 In case you didn't know, my name is Kerry Wolf. I run a web press development agency called WP Wolf Press, and I'm really excited to share some stuff with you tonight to this evening, this afternoon, that is kind of, it's pretty new and some of it is actually not even out yet, and it has to do with our ability to personalize our websites on a customer-by-customer basis. So, as is the norm, we'll talk, I guess, a little bit about me. That's the home team, me and my wife, my lovely wife. We don't have any children, but we do have a chief security officer named Sophie that she makes sure that all the, that everything's handled security-wise at the house. I'm a work from home. I've been building websites since 1995, and did that till about 2002, and then I founded Imagenesis Design Works, which was a, sure, founded Imagenesis Design Works, which was sort of an all-purpose design agency. We did websites. We did graphics. We did logos. We did everything. And in 2012, I discovered WordPress. Found that I could do so much more, and I decided to focus on that, and rebranded as WP Wolpress in 2017, and we do exclusively just WordPress-related material. And our current sort of motto, if you will, is, in everything we do, we believe everyone deserves to be listened to and treated like a real human person, thus providing a uniquely remarkable, personalized customer experience. Those last four words, you're going to hear a lot today. But we'll cover, we'll cover why we're here today, brief history of personalization, that is personalization, done right. Why should you care? How can you get started today? How do we do this? How can personalization impact your business? And then how can you sell this to your customers? This is how we got here today. A couple of months ago, I was at Wal-Mart, that's where we shop, and it's kind of, we're all, sounds with the chuckle I get that everybody has had this experience, and you're thinking, they just don't care. They treat us like cattle, and they can say, well, go shop somewhere else, but we're the cheapest, and so people do it, but it makes you feel like you just don't matter. And that's not a good feeling. We also have this experience, interminably put on hold. Go to the doctor's office, wait, you have an appointment at one o'clock, you don't get seen till four. I've often been tempted to send them a bill for my time, three hours of my time at what I bill at for that waste of time. So this is the way that we've come to be, used to be treated, and we're just treated like a nameless entity instead of a human person. We're treated like a prospect, an email address, a phone number, a demographic. But one size does not fit all, although they try. I'm a tall person, I can't go to coals and buy large shirts because the sleeves come to here. But we've been trained to believe this, and it's through this mass marketing that we've kind of evolved into. We have average products for average people, and the products we've designed to be average. Because if you want to market to mass markets, you have to find something the masses want, and that's average. But we don't want to feel average. We want to feel different, special, paid attention to it. But we've been trained to accept this for a hundred years. Henry Ford famously said, any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it's black. And if you don't fit into this box, we can't help you. So the thing is, if we're selling to everybody, we're selling to nobody. So it's time for change. Kathy Sierra said, years ago, when it comes to your features and even your benefits, one size does not fit all. Try to find ways to connect what you do have to what each individual finds personally meaningful. And then we're going to go to what I call the dawn of personalization. Does anybody know who Howard Moskowitz is? Howard Moskowitz, I'll let you read that. He was a research marketer, and he was hired by Campbell Suit Company because they had a problem. They had a pasta sauce that they made, it's called Prego, and they were trying to compete with Raghu, and they were getting killed by Raghu, and they said, we came to this guy, we've got to figure out how to make something better. So we need you to do some market research and find out what people want. So he sent, he did all kinds of surveys all over the country. He bussed in truckloads of people and put 10 bowls of pasta sauce out with different kinds of sauce, 40 something different kinds of sauces, you know, spicy, sweet, plain, chunky, salty, garlicky, all different kinds. And he discovered, when we looked at the data, usually they were expecting a nice bell curve, but that was a mess. The data was a mess, it was all over the place. But he did recognize that they fell into three clusters. They fell into their, those are those who like pasta sauce plain, there are those who like it chunky, and those that like it spicy. And that time, no one made chunky pizza sauce or pasta sauce. So they started making chunky pasta sauce, took over 30% of the market, made $600 million. So that was the beginning of the personalization of sort of segmenting the market. As it said in here, he's known for horizontal segmentation. But being Americans, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. This is what we have today. I every Christmas make a chocolate caramel cheesecake, and it requires an Oreo cookie crust. So I go to the Walmart, and I try to get Oreo cookies, plain Oreo cookies. You ever tried to find plain Oreo cookies? This is a shot just a week or two ago from my local Walmart of the Oreo cookie section. And I couldn't get it all in, I didn't have a wide-angle lens. But that part in the circle, those are the regular Oreo cookies. But they have 121 choices of Oreo cookies. They have 262 choices of ranch dressing. First I said, well, what company dressings? But it was over 1,000, so I didn't stop counting. 