Simple Fixes to Skyrocket Website Conversions [CRO Tips] | Marty Greif | MMP #040

Simple Fixes to Skyrocket Website Conversions [CRO Tips] | Marty Greif | MMP #040 Marty Greif: We've tested this hundreds if not thousands of time that phone numbers in the top right hand corner on a website on the desktop or the click to call icon on mobile increase conversion. People don't call as much as they used to. They'd rather text and so on. But having that phone number indicates that you're a real company and it is a trust symbol and it is the number one trust symbol on the face of the planet. Unknown Speaker: You're watching The Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Wow. Kevin King: I get the opportunity to start. Kevin King has given me the opportunity to start this podcast. So, hey, Kev, how's it going? It's going, man. How are you doing? I'm out here. I was out here shoveling snow this morning. You can't call that snow. Our cigar balcony where when you come to visit got polluted with snow. I went out there and there's like a little white patch here, a little white patch there, a little white patch there. That's called what? Fairy pixel or fairy dust. That's nothing. You guys, you shut down, don't you? You guys shut down. We shut down. No, here's the thing about Texas and Austin. The weather forecast on Friday was that Tuesday, because we're recording this on a Tuesday. On Tuesday, there was a chance of like a 50% chance of precipitation. The temperature is going to go below zero degrees Fahrenheit, which means it could snow. So on Friday, they canceled school for Tuesday. On Friday, they canceled the entire district, canceled school for everybody on Tuesday. That's how we are in Texas, is we can't handle this. In Austin, we don't get very much snow. I mean, this is probably the only time of snow this year. And maybe it's, it might not in the next three years. So it's a big deal. You know, sometimes people say, snow flurries are coming at 4 a.m. People set their alarms and wake up and run out and let the kids that have never seen it before, you know, Open up their hands and let it come down on them and go, ooh, look, it's ice coming from the sky. And that's the extent. I was going to get hit by a giant snowball. Yeah, it's, you know, but yeah, so it's, we're not like you guys up in the great white north where you dig out of seven inches in front of your, seven feet in front of your front door just to get to your car. Did you see my picture on Facebook? On Facebook? Yeah, I did a picture on Facebook looking out over the lake, okay? Oh yeah, the whiteout, the whiteout picture. It was a, and I was talking about like it was, it's snow blindness. Snow blindness is real. Like it was that bright and it didn't really come out in the picture. In fact, the picture came out almost completely white. I had to add blue tones in so people didn't think it was a fake picture. One last thing. I thought you were in Germany. No, not yet. Not yet. In a couple of days. Oh, okay. I thought you'd left. All right. You know what? We talk about you always got to pivot and change and be on top of things. We talk about this about AI. This has to do with, and the reason I'm talking about this is I had a client about a year ago come to me about why his conversion rates had sucked. He had dropped, like they were abysmal. They were just, they weren't there anymore. And I looked at his site and he was doing fine on Amazon, but his site was actually just terrible. Things change over time. And you have to mix just like with AI, we have to keep up to date with them. And he had these Awful fonts, mixed fonts. I mean, it was probably okay two, three, four years ago, but now people are looking for like a clean user experience. So just cleaning up those images, changing the fonts, a better call to action, a better user experience and even customer journey, completely different from a few years ago. And when we did that, we saw an increase of 15% on his website. And it was just a few tweaks, like there weren't anything massive. And then the other thing we did, when we talked to him, he was just, he was strictly working off of bottom level, like, you know, the bottom of the funnels for conversions. And we changed that a little bit. So we, in his new customer journey, it really did start at top of funnel and we started to try to convert top of funnel all the way down. We also saw that that was different nowadays. I just wanted to tell you a little bit about that because of our guest. I don't know if you have anything to say about that. That reminds me of that story you were telling me one time when we were smoking cigars about your conversion rate optimization back in the day before you met Connie. With the ladies. Or you just changed one little thing. Just one little thing. And you changed the shirt and the conversion rate went right through the roof. Yeah, and showered. If I showered and changed my shirt, I would get a much better conversion. I heard about that. So I was like, that reminds me of that cigar story that one night at three in the morning you were telling me. But no, conversion, I agree with you. You know, so many people, there's so many little things you can do. It's not rocket science. I mean, there's little tweaks and testing. And that's what our guest today is like a master at and excited to talk to him and learn some stuff because like you said, that consistency that so many people, there's not consistent between the social media ad and the landing page, for example, just little things like that. And that can hurt conversion rate where it's not saying the same message. The colors are different. Like you said, the fonts are off. There's so many things that you can do to increase conversion rate. Sometimes it's just the way, it's the face of the person or the way they're facing or the way the product is. Is it to the left or is it to the right? I mean, there's so many little things and I'm sure we're going to go into some really cool detail and some actionable stuff today with Marty. Yeah, so why don't we just get into it? This is a perfect subject. We're going to be talking about conversion rate optimization, or you hear the term CRO quite a bit today. And Marty, I hope I'm saying this right. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Marty Greif has a career spanning over three decades in various fields, including sales, marketing and conversion rate optimization, CRO. And he's held executive level positions in several companies and is currently the president of SiteTuners. So welcome to the show, Marty. And let me say, this is my other job, Marty. So just a sec. Marty Greif: There we go. Unknown Speaker: Well, hello. Marty Greif: How you guys doing? We're doing great. So, all good here. So, I will correct it. It is Greif as opposed to grief, right? But everybody on the face of the planet, unless they're in Germany, pronounces it incorrectly, right? Kevin King: Okay. Unknown Speaker: All right. Marty Greif: So, all good. I listen to Kevin talking about your conversion rate in your personal life. I've got to make a comment. You didn't know what you were in for when you invited me. Let me be clear. What I teach people and when people work with us, all right, they learn techniques that absolutely makes them a better marketer and a better business person because we teach them that they are all selfish animals and they're going about things completely incorrectly. And so not only do