AJ Roberts - The Growth Levers That Skyrocketed Sales For Kartra
16 Jul 2023 · 77 min
AJ Roberts, CRO at Kartra, shares the growth moves that drove sales: annual billing hit 40% uptake, exit-intent offers lifted checkout by 50%, and a $1 trial outperformed free. The core levers were conversion and retention, plus aggressive split-testing on pricing and pages.
Chapters
This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.
Hustle and Float Shark with your boy. My boy Matt Wolf and Joe Fit.
Hey.
Yep.
Oh, I just smacked my face on the microphone as I hit the record button.
Nice. Slapped by the mic. He don't like you.
The mic just punched me in the face.
Doesn't DMX have a great line?
Where are we going with this?
I'm not gonna go, but I know all DMX fans will know exactly what that reference is about.
X gonna give it to you.
I don't think it's in that song, but. Yeah, same dude. Same dude.
Gotcha.
Slappy at the mic and. Yeah, leave it there. All right, so today we're talking to our neighbor.
We are. We actually make reference to this show on this episode that this guy lives maybe a mile or two from us.
Legit.
And we did it remotely with me at my house and Joe at my house and him at his house.
Well, we were scared of lightning that day.
It was a storm. But he's in a basement and didn't even realize it was happening.
Yeah, no, actually, we were. This intro after the fact after that day. Cause I said it wasn't actually today.
No, today it's just hot. Clear.
Yeah. Yeah. A.J. didn't even know there was this, like, monster electrical storm that never happens in San Diego happening around him, because during this episode, there was something. One time he was talking and, like, a bolt landed outside the window. Like, Matt and I were like, what the.
Yeah. And he didn't even hear it.
Yeah, we're like. We got a little distracted there, aj. So today we're talking with AJ Roberts.
Our neighbor, one of the buffest, baddest.
Mofos in marketing, online marketing.
He at one time held, what, the.
Deadlifting world record, I believe it was. He can be the. There's actually our note takers. Either Sue, Kate, or whoever on the team will probably research that and link up the reference to that. And maybe there's a video. I know there's a video of him. So whoever's listening, like, source that video. It's. It's a little graphic, but it's him lifting a bunch of weight, so.
Oh, the one where he's like, blood vessels in his nose pop out of.
His nose, I think.
Gnarly.
Yeah. So if you don't like blood, don't go there. But if you're very keen on, like, interested in who's talking. Yeah, that's the dude.
Yeah, he doesn't badass anymore. He can pick up really heavy things, like a car. Yeah.
I don't know, I'm just making that up.
But we're not talking about that with him today.
No, we're not. No, I don't talk anything about that.
He is also. What's his title over at Genesis Digital?
He is the chief revenue officer who basically controls or looks after customer experience, the marketing, sales, and that's what we talk about.
And if you don't know what Genesis Digital is, Genesis Digital is the company behind Kartra Easy. Not ever. Webinar and Webinar Jam.
Yeah, those ones.
Yeah. Kartra Ever Webinar, Webinar jam.
Yes. So AJ basically fricking runs house on just ramping up sales, optimizing conversions, team, customer service, all that stuff. So the dude's got like a million growth hacks he's always experimenting with, and he shared a bunch of those with us. So I'll leave those in this episode. But it's even better for folks who have some kind of subscription business. So I would say definitely listen to this episode. If you have some MRR or annual recurring revenue in your business, you're going to love this one. It gives a lot of very tactical ways on how they've increased their sales.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, he helped blow up Kartra and we basically pick his brain. We talk about split testing. I think he gave us some of the split tests that they used that we're kind of surprised by. Yeah, like you said, growth hacks, a lot of good stuff. I mean, we really kind of go behind the scenes of how Kartra is operated. I mean, Kartra has become just a behemoth of a company, and it's just kicking ass right now. And we wanted to pick the guy who was running Kartra's brain about how that's happening. And that's literally what we do in this episode.
Yeah, buddy. So it's all good. And AJ's a badass, so expect to have him on again just in the future because we're all good friends.
Cool.
Yeah, pretty easy. So what we talking about? Actually, we have ahrefs.
We have ahrefs. Ahrefs is helping us make sure this show happens.
Yes, they are contributing and we appreciate them very much.
Yeah. So ahrefs right now they've got a seven day trial. Seven bucks. It's amazing. I actually found out this kind of cool trick I saw on YouTube the other day, actually, from Ahrefs YouTube channel. So I'm just gonna. I'm gonna share it, but it's one of the one thing Joe and I have found out recently. I was looking in our wicked reports, and I noticed that one of our most profitable traffic sources is going on other people's podcasts.
No way. You could profit with your voice.
Yeah. So us going on other people's podcasts, we always give a unique link at the end of the show saying, hey, go. Check us out@hustleandflowchart.com uniqueurl so we can tell which podcasts are driving traffic. And it turns out going on other people's podcasts is a really great way to drive traffic and make a lot of money. We've actually. It's our most profitable marketing outlet. And I recently learned that with Ahrefs, there's this cool little trick that you can do where you can go and you can basically search URLs that have somebody's name in it. So let's say.
Somebody that's like a. Somebody that's in your market.
Well, it could be, like, from other podcasts. Right?
Let's just say, like, Neil Patel. Right, Neil Patel. Let's say Neil Patel goes on a lot of podcasts. I don't know if he actually does or not. He's been on ours, but I don't have a podcast.
He has on a lot.
But let's say he goes on a lot of podcasts, and the podcasts he would go on would be a good fit for the podcast you'd go on. So maybe he goes and talks about content marketing. You're looking for podcasts to talk about content marketing. So you can go into ahrefs, type in Neil Patel, and then find all of the blogs that have featured Neil Patel. And most of those are going to be podcast interviews. And you can reach out, say, hey, I saw you had Neil on. I talk about similar stuff. Let's. Right, so it's a great way to find podcast outreach, too. And Ahrefs has just an amazing way of doing that. There's actually a YouTube tutorial on it that we could probably link in the show. Notes about how we do that. But really, really great little trick to go and find podcasts to be on. You just search out guest names that tend to go on a lot of podcasts and see where they pop up.
Easy peasy, man. Yeah, Ahrefs is legit, and it gives you, like, all the. I like to think of it as the cheat codes to SEO and even outreach, like getting on shows and pr. I mean, like, all these are tools that you could just kind of mold to your own needs. So, yeah, go get on other shows and. Yeah, there's just, like, so many out there, so a lot of money to be had. So Ahrefs is awesome. Go to Ahrefs. Ahrefs. No, that doesn't really help. Go to www.ahr e f s.com.
The www is optional if you want to.
If you're. If you're feeling risky.
Seven bucks. Seven days. Totally worth it.
Totally worth it. Go get it. Seven bucks for seven days over there. And check out their YouTube channel, too, because they have, like, I don't know, hundreds of videos that are very tactical. They're not, like, sales pitches and stuff like that. Yeah, like, this is. So it's not.
We have notes.
We do have notes. Don't we have notes every time, though?
Yeah.
Okay, cool. Just making sure. Just making sure note takers aren't slacking over there. Jk. All right, so we got them notes for you, and I'm just going to cut to the chase. They're at hustleandfluechart.com comp c o m p. It's hustleandfluechart.Com comp. Those are all the notes of this episode. You got to be quick. One to two weeks, they're live, and then after that, they go into our epic vault.
Epic vault.
That epic vault is not that expensive at all, but it is epic. And only Epic members get all access to everything, all the notes, all the goodness.
You listening to this? We want you to be epic.
We do. We'd prefer you to be epic, but.
We pretty much only hang out with epic people, so we can't really be around you if you're not epic. Wow.
No, no, no, no, no. Don't do that.
No. Why not?
It's a little harsh.
Okay. I'm sorry. I still love you.
We love you as you are. But if you choose to be epic, you know, we'll just have even that much of a better time. Yeah. So. So your choice. It's in your. It's in your hands.