121 different variations of Coca-Cola. 137 variations of cured cups. Wow. Choice. It isn't all it's cracked up to be. Because there's the paradox of choice. Choice has made us not freer, but more paralyzed. Not happier, but more dissatisfied. It produces a paralysis, rather than a liberation. With so many options to choose from, we find it difficult to choose. You experience dissatisfaction. If you overcome the paralysis and make a choice, you end up less satisfied, because of the result of the choice that we would have made if we have had fewer options to choose from. And then this is the most important one. The escalation of expectations. When there are so many choices, one should be perfect. But when we get good or we get great, we're disappointed, because it's not perfect. And I've had that experience. I recently repainted my office. And you ever go to Lowe's or Home Depot to pick a paint chip? There's millions. And so you try to go to a bluish gray area. So now it's only 100. So then you go and you pick it. So we painted the room. And then when you look at it, I said, I don't like it. But I'm not going to repaint the room. So what is personalization done right? It's listening to your customers and having a relevant conversation. It's knowing and responding to the person, not to the email address. It's a change of mindset. A lead is a person, not an email address, with a problem. And you are there to solve it. It's about developing human relationships with your customers. Your customers feeling well understood. Feeling well understood. Your customers feeling you care about them. Personalization is the pathway to remarkable. I told you we'd come up on remarkable again. Remarkable is surprising and delighting a customer by exceeding their expectations and creating a positive emotional reaction that compels them to tell others about their experience. You ever had that happen where somebody gives you just such a great experience that you just got to go out and tell your friends? That's remarkable. And that's invaluable. Common parlance is word of mouth. But what's all this talk about feelings? Why does it matter? Anybody ever seen the talk by Simon Sinek? It's about finding your why, that kind of stuff. He talks about this. He talks about the limbic brain. The limbic brain is responsible for all our feelings, like loyalty and trust. It's responsible for all human behavior, all decision making, and it has no capacity for language. That's where our gut decisions come from. Never had a thing, but somebody comes to you and they say, well, it just doesn't feel right. You know, on paper it looks good, but it just doesn't feel right. Well, we're not talking to the right person inside. We're talking to the up here, we're not talking in there. So we got to make the person feel like they're being understood and they're being heard, they're being listened to. So how can we listen? Well, and now we're talking into dealing with the website. We pay attention to how they found your website. You do a Google search, what were they searching for? Facebook ad, link from other sites. Where did they land on your website? They landed on your website about web design, maybe they're interested in web design. What pages and posts did they view? Maybe they went back to multiple pages more than one time. Maybe that shows that they're interested in that. You can ask them questions. You can have those little pop-up toasters that say, what kind of business do you have? What stages are you at in your business? How can I best serve you? What are the biggest challenges you're having in your business today? You can ask, they don't have to answer, but you can ask. If you get 5%, 10% of people answering, you can make it some headway. Why should you care? 71% of customers get frustrated with impersonal shopping experiences. 67% of customers have unsubscribed from lists because emails were irrelevant. I get emails from people that I don't know who the hell they are. Or I buy stuff from my wife at Christmas, from some obscure jewelry company, and then for the next two years, I get emails from them. So I have to delete them. 44% of customers are likely to become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience. Very important. Personalization is good for the customer. Conversations are more relevant. What you have to say to them means something to them. They feel better understood. They feel like this company or this person, they get me. They create more meaningful relationships. And this is very valuable because there's always going to be somebody that's going to be trying to, I'm sure what the term you think uses, they're going to try to poach your customers. But if they have a relationship with you, even if the other people come in cheaper, they're going to say, no, I think I'm going to stay with so and so. And that's a decision being made by the limbic brain. It feels right because of their experience with you. And it creates a remarkable customer experience. It's good for you as the web developer because now you have more engaged customers. They listen to what you have to say. You have earned credibility. They're more likely to buy from you. You have continued nurturing. They buy again and again and again. Lifetime value of a customer goes up high. And they become your evangelist. They become your tribe. And tribes are very loyal, I promise you. This is not what personalization is. It's what it used to be. It's what they used to tout. We can put their first name right at the top of the email. That's pretty fancy. That's not what personalization is about. And it's not about this. It's not about spying in people or falling around the internet. It's not about being creepy. Just to make that clear. So how do you get started? Well, we start with personagraphs. When it comes to benefits, you offer one size doesn't fit all. So we like personagraphs because they help us put a story on top of the sales process. Now, a lot of times you've heard of personas. But if you take a persona and put a story with it, you have a persona graph, like a biography. And the story that we're talking about is the story that the customer tells themselves about themselves. And that's how they get the feeling that you understand them. And to start out, based on you can do the start of personagraphs, based on existing clients that you know, clients you think you might like to attract, build out a couple of personagraphs to start with. Just two, a man and a woman. If you've already developed personagraphs, great. This will help you get a great start. Here's a couple of starter personagraphs, completely made up, but sort of based on past experiences. And we kind of pick out some things that might be helpful to how to interact with them. And so particularly paying attention to needs and goals. Now, what we're going to be talking about tonight or this afternoon is going to require some tools. It's going to require an email service provider. And email