Since the beginning of the web, the promise of business websites has been that they are like 24/7 salespeople. Prospects can find you at any time, get the information they need, and contact you for more.
And while it’s true that many significant fortunes have been made with content-rich sites that focus on the prospect’s informational needs, the promise still falls short. A real-world sales person can immediately adapt to the prospect’s questions, facial and body language cues, and lingering objections.
Websites can’t do that. But thanks to marketing automation and adaptive personalization, we’re getting a lot closer.
Personalization can be a confusing topic, and historically expensive. All that’s changing now, and today Brennen Dunn of Double Your Freelancing is here to lay it out for you.
Tune in to hear how to make your website into not only a great salesperson based on who’s visiting and what they need from you, but to also create an amazing customer experience prior to the purchase. This may be the most important thing for you to get a handle on in 2017.
The Show Notes
Transcript
How Website Personalization Grows Your Business Faster, with Brennan Dunn
Brennan Dunn: Hey, Everyone. My name is Brennan Dunn. I am the founder of Doubleyourfreelancing.com and the cofounder of Rightmessage.io, and I am most definitely unemployable.
Voiceover: Welcome to Unemployable, the show for people who can get a job, they’re just not inclined to take one — and that’s putting it gently. In addition to this podcast, thousands of freelancers and entrepreneurs get actionable advice and other valuable resources from the weekly Unemployable email newsletter. Join us by registering for our Free Profit Pillars Course, or choose to sign up for the newsletter only at no charge. Simply head over to Unemployable.com, and take your business and lifestyle to the next level. That’s Unemployable.com.
Brian Clark: Since the beginning of the web, the promise of business websites has been that they are like 24/7 salespeople. Prospects can find you at any time, get the information they need, and contact you for more.
And while it’s true that many significant fortunes have been made with content-rich sites that focus on the prospect’s informational needs, the promise still falls short. A real-world sales person can immediately adapt to the prospect’s questions, facial and body language cues, and lingering objections.
Websites can’t do that. But thanks to marketing automation and adaptive personalization, we’re getting a lot closer.
I’m Brian Clark and this is Unemployable, the show for fiercely independent freelancers and entrepreneurs. Today is special, because this is the 100th episode of the Unemployable Podcast. Woo-woo! Break out the champagne. Okay, maybe it’s a bit early for that. Your call. I’m still on coffee at the moment.
But I would like to ask that you help me celebrate by heading over to Unemployable.com/iTunes. Leave a rating or review of the show with Apple. Getting your feedback truly helps me keep going.
Personalization can be a confusing topic, and historically expensive. All that’s changing now, and today Brennen Dunn of Double Your Freelancing is here to lay it out for you.
Tune in to hear how to make your website into not only a great salesperson based on who’s visiting and what they need from you, but to also create an amazing customer experience prior to the purchase. This may be the most important thing for you to get a handle on in 2017.
Unemployable is brought to you by the all new FreshBooks, easy accounting software for freelancers, coaches, and consultants. You’ve simply got to try it for yourself with this special unrestricted 30-day free trial. Just go to Freshbooks.com/unemployable, and then make sure to put Unemployable in the “How Did You Hear About Us? section.
Mr. Dunn, how are things?
Brennan Dunn: I’m good. How are you, Brian?
Brian Clark: I’m doing well. I’ve been watching you lately and you are a very busy man, I think.
Brennan Dunn: It’s all an illusion. But I’ve been pretty busy lately. I’ll give you that.
What Does Personalization Mean in 2017?
Brian Clark: It’s interesting, because of course, with the impending release of RightMessage which is a tool — I’m going to let you explain it better, but it relates to website personalization. You have a great, very intensive course on using Drip, the email marketing solution for automation. And now you’re coming out with a masterclass on personalization. It all kind of relates together.
Really, what we’re talking about here is the topic of personalization. What does that mean in 2017?