they become better marketers, they actually become better employees, better bosses, better lovers, hopefully not at work, But in general, all right, by taking the principles of conversion rate optimization, which is the other people matter, it changes your life, right? And today, hopefully, we're going to change some people's lives and help them make some money. Kevin King: So were you saying you need empathy with your customers? Marty Greif: You really need to understand, you know, who they are, why they're there, and what it is they are really looking to do. Hey, Kevin, can I put you on the spot for a second, buddy? Kevin King: Absolutely. Marty Greif: All right. So here's the trick, all right, in a nutshell. Can you describe my hand? Kevin King: Can I describe your hand? Marty Greif: Yes, please. Kevin King: You're holding up five fingers. Your palm is facing forward. It's in front of your face. It's close to the camera. I don't have my glasses on. I can't see if you have any marks or anything on your fingers right now. But yeah, so that's how I would describe. Marty Greif: Interesting. See, I would have said hair, fingernails, knuckles. All right. Which one of us was correct? Kevin King: We're both correct. Marty Greif: Yeah. See, conversion rate optimization is all about understanding perspective of your visitors, okay, and being able to want to understand it to be able to explain what they need to see what you're seeing. And so by understanding both sides of that, that's what makes the difference. And in my team meetings, I can't tell you how many times when people are just talking to each other, I just sit back and go, And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, Marty, we know. And they go, so, so, you know, Jeff, what did you mean when you said this? Kevin King: Oh, okay. Marty Greif: And Stacey, did you mean that? Yeah, and they wind up in the right place. It's all about communicating. And that's the whole point of convert rate optimization. So we can be done now. Thanks for your time. Kevin King: Thanks, everybody. See you. See you next week. You got it. Just talk to the hand. Marty Greif: No pun intended. Kevin King: Yeah. Conversion, I mean, no, that's interesting because everybody comes in, everything is, you know, they talk about marketing pre-framing or, you know, and your experience influences your decisions. Marketing is a battle of perception. And perception becomes a reality in marketing. And that's basically what you're saying is you need to understand where are they coming from or what is their perception and what is their angle. And if you don't know that, it's difficult to sell them. And today, we'll probably get into this, but in today's world of AI, there's some cool stuff that you can do. I was just thinking off the top of my head on intent-based stuff with AI where you could actually, I was just on a phone call just before this, Where they were actually saying that you can run a Google ad to your landing page, say on Shopify, where you can control. You can't do this to Amazon, but you can do it to Shopify. They know who you are anonymously. They know that you just came from this IP address and that the person that lives at that house is It's 62 years old and they have three cats and two cars and this and they can change the pictures to actually show you on the clothing, show you something that's appropriate for your age on a jacket versus showing you just the general jacket. You know, that might be appropriate for your grandson or for somebody else and that level of customization is possible now with AI and stuff. That's conversion rate optimization and effectively trying to hone in or guess what the intent is and what this person really wants and how they view things. Marty Greif: Yeah. Well, that is absolutely one of the tools that we use, personalization in conversion rate optimization. But you know what, Kevin? We've been doing that for about 15 years now. Personalization and AI have been around for A lot longer than the latest buzz of a year or so. So we were running personalization tools that actually did dynamic changes on the fly for websites easily 10 years ago. So this is not a new thing within conversion rate optimization. But even if, and I'll go, even if they're not using a tool like that, there's some basic things that you can do on personalization, you know, treat returning visitors differently than new visitors, right? I mean, Use an IP address. You know they're in Texas, you know, versus, you know, in the middle of Canada in snow doing whatever he's doing. With an IP address, all right, and you welcome, you know, the Canadian, you welcome the Texan, you know, people feel good. And if it says, did you know that over 3 million Texans use blah, blah, blah every month? All right, now I feel good because of social proof. I'm in Texas. I'm going to feel good about it. Those are simple things that don't even require AI but are a level of personalization. Anyway. Kevin King: Let's just look at email marketing where you put, if you, on your customers, you're sending out something, you put their city or you put their name in the subject line or you put their city, you know, in the subject line. 17 people in Austin just bought this or they have those little things that That's that fly on the bottom of some websites. It'll say it looks at your IP address and it customizes says two people in Texas just bought this recently. Yeah, I've seen that kind of stuff. So when it comes to conversion rate optimization, what are some of the biggest wins that people can get really fast without getting into the weeds or technical or all these little cool little tricks? What is just some fundamental stuff that people can do that they just don't do? Marty Greif: Oh, I can tell you some quick hits that every single visitor or listener can immediately make changes to their website, okay? And I'll not only explain what they are, but I'll tell you why. So, we happen to know for a fact, because we've tested this hundreds if not thousands of times, That phone numbers in the top right hand corner on our website on the desktop or the click to call icon on mobile increase conversions. Now, what's interesting is we always get a lot of pushback because people are worried about phone calls and wasting people's time. But here's the thing. People don't call as much as they used to. They'd rather text and so on. But having that phone number indicates that you're a real company and it is a trust symbol and it is the number one trust symbol on the face of the planet. Kevin King: Hey, what's up, everybody? Kevin and Norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors, 8Fig. Let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for Amazon sellers. That's right. It's called 8Fig. On average, sellers working with 8Fig grow up to 400% in less than a year. 8Fig offers both funding and free tools for e-commerce growth and cash flow management. And here's how it works. 8Fig provides flexible data-driven funding tailored to your exact needs. You know, they could fund anywhere from up to $50,000 all the way up to $10 million. 