service provider, I'm not really talking something like constant contact or other, they just send emails. These are more robust email automation type platforms. Well, some call themselves sort of a CRM. But the most popular ones and the ones that work best probably for this would be ConvertKit, Drip, Active Campaign. Those are the top ones that seem to work best with it. And I'm familiar with. And then the Secret Sauce is this new product called Right Message. It's been out about a year. Harry? Yes, ma'am. Are those email providers paid for the virus? Do you mean do they cost? Right. Yes. Yeah. And there's varying degrees of cost depending on what you need. You can begin by gathering anonymous data with Right Message. You can get the Google search and the pages customers landed on. So I searched on recipes for mozzarella pizza. And maybe you have a site that has recipes for mozzarella pizza. And it lands on your page. That information is recorded. We haven't assigned it to a person yet. But it's recorded. Facebook ad clicks, what was the ad promoting? Page customers, what pages customers navigate to multiple times? Like keep coming back to the pricing page. What's that about? Are they having some trouble figuring out the price? Blog posts they keep reading. Or a type of blog post. Maybe they're reading blog posts on content marketing. You can begin to see a theme in there. And then, of course, those mention of toast or pop-up surveys and questions and responses. But each one of these actions applies a tag or a custom field to their record that will be later applied to the email service provider. Now there's a difference between tags and custom fields. Tags are things people do. They tend to be binary. They're either a subscriber or they're not. A custom field is like you can have a custom field as status. What is their status? Well, that can change. They could be the beginning, and they could be a lead. And then after you move them through your funnel, they may become a warm lead. And then they may become a customer, or then they may ask for a refund and they're a former customer. But their status can change. So it's important when you're setting all this stuff up to take those into account that they should be treated differently. Then you continue gathering data. Once they sign up for your lead magnet, your blog post, or your newsletter email list. In other words, once you get their email address, all that other stuff that we've talked about that it was keeping track of is associated with their email address. And it's put into the email servicing provider. And it's done with cookies. Then you can engage with customers further through personalized, relevant emails, and gather more data through trigger links. These trigger links down here, when they click on those, they're answering a question, but it's also put in a tag in the service provider, saying what stage are they looking for or are they looking for a job. And we continue gathering data. As they further engage with your website and emails, you can develop a very specific personagraph and help further uncover problems and help you know how you can best help them. In other words, they are better understood. They feel better understood. They feel like you're the only one that understands them, and you're the only one that has the answer. Over time, you can develop a granular picture of what your customers' needs are, and build new products, and tweak existing products to their needs. Now, there's different kinds of personalizations of how you can change a website. And what we're talking about here is modifying a website. On the fly, based on the data we have on that particular customer, not a segment, that person. Like, you go to a home page, you might see a version, and you go to that same home page, and you might see a different version, because it's tailored specifically for you. So we can add new sections within pages. We can change, move, swap out existing page content. We can change pictures. We can move things from one side to the other. And as I mentioned before, we can adapt the home page to reflect the visitor's readiness and specific needs. Now, after all this data we've gathered, we can have a progressively learned persona graph. And this is what we're aiming for, that we have a persona graph of everyone on your list that shows who they are and what they need. And these are three imaginary, or not so imaginary, some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent. We have Roger, who's a professional speaker, Allison, a marketer, and Mike, who's a life coach. So let's say if you come to my home page, that's pretty much what it looks like above the fold. But if Mike goes to that home page, it's different. Notice how it's different. It specifically addresses life coaches, and it addresses what's his main goal, long term client base, a loyal client base. And then the very last part, it adds a sort of an aspirational place that they could be, that is, your customer's experience is so remarkable that they want you to lead them to success. Then we go on to Allison, specific now online marketers, help her close more deals. Wait, that was what her main goal was. How'd that happen? Is it magic? Arthur C. Clark once said, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is what we've got going on here. And then, of course, we can change their aspirational desire. And then, of course, there's Roger. He wants more speaking gigs, and he'd love it if people would be begging him to speak at their events. So these are things that we can do. But how do we do it? Now, what I'm going to show you here is kind of a combination of how we do that, what I just showed you, but what's coming down the pipe. I'm a beta tester for the software. And this is called a call to action widget. So this is on, this would be on a website development page. And there's just a little pop-up toaster that asks about what industry they're in. And you can barely see it here, but coaching is slightly darker because it's been clicked. So they click, they're in the coaching industry. And that's what role they are. They're the owner. So now, they get a free e-book talking about how to develop a remarkable website project. So they click on, get their e-book, they click on send me my stuff, and then they get their stuff. Now, this is what the landing page looked like before. With this widget I just showed you, all that data collected on the fly. When they went to that landing page, or that particular person, the owner of a consulting business, they will go ahead. That's what they'd see. But how do we get there? We'll go back some here. And what we're going to show you now is the inside of write message. We can go in. Is the one not working? Oh, y'all hear me now? That makes no sense. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. OK. Step in the little red part. There's this free guide. We are in the interface now to where we're editing. So we're going to edit that. And you'll see it up where we got here. So here it says consulting. We're editing the consulting segment. So we're going to change it to, say, free guide for consultants. And this will pop up on the right. That's what's doing it. Then we're going to edit for the owner segment. And we're going to edit this area down here. And this is how we do it, using this little dookie. And then we've changed it to that. So now there's what the page normally looks like. And if somebody fills out that form, and they are a owner of a consulting business, that's what they see. They see free guide for consultants. A remarkable website project is a collaboration between business owner and designer. These are just some simple examples of how it can be used. Now all that stuff being said, all this data is recorded in the email service provider. As we can see here, the industry, this is a custom field, it's consulting, role, owner. They've added a tag for the project. And then in this particular, we're talking about websites mostly here, but this also dumps them into an automation. And this is an active campaign automation. If they're already a customer, they just come down here and get the email and say thank you and here's your download. If they're not a customer, they go through this nurture sequence that goes over a period of about a week where they get emails that go over all the benefits and so on and so forth until they get a sort of a, hey, want to buy a type of email? So this is how that works. How can personalization impact your business? Well, case daddy, some of you may be familiar with Pat Flynn. He's very popular, very successful. He did a, he implemented this tool last Christmas. And back then it was, this is one of those toaster widgets and he actually had, I think, five questions he asked. But by implementing this and gaining more information about his customers, during his Cyber Monday sale, he increased his sales by 138%, he raised another, earned another $104,000 in revenue just by doing this. And there's innumerable case studies like this to bring this up. So how do you sell it? Well, customers, when you go out and have to sell in person, you go out, make a call, do the whole dog and pony show, that takes time, takes money. For me, I don't know about you, but time is the most valuable thing to have. Imagine doing that a thousand times. Go out and do it a thousand times and then have your website do it a thousand times for you. That's a lot of time savings. But when you're going through, when you go do it yourself, you're profiling a person. You're asking them, you're learning about them. You can see how they act, they can get a sense of who they are. Well, the website can do that for you. But without the right tools, when you're online, you're forced to come up with the lowest common denominator, copy and messaging. You're going for average. You're selling to everybody. And when you're selling to everybody, you're selling to nobody. Another way to sell it's the future benefit. Retailers like Amazon and other companies are already doing this kind of thing, but they're doing it on a huge scale with artificial intelligence and they get creepy. If I look at a book on Amazon, it follows me all over the internet. This used to require a lot of custom engineering. Now it's achievable via off-the-shelf software with right message. I was looking at a report a couple of months ago that Adobe has a product called Adobe Experience Manager that does a lot of this kind of stuff. Doesn't do it with WordPress, but does a lot of this kind of stuff. And the starting, the range of cost is between $250,000 and a million dollars. This doesn't cost $250,000 or a million dollars. Think right message is like $50, $60 a month. And then to me, whoops, back. Well, I lose myself here. Here we go. To me, this is key. The future is personal. The future is personal. I don't know what else. This hasn't the best. Another way you can sell us the awareness benefit. By doing all this gathering data, you're doing in-source marketing. You're a better understanding who and what you're engaging with. Of course, we talked about Pat Flynn. And by better understanding your audience, you increase loyalty and engagement and you're able to make your content more relevant. And then I mentioned this, just don't forget the personal touch. This is a personal story. I used to live in California and I was married before. And when my first wife was going for a new job, she went to Nordstroms. And this was before Nordstroms used to be up in North, like Seattle or somewhere. And they had come down to California and they were eating Macy's lunch. So she went to Nordstroms and they assigned her a personal shopper that sat down with her and said, okay, what kind of clothes do you like and tell me about this job you're going for? And what kind of budget do you have? What colors do you like? All that kind of stuff. And then Beth went home, came back a week later. This lady had all these outfits hanging up with the shoes and the bags, everything matching and everything. And so she picked one out and went to the job interview. She got the job. When that personal shopper found out, she sent her a congratulatory bouquet of flowers. That is a personal touch. And we can do a small thing. That's a, I don't know if I can afford to send bouquet of flowers to everybody every day, but that's a nice touch. Just send a thank you card because when you surprise and delight your customers in very personal ways, you keep them coming back. So I challenge you, I dare you to be remarkable. And that's about all I got. There's some links at the end of this that refer some of the stuff I've talked about that if you copy, that might be hard to deal with that one at the top. The slides are available at that top URL. It's a Bitly URL to UWIPQX. I don't know if there's a way to. So, any questions?