Special guest Syed Balkhi, Co-Founder of OptinMonster, joins the experts to discuss how to generate more website sales. Listen to learn six growth hacks you can deploy at the bottom of your sales funnel to increase your conversions and, thus, your profit, so you can outspend your competitors and dominate your market.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The biggest mistake you can make when trying to generate customers online (« and how you can avoid this).
- The strategy you can use to reduce cart abandonment, overcome a customer’s objections, and generate subscribers and customers («Hint: You do this by removing one option and replacing it with another).
- How to use the “Magic Recovery Email” campaign to recover 55% of lost revenue.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Retain
Churn Buster
CartHook
Jilt
Episode 93 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello and welcome back to Perpetual Traffic. Episode number 93. Super excited about today’s episode. We got a guy coming on today’s show to talk about some very, very important topics when it comes to scaling your traffic campaigns; growing your business in general. |
| Today’s going to be Ralph, myself, and special guest, Syed Balkhi. Ralph, this is a guy we’ve been going to War Room with for about a year and a half now, two years, something like that. At War Room, which is digital marketers, high-end masterminds; it’s an amazing group and we meet on a quarterly basis, four times a year; and one of the traditions of War Room is they have a thing called Wicked Smart and it’s a part of the Traffic and Conversion Summit as well. It’s a contest, everybody can submit an entry for the coolest thing that they’re doing. Whether it’s a resource, a strategy, a tip, a hack, whatever it is. It seems like every single War Room, since we’ve been a member, Syed either wins or almost wins. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | I mean that’s how he kind of came into our world but none other than that and I’ll let Ralph jump in here too but let’s here, Syed I want you to tell your story. Back in 2009, he created WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. He’s also the owner and launched the product OptinMonster, which a lot of you probably have heard of or used or have used and several other companies, software, solutions, he’s been involved in or owned or created and recently bought at Yoast Analytics which is now MonsterInsights. |
| Ralph Burns: | Syed is that guy that obviously, he wins the Wicked Smart, or the “Wicked smaht.” It’s funny trying to hear you bust out a Boston accent, by the way, Keith, that was good. |
| Keith Krance: | First time I tried. |
| Ralph Burns: | Wicked smaht. Whenever anybody asks me who the smartest person in the room is at War Room and War Room’s a bunch of smart dudes, I always say it’s Syed. There’s no question in my mind. Now only does he manage so many different things from a business perspective but just the way your mind thinks. I like how you process information and then can take all these great ideas and implement them. Today’s show is going to be about a presentation that I saw, that I unfortunately had to leave early for and I was so ticked because the content was so good. Everybody who’s online right now, anyone who runs a business online or as an ecommerce store, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling; this is going to be an episode for you to really help optimize and pick up some killer growth acts to sky rocket your sales for your online business. |
| Totally pumped to have Syed here with us. Smartest guy in the room is finally on one of the smarter podcasts. Welcome buddy. | |
| Syed Balkhi: | Thank you guys, this is the best intro. Now I’ve got to live up to it. |
| Ralph Burns: | Pressure’s on. |
| Keith Krance: | No, no. It’s all good. He did a presentation that’s going to kind of be the premise of this show today and it’s really all about these amazing growth hacks you can use to sky rocket your sales so he’s going to get into that. |
| First, before we do, give us a little background like what got you into this whole world to begin with? Online business, helping people building software. | |
| Syed Balkhi: | I started when I was 12 years old with domaining. Fast forward several years, I went into SEO and social growth- just getting a lot of organic traffic. I launched a site called WPBeginner in 2009 and now it is the largest WordPress resource site. Through this website I’ve been able to launch several different plug ins and software services. |
| One of them is called OptinMonster which you see on digital marketer websites, traffic conversion, it’s running all over the web, we power 300,000 websites and that’s the exit intent pop up solutions with really smart conversion tools. Recently, as you mentioned we acquired the Yoast Analytics which is a Google Analytics integration for WordPress which is running on over 1.7 million websites. I live and breathe this stuff. I’m passionate about it and this is what I do day to day. | |