Brennan Dunn: If you think about the history of how people buy things, if you’re doing anything offline, if I was going to talk to you about buying something of yours, you would take into account what you know about me and you would tailor the way you describe the product based off that.
Now the issue I have as a developer turned marketer is you log into Facebook, you log into Netflix, you log into Amazon, and they’re personalized. I’m not seeing your friends in my Facebook feed, I’m seeing my friends. I’m not seeing your movie recommendations, I’m seeing mine.
It’s obvious why that works. Because people want to be catered to. They want to know — what should I do next? What should I buy? What should I do? The issue though is I think a lot of us have treated websites as just the static things that are meant to say the same thing to everyone. Some of us have landing pages that speak to a specific audience or something like that, but for the most part, it’s kind of like a one size fits all approach.
What I’ve been trying to do is I’ve been trying to think about, “Well, if I were speaking to you offline, I would tailor what I’m saying to be based off of what I know about you. That’s not really that hard to do online, because if you think about it, at the end of the day it’s just HTML being sent to a browser.
Why can’t we do what Netflix and Amazon and Facebook and the like are doing and do something similar? Maybe we don’t have a username and password like Netflix has or Facebook has of the person viewing our site. But we can look at where they came from, what they’ve been consuming. Are they on our list or not? And if so, maybe we’ll then know info about what they’ve bought or haven’t bought.
We can take all that and we can start to make more relevant content, more relevant copy on our websites that make it so the people who are looking at a sales page truly understand how this can benefit them versus needing to read between the lines to parse out, “Well, how is this actually going to benefit me?
Brian Clark: It’s not an easy problem to solve in my experience. We’ve been working at it two or three years with Rainmaker trying to make the site adapt content-wise, design-wise, beyond mobile responsive to who that is, what do we know about them, what did they last do, what have they done historically. That’s really the gist of personalization. It seems like you’ve been working on this probably since the last time you were on the show.
Oh, by the way, I should mention you are only the second person to appear twice on Unemployable. Do you know who the first one was?
Brennan Dunn: First one, well, I was looking today at your roster of people you’ve interviewed. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say Chris Lema?
Brian Clark: It was that scoundrel, Paul Jarvis.
Brennan Dunn: Oh, Paul, okay, I got it.
Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s funny because the two of you came on my radar about the same time. You were catering to freelancers at the time, him to creative entrepreneurs. That’s what Unemployable’s about. And you really have been two of my favorite people to talk to.
But yeah, for a Canadian, he was not polite and let you go first.
Brennan Dunn: Well, I won’t get into my thoughts on Canadians.
Brian Clark: Okay. We’re going to let that slide.
Brennan Dunn: Paul’s awesome.
Brian Clark: Paul says he doesn’t play well with others, so he’s not your typical Canadian.
What Made This Your Focus in the Last Few Years?
Brian Clark: Anyway, I remember you tweeting about a whole bunch of custom code you wrote to make your site adaptive or personalized for your visitors. When I looked at that, I’m like, “That’s the issue. Not everyone can do that, because you have serious development background. And not everyone necessarily can afford it either.
That’s the problem that I think a lot of people are trying to solve and it’s beyond automation. Can you explain what made this your topic, your focus of the last at least year or two?
Brennan Dunn: I actually started in 2013. Actually, if you go to WordPressconversionfunnel.com – this is a WordPress plugin I wrote back in 2013 when I was still on Infusionsoft. Where you could basically do something like, “If we don’t know who they are, show the opt-in form. If we do know who they are, show the product pitch. And if they bought that product, show the premium product, or something like that. I’ve been doing that since then.
Then I moved off Infusionsoft to Drip in 2014. I needed to migrate to something new, so I started moving everything over. On Doubleyourfreelancing.com which is my main company, we were running into issues where we have a lot of types of freelancers using our website. We have designers, we have developers, marketers, writers, solo people, agency owners, and everything in between.
