AP 0351: How Do I Interact with People on My Sales Page?

AskPat 351 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 351 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have another great question today from Pim.

All right, here's today's question from Pim.

Pim: Hey, Pat, my name is Pim Stickter, and I'm from the Netherlands. My question today is, how can you interact with people that land on your sales page? Is there a plugin, a software, or a way so you can ask them questions to figure out why my sales space is not converting yet. This is the situation I'm in. One year ago, I did everything everybody's telling. I validated my ID. Got my first nine customers without having a product or service or a website or whatsoever. My product is a multi-recipe ebook, and I sold that to nine girls between in their 20s and 30s. It got me real money on my bank account, and I bought the hosting and domain name from it. Created my first WordPress website. Created an ebook. Created the sales space with OptimizePress Plugin 2.0. Bought some Facebook ads directly targeted to my audience. I got 300 visits, now, from those ads, but nobody seems to buy the product, and I don't know why. I think I did a really great job on it, so there must be something wrong. I'd love to interact with the audience that is not buying yet. Hopefully, you could answer this, or it could help me and other people, as well. I love what you're doing. Keep on doing that, and hope to hear from you soon. Bye-bye.

Pat Flynn: Pim, thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. Now, there's a few sub-questions here within this overall arching question of why is your sales pitch not converting. We can go into some strategies in order to help you dig deep and figure out why.

The first question you actually asked was, is there any way to interact with your audience? It's gonna be difficult to interact with your audience who are live on your sales pages if you're trying to figure out why they're not buying. The best thing to do is ask your audience, perhaps track people. Track people who have either subscribed to a list and didn't buy. After a certain call to action, you can email those people, you could survey those people later. That way you can get clear answers from people who had been on your page and ask them, “Why didn't you buy?” That's a legit thing to do, as long as you know that those people visited your page. It's tough to do this live while they're on the page. There is a tool you can use to interact live with your audience, as well, which a lot of people use as a selling tool. When people are on your site, they're obviously somewhat interested. When you can get on a chat with them, you can use the chat feature to sell. A lot of times, that helps makes people feel a little bit better, because they know there's a real live person on the other end. Their questions get answered, in which case, they'd be more likely to purchase. There's a tool out there that I know a lot of people use called Olark.com. O-L-A-R-K. There's a number of other different live chat features, but what happens is if you are a potential customer, you come to a website that uses Olark and there's a little feature on the bottom right-hand side. A little tab that may pop up and have a little message like, “Hey, welcome to the site. If you have any questions about Topic X,” or whatever. Or, it might be a tab that people can click on to ask a question if they have one. Again, that resource is Olark.com. O-L-A-R-K.com.

Now, 300 people visiting your sales page and not having one convert, I think you need to do a little bit more testing. Not to say that you can't start to dig deep and figure to why people aren't converting, because obviously, you'd want some people within a visitor range of 300 to convert. If there are no conversions, you know that it's not working very well. It's also a small sample size, especially if you've just run one campaign. You mentioned a little bit about your target audience in terms of the gender and ages, but there's a lot more to goes into a target audience. What are their interests? What do they need help with? What do they … All those sorts of things. Where are they located? That's another thing that I'm not sure if you're doing yet. Are you locating influencers, for example, who have a number of people in your target audience already? You said this was a recipe/food guide, I believe? An ebook? Which is great, and those sell very well, if they are marketed properly, of course. But, also if they're targeting the right target niche. For example, I know a lot of recipe guides who are killing it with Paleo recipe guides, or there's the vegan recipe guides, or there's ones that are specific for Crock Pots. Using specific tools in cooking. Those women are actually doing a really great job. The Crock Pot women. I don't remember their website exactly, but they're crushing it because they have a specific spin and angle that a lot of people talk about and a lot of people share via word of mouth. Also, it's pretty clever, and the positioning within the recipe world has done really well for them, and I would hope that yours is doing it, too. I don't know, because you didn't mention what your food ebook/recipe book was all about. When you niche down it's a lot easier to pitch. It's a lot easier to get … Not just pitch to your potential customers, but pitch to another influencer who could then share your product with their audience, as well. So, that's another thing.