| Keith Krance: | I love it. So you’re seeing a ton of data. So I guess my first question for you is what’s one of the biggest mistakes you see people out there making that are trying to generate customers online? |
| Syed Balkhi: | One of the benefits of having this service like OptinMonster and seeing people using Monster insights, our software is running and processing billions of page views a month. The biggest mistake that I see is a word flow mistake in your entire funnel. It’s focusing too much on the top of the funnel and not focusing enough on the bottom of the funnel. |
| What do I mean by that? Right? Everybody is throwing all their dollars on their awareness campaign and their interest campaigns. Tons and tons of pay per click, getting the awareness and then retargeting that person and bring them back and doing all of that. Which is great, you’re going to increase the volume of sales that you’re going to get. | |
| When I talk with smart business owners, they’re often focusing on the bottom of the funnel because that’s where margins are happening. I always say that, “If you get more traffic, you’ll probably increase your revenue,” but if you improve your conversions, you’re definitely going to increase your profit and then the magic starts happening. You can outspend your competitors and you start dominating your market. The biggest mistake that I see people making is focusing too much on the top of the funnel stuff and not enough on the bottom of the funnel. | |
| Ralph Burns: | I think it’s harder to do. A lot people don’t really know what to do. I think there’s an overabundance of training, this podcast being one of them, on how to focus on the top of the funnel. How to get traffic, how to create a traffic machine which is what we talk about here but it’s a perpetual traffic system, is what we really talk about and so much of it is how you actually convert after the click. After you pay for the advertising as well as, probably the deepest stuff that I’ve seen, especially effect margins and ROI for agency customers is all the deep level targeting that we do way, way deep in the funnel. |
| I think Ezra talked about this when he was on, as well, Ezra Firestone and is super good at that. Like you said, it’s the smart guys focus on the bottom of the funnel and not just the top. You’ve obviously been able to figure it out with a lot of the stuff that we’re going to be talking about here. Food for thought for anyone who’s just concerned with more traffic I get, the better. That’s not the case. You’ve got to convert it and you’ve got to convert the ones who have already taken an action on your site. | |
| Syed Balkhi: | If your traditional funnel looks like a very nice interest decision action, I almost always work backward into the funnel. Not just the check-out stage, I’m talking about post checkout and then working my way up and that’s where margins start to happen. If you have a recurring business, which I don’t know how many you do, if you don’t, you should build a recurring business because that’s awesome. |
| Involuntary churn is a very, very big issues where you have people’s credit card information and when time comes for renewals, the credit card declines. It could be for one of the many reasons, right? Maybe they have a temporary hold, maybe their card expired, maybe they got a new card, maybe they have insufficient funds, maybe there’s no reason at all and the bank just thinks you’re shady. One of the things that we notice is that delinquent customers make up to 20 to 40 percent of your involuntary turn. Just insane. | |
| Meaning these are the people who spend money to get, they bought from you and when time comes to renew, these customers are dropping off because of a system failure. So, if you’re using something like a stripe and most advanced merchants now have a VISA, MasterCard updater which basically goes through and updates your customers’ expiration date to make sure that if the card is expired, it automatically gets the new data from Visa or MasterCard directly and just fixes that problem for you. If you’re using like authorized.net there’s a company called Cyber Source that has this as well. | |
| What I’m talking about is one level further. Taking it one level further in a dunning process. Basically, you’re sending emails, very targeted emails and lowering the friction for the user to update. I just say it’s free money, you have to turn it on. The key is, when somebody’s card is expired, you’re obviously going to try them one time, two time, maybe three times. If you have multiple merchant accounts, maybe you’re going to do that through three different merchant accounts. | |
| But after that, if it’s still not coming through, you just send them an email. Maybe subject line called, ‘Billing Issue’ and say, “Hey Syed, we’re having trouble processing your most recent payment, would you mind updating the card on the file and here’s a link to update your billing info.” The key is, that link. That link should not take them to a log in page. | |
