once they know you, like you, trust you. Right.

Cool.

Next up was Rodney, who's asking, is there a blueprint to all of this converting customers? Is there a blueprint? He wants the easy answer. What's the blueprint?

I'd love to say that I could give everybody an easy answer. I mean, for, if we're looking from start to finish, you know, we're looking for ways of converting them more, it pretty much relates back to the very first answer, the very first question that we got. And that's, you know, first, you know, cultivate your list, try to figure out who your customers are, what they're doing. If you're into e-commerce, what are they spending it on? Even more importantly, I think I said this in the beginning of the, Q&A was, remember, every no or every drop-off during that, that order path is just another way of you getting closer to the next person. So you wanna make sure that you're not only looking at what's successful, you gotta take a good hard look at what wasn't successful and moving from there.

Yeah. And I mean, this is general advice, but I think if you look at an overall blueprint and especially in terms of converting people, converting leads to customers, I'd be looking at what is your sales engine? Right, so at the end of the day, you wanna make a sale, back that up to how do people find out about your company? So maybe it's, you know, before the sale comes a newsletter and then before the newsletter comes your social media and your content marketing and, you know, advertising that you're doing and networking events, right? If that's your funnel, all of these things that generate attention drives people to the website, drives people to the newsletter, drives people to buy. Then when you understand your sales funnel, then you can figure out, okay, how do I optimize everything, right? How do I increase my newsletter open rates? And click-through rates, and how do I get more people from Facebook to then sign up for my newsletter?

Right, how do I get my newsletter to my website or from my newsletter to my order page? Those are the type of things you wanna make sure that you're watching constantly.

Right, so you back it out. You have, at the end of the day, you wanna make a sale. That's what you're trying to do as an entrepreneur. What are all the steps that somebody has to go through to get to that sale? And then how can you use data to optimize each step along the way?

Right, so I guess the first step would be, you know, gather your leads. So you can either get your leads from sending out certain pieces of content, Maybe you're using pay-per-click or, you know, search engine optimization, something along those lines that you're cultivating a list or you're cultivating a group of leads that you're gonna go out and you're gonna target. Now, with those leads, the next step is trying to figure out how you're gonna convert them into a customer. So, at the time you're cultivating your leads, you're gonna wanna figure out who your customers are, what they like, what your spending habits are, if you can get information. I mean, Google Analytics, if no one in the group is actually looking at this, there is a a ton of demographic information showing you down, even if they're like movie lovers or if they're, uh, how long, their age group, sex, demographics, things like that. But you wanna start looking at that information, understanding who your customer base is. Um, once those leads are cultivated, then you wanna start doing your campaigns, right? So you can start looking at, um, doing, uh, like I said before, Facebook ads, if that's something that's, that's relative to you. If you're looking into, um, An email, email marketing, of course, if you want to start doing any type of email marketing group out to them, and then just make sure you're tagging them and seeing how successful you're doing.

Cool. Live from the audience, Jay Rise wrote in to say, before talking in depth, can you do a brief, clear definition of what churn rate means?

Oh, sure. That's not a problem. So churn rate is— the most simplistic way of saying churn rate is all of your cancellations in, let's say, a given month, right? So if I have a, from the 1st to the 31st of a month, how many cancellations do you have there? You take that as a numerator, divide it by your total active. So your whole customer base, your whole customer universe, that's going to give you a churn rate. And what churn rate's meant to do is just give you an idea of the amount of people that you're losing on a month-over-month basis. Churn rate actually goes to a lot of other metrics. So it's going to help you look at retention rate. Retention rate is basically just, you know, 1 minus churn, and that's gonna tell you, like, if your churn is 2%, your retention rate is 98%. But we also use churn for things like lifetime value. So if you were to take your monthly recurring revenue or your, like, your average revenue per user, divide that by churn, that's gonna give you a lifetime value. And what lifetime value gives you is what would you expect to see from the whole course in time that you have a certain individual as a customer? That's what your lifetime value is going to be. So the goal there is to get a higher lifetime value as opposed to a lower lifetime value.

I love it. Welcome to all the new people who are joining. Uh, if you like what we're talking about, you can click on our faces to give us props. Right now, Michael has a lead over me. I feel like I should be taking my airtime to get more props. Uh, let's see what happens.

Definitely the hat.

I love it. Okay, Marisha wrote in to say, how do I challenge myself to be more data-minded?

Oh, how do you challenge yourself? I mean, best way of saying that, every, how do you challenge yourself? Every action that you do within your business should be followed. And the reason I'm saying that is to be, make educated decisions or understanding where things went right or went wrong, you really need to focus on using analytics. There's no other basis of understanding how a problem occurred or how to avoid future problems without looking at the information that you've collected. And that's, to me, things that keep me up at night is, with all the information that we have, and we have a ton of information, how can I best leverage that for our customers? I mean, honestly, we want to make sure that we're giving them the best experience over time, and we're very diligent about collecting that information to make sure that that happens.

I love it. And I think if you're not a data-oriented person, an easy way to get started is just come up with 3 things that you want to track in your business. Uh, what are 3 important numbers that mean something to you? Because once you start tracking something, what gets, what gets measured, right, you want to improve on, right? So what are 3 important numbers to your business? Maybe revenue is one of them, but what are some other 2? right, that might lead to revenue. And that if you see that you're, you know, you're tracking this every day, every week, every month, you know, for me, I look at my YouTube subscribers as an example. I look at that every day. I look at where my YouTube subscribers are at, and I want to do better because I'm following those things. It makes me want to do better. And so you'll find that that happens. So that's the easiest way that I think to start. If you're not a data-minded kind of person, then if you're looking longer term, maybe you need to bring on someone like Michael who lives and breathes and loves it and, you know, goes to bed dreaming of numbers. Uh, that may be somebody— I do do equations in my sleep, so that may be somebody that you bring in either a part-time basis or consulting basis. But to start, I think just having 3 numbers that you track on a regular basis would really help. Uh, there is a mad props war happening right now, but you're winning it, so I'm gonna have that. Yes, I'm winning for now, but we'll see. Tamara is Doing good. Tom writing in, are there any good blogs or content sources that help to make these concepts more digestible?

