 Here's something on Amazon before like most people okay when people think about how you buy from Amazon you really are just kind of your pain for them to deliver a lot of value to you and my wife has a lot of packages delivered so we have you know on any given day we may have like three or four Amazon packages and I go stir like what's all what's working in these packages you go I don't know any packages we get we don't even know what's getting delivered anymore which is a whole nother story Amazon is probably the biggest example of e-commerce online you know significant portion of all online e-commerce is done through here domestically in the U.S. I don't know about your businesses but my business is not really like this at least not yet I think I have to do more than Amazon because Amazon you order on Amazon you kind of know what you're getting two-day delivery everything secure you don't but when you're a small business with your own website people are asking a lot more questions of you and that's why I wanted to give this talk today because I think it's tough to compare ourselves with Amazon such a different e-commerce platform than ordering just you know on our own websites our products our services so what I want to talk about today is converting new website visitors into paying customers a little bit when you're not Amazon kind of more focused on small businesses here are so most people think about when they think about doing this converting new website visitors they think about my sales process I have to make sure the checkout process works I have to make sure people can go through the checkout process purchase my products or services and stay behind this TV and that's but people who come to your website aren't ready to buy yet obviously you should have your checkout process up so that people can check out if they want to that's the remains that most people who come to your website aren't even ready to buy from you yet and so if we look at this stat we only have four percent of people need more before they're going to buy anything from you and if you want visitors to just visit and we want them to give us the credit card information right that's like that's the goal of commerce or but rarely does that happen especially when you know we're not and so what I'm going to talk about today is how to get that to that 96% of people who may not be ready to buy a buy from you a month from now or may buy from you six months from now or may buy from you two years from now but they're not going to do that without you doing something as well and so that's what I want to talk about a lot today not necessities for getting value from this talk it's just what I'm assuming in my preparing for it have a website up and running services there if you don't have a website right now we're going to get value out of this but I'm not going to I guess like go through setting up a website or go through like how to set up products and services on a website so the focus is slightly more towards people who have a checkout process on their website people pay with the credit card or PayPal on the website this is need to get people on a call you want to get people but it is a little bit more slanted towards e-commerce so these are the main pieces I'm going to talk about today before I even really dive in I kind of want to preface my talk by saying I've so I started my own business and this process is what's worked pretty well for my business but I don't think this exact process is going to work for every single business I kind of think of this as a blueprint a skeleton that you can use and pick the pieces you think are going to work but just purely copying and pasting everything I say today and your own for me it's more sharing my story not giving you exact every business needs to and that's how you but we're going to go through a lot of helpful stuff regardless and also if people have questions while quick question WP buffs forward slash convert c o n b e r t oh I should go through these slides before I go to the next slide all right so we're going to go over today getting to know your website visitors is number one most might be about this I think a lot of people focus on SEO and driving traffic and trying to get sales but a lot of people skip that first step of just getting to know in gauge people you don't know who they are trust this is really necessary especially for like I mentioned before most people are times that's just a trust issue and it may not be because you're not trustworthy they require a little bit more time for you to gain the trust so we're going to talk about that to people to email list and then sending personalized email there was a presentation before all sorts of incredible statistics on why marketing is the most efficient way to do things I don't have any of those numbers here but it is in my opinion and especially for a small business there aren't a lot of highly effective ways to get new customers and build trust with them but if you can get them on your email list and if you can gain that inbox trust that's huge way for small business to be able to get in with people all right that's kind of the blueprint if I don't put water break slides I just burn right through because usually no one lasts about five seconds then once they seen it like two or three times like that's kind of all right best tools that I found to get to know your website visitors again these are the tools I use I'm not telling you you have to use these tools but I'm going to go through them because they've been what have worked for me there are multiple options for analytics and live chat and hot jars a tool where you can we'll go into that there are multiple tools for all just what I've used and I'm just going to go through them quickly again we're number one we're getting to know our website visitors Google analytics allows you to last a little greener than I want to be so I apologize for that but the you can turn demographics on and fix and after you do that once you traffic again this talk is not about getting the traffic it's more about birdie visit once we have that traffic you can actually turn on the fix and see what most of your like what kind of demographics are coming from this is for our website W. most website visitors are 25 to 34 years old pretty