Increasing Your Website Conversions feat. Ethan Denney of ConvertFlow

ASG 074 – Increasing Website Conversions feat. Ethan Denney of ConvertFlow

Chris Davis: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the All Systems Go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot, learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of Automation Bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis: [00:00:31] Welcome to the All Systems Go podcast. I’m your host, Chris Davis, the founder and chief automation officer of automation, bridge, the place online to learn about small business, marketing and sales automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers. And if you like to become one or find out more, make sure you visit AutomationBridge.com/ASP. Today’s episode I have Ethan Denney, who is the co-founder of ConvertFlow. Convert Flow is online software that lets marketers automate converting visitors into customers without writing code with intuitive tools for personalized to actions on site retargeting flows and integrated marketing automation. Marketers can manage the customer journey all from one platform. I have to say, I’ve been using convert flow for maybe five years now. I had the chance to meet Ethan and his his brother Jonathan personally when they were based in Chicago. And the approach that they take to let me say the reason that led to the approach of how their tool works is one that I had found at the time. I thought that I was the only one approaching implementing marketing on a Website for conversions, marketing automation, website for conversion. So I’m looking forward to discussing that and allowing Ethan to take the mantle on that. But before we jump into it, if you’re new to the podcast, make sure you subscribe and share after you listen to this episode, OK? I want you to know what you’re getting into.

Chris Davis: [00:02:25] So do me a favor. Listen to this episode in its entirety. And once you realize, oh, my goodness, this is what I’ve been missing, this is what I need in life, make sure you subscribe and share for those of you who are listeners and have not subscribed to our shared yet, please do so. The All Systems Go podcast can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcasts. You can subscribe on YouTube anywhere where you get podcasts. We are there. So subscribe and make sure you leave your five star rating and reviews to help us get the word out that we are the marketing automation podcast, that all small business owners, all small businesses and enterprises should be listening to. And if you have any issue at all leaving a review, we’ve taken care of it for you. We can do the heavy lifting. If you go to automationbridge.com for review, you can leave your review there and we’ll handle posting it. All right. So with that being said, let’s jump right into the episode. Ethan, welcome to the All Systems Go podcast. Man, I first off, how are you doing?

Ethan Denney: [00:03:28] Doing good. Feeling good. You know, it’s the middle of the week here, but got a busy week. Things were good.

Chris Davis: [00:03:34] Yeah. Yeah. I you know, it goes without saying if people follow me for a while, they know I’ve got a set of trusted tools that I’ve been using consistently over the years and convert flow just continues to be on that list. I can’t can’t get away from you even if I try to do so. It’s like excited is not the word. It’s something beyond elated. I’m extremely looking forward. Right. To you on the podcast. So do me a favor. I’m familiar with your background. I’m familiar with the story of convert flow. Give our listeners some insight on you, you as a founder in your journey as a marketer and what led up to the creation of convert flow.

Ethan Denney: [00:04:23] Sure. First, I just want to say thank you for having me on the podcast. You know, I love what you’re doing with Automation Bridge, and I think you’re helping out so many people. And automation is such a big thing that I’m really glad that you’re covering and going

Chris Davis: [00:04:37] Deep on it. Yeah. Thank you, man.

Chris Davis: [00:04:39] Yeah, it’s a little little background on convertflow and our sort of founding story. So I’m Ethan. I’m the co-founder and CEO. My other co-founder is Jonathan Denny. We’re actually brothers and he’s our CTO. We started to convert flow back in twenty sixteen and commercial was born out of an agency, a marketing agency that we ran. So we started a marketing agency, I think, back in 2013 or 2014. And, you know, we were small business marketing guys, worked with a lot of clients who used Infusionsoft an active campaign and MailChimp, and they all wanted to obviously grow their business. They had the operations sort of, you know, figured out in there. And now they were trying to scale through marketing and one of the challenges that they had was making their websites convert. So like many other marketers, we help them with their sales funnels. We help them with their marketing sequences and basically all across the board handling different types of marketing tasks for them and setting up their marketing systems. But one of the challenges that we found was getting the company website, their main website, to convert. A lot of times their website was poorly designed or they didn’t have their messaging clear. They didn’t have their target audience clear. And so. Getting the website to convert really required an entire website redesign, and that was that was the challenge for us as an agency because website redesign projects are complicated, to say the least.

Ethan Denney: [00:06:21] One, people like to to discover their vision or define their vision through you. So that’s very challenging to kind of navigate through. But also it’s just a very cumbersome project. So being able to think through all the copy, the design, getting to what developed, it’s a long project and sometimes it takes a long time for the client to see our eye on that project. And so as our agency was growing, we would have to propose bigger and bigger website deals in order for it to make sense for us to be able to take on the client. And what we found with that is that over time we were losing certain clients just because the sales cycle went from a few a month or a couple of months to four or five months to close a deal. And, you know, that wasn’t that wasn’t working for us as an agency. It was hard to scale on that. And so then we started to look for ways that we could impact conversions on the website without having to get into a website, redesign projects.

Chris Davis: [00:07:25] Yeah.

