How To Get More Sales From Your Website With Conversion Fanatic Justin Christianson

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Okay, so let's get to today's episode. I am really pleased to welcome Justin Christiansen from conversion fanatics onto the call. Justin is the best selling author of the book conversion how to double your customers sales and profits with a B testing and is a 13 year veteran of digital marketing having worked on hundreds of profitable campaigns. He's a self proclaimed numbers junkie, which I'm the exact opposite of. With a firm belief that the numbers don't lie. And with that I do agree with him. I just wish I had a love of numbers like he did. He has a knack for finding holes in marketing campaigns and offering simple solutions to quickly plug them, effectively approving the results. And he's an avid student of marketing and business. He believes that you must continue to improve daily in order to stay ahead and succeed. And with that, I could not agree more. Justin, welcome to the show.

Thanks Brad for having me. Glad to be here.

Yeah, I'm glad to have you. This is an episode or this is a topic haven't really ever dove in and discussed and it'll be interesting to talk about some of these things because I know a lot of my followers and listeners are in different areas of business. So some of them are salespeople and some of them are consultants and some of them are E commerce folks and info product owners. So we've got a pretty wide variety of types of business owners here, but I think the one thing that they all probably have is a website and they can probably all relate to the need to convert more visitors into either prospects or sales or something like that. So I really kind of wanted to find out a little bit more about what's working today in the world of conversion. What are some of the changes that you've seen happen? What are some of the best practices? And you know, the subtitle of the show is Sizzling hot business ideas. If there's anything you can share with us that it really is working and you're like, you know, we've seen that, we've done a lot of tests, we think this will work. But before we dive into that, tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into.

Helping business owners with website conversion?

Well, I started back 2002 ish in network marketing actually and figured out very quickly that it wasn't for me.

Right.

Moved, found Internet marketing and affiliate marketing, found some success there and went full time with my business in 2005 and then became partners in a company that I was number one affiliate for and we grew it to I think just shy of 9 million in revenue. I sold it back to my business partners and moved into consulting. But everything I kept getting asked about was the implementation and the optimization. Everybody knew they were needed to split test but they didn't have the technical gumption to do it or they didn't have the time. And I just fulfilled that because I had some technology standpoint of the actual implementation of the pages and the actual tests. So it was basically came out of demand.

And then you know my business partner Manish Punjabi?

Yeah, I sure do.

We were both doing the same thing privately and we'd been friends for seven or eight years and we decided just to play off our strengths and formalize it. And then Conversion Fanatics was born a couple years ago.

That's great. So what kind of business owners do you typically, or you know, business and website owners do you typically work with? Because I know that you know there's physical product, E commerce is sometimes a little bit different than information product, sales, etc. Talk about maybe some of the differences there as well as who you typically do. You have a sweet spot.

Well, we find ourselves working with a lot of E comm or software as a service companies. So a lot of physical goods. We've got a handful of supplement clients that just seem to be attracting to us recently. Okay, we were just talking about one offline here that's a physical product, a well known one that actually came to us which it's too early to mention names but.

So yeah, we kind of dabble in a little bit of everything. We have a strong info background but we actually find that we don't do a ton of work in the info space.

Because most of those people are. I don't want to bash it because I come from it, but they expect miracles overnight. So they're a little bit more difficult to work with in terms of an optimization plan because tests take time.

Yeah, they really do. And it's also in the infospace it's usually just sales letter or webinar or video sales letter and there's a handful of things that you can do to make those a lot better. But I can see how in the world of SaaS and physical product E commerce, there's so many variables. There's so many, as I'm finding out with my e commerce company, there's so many things to pay attention to. And an E commerce store is. It's not just a singular line that you just come in and watch the VSL and then buy.

It's a lot more intricate. So that's cool. So let's talk about some of the things that, you know, you brought this up earlier how one of the things that you're able to bring to the table that a lot of conversion consultants or not is that you do have a strong background in both. So let's talk about some of the ways that helps you get better results. How do you bring some of the best practices in info direct response to something like SaaS or E Comm?

Well, it all comes down to the basics. I mean people only buy for really two reasons and that's to avoid pain or gain pleasure. And in the direct response like InfoWorld, we rely heavily on copy. So in the copywriting skill to engage in that emotion really drive the message. And we have found that in E commerce and in software as a service, they don't necessarily play on those elements. They try to lead more with the features of the product rather than how it's going to help them and what benefit they're going to get and what they're, you know, the time savings, the whatever the big benefit is, they don't lead with it. They just say, hey, here's my stuff, buy it. Here's all these cool features. But nobody cares about the features at the end of the day.