8Fig gives you free tools to forecast demand, manage inventory and analyze cash flow. Visit 8fig.co, that's 8fig.co to learn more or check the link in the show notes below. Just mention marketing misfits and get 25% off your cost. That's 8fig.co, 8fig.co. See you on the other side. Marty Greif: Now, if you don't want to generate lots of calls, and some businesses don't, then when they click on the phone number, it does a drop All right, so it's not necessarily pure click-to-call. It drops down or instead of having the phone number, you could say, have a phone icon and call, speak with an expert or whatever the right thing is. And it's a dropdown and you could have your hours, you could have, you know, FAQs in there, you could have, you know, looking for your order status. So you could actually have other things above and beyond just the phone number in there to minimize some of the phone calls. And we've done that over and over and over again. And it always, always, always increases conversion rates. Kevin King: Marty, number one. With you showing the phone number, we try to do that as well. I tell people that and it's the same thing. They just don't get it. I've experienced this myself numerous times is that when I call, all of a sudden I get into this voicemail, no return calls. It just becomes frustrating because now you're trying to figure out how to contact them and it's just a wasted call. Marty Greif: Right. So when you have your phone number up there and you have the hours that you actually answer the phone, I don't know. Here's a hint. Answer the freaking phone, okay? It's not that hard, you know, and if you're not going to answer the phone, then you either get an agency to answer the phone for you, or if you're going into a voicemail system, make sure that that voicemail system provides love. Make the person feel like they matter. Don't make them feel like they just called the cable company, okay? Don't do that. Nobody likes that. So if you answer the, if you've got a voicemail system and, you know, I'll use SiteTuners. We have people answering the phone, but if you call SiteTuners and we didn't have it, I would like it to say, hi, you've reached SiteTuners. I'm really sorry we couldn't take your call at this moment. However, we would love to help you increase your conversion rate optimization on your site. The best thing to do would be to book an appointment, and you can schedule that right online. If you have some other questions that you'd like to talk about in advance, here's a couple options for you. You can send us an email at such and such, such and such, or you can leave a detailed voicemail, and I promise you that somebody will call back or send you a follow-up email. Either way, you are not in the forest by yourself. Look in the trees going, I'm lost. We're here to guide you out of it. That's the kind of voicemail you leave on your system. Give me some love. Make me feel like I matter. Kevin King: You know what, when you're saying that, I'm thinking in my own head, psychologically, because I love the psychology of marketing. I'm thinking like, if I saw a phone number, especially if it wasn't an 800 number, if it was like a local area code, call us, because that seems even more personal to me than an 800 number. If it is called 323-555-1212, I probably would not call it, but the fact that it's there will give me confidence. Marty Greif: Yeah. Kevin King: And it will give me like, okay, There's someone in our space, I don't know if you know Perry Belcher, in the marketing space. Perry Belcher, at every talk he does, he gives out, at every presentation he does, he gives out his personal cell phone number. He's like, this is the phone that rings in my pocket right here. This is not something. I'm sure he gets blasted. He just did an event, an AI summit that Norm and I were at recently. He converted almost one-third of the room into a $3,000 deal. I bet the fact that he gave out his phone number in there throughout the presentation actually helped build confidence and trust in him that led to actually more people buying that $3,000. I was like, why the hell would he ever give out that damn number? And he answers that number. That's the number that when I contact him because we do stuff together sometimes. He doesn't answer everything, but he does answer that and picks up that phone number. So it's legit. Marty Greif: Oh, yeah. Well, let's go back to Being authentic matters also, right? Kevin King: Yeah. Marty Greif: Oh, I have to share something. I'm not retired. You know, I bought SightTuners about five years ago or so because I was really enjoying this. But the day I retire, the day I retire, if I ever do, OK, I am changing my voicemail to say, hi, you've reached Marty Greif. I'm sorry I missed you. However, recently I've made some changes in my life. If you leave a message and I don't call you back, you're probably one of them. Someday, that's what my voicemail is going to say. Kevin King: My voicemail, I get so much spam, so much freaking spam that I actually do not answer my phone unless I'm directly expecting a call. My voicemail says that I'm Thanks for calling me. This is Kevin. I'm not going to answer this call and if you leave a message, I'm not going to listen to it. I get so much junk. It wastes so much of my time that I've even thought about changing my number, having a second number that I actually give out to people that I want to talk to. Marty Greif: So Kevin, I would call you once and that would be the end of it. Kevin King: Yeah, I mean, but I'm not putting my number out there to do business with. I mean, so I'm not putting, it's not like, it's not on a website somewhere. It's not somewhere where to actually encourage people to call me. But it creates a problem sometimes when I get a pizza delivery coming during a football game. They're trying to reach me to say we're downstairs. I'm like, I can't get my phone. I was like, so, but no, that's a, I don't know. It's making me rethink that a little bit, but I'm not trying to convert people. I've told him this a thousand times. He never rethunk it. No rethinking. Marty Greif: Can we go back to what I started with? If you follow my principles, it makes you a better boss, employee, marketer, and lover, and spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend. I think you're missing out on... Kevin King: No wonder I can't get any ladies. No wonder I'm having a tough time. Now it's all coming together. Norm, why didn't you tell me this? A thousand times. Why didn't you tell me this? This is why I'm single and solo. No, that's awesome. So you were giving us some quick wins, Marty. One is the phone number, which makes total perfect sense. What's another one? Marty Greif: So, you've got a website and you see a pop-up banner and entry pop, okay? Now, while we're big fans of pop-ups, we like ones that are in context and ones that are maybe exit pop, but not ones that are entry because I don't know who you are when I go to your website yet. I don't know if I want to do business with you and basically what you're doing is you're doing. Unknown Speaker: Don't do that. Marty Greif: Okay. It's just a bad. Nobody wants to work with that person. So so entry pops are rude and and We've had clients say to us, but when we did this entry pop, our subscriptions went up, this went up, that went up. And I go, yes, I believe it because here's what that's saying. Your underlying website is so awful that anything will work. But if you put an entry pop on a high converting website, your conversions go down, not up. So it's a bandaid, not a solution. Unknown Speaker: So anyway. Kevin King: And those are the worst on mobile because they pop up on you. You can't find the little damn X or close button to freaking close them to get them out of the way. And