This episode features a conversation with Eric Melchor, the Personalization Ambassador at OptiMonk, and host of the Innovators can Laugh podcast.
We discuss why Popups are one of the best ways to generate leads and sales for your ecommerce store.
On the Show Today You’ll Learn:
Eric Melchor is the Personalization Ambassador at OptiMonk and host of the Innovators can Laugh podcast. After overseeing online marketing programs for major companies in Texas, Eric moved to Eastern Europe and started working in SaaS. Since then he has worked for customer personalization-obsessed startups like Bonjoro and OptiMonk and is currently providing mentoring for SaaS companies who are starting Partnership marketing channels or want to create fun personalized shopping experiences with ease.
Links & Resources
Website: https://www.optimonk.com/
Shopify App store: https://apps.shopify.com/optimonk/
Continue the Conversation
In our ECOM MERCHANT PRO community, you can connect with our podcast guests and continue the conversation.
Our community is also a great place to get advice from other Shopify merchants who have achieved what you are aiming for.
This is your safe place to actively grow your online retail business with the support of the most amazing and helpful group of ecommerce entrepreneurs behind you.
Join the Ecom Merchant Pro Community! Podcast listeners get 50% off for life with the coupon: EMPC
Join here: https://www.clauslauter.com/ecom-merchant-pro/
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Every Thursday in your inbox. 100% free. Sign up at https://newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com
This episode features a conversation with Eric Melchor, the Personalization Ambassador at OptiMonk, and host of the Innovators can Laugh podcast.
We discuss why Popups are one of the best ways to generate leads and sales for your ecommerce store.
On the Show Today You’ll Learn:
Eric Melchor is the Personalization Ambassador at OptiMonk and host of the Innovators can Laugh podcast. After overseeing online marketing programs for major companies in Texas, Eric moved to Eastern Europe and started working in SaaS. Since then he has worked for customer personalization-obsessed startups like Bonjoro and OptiMonk and is currently providing mentoring for SaaS companies who are starting Partnership marketing channels or want to create fun personalized shopping experiences with ease.
Links & Resources
Website: https://www.optimonk.com/
Shopify App store: https://apps.shopify.com/optimonk/
Continue the Conversation
In our ECOM MERCHANT PRO community, you can connect with our podcast guests and continue the conversation.
Our community is also a great place to get advice from other Shopify merchants who have achieved what you are aiming for.
This is your safe place to actively grow your online retail business with the support of the most amazing and helpful group of ecommerce entrepreneurs behind you.
Join the Ecom Merchant Pro Community! Podcast listeners get 50% off for life with the coupon: EMPC
Join here: https://www.clauslauter.com/ecom-merchant-pro/
Subscribe & Listen Everywhere:
Listen On: clauslauter.com | Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Amazon Music/Audible | Stitcher | Deezer | Google Podcast
Become a smarter Shopify merchant in just 7 minutes per week
Our free newsletter is read by 6,402 busy online sellers, marketers, and DTC brands building successful businesses with Shopify. We scour and curate content from 50+ sources, saving you hours of research and helping you stay on top of your ecommerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends.
Every Thursday in your inbox. 100% free. Sign up at https://newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com
Claus Lauter: Welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee break. Today we wanna talk about conversion rate optimization. Now you want to think about conversion rate optimization when it comes to cut, but obviously there are more points in the customer journey when it comes to optimizing your conversions. One of the part is generating leads, electing email addresses on all of this.
So one way to do this is. Our popups, they are the best way to generate leads on sales for your eCommerce store. However, the success of your popup depends on converting visitors using relevant content and compelling call to actions.
Commerce Coffee break. Today we wanna talk about conversion rate optimization. Now you want to think about conversion rate optimization when it comes to cut, but obviously there are more points in the customer journey when it comes to optimizing your conversions. One of the part is generating leads, electing email addresses on all of this.
So one way to do this is. Our popups, they are the best way to generate leads on sales for your eCommerce store. However, the success of your popup depends on converting visitors using relevant content and compelling call to actions.
As an expert today on the show, I have Eric Melchor with me. He's the Personalization Ambassador at OptiMonk and host of the Innovators can Laugh podcast.
After all, overseeing online marketing programs for major companies in. Eric moved to Eastern Europe and started working in SaaS. Since then, he has worked for customer personalization, obsessed startups like Bon and Optimum, and is currently providing mentoring for SaaS companies who are starting partnerships, marketing channels, and want to create fun personalized shopping experiences with ease.
Hi, Eric. How are you
Eric Melchor: today? I'm pretty good class. Thanks for having me here on the show.