Right? You know, it's funny, like I've had to reign myself in on.

Hours because I have written a lot of the copy and I want to write a lot. And I have to remember that, okay, you can write more than the standard person does, but don't overdo it. But then again they say the more you tell, the more you sell. And sometimes people really want that. So. But I've definitely brought that side to our business. But I know exactly what you mean. There's so much room for, you know, doing better copy. I think I read that when Groupon started and one of the keys to their success, I think it was Groupon. They hired comedy writers.

To write their Groupon post. It was either Groupon or, I'm almost positive it was Groupon because they had really good writing. It may have been another one that I'm confusing it with, but I'm Pretty sure it was that or it was appsumo, because I know Appsumo had some amazing writing on there and they spent. Yeah, that's. You know what, I'm 99% sure it was appsumo, but the writing they did was hilarious. But they're talking about physical products, but they, they really engaged you. So it was that kind of that marriage. So that's awesome. What are some of the things that some of the biggest conversion mistakes that you see people making? Oh, I mean that's like we got six hours to talk about those.

Yeah. Well, if I would have to boil it down to a couple.

What are.

The most glaring that are probably the most universal mistakes that.

That folks make and don't say like, oh, they just talk about features and not benefits. Right, because you mentioned that and I get it, but is there anything else like especially. Let's just talk to the E commerce and software as a salespeople for now.

Okay. So one of the biggest thing is no focus. They tend to come up with a bunch of crazy test ideas and we can do that all day long.

I mean, I helped critique your E commerce store and I can come up with ideas all day long. I critique sites all week. But you need to really create an exact hypothesis to why you're testing certain things and what the expected outcome is. So you have to have a reason behind your test, not just that, oh, a green button is going to increase your conversions. Why are we testing a green button versus a blue one or an orange one for just simple examples. And you just have to look at the data and let that be the driver and then support it with some best practices to drive it. So when we start out with a client, sometimes they'll say, oh, we need all of these test ideas. We have all these things we want to test, but it never just goes, we're going to test this first, this second, this third. We use the data to be the driver. So I think the biggest the fall off is people just testing randomly rather than having an exact reason why they're going to need to be testing something and what's the expected outcome and then learn from those, whether it be a losing variation or not and learn from it and expand on it. Because we've had situations where.

We get a losing variation, but we see it showed promise early on. So we'll come back and revamp that test and then come out with a winner just based on that information. So we let the data be the driver. And I think more companies need to do that when creating Their optimization plan.

Yeah. And that's hard to do, especially when a lot of the founders of a company are. Their minds don't work exactly like that. Right. Like they and myself is one. I do love conversion optimization. I love looking at it. I hate implementing it because it takes so much scientific time, discipline in order to do this. I'm the guy who comes up with a whole bunch of potential ideas, throws them at the wall or drives somebody crazy to say, here, go implement all these. And it does take a different mindset. It takes somebody who is looking at the page through the consumer's eyes, which is really hard to do when you are. Which is why I'm a big proponent of people hiring external conversion consultants. Because when you are in your business all day long and you're looking at your website, you've got your website up, you're looking at five, ten times a day, if not more, and your customer is looking at it maybe once in their entire life, you're seeing different things than they are. So you as a consultant and any outside eyes can see things that the owner can't.

What has been.

When you sit down, this may be a hard question to answer, but is there one thing you like to test first on a page? Let's say you come across a decent page. Where do you even know where to start on.

A test? I mean, it probably depends on what they've got and what they're working with. But do you kind of have a rule of thumb?

Yeah, but we actually back it up with heat and click maps too.

Right.

So we'll look and see what people are paying attention to to kind of find those leverage points. But if I were to pick at absolutely one thing, it's always headline.

Yeah, I was going to say that. I guess that's true everywhere because that's what the first thing they're probably going to read.

Yeah, it's the first thing. It's the most engaging. If you come to a site and it's got a bunch of crazy movement and you're throwing offers at them and you really don't state your USP really quickly and what the key benefit is of your product or service, you're gonna lose them. So studies have shown that in a normal conversation you have seven or eight seconds to keep the attention of the person you're talking to. Whereas online you have less than three.

Yeah, yeah.

So I've heard stories of people paying 1500 plus dollars just for 16 words.

Wow. But those 16 words make a huge difference.

Yeah. We've had tests where we've shown 50, 60, 60, 125% improvements just by changing the headline.