The issue we kept running into, or I should say I kept running into, was I was talking with people, I remember I got an email from an agency who was like, “There’s no way this can help me. There’s the word ‘freelancer’ all over. I was thinking, “Well, it’s just the difference in scale typically. The same rules apply when it comes to pitching and largely sales, marketing and everything else for an agency as it does for a solo person.
I realized there was a messaging issue. And I thought, “I know typically what kind of work somebody does, because my main entry point into my site asked them, “What kind of work do you do? I’m capturing this, but I wasn’t really doing anything with it.
I started thinking, “What if I just started using that data and I could do something. Like if they’re on my product page, and they’re a designer, let’s make the testimonials from other designers. Let’s make the headline be about design. Let’s change every instance of freelancer to freelance designer. I didn’t really need an AB test. I knew it would work and it did. It’s actually been probably line for line the most effective and profitable code I’ve ever written.
That’s the idea. If I were speaking to a designer in a design conference about this product I’ve got, how would I communicate it differently than if I was at a coding conference? That was the thing that really led me to think, “Okay, I’m going to get serious about this. I’m going to do a lot of surveying so I can capture raw language that these people use. I’m going to bake into my automation things that get people to fill out forms that let me associate the capture data with particular, in this case, tags within Drip.
I started collecting all of this data and I still am. And I started then using it to modify copy, modify content, modify depending on where you are in the funnel. What I’ve gotten to now is I’m at the point where my marketing automation is in complete synchronization with my website, which means there’s a continuity of messaging across the board.
Brian Clark: That’s an excellent example. It brings to mind in the old days, we had to create landing pages for each of our personas and somehow try to make sure that the right person got to the right page. With personalization, one page adapts to that persona. Is that fair to say?
Brennan Dunn: Correct. There are obviously SEO implications with that, which is why it doesn’t hurt to have these unique pages also built out. A good rule of thumb would be, let’s say that, I don’t know, like Pat Flynn refers traffic to you. You can make an assumption about the kind of traffic being referred to your website from his site.
I actually saw this once done really well, and that’s why I brought up Pat Flynn. He was promoting something, some piece of software. He does a lot of affiliate marketing. It brought me right to the checkout page of that software he was promoting, and it had a picture of him with a testimonial from him right on that checkout page. And then I just for the hell of it took the URL, I put it into an incognito browser session and it didn’t have his testimonial on it any longer.
They were obviously tracking the refer and putting Pat in. Because they knew if Pat’s sending traffic, that traffic trusts Pat, they don’t trust the site they’re on yet. It’s just the idea of: what can you change depending on where somebody is coming from, what they’ve done, what you already know about them and so on? It’s not about rewriting the whole page necessarily. I mean, you could, but oftentimes, tweaking headlines, swapping out words, changing examples, changing up testimonials – that’s usually more than enough.
How Do You Get Started in Identifying Your Various Personas?
Brian Clark: So step one, this is just basic marketing and content strategy. Who are you talking to? You have to know in the broad sense, we’re talking to freelancers, in your case. In the narrow sense, we’re talking to designers, we’re talking to people who consider themselves consultants more than freelancers. We’re talking about writers, etc., like you mentioned.
Tell us how you get started with identifying your various personas before you do anything else.
Brennan Dunn: What helped me a lot was people would come to my site and join my list or buy something. Just by adding a P.S. “Hey, I’d love to hear about what drew you here, what you’re looking for from me, and so on, and getting raw, unstructured content helped me a lot early on, because that allowed me to start to normalize out of the responses I was getting kind of these discrete segments, these different groups.
I knew some just from thinking, “What kind of freelancers are there? What kind of work do people do if they are developers and designers and marketers and so on? But the hard part for me was figuring out… I mean, demographics to me really aren’t that interesting to be honest. What I’m mostly interested in is: what is it they need from me right now and how can I segment around that?
It’s obviously helpful to know if you’re a designer or if you’re a male or a female maybe or something like that. But when I know what they want, I can then change the way I pitch the offer depending on that.