Yeah, that's a, that's, that's a great question. So if you're not on Google Analytics, if you're not following them on Twitter, I mean, it is literally gold all day long that they pass along, that they retweet from other certain individuals, but then themselves put out just a wealth of information. Other places that I go, if you're really into analytics and you're a stats guy, you could go to Kissmetrics, does a great job with their blog. AWeber, of course, as always, has a good amount of information around analytics and how you can apply that to your email marketing campaign.

For me, I like a website called Which Test Won. Mm, great one. And they get an email every week. And their website is a little hard to navigate, which is kind of surprising since they're in a user experience kind of business, but I find the email super helpful where every week they send you a marketing example of, hey, there's this campaign versus this campaign, or this headline versus this headline, or this color button versus this one, and it shows you the two examples, and then you have to guess which one you think did better before they tell you the answer. And so it's, it's trying to train your marketing gut, I guess, along the way, and I find that I think it comes out every Wednesday, once a week, takes, you know, 30 seconds to go in, and I find it just, it's an easy primer to kind of get you thinking about this stuff. Eileen writing in, "How can I determine how often to email my list?" Oh, great question.

You wanna start testing those things around, so you wanna look at things like your open rates, you wanna start looking at, you know, click-through rates if that's available. But really, it's a tough nut to crack. I will definitely say take it more on a conservative side at first. It also depends on just type of information that you're sending out. Now, if you're doing a daily piece that people signed up for, then, you know, by all means do it every day. But if it's gonna be like a newsletter, maybe once a week, maybe once a month. But it's gonna take time for you to figure out what the secret is for you, what the best combination is for you.

Yeah. And to add to that, I would say you wanna make sure that it's it's about the quality much more than the frequency, right? Right. Like, if you're posting awesome quality stuff, people have a higher tolerance. You can send them 2, 3 emails a week if it's high quality stuff. Uh, so it's not like the magic bullet. It's not, hey, once a month is the ideal time, or once a week on Wednesdays is the best time to send it. Uh, it's really focusing in on, are you adding value? Like, if somebody— you know, here's what happened to me when I went on vacation. And people wrote into me because I didn't send out my newsletter to say, hey, I didn't get your newsletter, what happened, right? Like, that's a good sign.

You got your out of office.

Yeah, people miss your newsletter, right? Are you posting that kind of quality information that if you don't post, people are going to write to you, right? It's the same thing with any of the content you're creating, a blog, you know. If I stop posting on my YouTube channel, people would for sure write to me and say, what happened? Um, so, you know, on my YouTube channel is another example. People say you should post 1 video a week, 2 videos a week. I'm 3 a day, you know, 3 videos go out almost every single day on my YouTube channel, but it's all really good stuff, right?

Um, and different content, subject matter, right, for certain individuals.

Yeah, but it's a good question. I know it's one that, again, you want an easy answer for, like, oh, oh, once a week, okay, great, that's what I'm going to send it. But really, you wanna do the testing and make sure that it's high-quality information you're sending. Cool. So Ty is writing in, and then I guess for those guys again who are watching live, if you wanna ask us a live question, it's /q and then type, and it'll show up as a question for us. Ty's writing in, "With selling something like digital magazines, what are some good metrics to track?" Oh yeah, the ones we've already touched on.

So we're subscription-based service as well. Things that I currently look into, and I look into day in and day night, is gonna be our acquisitions, right? So our number of signups, always looking at cancellations, looking at churn rate, which we discussed earlier, and then actually looking at LTV. And the reason I look at our lifetime value, and the reason I look at lifetime value is I wanna see the type of customers that we have coming in, expectation, you know, how long we expect them to be with us. And we actually, 'cause I'm, you know, Evan said this earlier, I'm kind of a nerd with this stuff. I break it out by channel and source. So I wanna say, If I have a good amount of people that we referred, that were sent to us from Facebook, I wanna understand what their churn rate is or what their lifetime value is. Those are the things that I look at constantly, nonstop. So, sorry, that was long-winded, but acquisition, cancellations, churn rate, and lifetime value are the ones I look at.

I love it. And for me, you know, without knowing too much information about the business, I would say again, look at what the sales funnel is. So you want people to buy your digital magazine. So where are they buying it from? Are they buying it from your website? Are they buying it from your newsletter? And if those are the two primary sources, then how do you then get people to the website and to the newsletter, right? I think you probably have a lot more success through a newsletter than just a website because you get to touch with them every week or every month or whenever you wanna send them content where with a website, you're hoping that they land on it. It may only be a one-time thing. Right. So are you using Facebook? Are you using YouTube videos? Are you going to networking events? And if you start to track this stuff and say, hey, here's how many leads I got to my newsletter list from going to this networking event, then you can say, okay, this is worth my time, I'm getting an ROI from it. And if you don't track it, then you don't know what's working and what's not, right? And maybe you shouldn't be doing Facebook at all because it's not getting— it's not the best source for everyone.

Exactly. —Right.

—Right. And then once you're getting some data, you can work on, okay, well, how do I improve the numbers? How do I make it better? How do I optimize it, right? Maybe I test doing 2 emails a month and increase the quality, or maybe I work on going to higher quality or higher end networking events that are specific to my audience, right? Once you know where your leads are coming from, it's easier to optimize your campaign, where to spend more time and potentially dollars too, and then what you might wanna cut back and eliminate from. There's the old adage in advertising that, you know, 50% of my advertising is being wasted, I just didn't know which half. Yeah, right. People don't know where they're spending money. And I get, again, it's hard for entrepreneurs, you're doing so many things, you know, you're trying to run a quality business and you're in the day-to-day of running it and you don't necessarily wanna think about all these things. And everybody says, okay, you gotta do this social media, you gotta get on Blab now, you gotta get on YouTube, you gotta do all these things. Things, and, and like, when do I actually have time to run my business? Right.