Wow. You know.

That brings up a question specifically for e Commerce. Maybe SaaS as well, just not info.

So for instance with Stiletto.

I have a very small headline and it's not even as it's not a big benefit headline driven thing. However.

And I actually plan on running various different tests on this in something that is like an E commerce shop.

Would you say that the best way to test the effectiveness of that is it change the headline and then see which like version A, version B, we'll keep it real simple and then whichever one buys like leads to a sale or are there little other intermediate steps that you can do to measure the effectiveness of the headline? Because especially if you, if somebody comes to the main part of your main shop root domain, the main site, they may look around here left, right and.

They may have left the headline a while back and then they decide to buy. So there's a big gap between the headline and the sale. Is that one of the ways you would test a headline on an E commerce store? Or you maybe test two different headlines. Which one has the lowest bounce rate or which one has the, you know, the most pages viewed after that? So do you use different metrics based on things like that?

Yeah, we, we try to look at an E commerce situation as baby steps down to the end goal. So we look from the starting point where the most visitors are going could be your homepage and we try to get click throughs to the next page. So get them to the next step. Is it your shop now? Is it your find out more information? Is it whatever that next step is? That's usually what we measure first because you're pushing them further down.

The actual sales process.

Cool, I'm glad you said that because that's exactly what I was thinking as well. Like okay, well is it just. Yeah. One little headline to sale? Well yeah, you never know because you can have so few sales, you know, as a, as a comparison, you know, hell if 99% of the people leave your page, you're not. It's taken a while to get a lot of data on that. But I'm glad, I'm glad you confirmed that for me. That's, that's really cool. What are you.

If you can kind of reach back into your memory there, what are some of the biggest surprises or.

Notable tests that you've done that have been really fun? Like maybe unexpected winners or just some of the tests that you've run for clients where it's been huge outperformer like, oh man, we did this and it just crushed it. Is there anything that comes to mind?

One big one was probably the simplest test we've ever ran. I like that. A client had add to bag as their main call to action.

And we changed it to cart and it saw an 82% increase in their sales. Wow.

See, you know what I love? This is why I have a love hate relationship with conversion. The thing I love is that you can make simple changes like that and double your double your business. But what I hate is that there's so many little variables that can be interlinked and you never quite know what is gonna do it. Like I may have thought of a million other things besides that. And that's why it really. It's an art and a science. Right. There is no, you know, paint by numbers. Just do this and you'll be success. You have to have somebody who really gets it.

Yeah, it's definitely not. We usually look at the main kind of five elements regardless of the campaign we're looking at. Is your headline, your sub headline, your call to action. Are you telling them what to do? The button copy to make that to emphasize the call to action, stating the benefits clearly, usually using bullets. Because nobody likes to read typically, especially in an E commerce scenario, and then leverage it via proof. I don't see enough proof being used. In the info space we rely heavily on testimonials.

Yeah.

In the E comm space or even the software as a service space, they don't leverage them nearly enough.

Yeah, I've noticed that. I've noticed that.

What about the. On the testimonials, have you found that longer or shorter testimonials work better?

It varies case by case. Sometimes it's the written one with an image. Sometimes an image decreases conversion. We had one particular case and I actually spoke at an event in November and I was putting people through. I was highlighting the winner in my PowerPoint slide and bringing it out. And then I got to that this company was testing logos of some of their clients. It was a software as a service company and they had five main ones and we added five more, thinking more better, you know, obviously. And adding five additional logos actually decreased their conversions 89%.

Whoa, once more. Once more. Things I love about this business. Things I hate about this business.

Yeah, it's just crazy when you see that kind of thing. So we played a lot with the variations and mixing it up. Whether video is better and you got to pay close Attention to mobile traffic. Because video isn't always effective on mobile, since it brings it up full screen and you lose all of the other sales elements.

Right.

Do you typically.

I want a rabbit trail over there. Mobile. So mobile conversion versus desktop or whatever conversion is. I mean, that's a whole other animal. We could probably do an entire show just on mobile conversion. But for.

That, do use a. Suggest that a good responsive theme is enough. Or do you suggest people having a mobile. A mobile version of their site that detects and redirects to something.

I'm always a big fan of keeping it simple.

Yep.

So responsive is my way to go. Because then if you have a full mobile site, then you got to maintain two, you got to optimize two.

I'm so glad you said this, by the way.