| Too many times people make that mistake. Hey, log into your account and then go find the billing area and then go find where your card is entered and update it. No. This link just goes straight to a page where they can just type their credit card and information to update card. No log in required. What we’re using, we’re using a service called, Churn Buster to do this, and it’s basically free money. | |
| We were losing all these customers, enabled this service and we’re making money. We’re making more money than we were making before. It’s just like ROI positive from day one. There’s another tool called, Retain by ProfitWell, does the same thing. | |
| Ralph Burns: | If you have a recurring software business, this is the best thing he has. |
| Keith Krance: | By the way, you can access the Show Notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. This is Episode 93, and we’ll have all the resources or anything I have mentioned in this show on the Show Notes. We’ll be taking notes as well so that Churn Buster and we’ll link to that in the Show Notes. |
| Syed Balkhi: | I don’t know if you guys go and check your analytics but go on your google analytics and look at how many people are leaving your cart page. Just look at the percentage. Sometimes the first time user, almost 85, 90% sometimes will go to your cart and do not buy on their first visit. Which is completely mind blowing. That’s why we spend, retargeting is like a billion dollar industry. What can you do to reduce that which will allow you to reduce your retargeting spent and over all boost your margins. |
| One of the things that we noticed was that from our checkout page, people were going back to our home page or people were going back to the features page because they were having second thoughts. That was happening because we have links to our other features, other pages from our checkout page, either in the footer or in the header and I see this happen way too often. With people’s cart system, they add links, etc. Remove everything that you don’t need. We find that when our checkout page, there’s no nothing, there’s nowhere, there’s no other link you can click on. All you can do is buy unless you hit the back button. That boosted our conversions by a lot. | |
| Another thing, that we noticed was offering multiple payment types, helps. This doesn’t make sense to other people like, “We’ll we only take credit cards.” A com score study showed that 56% of online want to see variety of payment options at checkout. Because we’re in a software business and we have multiple products, I’ll say, “Well, let’s try this, let’s try this study out.” And see if we can challenge that data. | |
| We removed PayPal from our list. We accept credit card and PayPal but we removed PayPal. Our thinking was that everybody who wants to buy it will just buy it using a credit card. The only time people using PayPal is when the option is there. Well, we were dead wrong. We lost 20% of our monthly sales because we dropped PayPal. So if you don’t have PayPal as an option right now, guess what? So many people are going to your page and not buying because maybe they don’t trust you. Maybe they don’t have the credit card, they don’t want to share the credit card. So many people use PayPal because they don’t want to share a credit card with other companies. | |
| Keith Krance: | Security. Exactly. 100% we’ve seen, oh yeah, similar drops like that too. |
| Syed Balkhi: | When you add PayPal in your options, you will see a boost. The other thing we use and I’m a big advocate of it is called Exit Intent Popups. We actually crowned that word into the thing. Exit Intent is a registered trademark. |
| Keith Krance: | I didn’t know that. |
| Syed Balkhi: | We started doing this before the thing what’s called Exit Intent. We have Exit Intent Popup on our pricing page as well as our checkout page. The cool part about OptinMonster is the messaging that we have, we just say, “That’s abandonment!” Or 70% of your website users are doing just that. Get started with OptinMonster and convert abandoning visitors. The key is that we have two options. You can change the wording but the key is to have two options on the pop up. |
| The first option, which is the main call to action is get started with OptinMonster, they click on that, the pop up will close and they can go back to continuing the action that they were doing. We added a secondary option, which says, “I have a few questions first.” And when somebody would click on that, they will see a contact form inside the pop-up which you can add inside OptinMonster. | |
| What we say was the 4.7% of people who say that message sent us an email. They were about to leave. 4.7% of people that were leaving, they say that message. They clicked on it and said, “I have a few questions, first.” And took their name and email and sent us a message. Our sales team converted one out of three users. On a good day, one out of two. Which is so crazy if you think about it. If you’re getting thousands of people on your pricing and checkout pages, these people are ready to buy. Otherwise, why would they go there? You’re converting 4.7%, a third of them. So one percent of all the users. That’s a lot of money that you don’t have to spend on ads. You can go dump that in another campaign. That’s just so big. | |