Ethan Denney: [00:07:26] And what we found is that by being able to launch targeted pop ups and different types of CPAs on the website, creating landing pages, but also pop ups that would engage visitors at different points in the customer journey on the site, we could actually have a significant impact on conversions without having to write copy for the entire website or get into it like a big website redesign. And so we were custom coding these pop ups and forums and getting them to connect with these different market marketing automation tools. And we were having to deal with a lot of custom code. And then at some point we even. Like coded the ability to make these pop ups personalized for visitors or for your existing contacts in your e-mail marketing tools so that when those contacts aren’t on the site, do pop ups in the messaging they would see would be targeted and relevant to them based on where they are in the funnel or customer Judie. And so at some point, we were figuring out like, well, we were thinking, you know, let’s let’s build a software for this so that we can, like, you know, set our agency up to scale. And then we found that a lot of other companies needed access to the software and we were solving a problem that was much bigger than what we were currently doing at our agency. And so we spun the software off into a separate company. I believe the agency is still running while we’re no longer involved in it.

Ethan Denney: [00:08:52] But in 2016, we went full time on flow, which is what that software became. And then we did the whole startup thing. And, you know, we started with the Infusionsoft community. Now I think they’re called Keap Right. We entered in that competition that they were running at that time. Yeah. It was a pretty cool experience because it was a three day event. This was before the before way before covid. So events were big. And there’s lots of people there’s probably like three or four thousand people at that event. It seemed like a ton of people. And I remember there’s this build up, you know, in that competition where we had to get people to vote and things like that. And at the end of the weekend, Gary v. Gary Vaynerchuk was speaking and he got the entire crowd there. And then they announced the winners right after Gary talk. Yeah. And it was really cool because we’re fortunate to have won that competition. But we were right there, right with Gary Bee and like, you know, this huge crowd and everything. And that was a really awesome experience for us. But that set off that put us on a path where we were able to get accepted into one of the top startup accelerators and then from there raise the amount of funding and just really take Kemerovo to to the level that we wanted it to be.

Chris Davis: [00:10:21] Man, what a story. I love it. I love hearing it because I hear different details every time. And there’s so many there’s so many nuggets in there. Even for people who aspire to have a science company. Right. Is find an audience, serve that audience and the audience is served. That audience really will go deep, figure out, you know, how your software serves them in the greatest capacity. And then when the opportunity presents itself, scale that service right to dateable audiences. So it is being great to just kind of see you are in fact, I believe I was at one of your presentations because at that time I was a certified Infusionsoft partner and partner, Köln, an icon, you know, where your regular attendance every year ban the entire marketing space, digital marketing space was at those events. And I presented four Lee pages one year as well. But anyways, back to representing you there. Yeah, right. So now you’ve got convert flow. And what’s interesting to me is I feel like you all were a little ahead of your time because when I journey back to twenty sixteen, I remember I was at Lee pages for a couple of years before that, and at that time even landing pages were still like building a landing page was still like a very great achievement was like wow, how did you do that.

Chris Davis: [00:11:55] Right. It wasn’t as common as it is today. And then I remember we launched Lee Boxes at Lee Page. They were pop ups and then they were first off, they were just on the landing pages. Then you could do it on your website. But that was about it for a very long time there. The pop up technology had not evolved at all for a few years, right around twenty sixteen. I feel like you guys were just on the precipice of the new influx of generating leads online. So how did you tell me this? There weren’t a lot of people doing Pop-Up conversion, let alone personalizing it. I know how difficult it is to educate the market on some of these more technical things that they need to do. How how did you guys curve that education requirement that people needed in order to really see the value of the platform at its early ages?

Ethan Denney: [00:12:53] That’s a great question and, you know, that was definitely a challenging experience, but so, you know, we started with company websites because of our clients at that time before starting to flow. So while they were driving traffic to landing pages, they all had company websites that were getting organic traffic and that traffic needed to be converted. And so that’s why we started with pop ups. And also, you know, when you’re driving traffic to your blog post here, emailing them, sending out these blog posts, you’re sending out all kinds of content. That content usually exists on your primary website, not a landing page. And so being able to engage, you’ll be able to engage visitors and use that content to drive conversions for the right visitors at different stages of the funnel was really important. So that’s why we designed our pop ups to be targeted and personalized for visitors based on, let’s say, your integration data, like your email marketing tool or CRM being able to target visitors based on the time that they have or in MailChimp or Infusionsoft or active campaign based on the list that they are subscribed to, things like that. Yeah. And so our integrations made it really easy for marketers to be able to implement this because it’s just a one click integration. And all of a sudden all this data that you have, an active campaign becomes available for you. So when you’re launching a pop up, you just choose what list, let’s say, of subscribers you want to target.

Ethan Denney: [00:14:19] Right, or what contacts you want to target based on the tags that they have. And it’s really simple to implement. Takes a minute to get it launched on the site. And so we started with pop ups and educating the market at that time, we basically just had to point out what was obvious. So, you know, everybody would promote like a pop up, for example, on the website to promote their newsletter and subscribe here to get our emails or to sign up for our newsletter. And then those visitors would come back and see the same newsletter pop up or they would see the same email forms asking them to sign up. And that’s a really annoying experience. I remember when we were pitching this to investors, it’s like we quoted, I think, Einstein, who said that doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results is insanity. Right. So we communicated that to a lot of marketers and it resonated with them. And they could see that being able to show the right message to the right businesses the same way they were doing that with email. But being able to do that on the website and guides visitors to take the next step into the buyer’s journey, that was really important. And so, you know, while originally trying to figure out how to it, that was a little challenging. Once we got our messaging, the market really adopted it.