Yeah. You're not an Epic member. It'd be cooler if you were, man.
Man, you see what's happening on the other side, man, that.
That was my really bad Matthew McConaughey impression. Be cooler if you were, man.
Is that your Lincoln out front?
No. Hustleandflowchart.com comp. We take tons of notes on this, and we want to give them to you for free. So act quick. Go get them.
Yeah. Let's go talk to AJ Take off that cowboy hat. Okay. All right.
It's Off. Matthew, let's go talk to a Joe.
Aj, welcome back. Round two.
Yeah. Good to be here.
It's funny, we were. Joe and I were just talking, you know, before we started talking with you a couple minutes ago, about how it's kind of hilarious that we're doing this call remotely because I think you're about a mile from us right now.
Yeah, Yeah, I think we're closer than ever. Right.
It's really weird.
Like, you're like, basically in the same neighborhood as us, but we're still doing.
This over zoom, yelling out of the windows and just be like, hey, we.
Could be doing this podcast via tin cans and string.
Yeah, we'll have to do that next time. Have some beers and cook up a barbecue and then podcast.
The fact that you've lived. How long have you lived in the house you're in now?
Just over a year and a half now.
So you've been there a year and a half and we still haven't done a barbecue or pool party or anything like that?
You did have a baby last year, right?
No excuse.
No excuse.
Life has changed slightly for you.
Yeah, I just. Now I'm getting back to like normal sleep hours. So.
Yeah, no, it's crazy. So I was just actually looking it up and the last time you were on the show was episode two or. No, you were on episode 17. You are one of our very first guests that we ever brought on when we actually started having guests on our show. And now this is, I think, episode 211. Two years later.
Well, lots have changed. I know with your business, your focus and.
Similar focus overall. Like what? You're great at the sales, marketing and all that stuff. But it's interesting and we can kind of dig into, I guess, the changes since the last two years.
Yeah. So let's maybe start there and let's do a quick overview for folks that don't know who you are, and then we'll catch them up to speed of what you're doing now.
Yeah, for sure. So it's hard to kind of summarize it quickly, but ultimately my current role is chief Revenue Officer with Genesis Digital, and we have three SaaS products. We have Kartra, which is kind of an all in one marketing and online business platform. And then we have WebinarJam and have a webinar, which are for live webinars and automated webinars. But like you said, my role really hasn't changed. I'm still responsible for the growth strategies and I like what I'm doing Basically because I oversee sales, marketing, and customer experience, which is the customer life cycle. So to me, it's the lifeline, the blood of any company. And to be able to do that at the scale that we're at now is fun and enjoyable. And we get to test and tweak things and see huge changes, both for our own results and revenue, but also for the success of our customers. And it's just been quite the journey, going from ultimately broke gym owner struggling to consultant, to now running a software company.
That's what I love the most, is that story arc and then freaking deadlifting a million pounds or whatever it was. Oh, yeah.
I'm probably the strongest guy in marketing, and people can just go watch the documentary on Netflix, west side versus the world, to kind of get a glimpse into to that side of stuff. So it's, you know, it's kind of strange the different worlds I've been in. But ultimately, you know, the theme with it all is just, you know, peak performance and potential.
Yeah. So how did you get involved in Kartra or Genesis Digital? How did that whole, you know, how did you get introduced to Andy and Mike at the time? And how did you. How did you kind of rise the ranks in that company?
Yeah, so it all goes back to actually a mastermind that a group of us created. And there was like 10 or 12 of us, and we kind of. None of us wanted to be in another mastermind at the time, but we knew that we needed a mastermind with each other. And so what we did was we kind of had a kitty that we'd put like a couple thousand bucks in a month, and then four times a year, we would pay an expert to come in and run the mastermind for us. So instead of being in one expert's mastermind, we were able to tap into multiple experts over the year. And it lasted for a year or so, and then we kind of went on our own way. But one of the masterminds we had Yannick Silver, who is a legendary Internet marketer.
We brought him in, and I was always curious why he didn't have any digital products. He taught online marketing.
One of the first guys to teach it. And yet all of his products were physical products that were mailed. And so me being the curious guy I am, I said, hey, what's the reason for that? Is it better stick, better experience for the customer, Put it on the shelves, they see you. Is it more psychological? He just looked at me and said, no, I just haven't had time put my courses online.
I thought to myself, man, there's an opportunity there to connect with this guy and learn. What I really wanted was to get all this stuff for free.
He had a huge library of products and how do I get my hands on these? So I reached out to him and said, hey, man, if you want, send me all your products. I'll.
Rip the DVD using handbrake onto a digital format and then I'll build this out in. I think we were using Wish List at the time. And so.
He wanted to do a promo for Jeff Walker's product launch formula and bundle up some of his products to give away as a bonus. So it's like, you know, perfect timing. And he let me do that. And he was blown away that I would go to that length to help him out. And so he was getting ready to go on a trip to, I think, South Africa with Richard Branson. And he needed the underground online website. You know, it was a big event that he ran every year. About 500 people were at that, came to, came to that event. And I think it was number eight. And he didn't have a website, he didn't have any copywritten, he didn't have a design done. And he was going to be gone for like a month. And he said, hey, would you want to take this project on? So, you know, we came to an agreement. I took the project on, wrote the copy, built the website, and then, you know, came to agreement with him that he let me do the email marketing for him in order to fill the seats. And so that ventured me into the Internet marketing, online marketing space, which introduced me to Andy and Mike and Frank Kern and all these different people. And then Andy, roughly at the same time Andy was shooting. Andy Jenkins was also a co owner of a company called Hacks and Films, which nobody's heard of, but they've all heard of the movie Blair Witch Projects, which was one of their movies. And so he was, he was going off to shoot a Bigfoot movie and he's gonna be in Austin, Texas for eight months, you know, shooting this movie. And he needed someone to basically run his company for him while he was gone. And so I stepped in essentially to, you know, be him for the, for the, for eight months and keep the communication with his list. And we did a, we did a product launch during that for a relaunch of one of his products, Video Boss, which was a popular launch. So that was my first introduction to him. And then once he came back, of course, I kind went off, ventured off into consulting and that kind of thing. And then he partnered up and had marketing.
Marketing Genesis. And they brought me in to help with that. And, you know, our time there kind of came to an end too. And again, I went off and was consulting, and then Genesis Digital was born. And fast forward to present day, just over a year ago, you know, he called me up and said, hey, we just launched this thing and we're struggling a little bit with the marketing side of stuff, and we'd like to bring you in and you and I build this company out. And so I just had a baby and had been traveling a whole bunch for consulting and had a lot of coaching clients that was taking up a lot of time. And I thought, man, this would be really easy if I'm just consulting with one company. I actually had a couple of consulting clients at the time, before I went all in with what I'm doing. But it was one of those things where, you know, can I do the same thing, but within a company? And so instead of coaching individuals who had their own businesses, now I'm just coaching the team and executing within our own. And, you know, that's. That's kind of what, you know, the shift and got us to where we are.
That's really cool, man. And it's all like, it's. It's all relationships. That's the coolest part of it all. And what do you. Do you prefer working this way rather than with a string of clients?
You know, the difference between coaching, consulting, and then doing this is that stuff gets done.
Right? So, like, you know, I love people. I love working with people, but just like most coaches, I get so excited about the opportunity and the possibility and things like that. And sometimes you kind of care too much, right, and you're invested, you know, in their success. And then, you know, for various reasons that, you know, go beyond your scope, you know, they don't get stuff done or they change direction or they, you know, they have blocks, you know, mental blocks and things like that that hold them back. And so, you know, what I found is a lot of times you end up in, you know, kind of as a life coach a little bit here and a consultant a little bit there and a mentor a little bit here. And so although I find it very enjoyable, you know, the speed at which you can move is it kind of at the pace of the other person.