Yeah. And we've seen it and you can do obviously some mobile variations. And what we do is we always pay attention to that. So we'll mock up a desktop version and a mobile version to make sure the layout is effective. In our tests and we've had one situation and you got to keep in mind, on mobile, especially in E commerce, people are used to scrolling.

Yeah.

Desktop, they're not. It's not as much. So we won. I mentioned that test earlier where we revamped was in a mobile scenario where we. They had all of their options on their. Their product page collapsed. So you had to click and then choose. Click and then choose. And we expanded all of them and it showed promise early on, but then it ended up losing just by a few percent. So we revamped it and just highlighted the main key areas and we increased their conversions on mobile, 30%.

Oh, wow. That's fantastic. Are you finding that what percentage of people are typically purchasing on mobile versus on desktop? Are you finding it's like 10% of all purchases?

It really comes down to your traffic sources.

Yeah.

There's a lot of stores that are driving traffic, getting a lot of mobile traffic, but then they come to find out that the people are actually, you know, bookmarking it or saving it and then coming back on desktop and making a purchase. So it's a little bit.

But where the purchases actually happen, where they're entering their credit card. I mean, I've seen in other businesses that I've run or consulted on that it's really low. I just. I didn't know if you had a.

We've seen as high as 70% of people come on mobile really? And actually make a purchase.

Really? Are you.

It really depends on the product or the service.

Are you noticing any difference between people who purchase, like if they're doing it on mobile, if most of them are doing like PayPal or pay with Amazon versus just, you know, rent, you know, entering their credit card in.

We usually try to optimize the forms for mobile so we make it easy for them to check out via credit card.

Right on. Is Apple Pay?

Kind of varies whatever you have.

Is Apple Pay doing mobile? Like can you pay with Apple Pay on websites and stuff like that now?

We haven't done any integrations.

Yeah, I think it's still early. It'll be really interesting when they've got it to where you're just paying for stuff with your thumbprint.

Yeah, that's what they're moving towards.

Yep. Oh man, talk about good and bad. Bad for us as consumers because we'll be broke. It's too easy to buy stuff. But yeah, it's really cool. Somebody doing E. Com who is you get them on their mobile and if you can get that impulse buy with a thumbprint, that'll be amazing.

What about.

You? Tell me what else is really working? What else are you doing that you're kind of excited about or what are some other things that people can take away from here and maybe even apply to their own site?

Well, the biggest thing is just lead your visitors down and hold them by the hand to the end goal. And I don't see that nearly enough. I mean, like I said, I probably critiqued 10 sites this week. Nice already. And.

It'S just the same thing. It's the same song and dance every single time. It's like you're not leading with your benefits, you're not holding them by the hand. The first page might have a blue button and then the next page has an orange one. And then.

You'Re confusing them by having too many orange buttons and not emphasizing the actual add to cart or the checkout buttons and just making that process as simple as possible. I looked at one yesterday and they had seven steps to check out.

Oh, wow.

So we find that if you can keep it down to three steps, especially in E commerce, the better off you're going to be.

Yep, more chances to lose them. Are there any sites that you can or care to share that either a have been clients of yours that you've worked on and particularly proud of the optimization you've done there or any other sites that maybe they aren't clients but you really like? You're like, oh yeah, this is somebody who's just dialed it in as a great Example, if you have those, I'd love to share them in the show notes so people can and myself included can just kind of take a look at, you know, what's a really good high converting website that either you've worked on or you like.

Yeah. One that has it really dialed in in the software as a service space is Live plan.

Oh, see, I've never heard of them.

They're a business plan software. I've been trying to get in with them for two years.

Oh, wow.

I kind of use them as an example of our perfect client.

Oh yeah, I like it. I'm on their website here.

They have a ton of traffic and just some great, great marketing effectiveness in getting people through. They test a lot.

It seems they test a lot because it's ever evolving. As far as ones that we've really worked on is they actually. I don't know if they're really in existence anymore because I think they sold. But Beauty Box 5. Beauty Box 5, number 5. I think they're sites active, but we worked on that for well over a year and we actually saw 1,650% growth in sales for them.

Really? That's nice. Yeah, I pulled it up. It looks like a nice site. I don't know if this is the stuff that you've done, but.

It'S a very nice site. You know, one of the things that I've repeated many times because I heard it, I don't know if it was from Mech Labs or from.

Oh, who else was it? It was a. It doesn't matter. But saying that kind of the three questions to ask yourself when.

Looking at your own website.

Is the same questions that subconsciously the customer is asking themselves, which is, where am I, what can I do here? And why should I do it? Have you heard that before?