Chris Davis: [00:15:38] Well, yeah. And there’s there’s a few things I want to highlight now that we’re getting into the meat and potatoes of the podcast. One is your solution. The software that you’ve created alleviates the marketer from having to engage with our weight on a website developer or designer in any capacity and get marketing running. One of the things that I teach the all of my mentees that go through my program is the marketing layer, which effectively does that. It includes landing pages and now you guys have landing pages as well. So it’s more, more all encompassing. But what I tell them is the worst wait for a marketer is waiting on a website, like a website

Ethan Denney: [00:16:25] And like a developer.

Chris Davis: [00:16:26] Right. Like a website should never prevent marketing from starting or running. I just that is a profound, fundamental belief. And I will never let a website or the development of a Web site hinder my marketing. So that’s something that you mentioned earlier, which is just like, oh, my gosh, this is again, when I when we first met, you were saying a lot of the things I had not heard in the market. I was like, I knew I wasn’t crazy. I knew I knew you should be waiting on a web developer in a market for a

Ethan Denney: [00:17:03] Lot of people have that problem.

Chris Davis: [00:17:05] A lot of them do, man. So it’s actually one of the pillars that I teach is how to create that marketing layer in the tools that I recommend. So now you get into convert flow. And what I wanted to do is I think we both kind of jumped in. Convert flow is conversion based software that allows you to deploy a variety of Opt-In elements on your website, from banners to slide ups, from the from any corner pop ups, full page banners, you know, anything in the best part is it integrates with your CRM and you guys have a library of integrations even. I’ll admit, I was just browsing around the other day and realized I didn’t have convert flow. Integrated with my WordPress, and when I did, all of the elements came up like has visited this page, I was like, how did

Ethan Denney: [00:18:00] I miss this last category, for example? Yes, by like WordPress, categorize

Chris Davis: [00:18:05] Category tag, all of that. So with that, I’m I hope that everybody is starting to understand the excitement because I’m all about increasing conversions through personalization. And again, convert flows is just that tool for me. And you mentioned something changing the call to action based on where they are in the funnel. I understand what that means. Right. So for our audience, give us an example of what you do and how you would achieve that and convert flow.

Ethan Denney: [00:18:42] Yeah, great question. So, for example, if let’s say someone is not familiar with the term call to action, a call to action is basically some sort of message that drives people to take action. And that call to action can exist in multiple formats. They could be a pop up that engages a visit on the website and then has a button to maybe drive them to a certain page or to enter their email. It could have a IT requiring visitors to enter their email in order to get some sort of values from maybe a downloadable content piece or maybe a video or to sign up for your software, for example. It could also be a call to action, could also be a Web form on your website. It could be a landing page. We see a landing page as just another call to action because best practices for landing pages that you have one call to action per page. So. Calls to action could also exist within your emails whenever you drive people to take the action that you want them to take and to click, that also is a call to action. So with the commercial, you can create different types of calls to action films and also a platform for converting website visitors. So you can create, like you said, landing pages, pop ups, forums, sticky bars, quizzes, surveys, all kinds of like a call to action for your website.

Ethan Denney: [00:20:04] And yeah. So when you want to create like a pop up for your website, basically you can use our visual builder. So the visual builders all drag and drop doesn’t require any custom code to use. We’ve got a hundred plus templates for you to use and to pick from. We have companies and all kinds of industries, so we have templates for various industries, some of the more popular segments or types of companies that that use convert flow or e-commerce websites and maybe like software sites, but also lots of professional services and marketing agencies. They use commercial as well. So we have all kinds of templates for it, for them to use. And yeah, so they click a template to use to customize it. They with one click can integrate their email marketing tool or their CMS. So you mentioned where that unlocks all kinds of possibilities. But now we’ve rolled out recently like an integration with Shopify and you can do all kinds of targeting based on Shopify data and automation of Shopify. And so we’re rolling out more CMC integrations and as well more email marketing and CRM integrations as well. So with a couple of clicks, you know, you’ve got your marketing tools integrated and then from there you can get your your pop up or CPA or later page launched ad and then put that right message in front of the right audience on your website.

Chris Davis: [00:21:27] Yeah. And one of the things that that you all do is forgive me for the terminology. I’m anchored in the in the previous way where there were I think there were broadcasts and inflows. I believe it was offloads before. But what you can do, one of the things that I like to do in your platform is you can have a specific to the stage that people are in. So each stage of the funnel can have a variety of court actions in as context, take the appropriate actions and move through those stages. The court actions just change in its dynamic. Can you walk us through? What I found a bit challenging for people is they usually don’t have their marketing stages mapped out. So this feature that I’m talking about, the way they see it, but they’re not even in a position to, you know, to be able to do it for those who are who like, hey, I know this, I have three stages in my funnel and I want to change the messaging. I just never knew how I didn’t know the software exists that could do it. Walk us through what that looks like. Would convert flow as well.