Uh, and the nice part is a lot of the tools that people are using now, like YouTube, um, Blab, Facebook, uh, free analytics, uh, Google Analytics. If no one in the group is using that yet and you have a website, you should be on that constantly every day just to see, you know, what type of traffic you're getting. Where are people falling off in the funnel? Um, where are, where are my referrals coming from? Am I getting, um, you know, 1,000-some referrals from a certain domain as opposed to another one? So you just want to make sure you know, where your traffic's coming from, how it's converting, and where they're dumping off.

Yeah, I love it. FlyDuo, hey guys, welcome. FlyDuo is a loyal, loyal viewer. Great. Okay, the next question came in from Marisha. For YouTubers who are looking to use data to make important changes in their business for 2016, what metrics should they be paying attention to most? Thank you so much.

Great. I feel like this is one that you should cover because you probably know way more than I possibly could, but I will say before handing it off to Evan, because he is the expert in this. It's my understanding that a lot of the YouTube analytics are the same as Google Analytics. So if it were me, and I'm not Evan, but if it were me, I'd be looking at the amount of sessions that come in, the impressions that were given, the time spent watching the video, any type of consumer action that happened during that time. I would consider that my KPI or my, you know, the bar, and I'm constantly trying to jump that bar. Is what I'm doing. But Evan, please, I leave it to you.

Hey, you got the personality, you should have your own YouTube channel too.

I, I, I would say, am I killing partnership, Evan? Because Canada is not that far away, buddy.

We should do it. You should do it. I like it. I would subscribe, man. Understanding Data, I like it. Um, okay, so with YouTube, watch time is the most important variable, uh, in their system. If you have high watch time on your videos then you will get ranked higher. And it's not just watch time, um, on, on a particular video, it's then their entire session. So YouTube wants you to stay on YouTube as long as possible, 24 hours a day. So if you come and watch one of my videos, then you leave my channel and watch 10 hours of Justin Bieber, I get credit for all those 10 hours too. And so that's YouTube's goal. And if you look at your analytics now, they recently changed the backend where watch time is number one thing that you see. It's the first box when you log into your YouTube backend. It used to be views, and now it's— so it's watch time. And so if you're doing a deep dive on your videos, you could look at one series versus another. And I know Marisha's channel a little bit, um, she has different series. She has like Whatever Wednesdays, whatever Wednesdays, and she'll do some singing videos. What you can do is compare those two series, right? Take videos in those series and compare the watch time on them. Not the absolute watch time, but the relative watch time. So if your singing video is 5 minutes long, it'll show you how it compares to other 5-minute videos on YouTube, and you'll see if you're above or below the average. And if you're below, then what can you do to make it better, right? How do you— I don't know— sing better, or bring in friends, or pick different songs, or maybe don't continue that series, right? Um, so I'll always track, you know, I track my daily— daily. I'm kind of obsessed. I have this Excel file and I'll track my subscribers and I'll track my, um, number of views on the channel.

Yeah, after saying that, Evan, if you're keeping an Excel file, we should partner up. I'm telling you right now, because that's, that's my life.

You keep Excel files too. I like it. Um, but yeah, but like, in the— on an individual video basis, watch time is going to be the most important thing. Um, cool. JDI Get Wealthy, what do you think about storytelling in marketing?

So I just want to make sure I understand the question too. Um, and I, I don't know if he's, he's on here, if you can reach out, but by storytelling I'm thinking you mean content, the content that you're providing to your audience.

Um, yeah, I would, I would, I would assume so.

Okay, I mean, the things that you want to look at when you're starting to create or write or send out any content is, um, start looking at the type of keywords that if you have Google Analytics or any type of other analytical tool that you might be using. Look at the certain keywords that people are responding to, right? So for us, we look at things like email automation, email marketing. The other thing is if you've put out other types of content in the past, get in the habit of tagging every piece of content that you put out there. When I say tagging, with Google Analytics, you have 4 dimensions, right? So source, medium, campaign name, and ad content. You should be providing a tag for each piece of content so you can understand what's being more receptive to your audience, right? So who is reading your blog post or, um, anything along those lines. And it's the same thing with email marketing. If you're sending out certain types of, uh, newsletters or, uh, pieces of broadcast, um, you always want to make sure that you're understanding how people are reacting to it and you just want to try to follow that type of pattern. Throughout the course of your business, honestly, throughout the end of time if possible?

Yeah, storytelling is super important. You know, before we got on this call, we were talking about Star Wars and how Michael has to wait till Wednesday before he can see it. Stop reminding me, please. Star Wars, like, it's just a great story, right? It's built a multi-billion dollar industry. I think your advantage as an entrepreneur is your story, the way that you stand out, the way you compete against the huge companies in the industry is your story. Like, why did you do this? Let me feel your passion. Because if, if you are doing, you know, the same thing as a big competitor and you want to offer the same price, why would I ever go with you, right? I'm going to go with somebody else that has the brand name, the recognition, the trust. So then you have to cut your price, which isn't the business that you want to be in. So the difference is your ability to tell your story, because if I feel you're passionate about what you're doing and I can relate to you, then I'm much more likely to want to buy from you. And I think too many entrepreneurs hide behind a corporate-looking website because it looks professional. Put your picture on your website, tell us why you started this thing, right? In your email campaign, let me feel your, your passion, right? Like, one of the emails should say why you started this business and why you're so excited about it. Uh, when you're providing content tell me your personal take on it, right? Not just here are the facts and figures, but tell me what it means to you. That's your ability to create a personal relationship with people that will then convert really well to building trust and then to closing clients. 2000Books writing in, 10%, I think it's a YouTube question, 10% of 60-minute watch time is better than 100% of a 3-minute video. So yes, they're looking for a number of minutes. So 6 minutes, the 10% of a 60-minute video is 6 minutes versus 100% of a 3-minute video. Um, yes. Now watch time is not the only thing they look at. They also want to see engagement, right? So are people leaving comments? Are people, uh, adding it to playlists? But watch time is the most important factor and criteria in that. Close that down again. For those of you who just joined, You can do /q to ask us a question, and you can click on our faces to give us props. It's a close race. It's a close race. We're neck and neck here. We'll see how it ends up. Okay, Kumar, I would like to know which is the best social media marketing platform for e-commerce businesses.