And the thing I love in the situation I'm in now, you know, we. We grow and we move at the pace that we dictate. And, you know, we. We have the, you know, Money, so to speak, to be able to grow the team, invest where we need to invest in and test and do these things. So I'm able to move a lot quicker and, you know, implement ideas a lot faster. And so it's very, very enjoyable to do that. But, you know, both of them, both sides have the positives and negatives and those kind of things. But, you know, it's interesting because I think it's easy to see one or the other and think the grass is greener on the other side. So it's just one of those things where, you know, I'm a huge implementer and things like that and want to see stuff happen. And so being able to control that in a way, you know, being a little bit of a control freak and wanting to be able to control that, it works a little bit easier when it's in your own business.
100%.
Yeah. You kind of just explained one of the reasons we really, really backed off on selling a lot of courses as well is, you know, we have these strategies that we like to teach, and when we see people buying our course but not actually taking action on them, it actually frustrates us. We're like, no, this stuff works. Go do it. So, you know, we've actually moved more and more towards doing some consulting stuff, because at least with consulting, we do see some actions getting taken, because we're just like you. We like, you know, we want to see movement and stuff. And with our business, we're very nimble. We move very quickly. And with consulting, we see that it's almost like a tiered approach. Like when. When you're selling courses, like a very, very, very, very tiny fraction of people are actually taking action on what you're doing. With consulting, you're getting a bigger percentage of those people taking action, which is one of the reasons we're doing more consulting. But then also, you know, kind of being all in on one thing is nice, too. So it's just interesting.
Yeah.
And I'm curious, with. With Kartra, do they have. Is there like a Kartra offices in downtown San Diego or something? Or does everybody work remotely now?
No.
So we're a remote company. Our coders, we actually have an office, but they're all in Romania, so they like the office. But we have employees all over the United States, Canada, Philippines. So we're all over, and it's virtual, so everybody works from home. And we have different time zones and things like that. So it comes with the challenges of that. But the beautiful thing is we don't have to try to build this amazing office that people don't want to leave. But you know, because it's better than the home. These, you know, everyone lives at home. So, you know, we don't have to have the best nap pod, so to speak, because they got their bed that they can go take a nap. We don't have to stock the kitchen with everyone's favorite treats because they got their own kitchen with their own favorite treats. And so everybody's commute to work is just a few minutes and everybody has a little bit of flexibility with their schedule, you know, and as long as things get done in timely manner, you know, we meet deadlines, you know, everybody's happy. So, you know, the. There are certain people who don't fit the culture for sure, people who struggle with self management and things like that, but that tends to weed itself out. So it's been a very interesting dynamic. And again, I can see, I think it would be great to have an office sometimes and interact and be there with the team. But at other times when I venture out and it's rush hour and I'm sitting in traffic for two hours, I think to myself, oh my gosh, I'm glad I don't have to do this every day.
Oh man. We were, I mean, the three of us and other friends, Dan Ryan and all them, we're talking about an office for a while down in what, pb. And that was the exact issue is like, oh man, I don't want to sit in traffic. We don't live in PB and there's a shit ton of traffic.
Joe and I have actually had multiple times where we had offices for our businesses and it's fun for like the first month. And then after a month we just stopped showing up to the office because we're like, yeah, I'll just work from home on my laptop today. And then you do it more and more and more often. The next thing you know you're paying rent at a place that you never go into. Right?
Yeah. And that's one beautiful thing we don't have, is a huge overhead, you know, as we can grow the company, we don't have to think, oh, we're going to have to expand, we're going to have to break a lease. Are we going to have to do this? We're going to have to do that, you know, so because of the way things are and the tools and technology that is out there, you know, there's no reason to try to do that. Plus it allows us to Tap into different talent pools at different prices and you know, different, you know, areas and pay a premium price in their, you know, their country, but still is very, very affordable for us. You know, if we had to build our company out here in California, you know, California is one of the toughest places to grow a business, especially a physical location.
Sure.
With employees and things like that. Because all the rules and regulations, taxes and stuff like that. So it does give us that, you know, flexibility as well. And we can attract kind of higher talent from, from around the world. We don't have to just rely on what's here locally for sure.
So are you part of the management of the team? Like the. Maybe not the day to day, but maybe weekly management. Are you more of. I know you're the chief revenue officer, so it sounds like maybe more front facing.
Yes, I'm heavily like with the marketing team and customer experience, I'm heavily involved. We have a very small team and we kind of build it that way. Right. To keep the finger on the pulse. I get told routinely that I do too much.
To stay into strategy and big ideas.
But like, what are some things that you do too much? I'm just curious.
Oh, just like from making sure emails are done correctly and have this idea, okay, what's the text message going to say? Okay, I need to see that to make sure that it's direct response and not just branding and that kind of thing. So always making sure that what we're trying to do is conveyed correctly. And if a report's real, I like to proof it to make sure that it follows the direct response pattern. I've backed off more and more because our team has slowly learned kind of what is needed and expected. But always remember kind of Dan Kennedy talking about the last thing you want to give up is really the marketing. Right. And so I've kept my fingers in there and I just make sure I'm not the bottleneck, you know.
If things need to move, like I won't put myself in a position where everything's going to be held up and I'm too busy for a week, you know, so that's where we're heavily involved. And then, you know, I connect with customer support on a regular basis, the director there to make sure that, you know, we're all aligned and I know what issues are coming back from clients so that we can then kind of address that in the customer experience side of stuff in terms of training and things like that. You know, one of the things about eight months ago we realized was that you know, being a technical platform, there's a lot of people who aren't techies and, you know, we are as easy as you can be, but that doesn't mean people are going to be able to figure it out. Right. Even though I find it intuitive, I find it easy. Most people don't, you know, and without trying to change your entire, you know, design and do all these things, well, what if we just create a learning platform that walks you through step by step, every single component that we have, you know, so that if you have a question on how to set this up, there's a. There's a training on it. So it was a big undertaking. But by adding that in now, our customers support from customer support, we get less questions. If we do, we can just direct them to the content that's been created for them. And so those kind of things, that conversation and being in what's going on allows us to continue and improve the platform. And Hector, who's our cto, him and I talk regularly around from what do we want to release, what do we want to improve? Because our goal is always to be improving and getting better and listening to the feedback and seeing what people need. And what features do we have that maybe fall short, because we don't want to be a platform that.
Eliminates the need for a dozen or so other platforms. But by doing that, you're giving up some quality or some features. So we're always looking at how do we improve those individual features on the platform so that you're not giving up. And I think by switching over.
Yeah, I think it's. Go ahead.
No, and so I'm just saying, so we're always looking at that, and then that comes back into the sales and marketing stuff.
Yeah. I think it's super smart that your customer support is like one of the most. I can't say this. It's broadly and neglected, but the fact that you're listening and checking in and I'm sure you guys have SOPs on. Okay, well, you're hearing this feature request or this issue, the fact that you're willing to create a learning system around Kartra and the onboarding process and any issues like that. Most companies don't do that, especially SaaS.
Yeah. You know, the thing is, I would love to be able to say we don't make mistakes and, you know, we're able to help everybody. The reality is that I look for patterns. Right. I look for reoccurring things. There's always going to be the upset person. There's always going to be the person that it's not the right fit for. But my job is to see, like, okay, if more than a few people are complaining about this one thing, then we need to look at this one thing, right? And I think that our customers who have been with us now for over a year and, you know, who are our biggest advocates, you know, they always say in the Facebook group when people are asking about certain things, like, oh, it's not there right now, but it'll probably be there soon because, you know, it's been mentioned. And so we have a feature request board that our clients can go to and input, like, what do they want to see? And then can be voted on. And obviously there's stuff on the roadmap. So sometimes things appear to get really least before other things that may have been requested. But ultimately we're always checking in with that and are we in line and sometimes we'll roll something out we think is going to be a big hit, and it makes some people happy, but it's not the home run we thought. But our goal, like I said, is always to be improving. And we've done that, and the growth has mirrored that. What's fascinating, we just did a recent survey for a new webinar promotion we're creating, asking people who had, you know, previous customers about their satisfaction. And 25% of the people who cancel tell us they're going to come back. You know, it's either not the right time, they don't have a product, and they were just testing it out and they're not ready for it. They loved it, but they, you know, need to take some time away for financial reasons, whatever. But, you know, that's a pretty good number in my mind. And, you know, we have a good, you know, Net promoter score and things like that. And so we use all these as benchmarks. And we're just always trying to improve. And it's kind of like the overall growth strategy I have is, is that we're not trying to improve traffic by if I want to double the company every year, I don't need to double the traffic. I need to increase the traffic, I need to increase the conversions, I need to increase the stick rate, I need to increase the customer happiness, I need to increase the amount of affiliates we have. By doing small percentages across the board, we get to those numbers a lot easier. That's the approach I take and have implemented here with the. With the different products.