Claus Lauter: Eric, give me a little bit of a background. What got you into conversion rate optimization? What got you in this whole e-commerce?
Eric Melchor: when I think about cro, I also think about cvo, which is customer value optimization.
And to me that really means personalizing the user experience, for your audience, for your visitors, for your customers. I initially got into personalization with Barner, which is a, , personalized video email platform that makes it very easy to send personal videos. To your audience. And then I was very impressed with the Optimum platform [00:02:00] because they're able to offer personalized shopping experience, , for anybody that comes to your website, even if you don't really have that much data on them, even if they're an organic visitor, , or they came in through a social media channel and you just don't have information about them, but you can still offer real time personalized experiences with their.
Okay.
Claus Lauter: Now when it comes to conversion rate optimization, there's a lot of misconceptions around that topic. Give me a bit of an overview of what you see most often.
Eric Melchor: , when I think about cro, I think about short term thinking, and I think, , marketers are out there for the quick wins. Quick wins are like, hurry up and try to get that email subscription, , so you can get that email address and start marketing to 'em with email marketing campaigns or trying to create this sense of urgency, like, Hey, buy now.
Order Now, shop Now you've got maybe one hour left for this otherwise this special is gonna go away. So they try to get you to pull out your wallet and, make that, purchase, very quick. Or another bad example is, , using a paid media ad. And when you click on that ad, thinking that you're actually gonna see landing page, , about the ad that you clicked on, [00:03:00] you clicked on, it has nothing to.
With that ad, and those are just a few types of bad experiences. And then of course, Klaus, of course, when you go to a new website and within a few seconds you see the popup asking you to subscribe for the newsletter or, enter your email address for a 10% discount. , that one just is very annoying.
, what's an annoying one for you, Klaus? For a bad experience here,
Claus Lauter: it's exactly the one that you just mentioned, the one that pops up immediately. So it doesn't give me any time to figure out on which side I am, so it is just right into my face. Sometimes I see sites that have like two or three popups overlaying, so they're using different apps and they're all firing a popup.
And then obviously this sort of boring thing with the 5%, 10%, 50% discount. So store owners do not put really any thought in there, and then they're complaining that their margin is too low because they have to. Many discount codes out there. So I think that's where a lot of people end up in their thinking process.
They're quite right on that one. So how can you solve that
Eric Melchor: problem? Yeah, those are definitely some bad experiences. I associate [00:04:00] all of those experiences with conversion rate optimization. , what we're trying to do is, Trying to tell brands, take the long term approach like Amazon does, right? Think of the entire customer experience.
Think of customer lifetime value. Think about educating and helping customers at every step of the journey. And so don't be so quick to rush and try and make that conversion instead. Try to help. Visitors in your audience and even, returning customers, , at every step of the journey. So I wanna share a couple of examples of what you can do.
, the first example is, building that email list. Now why is that so important? Because a returning visitor or a multi-session visitor usually converts and spends at about two to three times the amount of a first time visitor. . So how do you get that person to come back? Well, obviously all the marketers out there, they use that popup message that you talked about earlier where it's like, sign up here, we'll give you a, , 10 or 5% discount and just give us your email address.
? Here's an example, ? That conversion rate, if you're just asking for email address to give a [00:05:00] 10% discount or whatever percent discount, will probably get you about a three to 4% rate. This method will easily triple that, and so this method is called a conversational popup, it's basically goes like this, Hey there, how about 10% off your next purchase?
And we'll give you a red wine recommendation. Now, this example was specifically for, let's say you're selling wine, but you can use this for anything, ? So you're a first time visitor. You go to this online retailer, they sell wine. , you navigate to a page that's about red wines. Maybe it's about Cabernets or Merlots or something.
And then after you've been on the site for a little while, ? Maybe at least 30 seconds, you're on this. , you see a little message that just says, Hey, welcome. , which region do you like your red wines from? ? And give them a choice or choices, Argentina, Portugal, France, South Africa, the us And once they click on that region, you can now offer them a discount code and ask if they would like to receive news and offers about red wines in that [00:06:00] specific region.
And if they would like to, they can just enter their email address. What you've done here is that not only have you tripled your conversion rates, because that's what we're seeing when we look at the data and we ask our clients, you know, what kind of results are they experiencing? But now you're able to segment that data into your email marketing strategy, which means those people, because of segmentation, they're more likely to open their.
They're more likely to engage with them, and they're more likely to come back to your site make a purchase. Again, you can use other examples. Maybe you're in the health and fitness area and you can have a little welcome message that says, Hey, are you here? Are you trying to gain more muscle or lose weight?