important information to know in terms of also in demographics you can see even more information about people so the most you know a significant amount of people who visit our website are interested in technology or techno files and that second one was very interesting me there are shutter bugs means you're interested in photography or videography and so that you know add a lot more photography or a website way to build trust people so very basic Google analytics demographics info not going to go a ton into it but it's a really easy place to get information on who's visiting a website the second is live chat I think that a lot of businesses have live chat on the website but it says stuff like sales agent or talk to me about sales and it's very clearly someone who's just trying to be a live chat you know they're like questions but only questions about what we do or like about buying something from internet a ton of traffic to interact with people who are on your website you can literally talk like that you just just get them who are you where are you chatting from and all arts nice because it give you some of that so as long as we're not using something like a VPN you can get some of that information before you can build this is one of those things I'm answered question one second this is one of those things that so on our website we now have kind of like more we push people more towards sales because we get a lot of really targeted super valuable for us yeah question yeah she was when I started out did I have to have people on staff on live chat all the time did I feel like I had to be on all the time as a team of one it can be difficult the answer is no you can be on and off whenever you want to it's your business do you want jar again there are multiple tools to be able to do like this but hot jars are really to be able to a whole bunch of other awesome stuff as well like heatmaps the point I want to talk about today is polls so I put this whenever anybody opts into our email redirected to a page a little answer it but once you have a pretty good amount of traffic you can get answering with this question up I don't know a year and a half ago or so I asked the question what are you currently working on your own website client website people were answering the second two right 55% rising client websites or both and my company manages WordPress websites for small businesses entrepreneurs now we also have a program where we work with agencies on their client sites and it's all because I asked this question and oh most people visiting our website or working on client sites why don't we help them work on client sites for one all day I gave another word camp talk on it which is literally all about getting to know your website visitors so what step two building trust these are kind of some I know I said to begin to talk I don't everybody should be doing in order to connect better with website visitors is really hard and I don't claim to be and so the copy on our websites fine to write like you speak I just use it I try to use it as a rule of thumb if you try to write whatever sales copy in a town to salesy I think just writing to not rocket science but you when people buy from if people are going to buy from you they want to see testimonials there is important as on area a lot of websites if you've kind of acted your in on a different side or guest blog posts or someone other website to your own website oh I trust you know this other site I'm gonna SSL certificate is a big one I hear from a lot of people like I don't have a check out on my website no one's that giving me credit card information do I need to have an SSL get on a website I don't think so and I like totally disagree with that I think this is a huge trust factor I'm like file like you mentioned before if I try to sell something and they don't have an SSL certificate I'm not even gonna think about because to me it's well they don't care that much of their website we talked about reviews a little bit but people especially if you're in this important to have good review as important as getting good reviews online having a system for that is also having some system for the what happens to the bad reviews too so like on Facebook we've gotten a few bad reviews and we reply to them and I think that's important for for people to see they see a bad review but then how does that how does the company handle it that's almost just as important but being authentic I think is important point here I think that you know people who you want to make very happy and and that comes from being authentic so if you're the kind of person who likes to influence your writing with or inflection writing with humor you're like a funny do that that you want to do if you are more of a serious writer that's okay too but there are certain cases where may not make sense but you will find your group of people regardless of what you want to do so right converting to email list there was a whole talk earlier today probably specifically it was really good I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more sorry here some of it again there are a few tools again not the tools you have to use but we use sumo there's another tool called a monster way to be able to collect email addresses on your website you want to pay for a tool that does so if you're like giving away a free ebook or a work or a course or anything you know to add values people because the whole point of building an email list is to build a list of people who at some point may be interested in buying from you and so if you alright a B testing pop-up an exit intent pop-up we threw up on the website this if you click yes it goes to our free ebooks page where you can download the ebooks so this does not directly convert to email but it pushes them to a page to collect email addresses at least it did we don't have this up anymore but you can see in the top five point three six percent conversion rate I did an AB test it's the same pop-up but the button is smaller I thought this is gonna convert worse it converts it's almost 8% smaller button my point here really is just that you have no idea what's gonna convert well right I thought the opposite would happen 80% of the time my assumption is wrong and so that may say more about me but I think it's important