Would you say that most of your decisions come from more the customer experience? Really tapping in and figuring that stuff out to optimize your sales marketing and all that, or is it coming from somewhere else?
I mean, it's constantly evolving.
That's one of the reasons I am involved. I think that it's very difficult to have a marketing roadmap where you have the calendar and you map out what you're going to do over the years in terms of. Of promotion and things like that. Because you never know how a promotion is going to go. You might do something and it completely bomb and that's going to change the direction. For the next 90 days. I try to work on like 90 day sprints, so quarterly, basically looking at what needs to be done and what worked last quarter, what didn't work, what language or hooks worked really, really well. That kind of got traction. And we look at our sales numbers for that and then we look at the conversations that are going on within the Facebook group as well, and what people are looking for or what they need. And so one of the things I noticed not too long ago was that a lot of people were saying they just wish we had more done for you campaigns. Not because they didn't necessarily know how to build a campaign, but because they wanted to save time. Right. They want to be able to push a button, have that campaign built, go in and tweak it, and it just saves a ton of time versus having to build it from scratch.
Sure.
You know, so I brought on a couple of guys full time to basically build campaigns. And so, you know, we should be releasing here about another dozen or so soon. And then the goal is to start, you know, dripping out one, one or two a month, complete, done for you campaigns for people.
Wow.
Just to make it easier, you know, for me, I'm kind of person who likes to build from scratch because I'm always thinking of, okay, if this person does this, then, then what's going to happen? You know, I think through these scenarios, but for most people who.
Are the expert themselves or the author or whatever, they just want to get it up and running. And so we realized that and so we're really heavily invested in that right now. So those are the kind of things that then allow the marketing department say, okay, how do we leverage that? Right. Each campaign in and of itself can be a mini launch where we're talking about why you would use this and how to do it. And then, oh, by the way, building, it's easy. Just press a button with Katra. Right. And so that's kind of how we've gone about it. And we have done very well with that. And hopefully I always think to myself, I hope that we can start getting ahead by six months and stuff like that. But no, we're very ear to the ground and that allows us to move and test and do stuff at a lot quicker speed.
I'm curious about some of the growth hacking stuff that you brought to Kartra, because I know when you came into Kartra.
You sort of really helped turn a lot of the sales around. Not that they were struggling or anything, but you came in and there was definitely a boost in sales from some of the efforts that you put in. What are some of the like, you know, growth hacking type topics are some of my favorite topics to talk about. So I'm wondering if we can kind of go there and talk about like one or two specific things that you did that had some real major implications on the business.
Yeah. So from like the 20,000 view, basically there's two sides of the coin, right? How do we convert more people and then how do we keep more people? That's really the first thing I look for. And so from the website layouts and different things and testing different components there to the checkout pages, to pricing, these are all things I looked at. And one of the big things that we didn't have for a long time was annual billing. You know, we just had monthly, and there was multiple reasons for that. But I was actually having a conversation with Justin Brooks and we were talking about acquisition costs. And I was explaining, you know, like, we don't necessarily have an acquisition cost issue. It just, it takes a long time for us to get our money back. And that's a scary place to be. That's a lot of money up front. You can only invest so much of it, right. Like, you can only for cash flow reasons. And, you know, he mentioned, hey, you know, you guys don't have an annual, right? And I was like, no. He's like, you know, if you had one, like, it offsets a lot of that because there's a large majority of people who would. Would take that. And so it was already on kind of my, my mind and, you know, I'd already kind of mapped out what I wanted it to look like. And so I just pushed forward with that and had the development team build that in. And we rolled that out and instantly 40% of customers signing up were taking annual.
Wow.
You know, you go from collecting a monthly fee of, you know, 99 bucks to an annual fee of, you know, 8, 900 bucks, and all of a Sudden, that changes the cash flow game, right?
Yeah. I mean, is that from a trial or were the existing subscribers changing from monthly to annual?
So that was. That's trials, that's on front end signups.
Okay, got it.
Now, obviously the stick rate is a little different, right. Because people who are going to get billed monthly versus annual and things like that. So these are all new problems that you create by adding that in. But we did upgrade plans and stuff like that for our current members and saw a large uptake there. So again, just like bringing cash flow in to be able to then reinvest that back in to the marketing. So those are the little things I look for. And then just the typical stuff that you're going to be split, testing and changing. And it's amazing what small changes can do from layout and templates and things like that. So we're always testing that stuff. Sometimes they have great ideas and they don't work. Right. And sometimes they do. But. But one of the examples of something else that's worked really, really well is on the checkout page, we use a lightbox checkout. So when they click Start now it pops and they do all their order on page. It doesn't take them to an actual checkout page where they enter their credit card information. It's just kind of a pop box. Well, they could exit that page. And so we had a. Before they get to that page, they begin their account creation by entering their name and email. Then they land on the select a plan page and then they fill out the form and they become a customer or they will. They were just leaving. Right. So I thought, man, what if we add an exit pop in here for like double your trial, right? And so we add exit pop, we test it and all of a sudden, you know.
Cart creation to cart to checkout. 50% increase.
Wow.
Because now people, as they go to leave, they're like, there's a killer deal that they can take advantage of. And so then, you know, so then we get to roll that out across all product, right?
Yeah.
And so those are the little things. And then of course, on the customer stick sequence, you know, you got basically 100 days, you've got the trial and then you've got the refund policy and then you've got them giving themselves an extra month or so to be able to figure it out. So it's about 100 days and.
To get someone to go from, I guess, potential client to client customer. And so, okay, how do we map that journey over those hundred days? What can we do and what can we add in? And what we realized was we offered a concierge service, but it came at a price in our community, a lot of people were offering those services. And so we made an internal decision to shut our concierge program down and actually allow our customers to be the concierge, so to speak. And then what we did with our concierge team was made them an onboarding team that essentially contacts every customer that signs up and then makes sure they have what they need to succeed. So we want to know why they signed up, what's their purpose, what's their goal, what they're trying to do. And then we want to make sure we get them the resources for that without them having to go look and search for it so they can get into motion quickly. Because we know, like, with any platform, usage is the number one reason someone sticks around. Once you start using it, they're not really going to go anywhere. So we want to make that as seamless and effortless as possible. And we did that by adding that onboarding team. The difference between someone who speaks to an onboarding client and someone who doesn't, we saw a 10% lift in stick. So it's little things like that that I'm constantly looking to be able to do. And that's really, like, for me, that's what growth hacking really is, is you look at what's going on, you look at the problems, you look at the numbers, right? And that's your base, that's your starting point, and you go, how do we go up from here? So, you know, if you, if you have a 50% stick, that's great, but how do we get 55? You know, what's it going to take? What do we currently do? What do we not do? And there's things that I would love to do that we just don't have the resources for or the team to do. But they're in the back of my mind, you know, like, you're being able to build someone's first campaign from start to finish for them. Now, that comes at a great cost, but if we know they're going to stick around for a year or two, it's worth the investment, right? But again, it just comes with time and doing stuff. So that's what I'm always looking for. And I think that's what people, especially if you listen to this, you know, you're looking at your business. You know, I was saying to my team the other day, we were talking about content marketing and expanding some of the efforts we're doing now. And I'm a direct marketer, so everything has to have a call to action. Everything has to have a reason. Right. For something. But I was saying, you know, guys, I know companies that literally have one webinar that make eight figures.