Okay, well, I mean, from personal experience and just previous experience, I don't think there is just one channel a social channel that's perfect for everything that you send out there content-wise. I mean, um, Facebook, uh, versus LinkedIn. LinkedIn is more business-oriented, right? So, um, you're gonna have a different type of tone, a different type of audience with that, as opposed to Facebook, where it might be a little bit more friendlier, might be a little bit more, um, not as formal. So, um, what you do wanna do is if you start spending money in any of these venues, like any of these channels, if you're starting to look at Facebook ads or if you're looking at LinkedIn ads, You definitely wanna see how much is being spent and then seeing how successful it was compared to the other channel, right? So you wanna look to see the amount of impressions or conversions that you have. So you can double down on something that's doing better, the one channel, as opposed to the other one that's not giving you the, the result you're looking for. But just to reiterate one more time, I don't think there is just one perfect channel for anybody. I think it's just a matter of testing the channels, seeing the best results, and then just doubling down on the ones that work great.

Yeah, I agree. I think having a campaign that targets multiple channels and testing and seeing what works is a great start. I think it's understanding the dynamics of each channel, you know? So like YouTube is a video channel, right? Are you able to create video content that's compelling? If not, don't go to YouTube, right? I mean, there's some basic things. I don't know what kind of programs you're trying to sell through your e-commerce platform and what your capabilities and strengths are. Ideally, that's what you wanna overlap is where your audience is at combined with what you are good at doing and have a passion for. So if my audience is, you know, on, on YouTube and I'm great at being on camera, that's the place that I want to be, right? Right. Uh, if I had to kind of pick one to start with, and you're looking for advertising, I would look at Facebook. I just think the ability to target is insane.

The dimensions they give are awesome. It's, it's very specific. Yeah, but, but it's, it's, it's paid.

Like, right, if you are not willing to spend money— doesn't be big money, but $30, $40, $50 a day— if you're not willing to spend that, then you're not going to get results from Facebook. It's, it's very much a paid platform, right? Um, Twitter is, is great. Their ad product is just okay, but you have to put in a ton of work. Like, you have to follow people, you have to follow hashtags, you have to engage with them. It's just It's grinding it out. Like, you can get the results a lot faster with Facebook than Twitter, but it's gonna cost you money. If you have more time than money, go all in on Twitter and put in the work. If you're great on video, go in on YouTube. And then the other ones are, you know, targeted towards certain communities, and if that fits your target audience, then that's where you wanna be. You know, marketing 101 is you wanna be where your customers are. Right. You know, if your customers are Star Wars fans, you know, you wanna be outside the theaters tonight Talking to them, 'cause that's where they're gonna be. And so do an analysis of where your customers are on the different platforms could be really helpful. I love it. A question from Eileen about AWeber. What makes AWeber stand out above your competition?

I mean, having— besides having good-looking data analysts, definitely it's our customer service. For me, we're one of the best in the business for customer service. We do love our customers. It's not just something that we throw up on our website. It's something that every single detail of our business is really focused around our customers, and that's why I love working for this place. For me personally, it's a great group of individuals, and we really do take steps just to make sure that the experience that you get is the best experience you could possibly have with us, and that's what we're interested in doing.

So from my perspective of being a customer for 10 years, I absolutely agree. I think the service is amazing. You can always call in and there's somebody that you can talk to. Who doesn't just answer the question but actually cares about your business. Like, why are you trying to do that? And ask a couple extra questions because I may not have the right thing in my head, and by talking it through a couple questions deeper, they understand what I'm trying to do and can maybe recommend a better solution for me, which I really appreciate. Everybody's really nice too. We're happy people.

It's one of the best places to work. We've won several years Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania. We do have, we actually have a very, we just got a nationally a customer service award nationally. So yeah, it's, it is a great place to work. And honestly, the reason it's a great place to work is because we do care. We just care about our customers. Yeah. It's just, everybody's nice.

It's, it's, it's, it's appreciated. I know if you're a nice person, it's just, you like dealing with other nice people. And, and for those of you who've been watching the series, you know, we've had a number of people now walk from AWeber and everybody's just, Nice, you know, they have their domain expertise, but they're just nice. Why I got on AWeber in the first place was I love on the— in the email, it gives you a spam score. So when you— before you send out an email, it says, hey, this is likely going to get caught in search engines because— sorry, in email filters because you included these 3 words which are going to get caught by spam filters. Like, wow, that's a huge savings, right? You know, you think of how much time you spend trying to cultivate a following, and then because you use 3 words, now your messages aren't being seen. So that's why I first got on, and then it's just been a great experience 10+ years later.

And then with our industry, you know, the CEO of AWeber, Tom, says this all the time, is, you know, our customer success is our success. So we're very invested in making sure that everyone who uses our service does well, because that's just gonna help us down the line.

I love it. Uh, Pastor D writing in on an email campaign for consulting services. What is the best strategy besides the content, besides the content to convert them speedily? Uh, what would be the tactic of creating urgency? What would you suggest? Or sorry, would that be the tactic of creating urgency?