Yeah, it's the same thing. It's like, what's it going to do for me and how do I get it?

Yeah.

What I boil it down to almost always.

Yeah. And.

What I liked about that, those three questions is in the very first time, if I come there and I'm confused, like, where am I? Because when they land on your website, it's a new site, they're a little bit confused. If it's like you said, if it's all over the place, if they don't know what this is, then you've already lost them. Don't make me think.

And yeah, what can I do here? Well, you can either buy something or if it's free or here's what it does for you. And then the last one being, yeah, well, why should I do it? And that's where your copy points come in. So whenever I've done my own conversion optimization, I try to kind of keep those three things in mind. Am I confusing the client? Am I trying to be too.

Coy with them and try to hook them into a video sales letter or something else that.

Is not going to reveal where they are? And that's always worked well for me.

It does. And one thing we do.

Especially in software as a service, is remove those distractions, remove that clutter. So in info we typically have watch the vsl, here's your one add to cart button and that's your path. Whereas software as a service, they might have, oh, sign up for a free trial, get a demo, download this white paper, join this webinar.

And they try to pull people in too many directions. And as soon as we remove that distraction and put emphasis on the main KPI or that indicator, that step that you want, that desired action you want them to take, is when conversions increase.

Right. Have you found that many of the.

Sites that you work with, e commerce SaaS, et cetera, that they're typically driving their traffic to their homepage versus an individual product page?

It's kind of a mix. I would say the majority are driving to home.

Okay.

Which is kind of scary.

Yeah.

For the fact that if they're shopping for something.

Specifically.

Right.

And they're entering a certain keyword in a search field and they're looking for an ad and they're clicking on an ad, they should be taken to that category page or at least a specific landing page. That's one of the areas we help companies improve, is we'll help them break out their traffic into different buckets and help streamline it to get to that end goal faster.

Nice. Yeah. And that's important, like you say, to kind of realize if the customer is typing in, they are looking for.

A blue widget that does xyz. If you've got ads like just in Google, you should send them to your blue widget page as opposed to your homepage. But if somebody is just looking for.

Whether they're following you on Instagram or Facebook or wherever, and they're not in that place where they're shopping for a specific product, sending them to your main homepage may be the best thing to do. So I guess like you said, it kind of depends on the mindset of the customer, how you're getting them. At what point in the shopping cycle are they.

Yeah. And I think it comes down to a lot of brand equity too. Yeah. I was looking at two sites yesterday, Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig.

Mm.

Two pretty big brands, especially now that Oprah took over Weight Watchers.

Mm.

But they drive all of their search traffic to their homepages.

Yeah.

Well.

And maybe they're be like you said, they've got so much brand equity, people know who they are. So they're like, alright, get here. We are now going to take you in the right direction.

Yeah. It's a shorter sales cycle because they don't need to be educated on exactly who this company is. They see the TV ads, they see all of this other stuff and they just need to know where to buy.

Exactly. So we talked briefly about this before we started recording. But hero shots for my listeners, a hero shot. You're starting to see these a lot more around the web. Which is where when you come to the website there's a huge picture video like right up front.

And there's minimal. Like on Weight Watchers they've got a great hero shot. Join free and lose 10 pounds. And then here's a button and then you really have to scroll down to get to where you're going. And like we mentioned, you know, most people don't scroll. When you do a heat map, you're probably losing 50% of the people just never scroll down. Are you a fan of hero shots? No Hero shots. Does it just depend what's your take?

I like to be able to see something I try to maximize above the fold of the page.

Yeah.

Essentially. And I'm a fan of the big images. But you have to be effective with the images and the images actually do matter tremendously on what you use. So I try to maximize that, making sure you have a strong headline, a call to action and like in the ecommerce world, if you do it right below that image where you can still see it above the folder of the page. We like to do best practices there or best sellers.

Okay. So like the hero shot and then right beneath it you put like the actual products and call them best sellers.

Best sellers. And I usually we found in E Commerce that across the board people love best sellers. We had one particular case where we saw like a 40 some percent increase in actual sales just by highlighting best sellers in the menu.

Yeah. It shows you how little people want to think.

They just want tell me what the best sellers are, I'll buy those.

Yeah. And one other thing, especially in E comm where you have multiple skus and you could go in so many different directions. We found it effective to leverage a pop up on desktop to basically ask them a short survey, what are you here for? Basically? And lead them down the path. Let them choose the radio button, click next and take them to that product page or that category page.