That’s where when I asked people point blank, “What are you looking for or what led you to buy? That was really helpful.
Another thing I added was I made it so if you’re on my list and you’ve visited a product page but you don’t buy, you get an email from me a bit later saying, “Hey, I’d love to hear about what brought you to the page. It looks like you didn’t buy. That’s totally cool. I’d love to hear what didn’t resonate with you.
I just started collecting this data over time and it allowed me to incrementally, and I’m nowhere near perfect, it’s still a work in progress as everything is. But I’m getting more in line with the different types of people with different types of needs that are put in front of my stuff.
How Many People Respond to Those Inquiries from You?
Brian Clark: Now let me ask you this. Do you have data on the percentage of people who respond to those inquiries after they’ve taken a certain action or what have you? And do you think a certain type of person responds to that versus another type of person?
Brennan Dunn: It’s a very good question. I bet there is more likely a certain type of person who would respond. I’m not the sort who would respond to be honest, even though I do it myself. I usually wouldn’t do that for other people. It’s kind of like the hello from the founder emails you’ll get when you sign up for a software product.
This is why it’s still something that I’m still learning about how people phrase stuff. I’ve tried to bake in as many feedback loops as possible across my entire funnel, both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative being open ended feedback. Quantitative being, “Check the boxes that apply to you.
I definitely do think there are probably a lot of people… There are probably different segments that are not the sort who would reply to an email like that. That’s why also one of the things that has been most interesting to me as a data geek has been around a more implicit segmentation.
It’s one thing for somebody to tell me, “I’m a designer, I do this, I want that. It’s another to infer based off of how they’re behaving where I think they are. Obviously, you can’t put the cart before the horse. You need to know a bit about the different kinds of segments and everything.
That’s why I think it could be as simple as just doing things, like say you have a blog with 10 different categories, track what kind of content they’re reading and what kind of category or in the different types of categories you’ve got. Then assume what I’m doing now. If they are mostly interested in marketing articles, it’s probably what they’re mostly interested in right now versus if they’re reading articles on growing an agency or pricing or proposals.
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I have no problem with survey responses. I just always warn people that’s not the totality. That’s an aspect of your dataset.
Brennan Dunn: They’re still helpful.
Brian Clark: Yeah. There’s so much more you can look at, observe behavior, which you touched on. Even behavior out in the wild and social media, you’ll start to get a composite. The art of surveying I think is more difficult than people realize.
Where Can an Entrepreneur or Freelancer Begin with Segmentation?
Brian Clark: You mentioned segmentation just a few seconds ago actually. When it comes down to it, personalization is an email segmentation practice. Would you agree?
Brennan Dunn: Yes, personalization is just… you can’t personalize without segments. So, yeah.
Brian Clark: I think people understand segmentation at the most basic level, which is you break up your list into different segments, for lack of a better term. Therefore, you’re able to more laser focus on what is appropriate for that segment. At the most basic, you have people who bought from you and people who haven’t, so you’re not sending offers for the same product to people who have bought.
That’s the same concept when a subscriber to your email newsletter visits a site, they shouldn’t see a signup form, they should see something else. Talk a little bit about how far down the segmentation rabbit hole you see the average little guy, marketer, entrepreneur or freelancer going with segmentation.
I think what I’m getting at is that people think they’re going to create this unwieldy mess that no longer makes sense to them.
Brennan Dunn: It’s a very good point. One thing that I do when people join the RightMessage early access list is give them a survey where I ask them, “How do you segment currently? Most people are segmenting by customer versus non-customer. Very few — by very few, I mean less than 20% — do really anything more than that.
It’s not surprising, but in my mind, yes, you can do stuff around, “If you’re a customer do this versus that. That’s one thing. But I just think a lot of people are missing out on opportunity by not capturing more data. I mean, I track everything. I track every piece of content somebody reads on my site. I have a lot of random things that are pseudo surveys that really are… I’m capturing data, but it doesn’t look like I’m capturing it really that intentionally, that I have strewn around my site.