| Using Exit Intent Popups effectively on your checkout page, on your pricing pages, if you’re not using it you’re losing money. You’re leaving money on the table. | |
| Keith Krance: | I’d love to dig into that a tiny bit more here because, and I’m sure a lot of people that are listening are like, “Okay, you said have two options,” kind of skimmed over that pretty quickly. If you were to give somebody a piece of advice, let’s say two people. One person is selling physical products and they’ve got multiples skews, different types of products and the other person is selling a digital, maybe an information product, a $97 course. What would be the first thing, to keep it simple, to give them advice if they’re going to add Exit Intent Popups to their order form, as far as like a strategy of what to say. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Usually when somebody is buying their product there’s a very, very clear value proposition there that has led them to get to the cart page, so you have to highlight that value proposition again. For us, at OptinMonster, our value proposition is that we convert abandoning visitors into subscribers and customers. When our popup shows, it has a very clear message that says, “That’s abandonment!” It shows that right there and some people are like, wait a minute, yeah that’s exactly what I wanted to stop my users from doing so they go on to read it. You have to highlight whatever your value proposition is right there and then and then use your two messages. You know your popups you have seen, probably the yes, no popups? I’m sure you guys are familiar with those. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. |
| Syed Balkhi: | So you basically change the wording on the yes and no to two different things on OptinMonster you can do that inside. The first one was, “Get started,” with whatever thing you have. Or you can say, “Continue shopping,” or, “Stop losing money,” whatever you have. Let’s say if you have auctions product, you’re doing stock trading, you can say, “Don’t make this stupid rookie mistake. Get our software,” or get our course that we’re training. And then the secondary option is, “I have a few questions, first,” because a lot of time when people are leaving, they have questions. You want to let them ask that question. |
| Another way that you can mitigate this is through a live chat but a lot of times you don’t have live chat agents sitting there ready for you. If you don’t have that, you should definitely do this. So, second option, in my opinion you should have to go to your contact page or to a contact form inside that pop up, I have a few questions first. | |
| Keith Krance: | Okay gotcha. So where you’re highlighting the value proposition, that’s on the order form itself. Right? Not on the actual popup. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Oh, it’s in the popup. |
| Keith Krance: | It is in the popup? Okay. Gotcha. |
| Syed Balkhi: | The user was ready to leave the page. So whatever value proposition you had on the checkout page, clearly was not enough. |
| Keith Krance: | Was not enough. Yeah. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Most people’s check out pages are very, very simple, by the way. Right? They don’t have very fancy value propositions. Most people think that by the time you get to the checkout page, value propositions no longer important, you’re usually said, you’re 60 seconds away from doing whatever the hell you’re trying to do and enter your information. The users have to be reminded. Think of this as a retargeting campaign. If that user had left and you were on Facebook, what were you going to do? You’re going to show them the value proposition. Right? That’s what you want to do on this page. Inside your popup. |
| Keith Krance: | So, just to be clear. On the exit popup, you don’t recommend putting the “no” on there at all, it’s really either “Yes, continue” or “I have more questions. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Exactly, I replace the “no” with a “I have a few questions.” |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah. That’s so badass. |
| Syed Balkhi: | The cool thing inside OptinMonster is that you can choose what happens when the user clicks each of these buttons so it doesn’t have to be us … It’s two separate buttons so you can say, when somebody says “Get started” without the Monster, close this thing. When somebody says, “I have a few questions,” take them to the actual opt in which you’ve replaced with a contact so the user simply just enters their information there. |
| Ralph Burns: | Right. That is great because I think a lot of people have seen the, yes, no and then no, I don’t like cute kittens or something like that. It’s something ridiculous. No I don’t want free money or something ludicrous but this is a shift in strategy that you’ve seen be more effective if sounds like. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Exactly. Because what your goal is to do is to overcome the objection. If they’re leaving, they have an objection. Some kind of objection, is there a better thing or does this product really do what I want it to do? Will my wife approve of me buying this? Whatever objection there is, you want to clear that objection. That’s why “I have a few questions first” when you click on it the contact form shows up, right inside that popup. The user enters a name, email and their question and your pre-sale support team can respond to that question and take care of it. |