Sure.
And the reason they do that is because all they're doing is constantly tweaking what they have, making it better, better, better. And I think that that's, you know, one of the things marketers, especially business owners in general, do is we get distracted by new and different and versus just focusing on that, that one thing and continually making it better. You know, and whether that, you know, for the pod for podcast, for example, it's listeners, right. You want to get more listeners and downloads. And then, you know, maybe the next step is getting them to join your email list.
Yes.
Well, what's the offer for that? And that's what you're, you know, testing is. Is a report. Good is a free course, good is, you know, like, you know, what, what goes from there? And that's really all that business is. It's just this, this game of, okay, where's the point of contact? Where's the conversion? You know, all of that and then going, okay, how do we tweak that? How do we make that better? How do we make that experience better?
Yeah, really, it goes down to what you just said is convert and keep. It's like, those are really the two big levers of a business, and you're just trying to figure out, okay, how do we convert them into the next step and keep them? Like our podcast, it's like, yes, we want more listeners, but at the same time, we want to retain as much of these listeners as possible because we know over time they're going to convert. Then it goes back to the convert into an email list subscriber.
I'd say attract, convert and keep, because you got to get them to you in the first place, which is a big piece of the marketing that we're doing.
True. But the thing with attraction, and I think, I just want to say this because I think that traffic is such a big conversation all the time, but most people should just realize a business is in the business of buying customers. And I was actually talking about this to my barber yesterday with him filling his seats, right. Like, you know, you work a lot on referral marketing, but if there's a lot of time you have an empty seat, how are you going to get someone in there? Right? And that's where, you know, paid advertising comes in. Play and there's no quicker way to build a business than to basically buy your customers. But so many people are scared to do that, right? And it's funny because everybody I know who does it ends up, you know, making a lot of money because it doesn't take much to see the ROI on that. And even if it's expensive and you're losing on the front end, if the back end is strong, you can always make that up. I think that's something people with customer acquisition, they need to understand. There's lots of ways to get an audience, and.
You have to tap into someone who already has the audience, joint ventures or influencers, so to speak, and figure out how do you get them to put you in front of their audience. Or you have to build your own. And it's a lot easier to build your own. And nowadays it's a lot cheaper. You know, you can go cheap. So I think that's a big thing that most people don't look. And it's funny because I think the Internet kind of created a lot of lazy business owners in the sense of when it comes to investing. Because, you know, if you wanted to open a business in the past, you probably needed a lot of money because you needed to pay rent to buy all the equipment for the store, you know, and that. And. And you had a physical location. Nowadays you can buy a domain name for 10 bucks and be up and running. So a lot of people don't understand that it's going to take some investment. And they're scared to go get a loan or to borrow money and those kind of things to get the business going. And if they do, they end up spending it in the wrong places. Right? They buy courses or they pay mentors. And if they just invested in advertising first, then they would do a good job. So, you know, it's interesting because I think that's something that a lot of people don't think about. They're always kind of, how do I get this person to promote me? You know, it's a lot easier when you can promote them first. Having an audience.
It's crazy because I used to work for a brick and mortar company. Was our family business. My parents owned it, but I, you know, I helped them run it. And our monthly overhead in that company was about, I think, $65,000. Like, we weren't breaking even unless we did $65,000 in sales every month. Now our business is on online. It's like if we make. If we make more than $2,000 in a month, we're profitable.
We did the math. Yeah. This goes back to working out of our houses, of course. So we're not factoring a rent for our house space, you know, our office space. But still. Yeah, that. When you said the 65,000. Because Matt told me this, like, the other week, I was like, holy crap. We kind of got it easy. But like you said, AJ it lends to potential lazy business owners and misusage of funds and time.
It's funny, because I think what you're seeing on the offline world, you see so many businesses going out of business because the Internet's come along. No, no, no. You're going out of business because you've been replaced. Easy. People find what they want online easier than have to go search for it. If you had an email list. And I just wrote about this. But we. My wife and I, we were at the San Diego Sand Castle Challenge. That was downtown. And, you know, I wrote about how allergic people seem to be to money, you know, from the. From when we went to pay for parking. And I paid with my card. But the guy said, oh, that reminds me, I got to put the sign up to tell people not to. We only take cash. The parking lot was half empty. You know, like, you have a machine. Why do you only want to take cash? You know, because, you know, they was going to get busy or whatever. And I thought, well, maybe they want to save the money on the transaction fee, but just bump up the card price, you know, charge a 5% royalty or something. Well, then when we go to get in, you know, there's a big line. Six. Six tills are open. There's six registers there to take money. Two are open. You know, there's a huge line. Well, you might say, okay, well, they're trying to build a line to create, you know, buzz. Well, no, we're downtown on the dock. There's a line for, you know, fishing tours. There's lines everywhere.
Yeah, it's very, very hot, you know, so, like, you know, get people in and get them, you know, buying the stuff inside. And then we walk in, and there's all these vendors. Of course, they dump you right into the thing. And my wife, being a shopper, she wanted to go look around, but she's not an impulse buyer, so she often sees stuff and she wants to go buy it later online or something. And nobody. Nobody had a website, you know, nobody had a place you could buy. Well, that's not a problem. But nobody asked for her email address. They all gave her their contact information, you know, and it's just practices like that and then they don't know any better. It's, you know, I'm not ragging on them as, you know, business owners, but this one guy who's in his 60s, he said he goes around from festival, festival. And I'm thinking to myself, I don't know how long you've been doing this, but you probably wouldn't have to do that anymore if you just had an online site. You've put in all the hard work, you've gone to all these festivals, you've had all these customers buy from you, but instead of being able to resell them, essentially sell them more of what they want, you know, you're having to go back and hope that that person even shows back up or you have a new buyer. And as we move into more of a subscription economy, you know, I don't know if you saw Porsche just released their subscription model, right?
No, Mercedes was doing that, but I didn't know Porsche did.
Yeah, Porsche has done it. They just released it here in San Diego. It's two to three thousand dollars. There's two different packages, but you get to drive different car. There's a fleet you can choose from. You can just trade it in if you want, every three days, every week, every two weeks and keep it for a month, whatever. I don't think there's any restrictions on it. But as we move to this subscription economy, what people are realizing, and these companies are realizing is it's a lot easier to keep selling to the same person month after month.
Go figure. You build the trust and you do all that work to attract them and then. Yeah, your real job then is keep them, keep them happy. Personal touch. Figure out their wants and needs and guess what? Give them more what they want and need.
Exactly. And so that's a piece of the growth. Hacking as well is number one. What keeps them around.
Right?
And we're lucky with software, like I said, if someone's using it and they built stuff out, there's a big pain of disconnect, right. As long as it works and does what it wants. And we see people moving over from other companies, number one. Mainly because our product does more than just these other companies, right? We replace a lot of products and people like the simplicity, they like the true all in one where everything is in one place and it's not pieced together. These have been built at the core. So people like that. But that in and of itself is not enough. So you have to constantly be showing them by reinvesting back into the platform, making it better for them, making it easier for them, those kind of things. But then the question is, what else can we offer our clients and customers to improve their business and their life? And that kind of leads into another game that we haven't really expanded on because we're focused right now on the product and making the product as good as we can. But most businesses never think like that. You know, they're very transactional one time, they don't think about that. And that's really what I see people struggling is when you're having to make sales from scratch every single month. Reoccurring revenue is one of my favorite topics. It's the easiest way to build a business up quickly is keep selling to the same people versus trying to get new people all the time.
Well, yeah, and it's compounding too. So it's like month one, you might make $3,000 off all your customers, and then month two, you're making 3,000 plus any new customers that you brought in. And so there's like this compounding effect on it that is really appealing as well. Yeah.