Ethan Denney: [00:22:40] Sure. So, you know, one of the ways that we recommend a lot of companies approach conversion for their website and improving conversions is to think through their their customer journey and or their funnel in four different stages at the top stage. The first stage is to segment website visitors. So there are pages that people will land on that don’t really tell you what the intention is of that visitor like. Do they intend to buy today? What product are they interested in or are they just interested in learning more about the company and maybe like diving into some of your content? So using that segment stage to identify the purchase intent of the business and basically define whether they want to purchase today and what they’re interested in, things like that, what type of buyer are they? That way you can put them on the right buyers journey. So the first stage is to segment visitors and then and segment them ideally by purchase intent. But you can use all kinds of other ways to segment them as well. The next stage is the capture stage. And basically what you want to do is you want to personalize your lead capture experience based on how business have been segmented. Right. So if you find out what type of product that they’re interested in or what type of problem they need solve, then your offer for your lead capture stage can be personalized for that visitor based on the product that they’re interested in or based on the problem that they need solved. Right. The topic or their interest. And then from there, you move onto the next stage, which is to convert that lead or contact into a customer. So now your offers and the seats that you’ve shown the website, the pocalypse in your the different messaging that you use on the website can be targeted to the visitor based on the product.

Ethan Denney: [00:24:31] They’re interested in the problem they need solved. And because, you know, they’re already a con. You can then promote the next step and guide them to take the next step in the fall, which is to purchase your product, and then finally we have the growth stage. So we’ve got segment, capture, convert, grow, and then the growth stage is all about helping a customer discover new value through your your your brand and your company by maybe recommending the right products and recommending the right offerings based on what they purchased in the past. Right. And so being able to do product recommendation and help them ascend or continue to do business with your with your company. And so being able to use pop ups in different cities that target business as a four different stages of the funnel can really have a significant impact on your business because you’re no longer just, you know, promoting an e-mail capture plan to capture leads. You’re actually creating a much better user experience for your visitors instead of them clicking around your website trying to figure out like, you know, what’s relevant to them. You automatically ask them, hey, what are you looking to do? Are you looking to buy these types of products? Are you looking to dive into this kind of content? What problem do you need solved? And then you guide them to the right pages and content and offers that are relevant to them based on what they’re trying to do. And then from there, you personalize the entire customer experience, the whole buying experience for them with your company.

Chris Davis: [00:25:58] Yeah, one of my I’m going to share one of my go to moves here. Ethan is this is a gift free for all my listeners, my, my my long time listeners and my future long time listeners. One of the things so, you know, I recorded a podcast to decouple digital marketing from marketing automation and, you know, the nuts and bolts or I would say the Cliff Notes version of it is, you know, as an automation service provider, that’s what I call a marketing automation professional. And the industry is we specialize on knowing the right technology for any strategy and how to leverage it for the highest level of conversion. Right. Which which, in essence, is the the highest form of personalization. So what I see commonly from digital marketers are pop ups, Xfinity Time pop ups standard. Right. Everybody’s got. But to your point, been very repetitive. I go to the same website and see the same popup. He shall remain nameless, one of the biggest bloggers in the game right now. Every single time I go to his website I see the exact same popup. I’ve even opted in. I still see the exact same popup.

Chris Davis: [00:27:14] No shame in it is what it is. He’s professional digital marketer. But as a marketing automation professional, one of the tricks that I like to do, and it’s highly effective in my with my convert flow stats on in my dashboard is if I send traffic to a to a blog page, I know what that blog is about. So instead of using the end of the blog, usually that’s the space that people use for content upgrades. That’s all fine and dandy. Again, good job, digital marketer. When we get to deeper levels of automation, I like to use convert flows, WordPress integration and either based on the page itself, the tag or the category, specify a pop up for that exact article. If you want to see your exit intent numbers rise, have an exit intent content upgrade specific for that article, next level even based on the source. So if I love it right, so if I send an email and I know it’s coming from my CRM, I can then only trigger that exit intent, not just on that blog page, but if they have a particular UTM parameter

Ethan Denney: [00:28:36] That’s definitely targeted.

Chris Davis: [00:28:37] Right.

Ethan Denney: [00:28:38] So I can imagine what that level of targeting. Oh goodness. Yeah, I’ve seen all kinds of conversion rates, but when the when there’s a relevant, let’s say, pop up accident to convert really well and that pop up is targeted to a specific content piece and and offers lots of value for the visitor to continue their sort of journey with maybe diving into that kind of content and learning more about that subject. A lot of times you see double digit conversion rates on the content piece, which is pretty amazing. Yes. Adding all the other layers of targeting that you’re adding there can imagine it’s, you know, converting pretty well.

Chris Davis: [00:29:17] Yeah, man, I very I don’t know if I’ve ever had a single digit conversion rate with using convert flow, but again, I’m so hyper targeted man with everything because I know exactly where people are at, you know, in the funnel. And another thing that I wanted to talk about, we’re talking about increasing. Conversions increase in conversion with with convert flow, you all have progressive profiling in in your in your platform. Tell us about that feature and the decision to execute it as is.