I just bounce off. Marty Greif: Oh yeah. And that, that goes to the other thing that I would say is, is rotating banners. All right. Frustrating people because we're literally animals and we've tested this rotating banners, like on a homepage, lower conversion rates, eight to 12%. All right. Now that assumes you put up a banner that is, that is, you know, value-backed and just got your value state and all that, but here's what happens, and I'll exaggerate, because 50,000 years ago, our ancestors were cave people, and danger, and, you know, movement was a danger signal, and every time something moved, I'll exaggerate. It's like, what's that? Unknown Speaker: What's that? Marty Greif: Right? And it stops us from thinking. It causes cognitive friction and pop-ups and rotating banners all do the following. Imagine that this is the gas tank of patience in your brain and here's full. You don't know that I had a wonderful day and I'm happy and I'm peppy. You don't know that. I might have had a fight with my spouse and my patience is here. The dog peed on the rug and my patience is here. You know, I argued with Kevin about phone numbers and my patience is here. You have no idea where I am. And every time one of these things happen, you're eating up a little more patience. So don't do these things that basically, what's the technical term? Piss people off, okay? Rotating banners bad, make sure there's a phone number, you know, don't do entry pops. Those are three really obvious things. Kevin King: Can I ask you, I was talking to a well-known web marketing guy and he told me, this is just about a week or two ago, about banners and he says, don't sell off the banner. He says, build up the reputation of the product. Let them scroll. Now this was I've always learned everything's above the fold. When people come to the site, know what they're buying, get them to click. Now he's saying, so let them scroll down, let them know the benefits and the features, the social sharing, and then the CTR. What do you think about that? Marty Greif: I would say he's right. And so the way we frame that is we tell people that when somebody lands on a website, they ask themselves three questions. Am I in the right place? How do I feel about this site? And what am I supposed to do here? And I need to be able to answer those three questions before I scroll. Am I in the right place? Well, that is highly dependent upon the upstream messaging. But a real simple tip is if on a desktop, for example, if you've got your logo, let's say it's on the left-hand side, or maybe it's a fashion site, so it's in the middle. But right underneath your logo, have three to six to 10 words to say what you do. So for us, underneath our logo site tuners, it says conversion rate optimization. Now, why do we do that? From an SEO perspective, I have no control over what page somebody lands on, so if they land on a blog page or some other page, at least it ties in from our logo, conversion rate optimization, and helps frame the entire website. So putting those three to six to ten words right up on the top is great. And then in the banner, the banner is where your unique value proposition goes. Why should I buy from you? Why do I care about you? What do you do that that matters to me? OK, so that goes into am I you know, how do I feel about this? So am I in the right place? We've already done that. How do I feel about so I know what you do and you're giving me a value proposition and hopefully got a phone number. So I'm feeling good. You've got some some Some social icons or trust statements or something there. So I feel really good. And then it should be a call to action. And the call to action could be, you know, learn more or shop category or depends on what they are. I'll give you an example. We get these clients to come to us. They're in the SaaS world and their website say, get a demo. Can I just find out what you do first, okay? So instead of, you know, and if you need to get a demo, and let's say I'm selling security software, you know, why doesn't it say get a demo or speak with a security software expert? Well, that's not threatening, you know, and I'd probably make that the primary call. So if you can answer those three questions before I scroll, and the same thing is true on mobile. Unknown Speaker: You are way, way ahead of the game. Marty Greif: And again, we've tested this. I can't tell you how many times. And so whoever you are talking to, he is right on. He or she actually is right on. Kevin King: Very good. What about pricing? That's another frustrating point for me when I want to, something's caught my eye. You've got my attention. I go to pricing and it says, click here for a quote. Marty Greif: Yeah. Kevin King: Call or something like that. They don't put it in at all. That's frustrating to me too. Marty Greif: Right, this would be like where I'm on your show right now, okay? And how would you feel if I just wasn't in the camera and I was hiding here talking to you, right, the whole time? Unknown Speaker: You'd probably go, what is he hiding? Marty Greif: Is he an ugly-looking guy or what's going on with him? Don't hide stuff. I mean, come on. So, if you have to hide your pricing, then you're not putting your value proposition there. So, we always tell people to display their pricing. Now, having said that, okay, you know, you don't have to display every single plan you've got and all the rest of it. You just got to give people a little bit of the pricing, all right? You don't have to go with it because if you've got complicated pricing structures, are you really going to explain it on your website? Probably not. But you give them something, plans starting at this, you know, you know, enterprise plans starting at that and includes whatever. Yeah, we need to display pricing. Now, if you've got different plans, there is a way to increase your conversions and your average order value and upsell people, and that is called anchoring. So you put the most expensive thing first, less expensive and so on, because that invokes the fear of missing out, because people will look at whatever the big number is, and then they don't go, you know, all right, What's this next price? They go, what am I missing out on? What am I losing if I go down? Right? If you go cheaper price to higher price, they go, oh, that's more expensive. I'm not comfortable. People don't want to miss out on things. So it's just psychology. Kevin King: What about when it comes to lead capture? There's people that say the conversion rate goes way up if you have a two-part lead capture. So the first one is just ask for the email address and that's it. Make it super easy and then they hit step two. It's like a two-step process and then step two is where you actually get their full address and their phone number and whatever else. Do you see that that changes conversion rate by actually having a two-step on the lead capture versus a one-step? Marty Greif: So it all depends, okay. So this goes back so a lot and this is the conversations I have so often with clients too. It depends. Sometimes all-in-one is better. Sometimes the flow is better. It depends. But what you want to do is tell people what it is they're getting and what the process is. Because if you surprise people and I put in the email address and then I go to the page I didn't expect and there's all of these things, you know, and I joke about this, you know, these forms people fill out for lead