| Keith Krance: | One of the easiest takeaways is that you don’t even really have to go out and do something. You just take out all the links on your checkout page too. That shouldn’t be lost in the conversation here as a great point. I see it all the time with our customers. You click whatever it is, it’s a logo and then it goes back to the home page, exactly like you’re saying. Take the damn links out. That’s awesome, dude. |
| Syed Balkhi: | The other thing that we have seen work really well on our checkout page is what I call Magic Recovery emails. The reason why I call them Magic Recovery emails is because they’re truly magical. The way they work is we capture the users information as they’re typing it. |
| Keith Krance: | Really? |
| Syed Balkhi: | Yes. How they used to do it was they used to have a two-step order form. They would say, enter your name and email and then click to continue. When you continue, they would save that email and if somebody was to leave they got that person’s email. We said, that’s kind of silly, we don’t want to have two steps, we’re going to do that all in one step. We put the email field as a top field on our checkout page so obviously the user’s going to type that. |
| If they leave the form without competing the whole thing, we’ve got their email address. So, we’re going to put them in a three-part email series because these are transactional emails, again very important, don’t get in trouble with the Camstamp. These are transactional emails, you can send three of these. | |
| We send the first one thirty minutes later. Then the second one, 24 hours later and then the third one, 48 hours later. After that, this used does not exist in our CRM. We delete him. The first email usually goes out with the subject line saying, “Is everything okay?” It would have, “Hey John, I just noticed that you tried to purchase OptinMonster but unfortunately it looks like you were having some trouble.” Again, we are taking the blame. I don’t know what happened but I’m going to take the blame anyways. My second question, “Did something happen with our order page? If so, please let me know so we can fix it. If you closed out of the page already, don’t worry I found your order and created a link for you, your detail’s already in the form,” and they can click on and buy. | |
| Sometimes people can some back and say, “Yes, I was having issues with my PayPal or my credit card company,” and I can say, “Okay, yeah can you retry again?” And one of our agents will be right there to make sure that transaction goes through. If an issue happened or sometimes they’re like, “My wife called me, I had to go have dinner, I’m going to buy it now.” Right? | |
| Then, if we don’t get a response after the 30 minute email, the next email that goes out 24 hours later says, “John, your OptinMonster account is on hold.” Then, the third one goes out that, “I’m deleting your OptinMonster account.” And you can imagine the response we get when we say, “I’m deleting your OptinMonster account.” No, no, don’t delete it, I really wanted to buy it. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Fear of loss. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Exactly, the fear thing really comes in. You’d be surprised how much money you can save by just putting this Magic Recovery email. By the way, when we first put this on which I believe was the beginning of 2014, we added this technology inside our checkout system, we’ve recovered over 55% of lost revenue. With this campaign. |
| Keith Krance: | I love that last one, deleting your account. Like guys that are on the fence, especially a lot of entrepreneurs out there that are a little bit like me maybe and you’re always like trying to, what’s the perfect solution and you know, can sometimes be a little indecisive. |
| Syed Balkhi: | No. When we were looking for a solution of something like this, nothing existed except for one company. A company called Rejoiner. And they wanted to charge like three grand a month for this kind of thing. I have a team of software developers so we just built it in. But then people were like, “Well Syed what if I don’t have a team of software developers?” Well, over the last few years, since I’ve talked about this thing enough times, there are other companies that have come out and started doing it. |
| So two that are doing it. One is called CartHook and then the other one that is doing it is called Jilt that are very cheap like 50 bucks or 100 bucks a month kind of thing. Trust me, if you’re getting any sort of volume on your check out page, you’re having abandonment and this thing is going to make you money. | |
| This combined with the Exit Intent, dude, you will add so much margins in your overall sales that it’s unbelievable. | |