Um, for, well, I mean, if you would, you wanna talk about urgency and creating certain CTAs or I'm sorry. Um, uh, anything along those lines, sure. I mean, but if it was a consultancy or if it's a service, any service in general, you really should be selling yourself. And, um, I know that might seem a little bit more on the contenty side is what you brought up, but, um, I would make sure that you're selling, you know, what you do, who you are, um, what makes you you and takes you above the competition. That's something that I would be pitching in any aspect of a service industry. But Evan, uh, what do you think?

So typically with service providers, I find two things. One, somebody has an urgent need and they're gonna call you, right? So I don't know what you're selling, what kind of consulting, you know, if you're helping somebody raise capital and I'm trying to raise capital right now, then I'm gonna call you when I have a need immediately. If I need to bring on a plumber, you know, I need somebody right now because my faucet is leaking. And in that case, they, you know, they may just call you up from your website. The people who are joining a newsletter list, they're interested, but it's not important enough yet. It's something they're thinking about, but they're not maybe ready for it. So example, like if you're a business growth consultant, as an example, like, yeah, I want business growth. Who doesn't want business growth? But is it important enough that I'm gonna sign up right now for it? You know, like I need a little more context to understand. And so if I were you, I'd be telling stories to create the relevancy and urgency. So if you're talking about business growth, hit me with something that makes me think, hmm, maybe I need that right now. And it's not just having a promo offer, but something that makes me think, like, that makes it important for me to wanna do this and make this change in my life right now. So if it's coming up in 2016, you might talk about how I didn't hit my, did you hit your goals in 2015? Was that important? What was your biggest thing that, you know, you missed out on, do you wanna hit that next year? You know, get me thinking so that it brings something that's relevant that makes me wanna sign up now. The other thing I would consider is having a lower entry product as a taste, just like your email's a taste, right? Like somebody visited your website, they didn't hire you, right? They didn't call you, they didn't email you, they didn't hire you, but they wanna taste, like they're interested enough to wanna taste what you got. And so that's your opportunity through your autoresponders and regular broadcasts to, give them that taste. What's the next level up? Like, can you sell them on a group package or a 1-hour call or something before getting to whatever you really wanna sell to give them a taste so that it lowers the risk, makes it easier for them to say yes? So those are some of the things I would look at if I'm in a kind of consulting business to try to get people to sign up faster. Dennis is writing in, he was asking, did we answer his question? Dennis, you had a great question, we opened the show with your question. Amazing. You're gonna— you can watch the replay. It was a great question. And why is it done on YouTube? We're doing it on Blab today, but it's gonna be— the replay will be on YouTube, so you can watch it there. Go back and watch the first question as we open with yours, and it was strong. We liked it. Uh, okay, who is next up here? And again, for those watching live, /q, and then you can start answering your question and it'll show up as a question for us. I know there's a lot of chatter. I can't keep up with what's happening on the side there. Um, so if it's such a Q, it comes to me.

And I don't know, Evan, I mean, uh, honestly, any questions we don't get answered, anyone can feel free to reach out to me, uh, through Twitter or, um, through AWeber, uh, michaelr@aweber.com. That, that's fine. I never have a problem with that. Cool.

Uh, I appreciate that. And maybe I'll put that in the, um, description of the YouTube video too. Uh, Brian, from Social Contacts and Mailing List, how do you professionally make a speculative proposal to contacts and develop opportunities on your lists?

Wow. I'm gonna need to hear that one more time. I'm sorry. That was, that was very deep. Hold on.

I'm sorry. Social contacts. I was like, hmm. So it's basically asking from, from, from people you meet and from, sorry, from social contacts. So people in social and on your mailing list. Right. How do you make a professional introduction to get them interested in your proposal?

Okay. Um, I, I guess that would really be a big part of it is the nature of your business. But I mean, uh, taking those leads and getting them to the next step of a customer, it's, um, again, it would just be looking at the type of people that you have as your leads. Um, you'd have to— me personally, it would be content, it would be education. Um, maybe you want to educate those leads before they even sign on to your service. If you, if you have some type of valuable piece of content or education to provide to them, um, it's putting you over the competition. That's in my opinion.

Yeah, for me, I think again, it's jumping too soon to try to get to a proposal. You know, people are on your list because they wanna learn about you. They're on your, they're following you on social because they met you and they're curious about you and it's up to you to deliver value. My style is I like to kick up. I'm much more of a marketer than a salesman. So take that with a grain of salt, I like to kick up a ton of noise in my industry. I like to provide insane value in my industry and get noticed, whether it's on social, you know, YouTube videos, Twitter, getting in the media, writing books, working with brands. I like to kick up just a ton of noise so that people in the industry know who I am, and then opportunities find me because people wanna work with me. And so it's finding the strategy that works best for you, that works best and fits my personality. But if it's somebody like, if I follow somebody on social, the last thing I want is to be tweeted back, "Hey, do you wanna buy my stuff?" Right? Like it's too quick a jump, right? Build a relationship with them first. If you're trying to reach out to somebody, then you should be a known quantity to them, right? Like people pitch me all the time with ideas and, "Hey, can you look at my app and can you promote my business. And if I don't know who you are, I'm probably not even gonna read the rest of that message. But for people who have been involved in my community for a while and comment on a bunch of stuff, you know, Dennis— we talked about Dennis at the start. Dennis, almost every week at least, there's multiple tweets coming out. You know, he's thanking me for my stuff, he's giving me pluses on Cred, you know, he's asking questions on this. If Dennis had something that he wanted me to look at, I would look at it because it's Dennis and he's a— he's been a valuable part of my community. And so I think that's the way to do it. Like, the person that you're reaching out to should, uh, should know who you are. You should be a known quantity to them because you provided a ton of value to them. Um, just don't jump. I know you want to make the sale, and I know it's important. Like, you got to make a sale. Business is about making sales and providing value to get there. but the way to do it isn't just to try to hard sell people because it doesn't work out well.