to test these and make sure it's data-driven I adjusted the plug or the the content or the copy here again and turn the sentence around added an image whoa it's almost 25% conversion right just phrase the question differently so AB testing is important you want to do it at least a little bit one caveat I'll have about AB testing is if you don't have a significant amount of traffic your AB testing doesn't really matter that much you probably want to focus more on getting more traffic and then AB testing when you have that traffic if I had to say cut off I'd say like 10,000 visitors a month if I like was forced to say a number but if you have less still find AB test if you have more obviously it's fine AB test that's just my kind of number it's in my head yes please good question how long do I run AB test do I run it for a certain amount of time or until I get a certain amount of data this is my super non-scientific answer which is I run it until I get enough data that I feel like I have come to a conclusion about the efficiency of it so if I have 10 on each I'm gonna keep running it if I have a thousand on each that could give me my answer depending on how much traffic you get it could take a day it could take a month so it's not time it's much more how much how many people have seen these pop-ups and what's the conversion rate look like yeah yeah and again that wasn't that but I think a lot of running your own business is just like having to feel for it so alright sending personalized email so I think when it comes to email copy I think people really think like I think personalizing email is can be the number one reason why someone can buy from you if they feel like you're really taking care of them then then they're going to feel trusted really interested in not just sending the same things you're writing or content to every single person that's gonna have a huge effect and it definitely has at WP buffs and I'll go into it a little bit here at the end you want to personalize email for each subscriber and this doesn't mean you literally have to sit and write personalized emails to every single person but you want to have an email service provider that allows about that here in a second jab jab jab right hook in my from what I've seen at what we've done at WP buffs it makes much more sense to deliver a ton of value to people before you do the ask and feel like man they provided so much value to me like I should probably consider buying what they have if it if it's something I'm interested in and this is kind of being in it for the long term as opposed to like for the staff people are not gonna be ready to buy from you and still at this point a lot of people are not gonna be ready to buy from you so really have to continue to provide value which is the last pull point here so provide great question yeah yes so very good point you said sometimes I get email that's like creepily like knows too much about me and I delete it I have two things there I think one is as someone who's running something like this I'm always looking at my numbers I have like a repeat task like go and check my stuff out and make sure I'm continuing to optimize things which everybody should be doing the second is don't not do this because you think some people will think that I think you're right but whatever you do as a business owner you're gonna have collateral damage you're gonna have a couple people like that who can delete your email and not want to talk to you it's like I said being authentic don't try to make everybody happy your job is to try and get a little better every day so don't like not implement this because you're scared something like that might happen it happened we get emails and people are trying to say hey your stuff sucks okay like what are you gonna do that's a little rant so yes yes so she says she has 500 customers I'm gonna send personalized emails to everyone so I'm about to go over how to send personal emails to a lot of people without actually having to type out all the email but very it's a very good question convert kit I know I said this bunch of times the tool I use not the tool everybody has to use but I would like demo can I get a time check oh sweet email service provider this sent email from me could have sent from the Gmail account we're going to do is you're going to find an email service provider and again I'm just kind of this is my account there's no like fake information in here this is how we okay so it joins our email list click on the welcome series we give it away all these free books when people sign up they can learn about website speed and security and you can even read case studies that we've created for customers who work so whenever anybody signs up for email address email this sends automatically okay so I have this set up to send immediately you can change that okay then the next Friday they're going to get it like at one week with some of our best content and the way I've chosen this content is I've gone on Google Analytics and seen what content gets the most traffic all right everyone about personalization so I've kind of talked a little bit about automation every Friday but they will stop giving these emails well let me talk about the click triggers okay so if someone this first link they want to check out how someone took control their three complex websites okay you can tag subscribe learn a little bit about this but this is literally how it works there's a potential customer and they're gonna be eggs if you look at this second they're tagged as a potential agency because they were interested in clicking through helping how we helped in one of our white label partners and so if none of this was clicked they continue to get these emails okay but if you come down here and great content or email us in the different buckets and if we come back out here to our sequences what we've done is once someone gets tagged is that they're removed from the new from the welcome see content every Monday so they still get a piece of content every week add to an agency or customer series or freelancer series and we come to our freelancer series again I'm still not selling that first I tell them about our podcast I'm sending them a new email every day you just click this now I'm telling you takes time takes a little bit