| Keith Krance: | That’s unbelievable and I mean the reason why the two step opt in, why everyone uses it is because, oh, well I’m going to capture that email and so everyone started to use it because it makes sense but it’s really a disruption from what you’re saying. Put it all on one but you’re still captioning it anyway. First thing they’re entering in is that upper left hand corner, first name, last name, probably the next thing is email. |
| Syed Balkhi: | We make email the first thing. |
| Keith Krance: | Oh okay. |
| Syed Balkhi: | We say enter the email the first thing and what our system is doing is the moment they switch to the next field, that email gets saved into our CRM. That’s where beauty is happening, you guys. It’s called partial form submission. |
| Keith Krance: | Partial form submission. This is gold right here, so now, my question is, is how does this integrate with all the different solutions out there? So, if somebody’s using Stripe, if somebody’s using ClickFunnels, if somebody’s using Infusion Soft Direct Order Forms, Ontraport, all the traditional, maybe they’re just using a PayPal. How does that work? |
| Syed Balkhi: | That’s why I mentioned the two services that I recommended. |
| Keith Krance: | Okay. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Because those guys integrate with other systems. We built this ourselves because at that point, nothing existed except for Rejoiner that was charging three grand a month for it. I was like, “Whoa, guys this isn’t rocket science.” Right? If you have a developer team and you tell your developer that you want partial form submissions, they can build it for you. But if you don’t have a developer or you don’t want them to spend their time on this. You want to go to CartHook that integrates. They integrate with Shoptify, they integrate with WooCommerce, they integrate with Magento, Volusion, 3dCart. They have an API that if you’re a developer or skim can integrate to whatever system that you’re using. |
| Keith Krance: | Gotcha. Okay, so you don’t have that solution yourself for sale. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Oh no. This is something that we built very quickly and then we rolled it in across all of our ecommerce products that we have. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Exactly. If you do the post checkout stuff and you do the checkout stuff, you’re putting money in your pocket without spending any more money. They traffic that’s coming to your site is converting at a much better rate and you’re making more money. What you have done effectively is you have decreased your cost per lead. You do increase your cost per acquisition so you can go out and do more stuff with that money. Whether it is to give yourself a bonus or spend more money on your pay per click ads campaign. |
| Ralph Burns: | What I love about it too is that when we talk about retargeting, we always call it “The Molly,” which is how we will typically word our ad copy for a retargeting ad for a cart to band in or whatever it happens to be. The responsibility is on us. We’re almost apologizing. Did we do something wrong? So, you’re taking the same exact tactic which keys into human psychology which is absolutely brilliant. 30 minutes later and you’re compliant with CAN-SPAM which I never would have though it is, but it is. Obviously you’ve looked into it. It’s genius. It’s the same kind of psychology in retargeting, you’re just doing it in an email. What are the open rates, typically, on that first email that you send out to people? Have you measured that as far as success goes? |
| Syed Balkhi: | It’s over 65%. People are opening, especially that last one, with the “I am deleting your OptinMonster account,” that email has over 60% open rate. This is gold, that subject like. I stole that from Ryan, by the way. |
| Keith Krance: | I love it. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Got to give credit where it’s due. That’s the thing. The reason why it is compliant is because that is a transactional email, you guys. You cannot use those abandoned users and say, “Well, now let me send them a broadcast.” No, no, no. You’ve got to remove them. These emails essentially are going out as a person. It’s not going out as, oh, it’s coming from OptinMonster with an unsubscribe link or anything like this. This looks like a personal email that’s going out. |
| Keith Krance: | Oh, okay, so be very careful with this. You made that comment about deleting that user after the third one. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Exactly because otherwise, they didn’t consent to be in your system. What you’re doing is basically reminding them, “Hey, you forgot something in your cart.” You might have seen these in a lot of ecommerce system, this kind of built in. “Hey, you forgot something in your cart.” And you’re like, “Well, how the hell did you know?” That’s how they remind you. |