And anything can really be made into. I know you guys are huge fans of the evergreen kind of membership subscription stuff, but really anything can be made into. You think about a book, and let's say A book has 12 chapters in it. What is each chapter? Could be a video training that's released once a month with accompanying worksheets and things for implementation and those kind of things. It's not like you have to go absolutely insane with content creation or product creation in order to be able to create something. And the reality is people like things in bite sized chunks. I don't know how many people buy books and courses and never go through them because it's just overwhelming. They get 72 videos to go through and then ever going to watch all those videos.
Well, what you just said too just. It actually kind of proves the business model that Joe and I are in right now. Because the way our business model currently works is we record this podcast, the podcast is available for free for anybody to listen to, and then we take notes on every single episode. And that is our continuity subscription business is essentially us repurposing, purposing the info that we sort of flesh out on this podcast into a different medium that makes it easier for people to consume. And so this one piece of content that we're making right now is actually going to generate revenue from our subscription model in the future.
Exactly. And that's the thing with it is you Understand that there's words of wisdom and nuggets of gold within these podcasts that people may miss or they may hear, but they don't know the how. Right? They hear the what, but there's no how. Well, a lot of people are willing to then go to the next step and you start moving into essentially it's a done for you service. Right. You're going to digest the important information, you're going to put it in an executionable format. And that's really what I think most people should do with their businesses is look at that and someone who's an E commerce person says, oh, I sell batteries or okay, great, but most people don't just buy one, they buy multiples. And that's a proven the best upsell for a supplement is more of the supplements. Right. But like if you're buying a supplement, there's other supplements you're going to buy. Right. You could be a part of a discount club that, you know, I now am in the club that gets me a 20% off every single month. And that's what Amazon did with their Prime. Right. So there's really no business that can't add a subscription portion in, you know, reoccurring revenue. And that's, that's what I think we're going to see more and more is, you know, things shift away from, you know, there's always, people are going to want to pay up front and save some money. Right. But, but the reality is that there's no reason you can't have a significant portion of your business be monthly reoccurring revenue. And it's so much easier on the stress levels when you know you're going to have a certain number in the.
Bank every month, cash flow looks good and then it just increases from there with all the additions you can put on.
Yeah, exactly. I do want to get kind of granular for a minute here and jump back to something you said a few minutes ago about conversion optimization and split testing. I'm curious if there's been any split tests that you've done for Kartra that you were kind of, you know, that you were very shocked by the results from.
Yeah, the losers. Any of the losers. I'm always shocked because I don't want to test something that I think is going to make anything worse. But one of the, actually the biggest one we just did, and I wasn't going to share this, but you guys are some of my good friends and.
I want to thank you, sir.
Your audience kind of disowned I tested a dollar trial versus a free trial. All of the SAS gurus say that you should never do a dollar trial. If you're going to take a credit card anyway, then just make it zero. Right. Why take a dollar if they got to enter their credit card? Well, turns out that the $1 converted better than the $0 trial. Now the reason for that, when I thought about it is obvious. If I think it's free and then it pops a credit card, enter the credit card, I kind of feel like a bait and switch, right? I'm kind of going to get, I'm going to get pissed off a little bit because it's like, wait a minute, why am I entering my credit card here? Yeah. Whereas if it says a dollar, I naturally continue on because I knew I was going to have to enter my credit card. You know. So essentially if it's not free, free like meaning, you know, enter your email address and now you got an account, you know, free doesn't be paid. You know, that's true. You know, and the idea when I, when I did this, he read what everybody was saying is using the word free and zero is going to trigger more conversions, more people. And so having tested it and seen the actual conversion through not only to sale trial conversion sign up, but to actual first billing stick the $1 and it saves a huge headache for us because there's some huge benefits with charging a dollar because you actually run the card and now you have the card on file and if there's fraud or if there's misuse or mistreatment or stuff like that, you can actually block the card and that kind of stuff. Plus for account creation when we go to rebill, it's already been things so there's less declines and stuff like that. So there's some huge benefits with that. But that was just absolutely shocked me, right?
Well, yeah, psychologically just thinking about it, it does make sense. I think I'm probably more likely to get go sign up for a dollar trial because a dollar trial I'm actually, I'm purchasing access to use this tool, a free trial. You know, it's almost like an opt in, but I have to opt in with my credit card.
You know, it's less investment, like, like energy. You're not going to take it as seriously unless you're actually putting one of your dollars, your hard earned dollars into this thing.
No, I mean it does make sense psychologically, but it's cool. Cool that you ran that test and now you have conclusive evidence and saying that about split testing just for the listeners out there. Just because it worked for Kartra doesn't mean that you're going to have the same result in your business always.
And that's what's funny is I'm constantly a student, so I'm always learning and investing and I want to see everybody split test and then test these things. One of the tests we have right now on Webinar Jam that I'm testing is.
Security images and.
Credit card images around the add to cart button. In the past, when I've done different stuff in the past that's always bumped conversions.
Security, sales and different stuff like that.
All the trust stuff.
Yeah, I'm running the test right now. We're nowhere near being able to make a conclusion because you never know over time how it will shift. But right now it's almost neck and neck and without is converting just a little bit higher. And again.
It'S going to probably end up meaning it doesn't really matter. But I've run tests in the past where that made a huge difference. So again, everything's product specific, everything is audience specific and you kind of have to test this stuff. But those are the kind of tests that shock me because you think, wow, wait a minute there. Also, one of the tests we ran was.
Vertical versus horizontal pricing tables. And the horizontal won out over the vertical, which is typically, everybody says vertical will win. So these are the things that we're constantly testing. And I'll go back and test stuff as well later on and see perhaps something was awful, that kind of stuff. But that's the stuff that I get excited about. And then when something bumps, I'm like, oh man, I really thought this is going to be better.
Ego takes a little hit.
Yeah. Especially if we'll do headline tests and I'll come up with a headline. I have one of the, have one of the copywriters come up with a headline and we'll do these tests and then none of us win. And it's like, oh man. So those are the kind of things that it's a lot of fun, but you learn a lot from it. You learn a lot. And that's one of the things that.
It is fun to do because you see the results, right. And 1% makes a huge difference over time in revenue. You know, when you do do something that gets you a 26% difference or the exit pop, the 50% trial sign up increase, like those are huge long term game changers. So that's what you're trying to do. And I Have a friend who. He charges $3,000 every percentage that he can increase a conversion.
On that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of money for people to be made on the consulting side as well, helping companies do this.
I've never heard of that model, that pricing model. That's pretty cool, though. Yeah. Because if the client you're working with, just like you guys, like, okay, you tweak the top of the funnel, the bottleneck, then everything compounds. The further they go, the longer you keep them as a paying subscriber.
Based on the scale of a company, a 1% increase could be millions of dollars.
Totally.
Exactly. And that's, you know, that's when you get into client selection and things like that to make sure. Sure that it all works out. But that's the thing that most people don't look at when they look at their own business, and that's why they end up going outside, because that's what people know. But ultimately, for me, I think sales, marketing, and customer experience are the lifeblood, because really, that's what's attached to revenue. And the cool thing is that the more revenue we make, the more we get to invest back into the business, which then allows you. It's compounding in terms of. Of what it allows you to do and the growth and things like that and people you can hire and the investments you can make and the risks you can take. And so I think for a lot of people, like when you're getting started or you have something going so you kind of have to tune into, you know, is how do we accelerate revenue? You know, and that. Because that allows you to accelerate everything. And I think that that's something that most people aren't thinking about. You know, they'll be thinking about all of these things that don't really matter. And one of my favorite books, 0 to 100 million, that book, Ready, Fire, Aim, it talks about this, too, about these different things that people do that just distract them from actually what's important in the beginning. Right.
Yeah.
No, that's a good one. That's one.