and the next week we talk about our white label program a little bit and it kind of goes through this cycle now as well so I think this is a very the email list with a whole big flow sheet it was awesome it was also like somewhat complicated it did take time to set up I think that was a super effective way to do for me like I got to keep it simple or I'm gonna lose myself in it and so but this is a really easy and simple way to segment an email list and it's it's like super easy right all I all you did was it takes a while to write this copy right you have to down write the copy that's time-intensive not gonna lie but and a reminder that this didn't sing and forget what works but just setting up the simple automation this is and we upgraded from MailChimp I think MailChimp to ConvertKit and our click-through rate increased significantly 20 30 percent questions specifically I'm about to wrap up so we're almost done there great question yeah yeah no I didn't show Sumo the question was the comment was you talked about Sumo but you didn't show it all right this is Sumo this is a click trigger they have this is called a click trigger so you click on the top of comes up they also have exit intent they have a box that comes up on the bottom corner they have a like a bar that just sits around across the top has a bunch of different options the question is the plug-in I kind of talked about this a little bit but in terms of final thoughts I know this is kind of a broad overview of moving from from new website visitors to getting but I think that the converting people into actual paid customers part the credit card this is the hard part actually implement this build in methodology this image in the top right is a little small so I apologize for that but learn build measure all the stuff I showed you I didn't just come up one day and say I'm doing it this way and then I did it it took a lot of experimenting large screw-ups obviously none of us do but if you have someone who gets upset with you that's gonna happen I promise it will happen to you if you're trying to do this and that's part of what I know but the little screw-up will lead to learning and lead to improving things last you like what's a trick and there is no finish lines kind of the same thing think the trick is you really have to dedicate time to this I think that small business owners or consultants or developers or designers or marketers we're very focused on our client for building relationships gaining trust and then eventually adding a value that people want to move the sales process of their schedule a call or actually check out then we have to dedicate time to it so pause I don't get email unless it's 5 p.m. on Monday to Friday email doesn't even come in my inbox turn the phone on airplane mode to get the chrome extension that turns off the Facebook feed you need to move the things that take up your time and notifications that take you away from what you're doing dedicate one to three hours at a time to just doing this one thing I think that's what works for me that's another thing I'm not telling you how to do it but I'm telling you is really effective for me a lot of people find you just try it and really dedicate yourself to it it does work for sure if you want to check out the website we do a podcast to sites for clients at WPM or R we business of WP bus increase we have a free pod so let's go him first and then back okay we'll start in the front question was have I considered drip or a Weber yes I considered drip I chose convert kit I don't like my talks be too focused on the tool but I just didn't have a lot of functionality they can do this in terms of personalizing and segmenting the question was have you seen a decrease in engagement rate that happened over time yeah that happens to everybody I don't think anybody's the cycle I talked about the four steps you always have to keep going back to step one who are my users why am I I need to be talking with them I need to be gathering information from them what do they want because you made the content you put in these automated emails may not work three months later they may not work especially a year you always have to continue to revamp this to give people what's new what's fresh what they're engaging with what they're interested in and so I think going back to that and constantly experimenting like I second piece I think about is I'm like as a people in the next six probably a little farther than that but this is not something that's gonna be like written in stone and forever good I found one more question so I see you in the back there so the question is is the question like what's too many emails to send me sending so this is something I think is really different for everyone I get emails that I subscribe to that I get every day and I don't get tired of them because there are great emails I like getting that kind of every day like indie hackers some big part indie hackers they send me email every day a new podcast new forums stuff I can interact with I love getting those emails but if some people sent me daily emails I literally unsubscribe immediately because I don't want to get though I did today I got emails from like teachable and they were sending me emails like three emails a day I had done subscribe that being said I think it's different for everyone I think that it requires experimentation to look at the numbers and see when it's going up and when it's going down but more importantly I think it's important to find some this is kind of a fuzzy answer but have some sort of gut feeling that's like what do people want and I put a I put a poll up that said that I asked people how often you want to receive email and had like four options and I got like 25% for each which was like the worst answer I could have gotten right I have no help so that's not super helpful but I think that lean cycle it requires experimentation there's no perfect there's no perfect way to do it and no one has it perfect or very very very few people have it perfect so take solace in that and that you're probably not there anyway so you just want to try and get a little bit better than you were yesterday that's the best advice I can give cool thank you all very much for coming have a good rest your day enjoy the after-party I think there's one