| Keith Krance: | This is money stuff here, Syed. Do you have any other tips? I have a feeling you might have a few more bag of tricks up your sleeve. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Absolutely. When it comes to are you seeing scarcity, you’ve guys have probably heard of 24 flash sales. Right? Where you have a dollar trial or something like this and those things work really, really well but you can take this further. |
| One of my friends Joe Simon, he was also a former War Room member, what he did, he created his own holiday. He created something called, “National Anglers Day,” because his audience is all in the fishing world. He just said, “National Anglers Day, get 40% off select gear while supplies last.” What he was trying to do was get rid of his inventory, clear out these things that weren’t selling. They just discounted them 40% and created a National Anglers Day sale. His competitors were going crazy because they were like, “Well, what is this day? How did we miss this?” Turns out he created that thing, all of it. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. That’s so funny. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Think about this, people are like, “Oh, wait, you can do that?” Well yeah, Amazon did the same thing. Amazon Prime Day. It’s a made up holiday. Right? It’s one of the biggest shopping days in the world, Amazon estimated like 525 million dollars is sales or something like that. Crazy stuff. |
| One of the other things that I wanted to share with you guy is the concept of onsite retargeting combined with the concept of onsite follow up campaigns. Everybody thinks of onsite retargeting as exit intent. Right? That’s cool. That’s great. But what about returning visitors, when they come back. You’ve got to show them something different, can’t show them the same dang offer you showed them when they were leaving inside the popups or inside your floating bars. You can use that and see, does the customer have purchased our plan already. So, if somebody has purchased basic plan of OptinMonster, we show them a completely different offer that prompts them to upgrade to OptinMonster Pro. | |
| Keith Krance: | Okay. |
| Syed Balkhi: | And you can do that with onsite retargeting. The other one is what we call onsite follow up campaigns, it’s practically like auto responders on your website. What happens when somebody opts in to your popup right now? Typically, most people just say, well if they opt in, don’t show them the popup for like 365 days or if they’re saying no, I don’t want this thing then don’t show them this thing for 30 days and then show it to them again. Well, that’s kind of silly. I was like well, how can we improve that? We created something called Onsite Follow Up Campaign. Nobody’s talking about this because this is something new that I built for our stuff. |
| When somebody has opted in for a specific Lead Magnet on our site, we just show them a scroll box with an offer, right there and then. So, when they’re scrolling down, it just says, “Hey, stop losing customers. Recover abandoning visitors with Onsite Retargeting,” and the button says, “Increase my conversions” and when you click on that you go to the Buy OptinMonster. Essentially if you opt in to the ultimate opt in form checklist, clearly you want to build the best opt in form and you’re going to need the tool. We’re doing auto responders on the website using these dynamic web forms which is crazy. People are not even doing any of this. This thing is working really cool so if you’re not trying it, this is one of those early adopter tips. | |
| Keith Krance: | So if they come back like two weeks later, let’s say, so what do you do in that situation, how does that work? Depending on where they are, about how they’re tagged? |
| Syed Balkhi: | Exactly, so OptinMonster has two ways. One is just new versus returning, we can detect when a person is coming back. The other way, if you want to be really specific. Let’s say, if a person purchased this thing, then show them this thing. You can get really specific like that. The most important thing that I want to highlight is the follow up campaigns, that if they have already seen your popup or closed your existing popup or have opted in to a specific Lead Magnet that you’re offering, then you should show them a follow up thing and you can do that inside a popup, you can do that inside a full screen welcome gate, welcome mat kind of thing. You can show that inside a scroll box, like the slide in thing or a floating bar, what have you. You can use any of the dynamic elements to show them your offer right there and then on the website. If they have opted in, don’t wait to send them an email. Show them the offer right there and then. Especially if they go on the second page on your website, that dudes going to convert. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, he’s interested. |
| Syed Balkhi: | He’s interested. Show it to them right there and then. You can use them for down sells too by the way. Let’s say you show then your core product offer and they said no, no thank you to the core product offer, then show them a down sell. You can target the user and personalize your forms based on their behavior on your website. |
| Keith Krance: | Wow. |