And the thing I loved about what you just said too, Evan, was that you're knowing your customer. I mean, that's the analytical portion of this is there's ways of tracking and just knowing and understanding who your customers are, and that's where you're gonna find success.

Yeah, even like, this is a little stalkerish, but in terms of data mining, I had a meeting with somebody. They called me and they said, "Hey Evan, we wanna talk about a campaign you wanna do." I looked at their Twitter following and found out that they like this, that she posted on her Twitter account, I love this local cafe. And so before I met, I went to the local cafe and bought some treats and brought them to her. It's like, oh, I love this place, right? Like I didn't say, of course I found it on Twitter and stalked you. But like you can do those things, just dive into the data, right?

I love that you stole in front of my interview. I, I do love that. I do.

You have a friendly face and aura, you know, it makes me wanna share. But that's like, it's never been easier to find information on people. And if you're trying to make a sale and you're trying to get to know somebody, try to build relationships. You know, as an example, Michael, I'd never met before this. We connected on Twitter a few times, but we haven't, this is our first time meeting each other. Today I went to his Twitter profile page and he's got this Darth Vader thing at the top, so I know he's a Star Wars fan.

I know it opens tonight. You're salsa dancing, I believe, right? On your website, you're a salsa fan?

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the first thing I talked about was Star Wars, and it gives us an easy way to open up a relationship. And so it's never been easier to find out about people. Just search on them, see what they're posting, have some context before you open a conversation. Uh, question from Joe that got cut off, so let me paste it in. Joe writes in, service-based business questions: would you provide tons of value from the beginning, then propose the highest price service program? Will this convert better than offering an intro program?

Wow, that is a really good question. So basically we're looking at adding a monthly, a monthly charge. Are we looking at bringing a freemium up front? Are we looking to do upsells? Sells. For each individual business, I don't think there is a perfect solution. I really just don't. I can tell you from working with several organizations in the past, it really, you really have to define who you are against the competition, right? So you might have a larger, huge marketing firm type of establishment where they're built on freemium models, right? They're looking at bringing as many people in as possible. Then again, you could be looking at another organization that's focused on small business or small to medium-sized business that believes in the service that they offer and they believe in their product. They might have the billing upfront because it shows a certain amount of, you know, we know who we are, we know what we do, and we feel that this is a fair price. Now, again, there is no simple solution for this. You should always be upselling. I did say that earlier, you should be upselling all the time, trying to figure out additional needs. But there is no simple solution for that or how you should be pricing out your product or service.

Yeah, I would say I think it depends on your client. If you're doing, if you wanna sell big ticket items, if that's your end goal, then I don't think you'll, you usually won't get people along that process, right? So I mean, I work with Microsoft, I work with Dell, How I get them is by providing insane content that then they reach out to me and we go right into a bigger package. It's never like, hey, you know what, before we do something big, why don't you buy my $99 ebook and then we'll see what we can do together. So if that's your goal, like to get the big deals, you could still start off on an intro thing with them. Like I might do one YouTube video with them as an example. Right? I'll fly to Redmond and do one thing with them, and then that leads to an annual program. But it's never these like super low budget cheap things. If you're trying to go mass, then yeah, then you're— it's a numbers game and you're trying to get people on a free thing, or maybe that's sign up for your newsletter for this free program or download. And then you have a $7 product and then a $50 product and then $100 product, and then maybe it's a coaching call that's $500 a month, or it's a live event. And that's the kind of logical stream to move up. So I think it depends on your audience, right? If you're a real estate agent trying to sell $5 million, $10 million homes, those clients aren't buying the $7 ebook on how to get more money from your house. Like, it's just, it's a different market. And it's not the middle market is the hard one. That's the hard, dangerous one to play in. So I'd be looking at high-end, custom, awesome content, and go right for the sale once you have a relationship, or low-end mass free and work their way up. But you're not gonna get, you know, from those free ones, $7, you almost never, I don't say almost never, get the million-dollar huge accounts from that free stuff. Right. Cool, I got to go on a bit of a rant there. So this is something that is unique to, uh, to Blab. We have the ability to call in if somebody wants to. We still have other questions to get to, but somebody wants to call in live, there's an open seat. I'm excited. You can click on the open seat. Do you have a question for us? Make it— this isn't promotion time. Like, if you have a genuine question that you want to ask us, we'll do the open seat and you can call in and ask. So whoever's on that first, I know Uh, some people were trying earlier to get in. I saw Rise Online and Marisha trying to get in, but, um, anyway, I'll leave that option open. Cool. Uh, Frivona, Frivona, email campaigns. How do you come up with the content for your emails to send your subscriber list?

Ah, oh, good question. Um, so there's a couple of things. Um, I think I brought this up earlier too. If you guys are using analytics, I mean, start looking at keywords, start looking at any type of previous articles that you've written, see how they're doing or performing. The other thing is, I mean, if you're in your industry, I'm sure that you're keeping up with it, seeing what people are responding to in your competitors' blog posts or anything along those lines, just understanding what's being more receptive with their audience, which is your audience. That's all I have for that one, I think.