Ethan Denney: [00:29:51] Yeah, so progressive profiling basically means that you’re profiling a visitor across multiple visits. Right. So maybe in one visit your country collecting email address and then maybe in future visits as they submit other forms, you’re collecting other information from that visitor, first name, last name, company, job titles, other information that maybe helps you continue to personalize the whole buying experience for them. The way commercial handles progressive profiling is that one. It is tracking your visitors across multiple visits and sessions and through their whole journey interacting with your brand and website. But then it also fills form fields that they’ve already filled out. So this way. One, you’re personalizing your forms for your visitor to some degree, and you’re requiring them to only have to enter the information that they haven’t entered in the past, but then you can also hide the prefilled form field. So instead of showing a long form, you can, you know, shorten your form to only show the feels that you’re missing. Right this way you collect the information that you need and then don’t bother the visitor with having to like, look at the rest of the phone fields or, you know, overwhelm them with a big form. Now, you can also use multistep functionality within any pop up form or landing page that you create where like maybe you collect email in the first step, you collect first name, last name, company and the next step. And then you can even use like survey elements to continue to profile that visitor based on all kinds of questions that you want to ask them. Yes, survey elements, quiz elements, things like that.

Chris Davis: [00:31:29] Yeah, absolutely. And what I what I enjoy about it is it it takes a load off the user, right. Is there already another one? Another one of my cardinals says you do this and I just get irritated like, oh you already have this information is if somebody asks me for the information that I’ve already submitted it, it burns me up. So I try my best to never do that. Right. So convert float makes it easy because it’s just a checkbox right on every call to action that says Prefill or Hadfield’s. I think it is hayfields because the Prefill is just standard. I don’t even have to do anything. If they’ve already opted in to a convert flow CTA, it just automatically put that information. But not only is it convenient even what the secondary benefit that I found with it is, it keeps my CRM data clean because a lot of times people will change their email address. True, yeah. So if I’ve already pre filled it and hidden it now when you enter the additional information, it’s to one profile and I don’t have scattered information across to contact records for one person.

Ethan Denney: [00:32:41] That’s a big deal for sure. The other thing is that like, for example, if most of your farm fields are filled out, if let’s say all the farm fields are filled out, then and you have that settings added where it’s going to hide the prefilled farm fields, that’s only going to show a button. Yeah. And what that creates is a similar experience to like shopping on Amazon where you’re already logged in and it’s just a one click order. Yeah, it’s the same thing on your website where you can with one click take the action that you want to take once the visitor to take and they submit any data that that has been submitted, things like that.

Chris Davis: [00:33:12] Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. A logged in experience for an anonymous user, you know, like that’s I hadn’t thought of it that way until you said that. So I would be remiss to not mention this feature. And this feature is important because with any marketing software, your time span of being exclusive is so short because there’s always somebody looking at what you’re doing with the developer to emulate and just change some things right. Even if it’s just like the last word of your title. Old there convert flow. I’ll call me convert go so that the platform that, you know, does the same thing. And if you’re not careful, if you’re not careful, it’s hard to tell which one is which. Right. So for the record, you all have been around since and you’re I think twenty sixteen is fair because that’s when you’ve officially formed. But you were operating as a convert flow even before convert flow, you know. So it was

Ethan Denney: [00:34:17] An idea, right, of Anapra there. But we we officially incorporated the company in twenty sixteen and had our official launch and like somewhere twenty sixteen.

Chris Davis: [00:34:27] Yeah. And that’s important because I always tell people to use trusted software you software that has a proven track record. You know, the company is not going anywhere. They’re not going to just disappear with your money the next day. They’re really committed to the space. So you guys check that box. And one of the things that I’ve seen so many competitors try to emulate but clearly cannot because it hasn’t been done and you guys doing so well is your contact management. This was something in the beginning. So so I’ll be I’ll be transparent here. There was something in the beginning where I was like, well, I already have a CRM. Why do I need you to manage my contacts and convert flow? And it didn’t make sense to me. Right. And then this happened on many occasions where I would have a lead come into my CRM and either the fields were blank, you know, because I do another thing that I let me save that. So I’m always capturing information. Right. I’m capturing a lot of information is sometimes the lead will come into my CRM and I’ll look at it and I don’t have enough information. And what I found is that whatever. Information I’m lacking in my CRM when I log in to convert flow, it’s there, you guys have first touch attribution, last conversion, attribution, every call to action that that contact has seen everyone take, they’ve converted on because your script, when it’s on the Web page, serves as a form of Web tracking as well. So I get more information and convert flow under the contact manager because I can see a call to actions that they’ve seen and not taken action on. I can see what their last the euro, their last visit was. I get all of that information and now I can understand the customer journey because I’m all

Ethan Denney: [00:36:23] Going to share that

Chris Davis: [00:36:23] With our team. Oh, my big love to hear your feedback on. Yes, you have to, because Ethan, I think one of the the most common mistakes anybody can make with digital marketing and marketing automation is not paying attention to individual customer journeys. There’s so much information in there. If you just look at the sequence, OK, they saw this, then this than that. I don’t care how big you are. When I was at Lee pages, hundreds of thousands of customers, I was still just randomly pick contact records and just