With the customers you do have, again, you validated the idea. How did you validate those ideas? How did you get nine customers? That's what my question is. Were they people that you knew already? Were they people that you did ads for? Were they people that you … I don't know, I don't know. Whoever they are, reach out to them. If possible, get on a Skype call or phone call with them and offer to … Chat with them for a little bit. Say it would be very helpful for the future of your book and what you'd like to do with it, cause you just have a few questions about who they are and what they like about the book. Also, you can ask them during that conversation, “What was it about the book that made you want to get it? What made you actually pull out your credit card and want to buy it?” That type of thing would be really helpful to understand, because then you would know. Then, you can make sure to do that or find people who are like that. Again, it's not just the age range and not just the gender. Those things are important, but now audience type is more than just an age and a gender. It's likes, dislikes. What are they going through, what are their biggest problems? Finding out where those kinds of people hang out together. Not just on Facebook, but like I said, in other spaces online. Forums. Who are those influencers? Look at podcasts. Try to become a guest on those podcasts who have that particular audience. There's a lot of things you can do.

Again, getting down to converting sales, the best thing you could you do is try to see exactly what those people are doing. Because, yes, you can have a conversation and they could say one thing, but they might act another way. You want to see what people are doing. How do you do that? There's a few ways to do it. There is a tool called CrazyEgg.com. Crazy Egg .com, spelled just like it sounds. That tool will give you a number of various tools. Confetti maps, heat maps and stuff to see what people are clicking on. What parts of the page people are on the most. Those types of things are very important. You may also want to check out something called ClickTale C-L-I-C-K-T-A-L-E. Tale, as in story. What it does is it helps you understand exactly how your audience is on that page, because it actually records them anonymously. You actually see the mouse and where it goes, and you see how and where on the page they scroll. You're able to validate whether or not they're actually going to the places you want them to go to. There's a lot of components of a sales page that matter in terms of sales.

I hope that you're also split testing. You're split testing the headline. You're split testing perhaps even the pricing. You're split testing even the copy around the buttons and the call to actions and all those sorts of things. It's really interesting. This is a really interesting question, because … To answer the question, why is your sales page not converting, it could be one of several types of things. Only a few things are going to actually give you the truth. That is talking to the people who have purchased. If possible, talking to the people who have not. Although, I don't believe that it's going to be very easy to track the people, unless you're doing some retargeting or things like that. At the same time, you also have the ability, using these different tools, to see how people are using that sales page.

One thing I would recommend, is perhaps not sending people directly from Facebook to a sales page, which can get pretty expensive. Sending people directly to a webinar registration where they can first build that relationship with you first. That's really what has been working lately is not going to the cold sale, because they're buying from somebody who they don't know yet. But, first getting to know that person. You could still use Facebook, and yes, it'll first be a cold relationship at first, until you warm them up in an email sequence or you warm them up in a webinar. Then, you pitch your ebook. Your conversions will be much higher. Obviously, you can't get any lower than zero.

Again, you want to test these things and see how they work out. That's where I would recommend going and trying the idea of building a relationship first and proving what it is that you have to offer. Even sharing a little bit of your book first. Giving away a little bit for free. A lot of great value, which would blow people away and want them to get more. That's how I would recommend going about it, Pim.

If anybody else out there has any suggestions or ideas for Pim, use the hashtag #AskPat351. We can all follow along on Twitter. You can leave your suggestions for Pim there. Again, #AskPat351. Pim, I hope that answers your question. Gave you a couple tools to check out. First tool that we mentioned was Olark for live chat. The next one was CrazyEgg for seeing how people use the page and getting a lot of great data around that. You could see heat maps. For example, the red areas are the people that people are on the most, or this is what they're clicking most, and here's what's cold and blue and what people aren't seeing yet. Then, there's also the other tool that I mentioned called ClickTale.com. Click T-A-L-E.com.

Hopefully that helps, Pim. Thank you so much. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way. You'll get an email from my assistant in the next couple weeks to collect your information so we can send that over to you wherever you're at.

I'd like to end with a quote today from Seth Godin. He says, “People rarely buy what they need. They buy what they want.” Mmm. So, on that sales page, you gotta really make sure that what you have to offer is exactly what they want. Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Thanks, guys.