Cool. You know, so a couple ideas for me. One, I would always have something that tells my story. I think every entrepreneur needs some piece of content. If you're talking about email campaigns here for Vona, so that should be in there somewhere, but why you started what you're doing and make me feel your passion. That also belongs on your website. That also belongs on your YouTube channel. That also belongs everywhere else in your campaigns. We have JRise joining us. Oh, oh, loyal, loyal viewer. But then some other ideas I'd be looking at, because it's easy to run out of content. It's super easy to run out of content 'cause you're like, "I don't know what else to talk about." I would be looking at what are your customers asking you on a regular basis, right? Like what are the common questions that you get asked? 'Cause chances are everybody on your list has the same problems. I'd be looking at what inspired you. Like what are some of the things that happened in your week that inspired you, made you upset, made you angry, made you happy? You could talk about behind the scenes. What's going on, give people a little sneak peek. Uh, and you can also subscribe to other people's newsletters in your industry and outside your industry. You know, I get some great ideas for my, uh, Salsa Business channel from a guy who does reenactments, like these 18th century battles. Uh, and you think, well, that's a totally different kind of business, but it's not. Like, how he interviews people and how he talks about the products they use gives me cool ideas. Like, oh, maybe we could do a video related to that too, but talking about dance shoes instead. And so you can subscribe to other people's content too to get ideas. Most of the content on my channel is from— what are we talking about today? It's all your questions, right? Like, the content that we made is just people's questions. And I started all my stuff by basically having people write in from my email list and say, hey Evan, I have this problem. And I would spend hours just writing back to people and said, this is I don't have time to run my business, so I'm going to start answering questions on YouTube and share them out that way. And so lots of ideas for you there. J-Rize. Yo, can you hear me? Welcome aboard. Can you hear me? Yeah, we got you. It's a little bit delayed, but we got you. What's your question? All right, so I have a question for you guys. First, thank you both so much for this. I really appreciate it. And second, you keep talking about the power of story and how we want to feel the passion. I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs aren't passionate about numbers and testing and conversions. Maybe Mike could share his story. Like, why are you so passionate about this? Why do numbers matter to you? Oh, okay.

Wow. That's great. Thank you so much. I love how I'm getting more attention than Evan. So make sure that you show that with your little sign here. And make sure— Props, conversion gods, man.

Yeah, the little props.

I could use more props, you guys. How did I get passionate into it? I'll tell you, a long time ago, in my first job, actually might have been my first or second job, I was actually a sales guy. So, I was doing business-to-business phone sales. Did that for a couple years. I moved into a sales management position. Then I moved into an account management position. And this is where it started to happen was with account management. So, I had a lot of clients large and small. I mean, no joke, Fortune 500 companies that I worked with, that's the type of business I worked with. We had higher-end contracts, but we also had small mom-and-pops. And what happened here was looking and seeing, you know, the leads that came in, how they were converting, seeing how we could track that. I was getting that information from the large enterprise, right? This is how you do it. And that's how I started getting a little bit more knowledgeable with it. But where I saw how great it was, was when I brought it to the small business. So when you're starting to see the people who are just starting their businesses or maybe have 20, 30 employees, taking that information and relating to them and just seeing, you know, just how happy they were just having understanding where to invest their money or how things were working, um, just being enlightened about, you know, how they can make their business better. That makes me feel better. And that's honestly the passion, the drive I get from analytics. Now, I've always been a math guy. I've always liked getting to the end solution. There's no wrong solution in math, right? There's always going to be that answer. The quest to get that answer has always been something I love, but taking my experience and from large enterprise and relaying that back to small business owners and just, you know, helping them grow their business, that's what makes me happy.

I love it. Amazing. I love it. Feeling the passion. And, and J-Rise has been on for like 2 minutes and already has 10% of the pops that I have, man. People are loving the J-Rise connection there. Love you, Evan. Thank you so much. He needs his own Blab channel now. Oh my God. Cool. Well, thank you for the question. My pleasure. You guys keep rocking. Really appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Before I close this thing on blab. There you go. That was cool. Okay, next question. Dinero, who's writing to say, as a young graphic designer, what can I sell besides my actual service of graphic designing to make constant income? Also, how can I promote locally as a graphic designer? This is a marketing question, but can we use data to—

I know, hmm, that's— I mean, you could maybe if you look at your referral sources, analytically speaking, if you have a good idea of where your referral sources are coming from and see if you can split off that way. But I'm kind of at a loss to give you a great answer, which I'm sorry.

No, that's cool. So I'll answer it and there may be a tie-in too. I see two things here. Uh, one, the fastest way to grow business is through, is through what Michael was talking about, partnerships and referrals, right? So who is already selling? This is like the analytics part. Who is already selling to my cust— my customers? Like, what kind of graphic design do you do? Are you designing billboards? You're designing websites? Who are the people then who are already dealing with your target audience? And then how can you connect and partner with them? So if As an example, you know, web designers and people in the advertising and agencies and video producers, those are the guys who already have your target audience. Then I'd start making a list in my local area of all the people who fit that mold and start reaching out and trying to have coffee with them. Not like saying, hey, you need to refer me clients, but trying to figure out how you might be able to help each other out is the fastest way to grow your business. If you're looking for an extra income stream, that scares me because if you're passionate about graphic design and then you're not making enough money from it, maybe you don't have the skills, the talents yet to then go take on another business. Like if you can't make money at the business that you're passionate about, how are you gonna make money about a business that you're not passionate about, that you're just trying to make money at? We're honestly, if you feel like you don't have the skills necessary, what I would say is I would actually try to find a job in that industry, uh, work at a, not a big company, but a company that has 5, 10 employees, a company you want to be like in, in 3, 4, 5 years, and go learn from them part-time while you're still building your business as well. So you don't want to take a job just for money, it's for the experience and growth opportunities to help you get better, and then go all in on your business. And now you have the knowledge and tools, you're getting paid to learn. Um, but the analysis, like the data part, is, hey, you find all those companies, you figure out who's the best target, who owns my audience. And then as you start working together, you can tweak that algorithm, right? Like, oh, I get the best referrals from website designers. Okay, great. How do I find more website designers? What are the programs could I offer to boost my conversions from these website designers? How do I be the one graphic designer that is top of mind versus all the other ones that they know, right? Fastest way to grow through partnerships. Question: Do you feel that visualizing the data in a beautiful way is impactful or inspiring the people? Oh, okay.