gen. You know, name, phone number, address, company name. What did you have for lunch? Did it make your tummy sick? You know, I mean, it's like, where's the where do you stop with this? All right. You know, it's just Too much. So instead, tell people that you're going to be asking these types of questions and tell them why. In order to provide a quote for you, in order to better answer your questions, you know, your input will guide who you speak with, right? Whatever it is, tell me and I'm going to feel better about it. But unfortunately, Kevin, you have to test it and not one size fits all, and that's kind of where CRO also comes in, is testing to find the right combination, right? Kevin King: A lot of people don't want to give out their real phone number. So to encourage, I think it's Perry Belcher that actually said this, to encourage people to give out their real phone number so that you can SMS them or whatever, is you actually put exactly what you just said, give them the reason. People are like, why do they need my phone number? You're just going to call me and try to sell me something. He switches it to say for order confirmation, for tracking numbers. He'll text your tracking number to you or something and people are like, oh, yeah, sure. I'm going to absolutely give you my real phone number right here. Marty Greif: Yeah, absolutely. I agree 100%. Kevin King: Conversion rates go way up on that. Marty Greif: Yeah, agreed. I mean, because otherwise, if you've got a phone number, email and an address, so what are you going to do? You're going to call me and say, hey, did you get that email? And then you can come to my door and knock on the door and say, I just want to make sure you read the email. OK, I mean, why do you need all that? Give me a reason. Right. Make me feel good. Make me feel loved. And I'll give you what you need. Kevin King: Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Lavanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it. That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right. It's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers, all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from. So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. So what is... There's something that you've talked about. I've heard you talk about in the past called greedy marketing syndrome. What is that? Can you explain that to the audience? Marty Greif: Yeah. Well, actually, you guys semi-defined it. It's the bottom of the funnel where it's buy now, do this. It's the opera school of marketing where it's like, me, me, me, me. It's all about me and I don't care about you. Yeah, don't do that. Instead, what you want to do, is get people at different levels of the funnel, the top, the middle and the bottom. Because if you only focus on the bottom of the funnel, and you're trying to push people through any kind of CRO or psychology tactics, What you're doing is you're turning off the 98% of the website visitors who aren't ready to buy. And so greedy marketer syndrome is where you focus completely on the bottom. You focus completely on what it is you want without caring about your visitor in any way, shape or form. And that's greedy marketer syndrome. I think it's a, I think it's a character floor actually. Unknown Speaker: So yeah. Marty Greif: If I may, poor Kevin's going, Norm, why did you invite this guy? Okay. Kevin King: No, not at all. This is great. And one of the things that I had mentioned earlier is starting that customer journey with trying to convert right off of the top. So are you finding that that's more and more coming to be the norm? No pun intended. Marty Greif: So I'm going to go back to my favorite answer. It depends. It depends on what it is you're offering. Is it straightforward and obvious, or is it something that is going to take a lot more understanding? So if I'm selling, let's say, a SaaS product that's got peer-to-peer and endpoint technologies, security solutions, I probably have to explain it, even though my audience might understand it, versus would you like a quote for your homeowner's insurance, okay? Everybody understands, would you like a quote for your homeowner's insurance, all right? For the most part. Not everyone understands the more complicated stuff. And even in the really complicated websites, whether it's, you know, SaaS or finance or, you know, pick something complicated and medical. There's different people with different levels of knowledge. You can't assume that everybody understands So you have to have different entry points for the different types of people. So if I'm selling, you know, for the sake of argument, I'll go back to that SaaS product for a second. I might have technical people from in the IT department, but I also might have a procurement manager looking at this who's not going to have a clue what I'm looking at. Or I might have a lawyer who's looking at our contract and then trying to figure it out. They all have different needs and you need to address the needs of the various visitors. And so depending upon how complicated what you do is, you can ask either upfront or you can guide them down a path that makes sense for them. Kevin King: So that's understanding your audience. But what happens, you were just describing like a technician to somebody that, you know, just might be getting some beginner knowledge. So how can you, how can you create a funnel that nails those different people? So it, like for the beginner, it's not too complicated. For the technician, he goes, ah, this is for beginners. I mean, it's really a fine line, isn't it? Marty Greif: Yeah. So it's the Goldilocks theory. So basically what you do is, is, you know, some people like a hard bed. Some people like the soft bed. Someone's like just in the middle. So, on the website, you have paths. It's almost like signposts. It basically says, you know, for IT management, go here. For accounting services, go here. And then they go, oh, they're talking to me, okay? And then they go to a page that actually explains in more detail in the language that they are interested in what it is you do. Now, here's where we really get to advanced CRO techniques. And this will have a lot of people starting to feel ill because nobody wants to do what I'm going to recommend. All right. And that is whatever your downloadable asset is, whether it's a really informative video, a white paper, or whatever it is, do not gate it. Just let the person download it, read it, watch it, and so on. And every marketer on the planet will go, but how do we generate our leads if we do that? And the answer is you generate higher quality leads because people will give you their real phone number and their real email address. If instead you give them something of value, it's invoking the principle of reciprocity. I give you something, you now trust me. And in that asset, whatever it is, it then says, for more information on XYZ, go here. All right, so you've got a couple calls to action in the downloadable or on the webpage. I trust you now. It takes me to another page and it says, Norm, or it says, because it doesn't know you yet, if you tell us a little bit about us, we can customize exactly, you know, what we can send you. If you can give us your name, you know, and an email, we'll send you either this, this, and this. Which one or more of these would you like? All right. Now what's happened? You've gotten their name, you've gotten their email, and they've