I like that. Especially when it comes to E Comm. From what I've seen, most of the effective pop ups they say, you know, it's hard to beat. Just enter your email here for 10% off. Yeah, right. So they say that's hard to beat. But I like what you're saying too because to me that immediately, I just don't like that it immediately discounts the value of your product and it just.

It doesn't feel the way it should. When you walk into a store, you don't walk into a store and the greeter, you know, the greeter says, hey, let me know if I can help you with anything. Are you looking for something? They don't walk up to you immediately and say, hey, give me your business card and I'll give you 10% off.

Yeah, exactly.

So maybe that works. Maybe at the end of the day they get more customers or more money, I don't know. But I agree with what you were saying and I like that. So it's coming up, especially on the home page, just reiterating what you said and it. Just ask them a question, what are you here for today? Are you to shop for widgets or thingamajigs? Are you just, are you looking for more education? Are you looking to buy now? I mean, is it questions like that?

Yeah, it's just if you have multiple categories, say you're a clothing outfit and you have men's and women's and shoes and all sorts of different things.

Ask them are you a man or a woman?

You know, a simple question. And then lead them into shopping for men. And then you can actually do things in optimization with personalization to where you now know they're a man. So you can, you don't ever have to show them anything ever again. Having to do with women's clothing.

Yeah, that's smart. I like that.

So all of the messaging will be catered around. You can even change your homepage based on that info just, just to show them men's products.

Okay, so how do you work with people? So one of the things I can definitely see.

Everybody out there who's running any kind of a traffic to a website and trying to get sales, you know, especially once you get some traction, should be working, I think with a conversion Expert because there's too much money being left on the table if you don't. And. But it can also be very intimidating. It can be like, how much of this are you going to just tell me to do a whole bunch of stuff and I have to do it? Do you guys implement stuff on your side? What's it look like to work with conversion fanatics?

We take care of 98% of the heavy lifting.

Okay, so explain what that means. Somebody's got a website and they're like, yeah, I want, I want you guys to what's your 98%?

So we take care of basic design in relation to the test, front end development, implementation, management of the tests, pushing winners live in some cases, as well as advisement and reporting.

Okay, that's great.

That's not the intimidation factor. We kind of take that off the plate.

Of our customers because they don't have the bandwidth necessarily to be testing it. Maybe they don't even have the access expertise, but they want it done. So we've kind of built out our company to help alleviate all of those problems.

Nice. Now, do you use custom or other types of like visual, like Visual Website Optimizer or any of the other types of split testing programs to run some.

Of these tests with or our go to platform is Optimizely. Okay.

Yeah, I've used that before.

We're certified partners with them. Great. We've tested pretty much every platform out there.

Yeah.

But we're not necessarily biased. Obviously we want to use Optimizely where we can, but we don't try to reinvent the wheel. So we'll use whatever our clients have in play.

Like if they have Visual Website Optimizer, you guys can work with that. If they aren't using anything, you direct them towards what you know best.

Yeah, we use VWO, we've used Conversations, Convert.com, adobe Test and Target. We've used Monetate. We've used all of these different tools. But our whole point is speed of implementation. So if we're waiting around to sign up for a new service and we're trying to implement new code and do quality checks and do all of that stuff, it just delays optimization.

Yeah.

And we don't ever want to hold our visitors or our clients data hostage, so we want to work within what they're currently working with.

That makes sense. At what point.

Should a business owner reach out to you? Like when does it make sense? If, if somebody's got a certain level of revenue, a certain level of traffic, you know, what is the what's the kind of the minimum viable client that you guys want to work with?

They get 100,000 unique visitors a month. They're spending $10,000 a month on ads or more.

Usually we kind of fall into the range of probably 5 to 20 million in revenue.

Okay.

We've worked, we've worked all the way up to 200 million, but that's kind of our sweet spot.

Okay. So if.

Yeah. So if somebody isn't necessarily doing 5 million but they've got a hundred thousand clicks or spending 10,000amonth or doing that kind of stuff that's they can, you know, they should still feel free to contact you, Right?

Absolutely.

Okay. Do you.

It's a case by case basis a lot of times. I mean I just had a company this morning, their software service company. They only have 50,000 unique visitors a month. But it's, it just takes a little bit longer to test is the only.

Right. Yeah, that's the biggest problem is. Yeah, it's one thing to hire somebody that you know to work on your stuff, but if you've got no real traffic then it's. You're not going to be able to. All your tests in the world is going to kind of fall silent.

On.