| Syed Balkhi: | This is the next level stuff that you will see happening over the course of this 2017 and 2018 as more people catch up to it because again, this is one of those things that we built On Site Follow Up Campaign and as more and more OptinMonster users use it, more people talk about it and you’ll probably see somebody else now start talking about it at conferences. Onsite Follow Up Campaign, this thing works really well. Well, you heard it here first. |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s right. You absolutely did. That is so cool. |
| Keith Krance: | That’s what I’m talking about. |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s just amazingly cool. My question is on any sort of Exit Intent Pop. At what point and you probably know this through data, I’m guessing. Is at what point do you become an annoyance? How much is too much because I think people are going to listen to this episode and, “All right, I’m going do this, I’m going to put it on every single page and I’m going to use all the bells and whistles,” but at some point they might actually tick off the customer and they go in the reverse direction. What are your thoughts on that? |
| Syed Balkhi: | You want to be very careful with the message. Show them the most targeted offer. That’s our goal. To help the users show the most targeted offer. The offer that you’re showing on your checkout page is completely different than the offer that you’re going to show on your blog post. I recommend only turning on Exit Intent, targeted ones for your money pages. So, go into your Google Analytics, look at the top five, top 10 pages on your website and create the offers for those pages, create specific Lead Magnets for those pages and then show it to them on exit. |
| When those users see there’s a targeted offer for those pages, they’re going to download it because obviously that page was resolving their problem. For example, let’s say we have a blog post on 50 blog post ideas to help you come up with your next blog post. Then the user is about to leave, you can say, “Bonus! Download 73 more blog post ideas for free.” Will you ever turn that down? No, you’re not. You’re like, “I actually want this.” Or when they’re leaving you’re like, “Hey, download my free published blog post checklist,” so you can make the best blog post. | |
| Obviously you’re going to download my checklist so it’s not annoying at that point but if you say, “You’ll get 30% off on every single exit attempt,” that’s going to annoy them. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Got it. So, it’s got to be consistent- |
| Keith Krance: | Which makes it relevant. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah, whatever they’re consuming makes it consistent with it. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Yeah, relevancy is key. |
| Keith Krance: | All right, this is amazing stuff, this is awesome, thank you for sharing this gold. Once again, Show Notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast, Episode 93. What I would do if I was listening right now is I would go to OptinMonster and just experience what he is talking about, how they are using these strategies within their own company. That’s the first thing I would do. Then, second say, “Where can people find out more about you and more about their solutions,” or where they can just burn more of this good stuff. |
| Syed Balkhi: | The best place is OptinMonster.com, we talk a lot about conversion marketing, even marketing, et cetera. So, we have a pretty decent sized blog there. If you have a WordPress site, you will want to check it out. You want to check out WPBeginner.com. We have a tutorial, or 2,000 tutorials, all free for you guys to use. Then and yeah, if you’re using WordPress, check out some of our plug ins, they should be under our products page. To find more about me you can find me at Syed Balkhi just about anywhere on the web. |
| Keith Krance: | Right, so it’s just syedbalkhi.com. Once again, it will be in the Show Notes. Good stuff here, appreciate you coming on. We’ll be seeing you probably in another three months or so. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Absolutely. |
| Keith Krance: | Or another event. |
| Ralph Burns: | Probably like figuring out 20 other incredibly cool centered things by then. |
| Syed Balkhi: | Thank you so much for having me on this show. |
| Ralph Burns: | Oh, this has been awesome. |
| Keith Krance: | I’m going to have you back on like every four or five months, a little check involved. |
| Syed Balkhi: | I think so. |
| Keith Krance: | It would be pretty sweet. |
| Syed Balkhi: | What’s Syed working on now? That’s- |
| Keith Krance: | That’s how’s you instantly take your campaigns. Like take two things you took out of this show just now and just implement one or two of them and then you get to go right back to your AdWords analytics dashboard or its your Facebook Ad Campaign Metrics and you’re just going to see your cost per conversion down and your overall ROI go up. Pretty epic stuff. Thanks again for coming on, talk to you guys all soon. See you later. |
| Syed Balkhi: | See you. Bye. |
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