Chris Davis: [00:36:57] Look at their journey,

Chris Davis: [00:36:58] Just look at their journey, because you don’t know until you know, man, like I built this out. I think this is how they’re doing it. And then most of the time when people get a sale, they’re like, OK, it’s working. But I’m always like, hmm, I wonder how you got here. So I always look a lot of times it’s confirmed what I built, but sometimes it’s like, oh, I didn’t realize that, you know, or it could just show me the intent, even if they’ve sent all of these call to act like I can start to really piece together a really good lead because I have a part of my of my process that my customer journey is you can actually get on a call with myself or someone from my team. So and we have all the information you submitted, but I also have the information. So I’m very prepared, you know, for these calls. But I wanted to highlight that because that is something that is exclusive to convert flow. And you don’t see I’m trying to think of another third party lead gen platform that does that. What went into the decision to to include some contact management?

Ethan Denney: [00:38:11] Well. We thought marketing automation started in the wrong place, started with email. Starting on the website. So when we started the company, you know, we we recognize that email had been around for a long time and everyone was trying to automate email sequences and then from there trying to like, you know, show the right ad and things like that. The problem is, is that that’s email. It’s not where all the activity is happening. Your visitors start their journey on the website. That can potentially start the journey maybe by seeing and some would argue that and then arriving on the website or maybe discovering it through Google and then arriving on a website. Ultimately, when they interact with your brand, they’re interacting with your website primarily. So they start their every contact piece that they read is on the website. Every product that they purchase is on the website. And so we thought that the marketing, automation and the process of like, you know, building out customer journeys and things like that should start with the website. And that’s why we started with, you know, trying to personalize the experience and automate some of the experience on the website and then automate the actions that happen in your different tools based on what’s going on in the website.

Ethan Denney: [00:39:31] Right. So being able to trigger an email sequence with convertflow, there’s all kinds of automation functionality that allow you to basically add fell into an automation or sequence for an active campaign or an mailchimp, maybe apply the right tags and do all kinds of segmentation across your marketing tools as well as like giving you the ability to add custom scripts so that you can, based on how someone interacted with a quiz or that interacted with put them into the right retargeting audience on Facebook or Google or one of your advertising platforms. This way, based on the activity or action that a person took on your website, you’re coordinating this orchestrated campaign across multiple channels that all are driven. That’s all designed to like get the visitor to take the next step. Right. So they’re getting the right email sequences again, the right ads, and they’re seeing the right settings on the website. And it’s all working together to help guide that visitor through the entire staff. Yeah, it really it really came from that, you know, thinking that marketing automation started in the wrong place and having a little bit of a different outlook, I think, after seeing the market develop. And that’s kind of how it

Chris Davis: [00:40:42] I think I think you all were spot on. One of the things when I had you guys come in and give a demo and active campaign that you mentioned was how you use the contact management feature to collect anonymous data. And then once the contact is known, you push all of that data to the CRM. And it gives me another reason again, is because when you’re in the CRM, you’re known. I know who you are. I have your email more than likely to have your name. And there’s some tags associated. But there’s this this entire other side of much of the customer journey that’s anonymous. I have no insight. I can always go into convert flow and see that and see. OK, OK, so people are seeing this court action. People are doing this, people are doing that. And it’s it’s something that I hadn’t really pinpointed that I relied on until people kept telling me about alternatives. And, you know, of course because of who I am, I have to know all the space. So I will go use these tools and it would always be missing. I’m like, OK, well, that’s good for you.

Chris Davis: [00:41:53] That’ll work for your case. But I you know, this what I use I recommend one another thing that you all do do really well is in I don’t know if people understand like what an ad network is, but usually when you’re on like a, I don’t know, CNN dotcom or some big mass media website, you’re scrolling through. And then you see this area that advertises to you. And in a lot of people who don’t know retargeted, they’re like, how did I know? I was just looking at that pair of shoes? How did you know I wanted those shoes? And it’s like, no, that’s that’s not CNN. It’s an embedded script on their site that’s attached to an ad network that’s collecting all of this data of what you’re doing online and just essentially saying, hey, you looked at this over at Zappos, here’s the same set of shoes by it. Right? Well, we convert flow. You can emulate an ad network on your own website because you guys have embeddable areas. So I can place an embeddable area on my Web site and then based on tags in my CRM, it will change the CTA in that area.

Chris Davis: [00:43:00] So, yeah, it

Chris Davis: [00:43:01] Being read my blog post, I can embedded a third of the way through the blog post. Right the first time you come through, it’s like opt in for X, Y, Z. Right. And then you can come back. And it says something totally different. Still, still relative to the article, though, but something further down the funnel, because my belief is I treat funds like football right. Forward progression only do not go backwards. And if you have to do not lose a whole bunch of yards. Right. If somebody has taken a step further in the funnel, do not give them a way to go all the way back. That will be crazy. It’s like running a lateral where you toss the football 30 yards back. Why now? You have to make up 30 yards just to start

Ethan Denney: [00:43:51] Where and when, where, when people are showing like the same email op’tin that they show to visit at the first time. It’s a fumble. Oh, my goodness.