It's been recommended a lot on Michael Masterson. Yeah, I mean, the whole first. First portion of the book is focus on sales. Get the sales, get the sales, get the sales. Nothing else matters. Speaking of that, actually, you mentioned a few minutes ago, like.
When it comes to, like, acquisition and attracting clients, the best way to do it is to essentially just go buy the customers. So I'm curious what. Because, you know, in theory, yes, that makes a lot of sense. And you Know, we're big proponents of just going and paying to acquire customers. But it's, you know, there's an easier said than done kind of element to it too, where a lot of people struggle to even purchase customers. So I'm curious what sort of, what some of your acquisition strategies have been to get new customers into Kartra.
So the done for you campaigns that I mentioned earlier have been a big hit. We do what we call feature launches, which is, you know, we look at, look at what the campaign is. For example, you know, we did a masterclass done for you campaign, which video on demand. And you know, our goal is then to educate the audience on the front end, like why you would use it, how you would do it, here's the structure you're going to use and then, you know, once you have the masterclass, you know, you need that, you need the marketing campaign and here's, here's what you're going to need. And oh, by the way, it's done, it's done for you. And those work very, very well. For us, those have worked really, really well. Some of the stuff that our affiliates do that works really, really well, you know, is basically showing people certain business models and you know, they'll talk about, you know, Kartra. So someone who's teaching affiliate marketing will show how to find products on Kartra to be able to, you know, sell because we have our affiliate marketplace. And so they might be teaching people who don't have products how to use Kartra to be an affiliate marketer. You know, other people, like we have agents that are using Kartra. So we recently added Kartra Agency, which is an add on piece to it that allows you to manage all your clients in one place and gives you a dashboard and different things like that. And so we're able to go after those types of people. So a lot of that is like with the different features and stuff, it's always looking at what the benefit of it is and then around that creating a campaign that essentially explains what it is, how they would use it and then that leads to sales.
Right, Gotcha. So is one of the largest percentages of the acquisition strategy, affiliate marketing versus like you know, running Facebook ads or Google Ads.
So we have a, we have some really good affiliates. You know, that's how we launched and that's how we've done so well. You know, so those guys are kind of self managed, right? The professional affiliates. And these guys, they love Katra because our numbers seem to beat Everybody else. And EPCs and stuff like that. But it's interesting because I can go in and see like the top affiliates and EPCs versus like the rest, and they outperform. You know, it's not a standard EPC across the board because it all depends on the affiliates traffic and how they're making sales and stuff like that. So that's a huge portion, you know, percentage. But from our stand, we're really focused on, you know, with paid advertising, we're really focused. We bring them in and then we're. Retargeting has been a huge piece of our puzzle. And, you know, essentially, like anything, retargeting allows you to have 100% connection with the audience.
Sure.
So our goal is obviously to put them on, on the email list and build the communication that way. But, you know, email, you're only getting a fraction of the people who click through, who sign up, who do this, who do that. So retargeting became a huge piece of our puzzle. And then, you know, of course, brand advertising as well. And when I say brand advertising, brand bidding on Google, you know, that's huge, you know, the amount of people. And I think it's because, you know, every email that goes out is powered by Kartra. Every checkout page has Kartra on it, powered by Kartra. Now, these aren't clickable links. They don't distract people can't click it and get taken away from anybody's order form or anybody's email and things like that. And that's pretty standard, you see. Pretty. Every big company does this. Infusionsoft and Salesforce and stuff like that. It's not new, it's not something we created. But I think customers, especially people who are selling business to business, for example, their customers could also be Kartra customers. And not everyone's interested in being an affiliate or promoting us. But, you know, you get enough emails from different people with the same powered by, you're going to go check out the product. Well, then you go to Google, you search it, and of course we come up. But, you know, you got people bidding on that, other companies are bidding on that, so you've got to be playing that game, too. And so, you know, the reason I noticed that was we were looking at our traffic and we had this huge amount of organic traffic. Now, you know, we don't do much SEO that I could tell. I said, where's all this organic traffic coming from? There's just no way we're getting this much organic. And then it turned out it was Direct, you know. Oh, okay. If we're getting this much from people searching for us, imagine if we were actually bidding on our own name. Right.
That's like one of Mike Rhodes, I think was on here. I think he said it on here is like, that is like the number one thing everyone should be doing on Google is like bid on your own brand.
At the very least, own your own brand on Google.
Google all over the place. Yeah.
Very cool. Yeah, that's awesome, man. And yeah, I mean, we use Kartra in one of our businesses. Yeah.
In our homebrew academy. Running on Kartra. Yeah, you know, like full transparency. Just being honest. One of the reasons I think it probably took us so long to have this chat with you and talk about Kartra is because, you know, we're also big affiliates of ThriveCart. We've always thought, well, maybe there's a conflict of interest talking about Karcher on the podcast when we're also, you know, we also promote ThriveCart and is that going to confuse our audience? But we got over that pretty quick. But.
Well, I like to think what we're teaching is just mostly concepts and theories and really can be applied anywhere, you know. And like, you know, I think our product kind of speaks for itself for people who use it and they'll either like it or they won't, you know, and so I don't ever try to hard sell anything because it's the right fit for the right people, you know, but overall, you know, with anything.
The fundamentals are the same. You know, I mentioned to you guys, I think before we started recording, you know, I'm kind of the millionaire next door guy. So, you know, I'm always thinking about long term strategy. I'm always thinking about, you know, execution plans versus hacks and cheats and stuff like that. And that kind of is reflected in our audience and, and that's one reason I enjoy working with the company and working with our clients is because a lot of our clients have those kind of morals and mentality. Right. They're not jumping around from product to product. They're not doing those kind of things. And so everybody is attracted to different businesses for different reasons. And I think that you end up going with what works and what works good. And if that happens to be what could be considered competitor, doesn't bother me at all. We have clients who avid learners from some of our competitors and they use our product and then vice versa. We have people who are huge friends of mine that have been friends for a long time that use competitive products and it doesn't bother me at all. I try to get them and I.
Think we kind of fall into almost like a third category of we're constant students and constant testers. And like Joe mentioned, we own multiple businesses. We're like, we're true entrepreneurs at heart, where we've got five businesses we've got our fingers, fingers in at any given time. And in some of the businesses we're using ThriveCart and some of them were using Kartra. And you know, we're constantly experimenting with all these different tools because you know, at the end of the day we want good relationships with, you know, as many people as possible. But what's really important is providing a good customer experience for our customers and, you know, doing what's right by the business. But you know, saying all that, I think kind of getting into like the wrap up phase of this episode, I was wondering if you can kind of give us what you see is the sort of top benefits of using Kartra. What are some of the features and the kind of tool sets that are included with Kartra that you get the most excited to go tell people about that ultimately convert them into Kartra users?
Yeah, I kind of joke because people ask.
What is the difference? And they'll say clickfunnels are infusionsoft or lead pages and ontraport different companies like that. The thing that I always try to tell them is you're comparing Kartra like three things Kartra does. Right? Kartra is more of like if you combined ClickFunnels, ActiveCampaign, Vimeo Pro, Zendesk, ClickBank, Kajabi.
