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Video Highlights:
00:04 – Concentrating on a smaller section of your business
01:04 – Setting up your conversion testing
02:11 – Recurring subscriptions are like getting paid to be in contact with your best customers
02:57 – Having multiple customers
03:11 – Automating a welcome message using video
04:01 – A great player for private videos is Wistia
04:32 – Dividing your database into relevant clusters
04:51 – Segmenting your communication with your customers
Transcription:
James Schramko here with a business news update.
My advice this week is to concentrate on a smaller section of your business and go deeper into that business. That’s where you get the real victory when it comes to profit. I see people going too broad, they’re all over the place, going very shallow into their business, and they’re never really getting to the real stuff that makes the money, which is the testing, the tracking, the conversions, the sales copy, the follow-up sequence. And you can really only do that when you go deeper into one part of your business.
This was the secret to my business when I really accelerated that first growth phase. It was just concentrating on one product, and even one market of one product, and just going as deep as I possibly could, and I was able to tick all the boxes. And once I had that in place I was able to do the next one. So go deep, and tick all the boxes on one product or one service for the next week and tell me how you go.
The importance of testing
In line with that, the first thing you should do after you get your new product or service set up, is set up your conversion testing. Even if that is sending out fliers to the marketplace, at least have two different fliers so that you can test one against the other. If you have a website, test one offer versus another offer.
If you have a telephone sales script, then have two telephone sales scripts, and have your people test one versus the other. If you’re using any sort of automated follow-up, try different versions of a video. For one of the tests that I’m running right now, I actually run a fourteen minute video versus a one and a half minute video, and the results are actually very surprising.
The one and a half minute video is out-converting the fourteen minute video, so I think people have short attention spans, and the goal is to deliver your entire message in the shortest possible timeframe. Whatever you’re doing, have two versions that you can test against each other, and quickly get data. Traditionally, this is called an A:B split test, and you can apply it to most parts of your business.
Here’s a new look on recurring subscriptions.
I’ve often talked about the power of having a recurring subscription, which is where you get paid every single month, or possibly every single year or every quarter, whatever your billing cycle is. You sell once, get paid over and over again, and that’s great, but the other aspect of recurring subscriptions that is so cool, it’s like you’re getting paid to do CRM. CRM stands for customer relationship management. But you’re actually getting paid to be in contact with your very best customers each week, month, quarter or year.
So that’s why I think subscription programs are essential in just about every business. Get paid to be in contact with your very best customers often, and you’ll find it so much easier to keep that lifetime customer.
Remember to get multiple customers.
I’m still hearing stories of people who had just one customer, or two big customers and those customers leave them, causing them to come up short. You need multiple customers to protect your business.
Here’s a handy way to use video for any sort of business, even if it’s offline.
Automate yourself. You can and clone, as Joe Polish would say, but record yourself on video and send a welcome message. This is like a take on the free recorded call system, but you can make a welcome video and you can send every single person who makes a purchase with your business to the welcome video to let them know that you do care, tell them how they could contact support if they need help, and also outline the next part of the experience that’s coming to them so they can get it.
I do this on my online memberships. When people order, they get sent to a welcome video where I explain what they’ve purchased and how to get the best value from it, and they also get to hear from me and get a feel for how I feel about them joining my community. So use recorded videos.
A great player for using that is Wistia. It’s like a private version of YouTube, and you can see website-viewing statistics, who’s actually watching it, you can even out an email address if you have a sophisticated system, so you can see which customers have watched your welcome video. It’s great data to have, and I highly recommend Wistia for that purpose. Plus it’ll play on any device, and it streams fast. It couldn’t be easier to upload, you just upload any raw video and it will encode it for you.
My final tip today is about segmenting.
Once you have a database, it’s important to divide that database into clusters of free versus paid, or high-value customers versus pain-in-the-butt customers (hopefully you don’t have too many of those) but you want to segment. But beyond that, you also want to segment your communication, which is about having the right message, via the right medium, to the right market, at the right time. Okay, so you want to actually corral off your customers into little groups, so you can have just the right message for them.
Send it through the right medium. That could be an email, it could be a telephone call, it could be a video, it could be an audio, but send the right medium. And make sure the message is relevant to them.
It has to be the most relevant message possible to their phase in the cycle – are they a prospect? Are they a buyer? Are they a repeat buyer? Is it a follow-up for something they’ve purchased? Is it a follow-up to ask them to purchase something?
And then send it at the right time. So make sure that the timing is just right for that message. When you get your segmentation and your communication just right, you will have a fantastic business. You don’t need many customers to have a great business.
I hope these tips have been helpful. I look forward to catching up with you next week.
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Be sure to leave a comment right below.
Great video! I need to work on segmentation and adding the welcome video too!! Need to get these off my to do list asap!! Thanks for the reminder!! :) Julz
Hey James,
Great stuff. I take all your updates and whiteboard them immediately. Then on to a mind map for further review.
Keep it coming, feel a bit guilty getting all these hot tips and not paying for it. OK, not really.
Thanks,
Alan
I totally agree – conversion tracking and split testing everything is so important.
We tried long video versus short video and found that although the short video converted better on the front end (to lead opt-in) – our sales conversion rate on the phone went down.
So, I agree, James, that conversion tracking is important but it’s important to test conversion rate end-to-end too :)
Test everything.
always test the end result you are chasing – agreed. The same can be said for opt-ins versus buyers. I prefer buyers.
When I originally commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each time a comment is
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Appreciate it!
Most of those emails have an unsubscribe link. You should be able to unsubscribe fairly easily.