already started telling you a little bit about what they're interested because they've picked something. Now they're in your drip marketing campaign. We're still not, this is not a sales qualified lead yet. This is a marketing qualified lead. All right. So what are we doing? We're now sending them something because we now know Norm is Norm and we go, Norm, You know, we downloaded this and this, you know, it turns out that a number of our clients really like this, this and this. Also, if you're interested, go here. Okay. And it goes back there. And now we ask them a couple other questions. And we say, so Norm, in your business, do you have You know, for this kind of product, do you have 10 or more people or 15 people? You know, do you do this? Do you do that? And that's called progressive disclosure. Okay, because every time I'm giving you something, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about myself, because it's all part of a normal conversation with somebody, right? And so what happens is, in the next thing you're going, you now know even more about them, and you offer them more things, but you also offer for them to speak with, buy now, you can give them something that jumps the funnel, right? But if they're not, you've got this drip marketing campaign to the point when they're finally at the end of it. And every industry is different, but when they're finally at the end of it, they'll go, I've been talking to, you know, marketing misfits now for six months. I absolutely need these guys on my team. You know what? I'm just going to sign up with them. I'm going to make an appointment with them because they trust you now. You always let them jump the funnel, but by doing this and providing value and providing progressive disclosure, your conversion rate goes way up. The number of non-qualified leads goes way down, okay, and you wind up with more revenue. We've done this over and over again. Kevin King: That's a great point. What about colors and stuff on a site, on these Buttons and forms that you're talking about, does it matter or does the wording matter? Do you need to, you know, in the old days, they made sure, like, make sure every hyperlink's always in blue, not in another color, or make sure that the buttons that they're pushing are yellow or orange because if they're, red means stop and blue means go or whatever. Is there anything like that that matters that you're seeing when you're helping people at site tuners optimize? Marty Greif: Yeah, so contrast matters more than the color. It needs to pop off the page. So green, blue, red, yellow, pink, whatever the right color is, right? And that's based on their palette. And so just to say orange is the color. No. Okay. Contrast matters, but words matter also. So for example, how many times have you seen a button where it says submit, right? Submit's a bad word. We've tested it 99 times out of 100. It fails compared to please send me my quote, please schedule an appointment, please whatever, which is more benefit oriented, action oriented. The only time submit works is if your visitors are fans of the book Fifty Shades of Grey. But other than that, nobody likes the word submit. It's a bad freaking word. What? You're laughing at me. I'm dead serious, guys. Kevin King: No, no, it's dead serious when you think about it. It is. Yeah, Kevin hits the submit button quite a bit. That's my favorite. No, I used to do that. In fact, my background is direct marketing. Before this whole internet thing, I was selling through direct mail and used to do that on all my order forms. If I was selling, I don't know, selling a kitchen gadget, it would, on the order form, it actually had a little box, like one of those zap dingbats, you know, you can make the little, that font, you can make a little box, so they could check it, and it says, please send me my X, Y, Z, kitchen gadget and then below that would be all the, it's reconfirming the sale and it's reconfirming, it's almost the submit button. It's not necessary at all. They can just put in their name and address. Here's where I ship it to and here's fill out the shipping and tax or whatever and send off a check of money order. But by putting that there, it increased conversion rate. Marty Greif: Yeah, of course. The tactics may have changed, a piece of mail versus a forum or a website, but the strategies behind that are still the same. Strategies don't necessarily change. Strategies are how you think about your business, how you think about your clients. Your tactics, you know, if I advertise on Facebook versus in the paper in the old days versus direct mail, those are tactics. But the strategies live on. Kevin King: Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning? The influencer platform Stack Influence can help. That's right. Stack Influence pushes high volume external traffic sales straight to Amazon listings using micro influencers that you only have to pay with your products. They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products. Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stackinfluence.com or click the link in this video down in the description or notes below and mention Misfits, that's M-I-S-F-I-T-S, to get 10% off your first campaign. Stackinfluence.com. So what about the strategy of in the old days in direct mail there were stickers. So you would get a magazine to subscribe to a magazine or to get something you had to take the little yes sticker and it would peel off and you would peel that off and The order, the letter or something and you can stick it on the actual postcard or the order form to mailing in, that increased conversion rates like crazy for a lot of direct mail pieces have done right. How do you do that same concept or that same strategy online? Marty Greif: You're getting engagement. So it's basically getting engagement. If someone is going to spend time with you and they're going to do the sticker on the form, they are engaged in the process, right? So how do you engage people on a website? You give them enough information to go from thing to thing to thing. And this is why if you look at Universal Analytics versus GA4, how we've moved from bounce rates and stuff to more like engagement rates over time. Engagement is now the metric. Are people actually engaging with the website, engaging with the company? And so we look at that as just almost a direct example to what you're talking about. Are they engaged? Are they following the path? Are they keeping going on? Because on the stickers, you know, there were people who went, Yeah, they put one down and they went, eh, you know what, and they decided not to. And there's a couple, put a couple down, but they didn't put the check in. You know, there's different stages and you want to keep giving people engagement steps so that they continue on to whatever the final thing is up on your website. Does that make sense, Kevin? Kevin King: Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. There's a lot of people out there that are good at marketing maybe, at getting people to the page, but that's where they stop. So many people don't know how to optimize the page once they got on there. You see this over and over. You see it on Amazon where you don't have as much control as you do on your own website where people are getting massive clicks or they're spending a lot of money, but then they just can't convert them. And I think more people need to pay attention to and spend