The survey that I asked you before we jumped on the call, I said what's another tactic that's kind of working? Is this what you were talking about? You mentioned that it's taking the normal long forms, the full record and breaking it up to more survey style with one question at a time. You said that that is, Is that what you were just mentioning a minute ago?

That could be part of it. But even in any other scenario, obviously we know from the infospaces, most times email only is what you get.

Yeah.

But some people ask for more like a questionnaire. Basically seen a lot of the. For coaching and things like that. They're using these questionnaires and we were driving a lot of traffic from PPC to a page like that. It had about 10 or 12 questions on the form and we just weren't getting the results we were looking for. So we broke it up. Asking one question at a time. Just using Survey Monkey.

Yep.

And we saw almost an 1100% increase.

Oh wow. Are you able.

Is that a website? You're able to divulge who it is or is there little confidentiality there?

Well, it was my site.

Oh nice. Was that just conversion fanatics?

Yep.

Oh nice. So I'm there right now. So if I click get in touch.

Is that you might see one of.

Yeah, probably.

Anyway, I've got a question on this. I see this all the time. Big companies do this. It drives me nuts because I think that they're leaving so much money on the table. But then I'm like, well, but they got so much money, maybe they know what they're doing. Doing. A lot of Times It's a SaaS business where exactly. Like what you just said.

They'Re running a Google Ad directly to.

Sign up for this demo and enter in basically everything, like from name to address to phone number.

They stop short of date of birth and Social Security number and stuff like that. But they ask for so much to run a. To give you what's called just a demo or just to even find out more about the. About the product. What's your opinion on those? Do they actually work? And I'm just crazy.

In most cases, they're just trying to heavily filter who comes in the door. But we have found, even working in software as a service where you try to test with the least amount of fields that you can get by with.

Yeah.

And we've run a lot of trials and demos and it always comes down to basically your name, your email address and your phone number and maybe company.

Yeah.

So you know who you're dealing with.

I just know that phone number is always the most intimidating one for people, myself included. 99% of the time I will put in a fake number. Just like, let me just see what you've got before I allow you to call me. So I do understand how that filters out people who aren't serious, because if they are serious, they'll put in their phone number to be called. But these days, I think more people are wary of the phone number than ever before.

Yeah. And we pulled it out. Our one software as a service client, they have like 80 plus salespeople.

Okay.

So they. We tested removing the phone number. They said, well, let's test it and see what we get. Pushing people into a free trial. Then it increased conversions probably 25%. But then their sales people got mad because they didn't have phone numbers. Right. Ended up having to add it back in and test around it.

Right. Okay. I've always wondered about that, especially when it comes to where they are in the buying cycle. Like, I may just be. I may Google something like, I don't know, best contact management, CRM software. And then I go to a page and it's just. There's no menu on it. All I can do is sign up for a demo of this. I'm like, no, Dude, I'm just looking around. I don't even know what your features are. I'm not going to give you my phone number and all this other stuff. So I've always thought that those companies could be doing so much better.

Yeah, just sometimes it's a two step process.

Yeah, it is.

And that works extremely well in some cases too.

Nice. You mentioned SurveyMonkey. Have you ever come across typeface form.com top form? No. Yeah, Typeform. It's a survey tool. T, Y P E F O R M. It's a really beautiful like survey tool. Really like really, really rich. Looks amazing on mobile. Anyway, you may want to look at that especially if you're currently using things like SurveyMonkey but pretty versatile. I've used that a lot. So what is a.

What'S a nut you're trying to crack right now in your business or a bottleneck in the growth of conversion fanatics? You've been helping us, you've been letting us know things that we can do. What are some things that myself or my listeners can help do for you? Obviously if anybody likes what you have to say and may fit the criteria, they're free to reach out to you and see if working with you is a good thing. But.

What about the growth of your own business?

Well, one of our biggest problems areas right now is just been keeping up with the growth in terms of manpower.

Right.

We basically doubled our business in the last two and a half months.

Oh wow. That's quite a. That's quite a lot of growth in a short amount of time.

Yeah, we grew 150% last year.

So it's really just finding a plus talent.

Okay, what kind of talent are you looking for right now? Is there any particular.

Positions or skill sets that you're looking for?

We're looking for a conversion analyst, somebody who can help create test ideas. Right now we've been trying to hire for that for two months.

How much experience do they have to have in that area?

Just understand how the game works. Nice is pretty much it.

I like it.

And can pick out stuff just at a glance. Just understand how conversion optimization works. We're actually interviewing somebody after this call but.