Like I mentioned, one of my courses, I have worksheets at the end that people fill out. Some of the data from those worksheets ends up being added to their profile. The average person on my list has between 100 and 200 tags applied to them. It might seem like overkill, but data’s cheap. And using that data is what matters.
I’ve been able to do things on two levels. One, which is where I started, was getting all that data into tools like Mixpanel. Because I track things in Mixpanel and I can then breakdown by any data point or mix of data points I want. So I was able to see, “What are the conversion rates by business type? from looking at the product page to buying. Or I was able to see things like somebody who reads an article and then does this, break that down by their intent. What is it that they’ve told me they need or purchasing based off behavioral things like the kind of content people are reading?
It’s really interesting when I started doing that, because I could see what low hanging fruit there was in terms of people that I acquire consciously more of right now versus people that I am really dropping the ball with. That’s what started these things.
But then I started thinking about, “Well, what can I do if this segment is performing really poorly? What can I do about that? Do I write them off as just being a crappy type of person who is not going to buy my stuff? Or do I take what I think is the more mature route and think: how am I losing them and what can I do to better that?
That’s where I started to do a lot of these kind of incremental and ongoing personalization adjustments, where I’m just tailoring copy and everything else. I think that’s the baseline.
The thing that frustrates me is I’m on a list, I get an email that brings me back to the site. I’m hit with exit modals asking for my email. I see these sliding things asking for my email. It’s nonstop, and they already have that. They’re not only annoying me, but they’re also wasting real estate, visual real estate that could be doing something a lot more effective.
The Importance of Headlines
Brian Clark: That is such a great point. Again, that should be as basic as customer versus not subscriber versus not – but you’re not seeing that as commonly. Hopefully, tools like RightMessage will help that. And I do want to talk about how that works in a second.
But I want to tackle another issue that I think frightens people, if that’s the right word, away from personalization, which is, “Look, I’m already creating all this content. I’ve got all this sales copy. If I go to personalization, my rate of words, content, pages, post is going to grow exponentially.
And I saw you say something, again, I don’t remember, it could have been on Twitter or one of your emails. But really, it’s the concept that a lot of old school copywriters know quite well, which is often a change in headline will boost response, maybe also the subhead, maybe tweak the lead — not major revisions.
With personalization, and I think your point was if you make that headline address that person and everything else is the same, 9 times out of 10, that’s all it takes, because that gets them going, “Okay, this is for me, and they start reading.
Brennan Dunn: You’ve hit the nail on the head. That’s the origin fear is that, “Do I need to write like 12 different versions of the same sales page? That’s the concern – “Now you’re making me exponentially create more. Especially when you deal with, let’s say you have three different types of segments and each of these segments could have three different options. I mean, you’re just making things harder.
But like you said, the thing I referenced, and that was an email I sent out, was an old article from Kathy Sierra who wrote the book Badass, which is amazing.
Brian Clark: That’s right. I remember this now, because I remember that article from way back when.
Brennan Dunn: Yeah, it was 2005, I think. The premise in it was she was doing an interactive marketing campaign for an auto company. And the very first question — it was a quiz type of thing that you’d do in a kiosk – was: “What is it you value most? Do you care about resale value, safety and a bunch of other options?
Then all they did was made it so the headlines on each of those subsequent questions would be tweaked slightly based off of that original thing, so something like “Engineered for your safety or “Engineered for maximum resale value or something like that would be on later, more downstream screens that people would see. It didn’t require them to retool the whole thing or anything like that. It could just be adding a word.
The example I like to give is… you see a lot of software companies that will have these industry specific landing pages where maybe they target 10 different industries. My argument is let’s say I go to the health care landing page. That probably means I landed on that organically. I was looking for help desk software for a healthcare and I land on this industry specific landing page.