Visualizing data. Yeah, well, I mean, this— I mean, it is huge. I'd like to think that the visualization, like the graphs and the charts and the way I display my information, is beautiful. But that's kind of second to making sure that people can interpret it. And that, that's my biggest thing is you really don't wanna overload any type of visualization with facts and figures that's just noise to your audience. You wanna make sure that you can clearly define the point that you're trying to get across with that visualization, right? So you wanna make sure they understand, hey, we have more account signups than cancellations, or our churn rate has gone down over time. Like these are the things that you wanna clearly point out and just don't put a bunch of noise in there that people are just going to overlook and not understand.

And that's more important to me. Yeah, and I think, I think it depends on who the data is for. I think if you are a data head, then you want to dive right into the data. And if you're preparing it for other data heads and they're like, let me look at the data. I remember when I was in the venture capital business, one of the guys was all about the financials, like, tell me about the financials. And you give him a business plan, he just flips to the end to look at the numbers, right? All that work. Oh, just let's go to the end. That's, that's his style, right? Yeah. Um, there are others who, who don't understand what all the numbers mean, and you got to simplify and make it easier for them. And so if the data's for yourself, then you don't maybe need to do all that work. If you love looking at— like, I'm— I can look at my Excel chart of my YouTube growth and I know what it means, and nobody else might be able to look at it and understand it, but I know what it means. If I wanted to then share that information and make it relevant and valuable for other people, because I need to have them make a decision that would impact me somehow, right? If I have a boss or a customer or a supplier or an investor or media that isn't a data head, then they might be confused. And so then making it beautiful and simple and easy to understand, uh, is helpful, valuable, important. Cool. Um, Joseph, 3 things you would say that are the distinctive factors that would win a lead to conversion of customers when other service providers are pursuing the same leads?

Wow, okay.

Uh, 3 things to suggest to convert clients when other people are trying to convert the same client?

Um, I'll, I'll say there's, there's 3 things that I think, and this is just in my opinion, there's 3 things that will help you get above your competition. And to me, it's going to be customer service is always going to be number 1. Number 2 is the way that you're educating your, your group, right? You want to make sure that they're well informed and understand what your service or product is. And then finally, of course, cost is always going to be a factor. But if I had to pick 3, those would be the 3. So customer service, education, cost.

I love it. I know we're short on time, so we're just going to kind of ram through the questions. Uh, Amna is asking, How to differentiate our services in real estate? What strategy would you make to attract larger number of customers?

Hmm. For real estate. Um, well, probably I would start looking, we'd said this before, maybe if you start looking into, uh, referrals, if you're looking into advocates, uh, things like that that would help promote your business, like cross-industry maybe. Um, but what you wanna do is start to look at if you have a website or, um, if you're using email marketing, which I hope you are. Um, look to see where those referrals are coming in from on your website. So you want to understand if it's coming from a certain, maybe, trade publication, something like that. Um, you really want to start looking and understanding where your leads are coming from. And then once you understand where the leads are coming from, then you can start establishing a connection or a relationship with that, that person or that service.

Yeah, I love it. And to add, I would say I would try to combine your passions because real estate You know, if you're a real estate agent, I could swing a lightsaber and hit 4 real estate agents, right? Like, it's a commodity. And so how you make it not a commodity is by adding something else that you're equally passionate about to the mix. So as an example, a buddy of mine is a financial advisor. It's the same thing, financial advisor. Like, you're selling the same products. He had a passion for hockey. And it's like, well, how do you combine those things? He's a guy who can walk hockey, watch hockey replays all day long, same thing 7 times. His wife thinks he's nuts, uh, but he ended up being a financial advisor for NHL hockey players. Wow. He could talk to them in a language that makes sense financially but also understands the game, where other financial advisors, they're just doing it for the money. They're just expertise on stocks and bonds and how to allocate your money. This guy knew that plus hockey. And so because he could speak that language, he stands out. It's easy to give him the business. If I look at real estate for me, I built a 5,000 square foot modern home and then I sold it. And when I was selling it, I didn't want just any real estate agent to sell it. So I looked up who was the guy in Toronto, my city, that sold modern homes, because I felt like somebody who sold normal residential homes wouldn't understand how to sell the modern house. And I did a search, and there's one main guy. There's one guy. Toronto is after New York and LA. Toronto is the third biggest city in Canada and US, right? Some respect for Toronto. But we don't have like Toronto. Like, there's one guy, there's one guy who's the modern guy. Like, most people don't segment themselves, and he just, he had a love of modern homes, and he, he drove up and he was the the guy who sold the house. And so if you're in real estate, great. What else can you add to it? Like, what other passion do you have that you can bring into the mix to be the real estate agent for this niche? Because you love it, not just because it's an opportunity, but because you have a genuine love for it. I think that gives you disproportionate value and an edge over everybody else. Cool. Well, we're at time already. This is crazy, it flew by. Michael, I was That was great.

And Evan, thank you. I mean, your audience, well-informed, great audience. You, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

I appreciate the time and the love you gave and all of the activity, and people are still giving props. For people who wanna learn about AWeber, you can learn, you go to aweber.com. For people who wanna learn about you or have extra questions, we didn't get all the questions answered. What's the best way, just through email or Twitter?

Oh yeah, you can Twitter, Michael_Ressatar on Twitter, or I mean, And of course, you guys can always use my email. It's michaelr@aweber.com. Again, I'll try to get to respond to you as soon as possible. But I think it's important.

So yeah. Cool. Well, this is going to go up on YouTube. And I will add those two links to his email and Twitter in the description. And that's it. A lot of thank you comments coming in. So thanks again, Michael. Have an amazing week. Enjoy Star Wars when it comes out.

I can't wait. Please don't ruin it. No spoilers, Evan Carmichael.

I love it. And thank you everybody for watching, and, uh, we'll see you soon. Thanks, guys.