time on optimizing for conversion rather than finessing their images or their graphic or something like that. Marty Greif: And this is why we're in business. And we're quite happy about that. As a matter of fact, 50% of our revenue comes from other agencies because we're not competitive with them. But what we do makes them look really good. Kevin King: Let's talk about engagement on a website. There's certain things you can do. You can have your chat bot running and you can get people to start asking questions and getting the answers right away. What are some other things that people can do to engage while they're on a website? Marty Greif: They can watch a video and hopefully watch it to the end. They can fill out a form. That's considered engagement. They could go from page to page to page within a website. They can read a long article, which takes them 10 minutes to read. All right. And they scroll down to the bottom. That's engagement. So there's multiple things that Google sees as signs for engagement. Time on site, number of pages visited, actions taken. Those are all engagement metrics. Kevin King: And you mentioned, just real quick, Norm, to clarify, you said it a few minutes ago. Can you explain for the audience? I think you said some terminology there that everybody listening might not get. You said everything went from the old way to the GA4 way. Can you explain what that is? I mean, I understand it, but can you explain for the audience what that is? Marty Greif: Okay, so universal analytics, which which, you know, there's pluses and minuses to everything that's Universal analytics was relatively easy to use and it was a way to set up and capture your metrics as well as report on it. Where GA4 now is more of a reporting mechanism and when you're setting it up correctly, you're actually setting up the triggers up in Google Tag Manager to fire off and then you're doing the reporting. So, universal analytics is more of a, I'm sorry, GA4 is more of a reporting tool where UA was more of an all-in-one. But they also changed, you know, from what was important on metrics there, and engagement became a much more important metric than in the old days, bounce rate. As a matter of fact, when GA4 first came out, It didn't even offer bounce rate. You had to kind of create it on your own to do it. I think it's back in there now because people got lost. But, you know, the mechanisms on how you set it up, how you trigger the key events, you know, and how you do reporting have all changed from UA to J4. You know, I used UA for universal analytics for forever, right? Or at least it felt like it. I think dinosaurs roamed the earth when I first used it, right? And so, but now, you know, we all use, you're smiling, but it's true. But now, you know, for the past, you know, A couple of years, you know, we had to transition to GA4 and now on my team, I have people that actually set up the tag manager correctly because I can't tell you how many times we have things fired multiple times. People fire it in tag manager and then they somehow manage to embed code on their websites and things are double counting, not counting at all, doing all sorts of wacky things, okay? So it's a little bit more complicated. It requires a little bit more Technical know-how, but when done right, you can get nice reports out of it. So as opposed to in the old days with, I'll go a step further, with UA, you could get reports out of it, but they could make your eyes roll in your head and you could foam at the mouth, right? So we would use, you know, Looker Studio, okay, or Data Visual Studio at the time, to actually create reports that people could comprehend, right? And now we're able to do a little bit more of that within GA4 itself. Kevin King: That's when I first started losing my hair. Looking at those reports. Marty Greif: That's what happened. Kevin King: Yeah. And by the way, you said dinosaur. They call me the fossil. So now let's talk a little bit about tools, apps. Are there any low cost apps or no cost tools that small businesses can use? Marty Greif: Oh, absolutely. The number one free app that people should use is Clarity, Microsoft Clarity. It is a heat mapping tool. It does a lot of really good things on it. For years, you know, for people who are looking for paid versions of things, we used You know, we use Hotjar and Lucky Orange and so on, and they're all good products, all right? But if someone's at the lower end of the spectrum, then, you know, they could use Microsoft Clarity to do a lot, maybe not all, but a lot of the same things, okay? And so it's a pretty decent tool. Now, in fairness, unless you've got massive traffic, even Hotjar is not that expensive. And ArcGyre has some other things that are good in it that Clarity may not have. Now, in the old days, I go back to the old days, back when I used to walk uphill to school. Now, in the old days, Google Optimize was a free testing tool. Now, they had a paid version, but a lot of our clients use Google Optimize. And so since then, that went away. And I'm sure Google at some point will come back with a new version. But there's a ton of really good testing tools out there and if you're testing you could use anything from, you know, at the lower cost from like OmniConvert or Convert or ABTasty or VWL. Well, VWL can start to get expensive. But the trick is those are all charging based on session. So here's the thing. For small businesses, if you don't have a lot of volume, all right, it's really hard to test. And here's the testing rule of thumb. All right. To really run testing, you need to have 10 conversion actions per day, per device type, meaning desktop versus mobile, right? And in a perfect world per channel, because organic traffic is different than paid traffic versus social traffic, and so on. So if you think about what does it take to get 10 sales a day, or 10 leads a day, where the 10 leads, let's say, came from your desktop on your pay-per-click channel, you need that minimum. And then your test is going to run for almost a month before it resolves out. If you don't have those kind of volumes, your tests will run, never get to statistical significance, and then what do you do? So you can test on what we call micro conversions, which is they get from one page to the next page. So they're on your page where it says, you know, book an appointment, and they click on that button to book an appointment, and then they don't fill out the form. But you know you're getting more people over to that page. You know, and then you get more people starting to fill out the form, and then you get more people hitting submit. Those are micro conversions, steps along the journey, and most people have micro conversions that they can test, and you can do that, all right, with getting to statistical significance. But again, it really should be, well, it has to be per device type, all right, and in a perfect world, per channel, okay? Kevin King: Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not gonna know what I say. I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Unknown Speaker: Yikes! Kevin King: But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits. Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. Let's focus on clarity. We'll give you those tools, a hot jar. That's not just more than just heat mapping. They'll actually give you these statistics. Do they actually do swap outs of like A-B testing? Marty Greif: No, no, no. Those are going to require the testing tools like the OmniConvert. So what the heat mapping and recording tools do, it will let you look at the data to figure out what people are doing. So for example, on heat mapping tools, if you look at the recordings on a heat map tool, When somebody comes to your site and they don't scroll and they just leave, whatever you said there didn't match the user intent up front. If they scroll down to the page at the bottom and they leave, whatever you said wasn't interesting or compelling enough. If they scroll down and then up and then down and up and they leave, whatever they were looking for, they didn't find. Okay? And so there's different tricks to look at these heat maps and recordings to figure out, like, why are people abandoning? What are they actually doing here? And so Analyzing heat maps and recordings in itself is kind of the science, right? And you can get quite away with just using those types of tools. Kevin King: What about trends? What do you see for online sellers? What should they be looking at? Marty Greif: I'm going to go back to engagement. If people are not engaged on your site, you're, you know, sooner or later, you're, you're going to wind up in trouble. You have to make whatever you're offering, you know, compelling. So we had a client who, and again, this is not normal case, but we had a client where we increased their revenue by 1000% within six months. Okay. And we turned them into a multi-multi-million dollar business by increasing the engagement so that people would actually go from step one to step two to buy, right? Now in fairness, why are those results not normal? You know, the before, if I showed you the before of their website, it literally looked like who did it and ran. It was awful, right? So a blind monkey could have made it better, right? We got them to, like I said, be a multi-million dollar company because we apply all of those engagement things to get people to go through the funnel from start to finish. Kevin King: All right. So, Kev, do you have any other questions? Not off the top of my head right now. This has been really, really good. Yeah, a lot of information. So, Marty, I got to ask you, at the end of every podcast, we always ask our guests, our misfit, if they know a misfit. Marty Greif: You mean besides me? You don't want me back again? Is that what you're saying? Kevin King: Oh, we'll have you back again. We'll have you back again. Marty Greif: Yeah, I'm hurt. Oh my God. So anyway, I have a friend who runs an agency called Fire and Spark. His name is Dale Bertrand. Although you and I talked about him a little bit before, he's not French. It's Dale Bertrand and he is with Fire and Spark. He and I went through heroic public speaking together. And learned how to speak in front of large audiences, although he's already doing a lot of that. And he has actually been a keynote speaker at Inbound for HubSpot in front of 12,000 people. So he is an amazing, amazing speaker. And he's brilliant. And he is he is very, very knowledgeable about SEO, conversions and AI. He and I just had a conversation the other day about using AI for different things. I gotta tell you, my hat's off to Dale. He is freaking brilliant. And a nice guy. Unknown Speaker: But not French. Kevin King: But not French, okay. And that was SiteTuners. If people want to know more, too, right, it's sitetuners.com, right? Marty Greif: Yep, sitetuners.com. And they can read about us. They can sign up for an appointment if they're generating $5 million a year or more in revenue. We're more than happy to do a free consultation where we tell them what to change on their website. We believe you give before you get. And if I can teach people how to make more money, They typically, if they do this for free, imagine what happens if we pay them. Kevin King: Or you can hit that little symbol of a phone up in the top right corner and you can call. Marty Greif: And they will schedule an appointment because that's what I've trained them to do. Kevin King: All right, Marty. Well, thanks a lot for coming on. I am just going to remove you. We'll be right back to you. Marty Greif: All good. Kevin King: That's my other job. Okay. You do your job pretty well over there though. I'm getting better at it. You can like hit that button. Yes. You're getting better and better at it. You know, instead of removing... I'm not getting kicked off anymore when you hit the button. I'll believe you. Just a sec here. Unknown Speaker: Okay. Kevin King: So I think I'm getting really great at this now. This is how I take over a podcast. Yeah, the only thing that would be better is if the remove button would be called submit. There you go. That's the word of the day. Oh no, now every time I see that submit, I'm going to be like, I'm going to think of it like Norm, like Norm hitting submit. No, that's just a bad thought in my head. It's something that a lot of people don't spend enough time on or they don't get help with. I mean, that's where sight tuners, I mean, sometimes it's just simple things that you just blind to or you don't know or you don't think about and by going to someone like Marty and the guys at Sight Tuners, Um, they could, it could make a big difference. Just like they gave the example of the site that was, uh, just doing okay. And they took them to millions of dollars, uh, just by making some tweaks and, uh, and, and jazzing it up, uh, with the right stuff. Can you imagine, I mean, just we're talking tweaks, you know, just understanding the process. That's the incredible thing. You know, even just talking CRO, a lot of people, just before Marty came on, I was just telling them that, you know, we haven't really talked about that. And I don't see a lot of podcasts talking about that, you know, that side of the strategy or strategies. But anyways, how can people get a hold of us? Yeah, if you like this episode with Marty, make sure you actually check out some of the other episodes of Marketing Misfits here on this channel. If you're watching on YouTube, there's plenty of other ones around that you might want to check out. Go back and look at last week's or hit that subscribe button if you want to make sure you don't miss any of them. We have a new one that comes out every single Tuesday, like Clockwork, so be sure to check those out and hit subscribe if you're listening to this on Apple. Our podcast or Spotify, subscribe to us there. And sometimes, you know, you might want to actually check us out on YouTube as well because on YouTube, you can actually see our smiling faces and see it when Norm, when he winks at me, you know, you can see it. Quite often, actually. Too much. It's too much. I wish I had a button. It doesn't say submit. Yeah. I can imagine. Marketingmisfits.com. I can never get this right, Norm. It's .co. One of these days. I thought I was the fossil. It's .co. Marketingmisfits.com. Look for some cool stuff announcing soon. Something called Dragonfish. I don't know what that is. You know what that is, Norm? You ever heard of something called Dragonfish? I do, but I have taken an oath of secrecy until we launch it. Oh, you plead the fifth. Okay. All right. You don't have that in Canada. You don't have a fifth in Canada, do you? No, no, no. Don't even get me started. All right, everybody. We'll see you again next week for another episode. It's been great hanging with you. Thanks for coming and joining us here on The Marketing Misfits. See you later.