When we say all in one, we have checkouts, leads, pages, you know, mail, you know, campaign page builder, site builder. Now we have blog templates and we have membership area video, you know, Wistia style video set up. We've got built in help desk, we've got the calendar, you know, we've got the affiliate platform. Now we have the agency section too. So you know, it really is this all in one platform. And the big difference is like when this was first being developed, you know, what we saw in the industry was people splintering, like breaking their product down into different components or they had a core product and they were starting to piece stuff on the outside to it and things just didn't work properly. So we built this from the core as a true all in one platform that's truly integrated. So they're not pieces that are kind of stuck together. Everything communicates. And we thought, okay, what are the hundred ways that you would communicate? You've got if then that you've got tags, you've got lists, you've got on page action. So we have what we call behavior adaptive marketing, which allows you, based on page behavior, to show hide sections, to pop different things to trigger different campaigns in the background. So we have a lot of different stuff like that. So it's tough because a lot of people will get it and they might only want the page builder and the email thing and they don't see, oh, this is way too much for me. Right. But I try to think of a Kartra grows with you, grows with your business. You're going to need all these things at some point and it's there and it works. And so that to me is why I get so excited because it does it and it does it so well. And our email is one of the things I'm most proud of because we have better deliverability rates than most platforms now. We do have a very strict process, but it's manual and it's handled in a way that we know we're going to get in the inbox. And we're very cautious with that. And that's kind of like how we want to grow the business. We want to make sure that, you know, with affiliates is a very aggressive affiliate process because we don't want people out there spamming for us. Right. And we do all of that because we think long term and we think growth. And on the backside we're always looking at how do we improve. And we, you know, in some instances, you know, they say it's dangerous to lead with product. Right. And it's all about the marketing and being a marketer at heart. You know, I totally get it. But what I realized and what the team realized, especially Hector the cto, was if you have a solid product that actually does what it's supposed to do, believe it or not, that's a unique selling position in our marketplace.
That's right.
So that's what we've tried to do and that's what we've tried to build. And like I say, I can't stay here and say we're perfect and we don't make mistakes and we haven't done things that we wish turned out differently with different launches and stuff like that that we've tried and things we rolled out that we went back to and had to edit. And one of the examples of that is calendars. We added our calendar feature. If we just, it was on the list. You know, integrate with Gmail and Google Calendars. You know, we got to like number 50 on the list to roll out for phase one. And I think that was like number 53 of things to do in calendars for, you know, it was going to be in phase two. Well, you know, cause an uproar in the community. What's the point in a calendar if it doesn't connect to your Gmail? You know.
We quickly course corrected that, you know, made the update quicker than it was planned. So those are the kind of things that like, you know, we're all out proud sometimes and we'll see. Oh, community, community. We missed something here. But those are easy fixes. But that's the kind of thing we don't predict. We continue to just keep adding stuff. We don't want it to get insanely bloated. What we do want to do is make sure that every piece of it is as good or better than anything individual out there on the marketplace. Because what we find is most people are saving six to $800 an average a month on these different platforms that they no longer have to use. And that's what's important to us, is that they're not only saving, but they're growing with us. And we want them to grow their list and their audience and their products and those things. Because what we've seen across the board is the bigger someone's database is, the more money they tend to make.
Yeah, I could see that with the all in one. I mean, that's the thing is us using it in the homebrew business for one. I love how the emails work and how you can see how people just totally behave with the emails, all these stats, and you can really dig into crazy shit. Where are crazy details.
If somebody watches 75% of this video, then shoot them off this email and stuff like that, that's just crazy.
Yeah. And aj, you said a good point is I could see how someone can feel like, oh, I don't need all this stuff or that's way too much for me. But the idea is, I love the idea is you grow into it. And there's the other option of piecing together all of this stuff. And we're hearing from our customers all the time, we talk to them personally. And there's issues with tech integrations all the time. And like, oh, how do I do this? How does this talk to that thing? Or I need to use Zapier. Okay, well that's not going to be a cluster. So it's like if you're not a techie, then you might as well surround yourself with the best tools, the most updated tool tools that actually talk to each other even if you don't quite need them right then and there.
Yeah, I have a question about email because you mentioned deliverability and being sort of strict. Just out of my own personal curiosity, are there certain industries or types of businesses that aren't a good fit for Kartra due to email deliverability? Potential issues?
Yeah. Cannabis industry is a bad one because even though some states are legal, it's not federally legal. Right. And it causes, you know, depending on what you're mailing, who you're mailing to, of course, you know, spam traps or you know, basically, you know, people, people complaining more. Right. Based on area and stuff like that. And so despite, you know, there being people who are in the CBD space and the hemp product space and things like that, and then being. Being nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with it. It just, it just causes higher spam complaints and opt outs unsubscribed and stuff like that. And so we were watching those numbers and we just realized there's certain companies like that that unfortunately we just can't let beyond the platform. Same with huge.
A company like Groupon for example, that type of business model where you're just sending out tons of emails with offers because even though everybody signs up for it, they then to unsubscribe, they can't find the button, they go hit spam. So there's just certain things like that that typically don't work well on the platform. But we take everything kind of case by case. And like I say, everybody's list is kind of manually approved and we recommend that people clean their list before they come over and do any of that stuff. And then when someone first uploads a list, we kind of batch test in the beginning when they mail a broadcast, if it's the first time it's ever mailed, it'll only mail like a thousand accounts. See what the numbers are and then start. Because we don't want to affect the entire platform. That makes sense to be affected if you were.
Someone who was doing that kind of stuff. You can still use cartridge. You're just going to need to use your own integration for email.
You're going to want your own account with Sendgrid or something like that integrate into. So you're controlling your own numbers and those kinds of of things versus using a shared platform. That really the deliverability and all that stuff is based on the overall platform. And we're sending over a million emails a day. So having a high deliverability benefits someone who only has a small list or hasn't mailed much.
If that goes the other direction, it can hurt them. So that's why we're so protective of it. But in general, most people are trying to. Like I said, we try to attract, you know, I don't want to say legit business owners and make it sound like other people aren't. We kind of only attract those business owners that are. I like to think of, like serious business owners. Right. They're not. They're not in Get Rich Quick or Make Money Fast. These are real business owners selling real products and services and training and stuff like that.
Sure, yeah. Yeah.
Cool. Well, I know, I know we've got some time constraints here, so we better start wrapping up, you know. So Kartra.com is the main site. Oh, books. Are there any.
You mentioned one of them. Ready, Fire, Aim. So that was one I wrote down for sure. By Masterson.
Yeah. Are there any other books that you've read recently or that you refer back to often that have had a real big impact on you or your business?
I think Joey Coleman's book, I think it's the First Hundred Days is the actual book title.
That was a great one. When it comes to customer service stuff, you know, some of my favorite, like one of my favorite marketing books is like, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.
That's always a good one.
Gotta read that because I like marketing and I like the Grateful Dead.
That's perfect. Yeah.
Yeah. And then Brian Cutts has a new book over Deliver I thought was a phenomenal book as well.
So those are coming on the show. Yeah. And his book's great.
Yeah, those are some of recent ones. Off the top of my head. I'm an avid book fan, so I could go on all day, but I think those are some of my favorites.
Recently I've seen your bookshelf. It actually probably puts mine to shame. And mine's pretty Bookshelfy.
Bookshelfy.
Well, cool. So karcher.com that's the main site. Is there anywhere else you'd want to send them anything else? What do you want people to do after listening to this episode?
I mean, if they're interested in Cartra, then you can check it out. Totally fine. If they're interested in following me and. And keeping up with me, best place is probably Facebook, to be honest. Facebook.com ajroberts or if they're interested in revenue stuff, they can always opt in on my website. Ajroberts.com Sweet.
Rad, man. This is fun chatting again. It's just a whole new journey. And just like you having a baby, it's like everything's just totally different now since the last time we talked. So it's just really cool to have you back.
And when we do round three, we'll.
Have to do it in person with barbecues and beers. Yeah. Hopefully not an electrical storm outside, though.
Barbecues, beers, and babies. That works.
That's a good one. Yeah.
All right, brother. Good chatting, man. And have a good one.
Thanks, guys.
See you.
Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Before taking the time to listen, we want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address, and we'll see send you the notes. Thanks for listening.
Go get it.
We love you.
More from Joe
The Next Wave - AI Tool Better Than OpenClaw? + NVIDIA’S $1T Prediction & AI Image Wars
The Next Wave - Meta Replacing Creators? + Sam Altman’s Mistake & 3 Big AI Updates
The Next Wave - NotebookLM Just Killed After Effects? + ChatGPT vs Anthropic War
Are You Treating Podcast Guesting Like a Hobby Instead of Marketing? - Tom Schwab