Now let’s say I go to the pricing page. More than often, the context is lost. There’s a lack of continuity. So now I’m out of that siloed landing page and now it’s just general help desk software. All you need to do is just say on the headline for the pricing page, instead of “Pricing, “Pricing for Healthcare, “Pricing for X, whatever X is based off the original landing page that came to you first.
It doesn’t need to be completely rebooting. You could obviously do that if you want to, but you don’t need to do that to be effective.
Brian Clark: Excellent. So you’ve got to know who you’re talking to and then you need to segment them accordingly, serve them up slightly modified content or copy that speaks to them.
It’s just like your example of how would you treat someone in person if you were trying to sell them? You ask them questions, they give you responses, you tailor your responses accordingly. All we’re doing is trying to make the web a little more authentically interactive like the real world, which again was a hard problem that’s becoming much more solvable.
How Small Changes Lead to Big Results
Brian Clark: I do want to talk about once you’ve done that, and I think you’ve mentioned this a couple of times in your answers, the idea of you have to take a look at your results. It’s almost like a kaizen thing. You’re constantly making small incremental changes that after a while lead up to big results.
I just come back to the concept of overwhelmed. When I talk to people, you just see the fear in their eyes almost of, “It’s already tough enough. But if you do the work and you make these small improvements constantly, you’ve got a machine that’s really cranking for a relatively tiny business.
Brennan Dunn: I mean, it’s a perpetual thing. Bare minimum, like we talked about — don’t show opt-in forms for subscribers. So what are you going to show instead? Well, maybe a call to action for a product. What is that going to do? It’s going to make people who are already on your list see a promotion for a product that is going to hopefully drive more sales. That’s step one. And then you go on from that.
Now what I’ve done for my call to actions is I look at what they’ve been reading on my blog and I pitch the lead magnet differently depending on what they’re most engaged with. It’s kind of like if you think of content upgrades, why they work so well, it’s because the lead magnet, the offer is completely in line with the theme of the article they just read.
It’s that same concept, but applied outside of the content upgrade paradigm where instead you’re saying, “Well, if they’re really interested in this, promote this to them. You see there are plugins and such that let you do, “If they’re reading an article under this category, show them a lead magnet for that category. That obviously works. That’s a bare minimum example of personalization at play.
But what I’ve done now is if you’re reading a bunch of content on proposals on my site and then you go to the homepage, the hero call to action is about proposals. Again, if you think of each page on your site as having a job description or a role, how can you make sure it’s a very streamlined start to finish messaging experience that somebody has?
That’s my big issue with these siloed landing pages. Once you leave that silo, it’s gone usually. I think the more we can do to incrementally… It doesn’t need to be this overwhelming thing that you’re going to dedicate an entire month of doing nothing but this, and sure you could do that. But just by starting small where you treat it like you would an AB test or something like that.
The benefit of this is unlike an AB test that might not work, more than often… like no one has ever said, “Oh, I really miss the general sales copy. Everyone always wants specific done for them. They want to buy a product built just for them.
The issue is, if you’re trying to speak to everyone, what ends up happening is the buyer needs to think, “Well, how do I translate this into my specific need that I’ve got? And that’s why niche websites, niche landing pages and everything works so well. They’re a little closer to the specific need that a type of person with a type of problem has. Whereas if you’re selling something more general, you’re putting the responsibility on the potential buyer to figure that out themselves, which anytime you do that you’re going to lose people.
Brian Clark: Exactly. What you’re doing is maintaining context throughout, as you mentioned, “Okay, the sales funnel looks like it’s for me. Again, going back to the multiple landing page approach. But after that, “Everything just went super general. Right when I was on the cusp of thinking this was the right thing for me, now I’m not so convinced. It’s almost like you’re losing a low hanging fruit.
Brennan Dunn: Absolutely. Yeah, you are.
Brian Clark: All right. Let’s talk a little bit specifically about RightMessage. Tell us how it will work, not at the technical level, because you are much more advanced than the rest of us. But really, how does it work? Is there a plugin for WordPress? Is it JavaScript that works with every site? Give us some insight.