Chris Davis: [00:43:59] That’s a good one. That’s a good it is a fumble and it’s a lost opportunity. And you’re risking that the other team, which is some other website that’s doing it right, picks up that ball, picks up that contact and takes it to the end zone. And you’re the one that started the journey. Exactly right. So unfair, man. But you go you have to be mindful of these things. So these are Ethan. I could go on for days with use cases of how I use it. One more thing I want to share, and then I want to give you the floor and just talk about some of some of the cool things you’re seeing from from some other clients. I’ve got one I’ve got I couldn’t I couldn’t do this without shouting out your brother Jonathan on this one. He provided me with the script maybe two years ago, maybe maybe longer. I just know I use it religiously now. And what the script allows me to do is I place it in the in the header of every in the edit script. I think it’s the script section of every call to action and convert flow. And it allows me to grab the arrow, it allows me to grab the barrel of any page. It does some other things, but primarily I use it to grab the URL and populate a hidden field in my in my CRM.

Chris Davis: [00:45:10] So that way I always know because a pop up can trigger on any page check, you know. So now it allows me to grab exactly what page they were on. And again, it’s just more information in my CRM. So when I get the notification, I’ve got a new lead. I can see the customer journey, you know, I can tell what it is. So those are just a few ways I’m just touching the surface of the ways that I use converse flow and the and the features man, like the way that you can set up conditions targeting conditions. I love it. It is. You could do it by device. How many times they visited your website. You could do of course by CRM tags and custom fields they visited. Oh my goodness. I mean it. You could, I could just look at the dropdown and just dream for days like, oh, if they did this then that I could pick up that, you know, like you could really get lost in it. But what were they are some of the most commonly used features that you’re seeing that that are helping people increase their conversions?

Ethan Denney: [00:46:17] Hmm. Well, definitely, you know, using targeted pop ups that that’s really impactful, creating quizzes and surveys to segment visitors and basically try to identify what the visitors trying to achieve on the website and then creating a more accelerated experience of getting to that value that the visitor is looking for being able to get into right page’s right products, things about creating automated sequences within their different tools, you know, being able to automate those actions without having to go into the other tool that you’re using and crafting some complex workflow in order to achieve a certain tag added to a contact. No, with workflow like you can just apply that tag with an active campaign or, you know, MailChimp or something. So saving marketers a ton of time from having to solve complex automation like workloads. So that’s a big thing, just being able to cut to the chase and, you know, set the automation to happen right. When someone submits a form or when someone selects a certain response. But then he quit is our survey. So that that’s a big thing. Obviously, the targeting conditions, whatever you integrate at different level, it unlocks like a whole new set of targeting conditions that you can now target by. The broadcasts, that’s a pretty popular feature that is being used a lot by companies that maybe want to run statewide promotions or want to schedule a statewide campaign to go live and show like show up on the website at a certain time and date and then end at a certain time of day without having to get into the CMS and code and have to change these things around. And then it automatically reverts to changes once the campaign is over to show the existing setas on the on the website or the previous case.

Ethan Denney: [00:48:07] A good example of this would be like on a Black Friday, you know, for a Black Friday campaign or some sort of holiday, being able to automate the entire promotion of your Black Friday campaign on your website and schedule it to go live at Friday at midnight. Right. Like, I’m sorry, at 12:00 a.m. and then end that following night and automate the entire experience without having to touch your CDMS. And you just know that everything is going to go as planned. That’s a pretty popular feature, especially for bigger teams where they would have to rely on developers. And someone’s going to have to be up in the middle of the night to like these campaigns and they could actually get some sleep now. So that’s a pretty important feature. Yeah. And there’s there’s more advanced features in there as well that a lot of people are using conditional actions, things like that, that basically check like whether someone submitted a certain, you know, certain value within a form or maybe they select a certain response and then being able to personalize the path within a pop up or within a multipage funnel and creating like a personalized multipage funnel with different parts based on how people are interacting with your that that initial step, which could be the landing page or a quiz or any other data that you have. So, you know, all this integration data or activity on a visitor, we also give you access to within the builder for building out these these conditional pass. So all this data is available to you from places like Personalization Engine where like you can just use all this data as needed in order to create the right experience for the right visitor.

Chris Davis: [00:49:43] Love it and love it Ethan Man, I can’t thank you enough for coming on what’s what’s next what’s on the horizon for convert flow for the existing users and new users who are now interested in using the platform?

Ethan Denney: [00:49:58] Yeah, so we see our product is going beyond just our product, there’s education, there’s service, there’s all kinds of things that really help our customers get the outcome that they want to achieve. So this year, we’re really investing in education and these other extensions of the product that really help our customers get the outcome that they want to achieve. There’s also lots of new features planned for our builder. We’re going to be expanding the builder, making it easier to design high quality on brand landing pages, things like that. It’s already pretty easy, but we’re going to give some more control while keeping it relatively easy, more integrations, things like that.

Chris Davis: [00:50:43] I love it, man. I love it. Well, I know where to find you and hopefully people understand where to find. We’ve only said the words so much, but if people want to connect with you, convert flow, find out more about about your company. Are there any resources or any place that that they should be looking?