And then we're hiring for a front end developer too right now, which you've got a bunch of different candidates in there but in terms of that that isn't really. That's really our biggest and one area we've been, I wouldn't say really struggling with but we've been very picky at because we know what it looks like to hire a B or a C player versus an A player.

Yeah, it's really hard. Hiring is an area that I. It's on my list to get a lot better at this year, just in general. And it's not just hiring quickly, because I've always been the type to hire fast and fire slow, which is the exact opposite of what you should do. Because I hate the recruiting process so much. Like, I have something I need to have. Oh, yeah. I have something I need to be done. Can't I just close my eyes, open them, and then the perfect person is sitting in front of me? Why doesn't that happen?

But once in a while, you get lucky.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's a. It's the key to making it, you know, really. Last. Bootstrapping. I'm a big fan of bootstrapping. When you need to. But bootstrapping people, you often get what you pay for.

So, yeah, we found that out tremendously. Yeah.

And I've come to the evolution in my career where I would rather. If I feel as though you are the right person, I would rather pay more and then figure out later that you weren't. Rather than pay really cheaply.

And.

Then, you know, and then find out that you weren't the right person. Right. So one of them. I've saved a little bit of money on not paying you as much, but I've lost so much in opportunity cost in not having somebody better in there. So that's probably a topic for an entire another episode of the podcast that I could go into. So if people want to get more information on you, the website is ConversionFanatics.com plural.

Yep. ConversionFanatics.com is plural. You can find information about the book. Yeah.

So that's the thing is, even if people can't afford or they're not in a place to hire you right now, you've got a great book where they can get some information about all the stuff they're saying, so they can implement it themselves and then get to the point where they, you know, it makes sense to hire you.

Yeah, absolutely.

I.

Set out to write the book. It took me over a year to write it because I didn't want to fluff it at all.

It's not just a glorified business card.

No, it was. I really wanted to put some meat into it and some real tangible stuff that you could execute on.

Right.

As well as some theory and stuff behind it. But, yeah, it took me a while to write it and put it together. So, yeah, I hope people enjoy it.

That's great. And I look forward to reading it myself and putting a handful of things into effect. Justin, man, this has been, this has been great, by the way, for my listeners, if you like this, I've got a special treat for you. So as I mentioned earlier, my wife and I are the owners of stiletto coffee.com and.

A couple things. I'll give you a coupon code if you guys want to try it out here in just a second. But if you are interested in.

Seeing Justin in action, I had him give me a critique on my website and he did it on the on video screen. He pulled it up and then he went to YouTube and he put it in a private link. And Justin, if you don't mind, if people want to come to my page and when they sign up for my newsletter on the page, I'm gonna unlock this and let anybody who wants to view that. Do you have any problem sharing your critique of my site with them?

No problem.

Perfect. So in order to get this private video that some people would pay very, very good money for, I'm going to give it to you for free. But I'm just going to ask you that you sign up for my newsletter that's over here on the site. Baconwrappedbusiness.com ConversionFanatics that'll be in the show notes. If you're listening on the iPhone, just click on the thing and I'll ask for your email. I don't spam you. This is just where I can continue to communicate with you. But I will allow you to watch the, I think it's a six, seven or eight minute, very detailed site critique. So you can also see exactly how Justin's mind works and the things he's looking at when he is actually critiquing a website. You will also be able to apply a guarantee if you've got a website. Some of the stuff that he says on your own, I've got a big list of notes of things that I have to change as it is. And if you're on the newsletter, I'm going to be doing kind of a behind the scenes look at how my wife and I have built this brand and the success we're seeing. And if you're interested in that, that's only going to be for my newsletter subscribers. That being said, subscribers, you can also subscribe to the podcast. Just hit the little button if you're on there. I encourage you to check out ConversionFanatics.com and if you're interested in trying some Stiletto Coffee, all of my listeners will get a a great surprise when they enter in bacon and the coupon code and you'll see the discount that I'm going to give you. I'll actually be, screw the surprise, 25% off Stiletto Coffee when you use the coupon bacon. So, Justin, thank you very much for being on the show, man. This has been great. You've shared some stuff that kind of opened my eyes and I hope that anybody listening to this is motivated to read your book, call you, get in touch with you, Manish and the team there and see if there's you can help them make some more money.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you having me. Hopefully it was some value.

Yeah, absolutely, man. Thank you very much. And to all my listeners, stay tuned for the next episode. We've got a really cool guest coming up and I'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Subscribe on itunes and leave me a review. It makes me happy. All right, talk to you soon.