Brennan Dunn: It’s a line of JavaScript that you add to any site. It’s very similar to the way a tool like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer works, in that whatever the server sends back, we’ll slightly modify it before the end user sees it.
So you add JavaScript to your site. Then what that allows you to do is once you log in, it gives you a point and click editor where I can point on a headline. Basically what you would do is you would set up a new campaign, a new personalization campaign. And you would say, “I want these conditions to trigger this campaign.
So maybe if they were referred by a certain site or they have this tag in your email marketing app or whatever. Then if any of these are true or if this comes out true, we want to make these changes. Like change the headline, change this bit of text, change this testimonial based off of that. That’s what it does. It’s all visual.
The issue is I released a course on marketing automation that included lessons on personalization. I gave away the JavaScript code in that course to buyers. And we got a lot of people, because a lot of the people now who are using Drip come from Leadpages and most of them are not technical in that sense. It’s like handing them a code base. It’s like, “What do I do with this?
We wanted a way that would allow them just to add a single line of code to their template file and then that’s it. Then they can just go in and add these campaigns.
What’s really interesting though that we’re doing with this that I haven’t done historically, and I’m really excited to see how this pans out, is this concept of smart segments. Where instead of just saying, “You are in this segment or not in this segment, we’re lead scoring somebody’s likelihood of being in a segment.
Let’s say that they came from a design blog to our website. Well, we might think that they’re a designer based off of the fact that they came from that site, but we’re not positive yet. It’s not conclusive. What we could do within RightMessage, you’d be able to do (if we think that they are between zero and 50% of being a designer) more subtly tweak the language to be like this.
But then, if they’re 50 to 100% or they’re 100% or whatever, that they’re a designer, then go a little more heavy-handed in the assumption that they are a designer. You’re able to do things as they consume content made for designers, increment that score. Or if they fill out a survey saying they’re a designer, you bump it up to 100% right then.
What’s interesting is you can have – I’m calling them “segment groups where there could be multiple… like say, a segment group could be a business type. In that, you have designer, developer, marketer, writer, and so on. There’s kind of a push-pull at play. If they are doing a lot of designer type actions, it subtracts that from everyone else’s score in that segment group. But then if they started new things that indicate they could be a developer, it now starts to siphon away from the designer segment score, if that makes sense.
We’re able to make it easy for you to say, for instance, “These are sites that are design blogs that we get traffic from. “These are reviews that are from development blogs that we get traffic from, and so on. And be able to auto classify people and intelligently raise the likelihood that they are in those segments based off of behavior both in how they came to your site, or what they’re doing on your site, and how they’re interacting with you long-term.
Basically the idea is no coding required. It’s easy enough for somebody who’s just a marketing manager to use, but powerful enough for me, a developer who is gripping on to my old code base that I’ve used for so many years and does not want to give that up. But I’ve been able to give it up, because what we’ve built is also powerful enough with my weird use cases that I’ve come up with.
Brian Clark: Fascinating stuff, and in my opinion, soon to be indispensable. I’ve been saying for a couple of years that the personalized website experience will become the norm and it will become what people expect as long as you can pull it off in a non-creepy way.
Brennan, thanks for coming on the show. I’m really looking forward to checking this out further.
Brennan Dunn: Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian Clark: All right, Everyone, I’m going to put this link in the show notes, but Brennan is about to launch a personalization masterclass that includes a free month of RightMessage. Not only will you be able to try the software for free effectively, you will learn what you need to know in more detail than we’ve done here today. I will put that in the notes so you can check it out.
Just remember, your job is to create a fantastic experience for your customers and clients. The experience starts before they hire you or buy from you. That is how really effective content marketing works. So keep that in mind.
Don’t be intimidated by this aspect of technology, because from what I just heard, it sounds like the tech is getting out of the way and the experience will be forefront.
Hang in there and keep going.