Ethan Denney: [00:51:02] Yeah, sure, so go to convertflow.com there, you can check out our blog, we have a free plan so you can sign up for our product for free. Try it out. The blog is covering all sorts of content on conversions. We’ve got all kinds of tips. We have a campaign library that highlights all kinds of campaigns that you can run for your own business. When we give you examples of how other companies are running these types of campaigns and give you a step by step process for how to execute that. And then we’re also soon going to be rolling out some more educational content as well. But, yeah, just go to commercial dot com. You can talk with our team there as well. If you want to email me. My emails keep an accurate flow. You know, I’m happy to to talk about conversions or anything that you guys want to talk about, so.

Chris Davis: [00:51:51] Yeah, yeah. Great. Well, I, I greatly appreciate it. Even proud use of this way man. So keep up the great work man. I appreciate it.

Ethan Denney: [00:52:02] Thank you, Chris. You know, we love you like I love you being part of the community. You know, you’re you’re a really great marketer. And so it’s really cool to see how you’re using the platform and that also that you’re educating like your community as well, how to use that. We really appreciate it. So thank you so much for having me on today. Really fun.

Chris Davis: [00:52:20] Yeah, no, no problem man. I’ll I’ll, I’ll see you online and hopefully I’ll get make my way down there in that beautiful weather man and get to reconnect with you all in person as well.

Ethan Denney: [00:52:31] Come on down. It’d be fun to hang out.

Chris Davis: [00:52:34] All right man. Thanks.

Ethan Denney: [00:52:36] Thanks, Chris.

Chris Davis: [00:52:39] Thank you for listening to this episode. As you saw, with the amount of fun and energy Ethan and I had, it was because, one, I am a power user of the platform. And and you got to see some of the considerations. And here’s what I’ll say. Make sure that you’re always paying attention to not just the tools that people use, but the reasons why, you know, every tool that I use, I can defend strongly my choice in using it and the features that are greatly benefiting me. So things as things that may seem as simple as progressive profiling, having web traffic, have a heavy Web tracking native to the third party capture tool I convert flow has these are all things that are specific to my marketing strategy and what I do, it may fit yours, and it may not. But the important part is that you not only get a better insight on these tools, but also the people behind them. It’s a two fold approach when it goes when you go to choose software, you want to pay attention to the features and make sure that they match your strategy as well as the people behind the business and make sure that they’re in it. They’re in it for the long haul because you are right. So I hope everything that we discussed help you get a better insight on how to convert on your website.

Chris Davis: [00:54:06] And for those of you who are using your website as the means of capturing leads to, I really want you to go back and listen to the episode entitled The Marketing Layer, because your marketing really should be separate. Of course, a tool like convert flow allows you to do that easily. But there are a variety of reasons why and I detail it in that episode. So do me a favor. Send this podcast’s to that business owner who has a website and they’re doing everything through that website. OK, let them at least hear this. Now that I’ve mentioned the marketing, the marketing layer podcast as well, they can listen to this one and then bounce over into that one in and hopefully we can save them from an unstable setup online when marketing. OK, also share this with a digital marketing professional who’s always getting asked, hey, what tools should I use to to capture leads online? Just share this with them, if you could do that for me. So for all my first time listeners, this is now my invitation to you, my official invitation for you to join the family, the all systems go family podcast listener, small business owners, savvy marketing professionals that get new episodes every Thursday. Now is the invitation to subscribe. Make sure you subscribe and leave your five star rating and review.

Chris Davis: [00:55:32] Here at Automation Bridge, we’re dedicated to turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers because small businesses, they’re in dire need of marketers with the ability to learn that these marketers who have the ability to quickly pick up technology. Matchett Mariotte with that business strategy for the efficient deploying of automated systems for rapid growth. We the need is. Growing by the day, OK, and I’ll be honest with you, a lot of these businesses, they just need somebody to come in and do it for just come in. Hey, I tried to learn it. It overwhelmed me. Hey, I tried to do it. It didn’t work. Right. They need they need people to come in and just do a form. So if that’s you and when you listen to this podcast, it just resonates with you more strongly. I’m speaking your language than what I want you to do is go to automationbridge.com/asp asp for automation service providers. So automationbridge.com/asp and take the next steps to talk to someone on my team or myself to assess if you will be a good fit for for any of our current program offerings, specifically the automation service provider program. OK, also also we’re accepting guests for the podcast, everybody. So if you’re a SaaS founder like even and you have marketing our sales software, we would love to discuss your new software as well as your journey to creating it.

Chris Davis: [00:57:05] You know, we marketing automation professionals can never have enough insight on the tools available because there are people using all of them. And again, we need to be able to defend why we recommend this one, why we use this one, why we do not. OK, also, if you’re a marketing automation consultant experiencing success with your clients and you like to share with this collective audience, go to automationbridge.com both If you’re a founder or a marketing automation consultant, go to automationbridge.com/guest to submit your information and get on the schedule to be one of our next guest on the podcast. All right, listen, everybody, the time is now and the need has never been greater, OK? I’m seeing it with my own eyes and serving it with my own hands. It is time to help the small businesses and enterprises truly leverage the power of automation to grow their business in a way that’s repeatable, scalable and reliable. All right. So all the show, notes and podcast are accessible by automationbridge.com/podcast. You can subscribe there and listen to all the other episodes at your leisure. So until next time I see you online automate responsibly my friends.