Or maybe sleep better? And then once they answer, then you can say, great. Would you like content and offers around that specific, , thing that they clicked? , once they enter their email address, of course you can segment them and then begin personalizing their email communication after they leave your site.
That's just one easy example of how you can triple your email [00:07:00] subscription rates and get more people to come back to visit your brand.
Claus Lauter: Optim Monk is one of the leaders in the market and has tons of data. So I wanna know , from your side a little bit more about when is the right moment to show a pop.
Obviously there's different ways to do that. , so for a certain page when it's the right moment and where in the customer journey can you gimme some
Eric Melchor: examples there? Yeah. It really depends on what the goal is. I mean, for a conversational popup, we recommend that, they spend at least 30 seconds and that they've at least clicked on something, , to give you an idea of how we can further personalize that experience.
So in the case of the Red wine, they were on the site and then they clicked to a page that was about red wine. But you can do the same thing if they click to a page that was about white wines, and I'll ask 'em, where do you like your white wines from and showcase countries there. , if you just have a regular strategy right now where you just have a regular popup you're showing the popup after 30 seconds, recommend.
Experimenting and instead of showing up, popup, use an exit and 10 popup and show a popup when the person is trying to leave the website. [00:08:00] You'll typically, , double your conversion rates if you use an exit and 10 popup, as opposed to just a generic popup trying to get somebody's email address.
Claus Lauter: When it comes to different devices, talking about desktop, mobile devices, , what's your experience there?
How do you handle popups, for a, , mobile
Eric Melchor: phone? We have a lot of clients they have mobile friendly websites, , but a lot of it really is dependent on the browser. mean, We're seeing excellent rates across mobile and desktop and iPad. , but the browsers where it's a little bit different and the reason why it's a little bit different is because of the cookie settings.
If somebody goes to Opti Monk and then leaves, but they're on Chrome, , there's a good chance that we're still able to track them through Chrome and we're able to personalize that experience for at least 30 days. But if they're using, , a browser like Safari, then maybe instead of 30 days, it's only seven days.
, so it's really the browser more so than the device
Claus Lauter: Okay. Now email addresses is one thing. , some people wanna grow their SMS list and do mobile marketing through text messages. Is that something that you guys
Eric Melchor: support as well? Absolutely. [00:09:00] There's been influencers and bloggers, , that are written about, , this method of collecting both the email address and text message.
In fact, I think they even coined the term called the Trojan Horse. It's a method. If you just go to YouTube and type in Trojan Horse, and you can see this example. Just kind of give you a quick overview is after you get somebody's email address, let's say you're doing a conversational popup, then you can actually do another incentive like, Hey, would you like to increase that discount offer from 10% to 20%?
If yes, then give us , your phone number and, , now you have a 20% discount offer as opposed to just a 10% offer. And so, The rates work really, really well. Obviously, if a person is there and is purchased ready, they want that 20% discount. They're gonna leave their phone number.
Claus Lauter: Yeah, I think a very important point that you said that you should have a two step process. People are obviously, very concerned about their data privacy, so once they have given you an email address, then the likelihood that they give you the, phone number for SMS marketing is higher. See, a lot of popups, they asking you straight in your [00:10:00] face for the phone number, and I think they will have very, very low conversion rates on that because there's just not any trust build at that point.
Eric Melchor: . Absolutely. You, said something, Important there is. Once they gave you their email address, they're more likely to give you their phone number. And we call that a micro engagement. And so what we're advising is before you even ask for the email, make them do a micro engagement.
And that's by answering the question again, like the red wine, , what location do you like, your red wines from? If you're a health and fitness, store, are you here to lose weight or build muscle or sleep better? Have them do that little micro engagement. That's not asking for anything in return.
All you're asking for is basically information, and it's valuable information because once you have that, you can start segmenting them and start personalizing , their experience on their website and also start personalizing their experience through email marketing. And once they make that micro engagement, they're more like, To give you their email address if they feel like they're getting value out of it.
So, good point there. Claus. , I do wanna talk real quickly about global e-commerce. , it's a trend [00:11:00] that we saw, , spike during Covid, , 5.5 trillion in 2022. This is expected to grow considerably over the next few years. One of the clients that uses Optima, they do something quite fascinat.
They're called Woodhouse Clothing. , if you visit their website, they're a US retailer. And if you visit their website from abroad, let's say you're in South Africa, , you go to their website and they'll likely have a little welcome message that says, welcome, South Africa. And if, they're gonna share with you their shipping information in that little welcome message and they say, Hey, we shipped to South Africa.
Whatever the local currency is are free. , all the taxes, any of the other charges already included, and the total price. And so once you see that, it establishes , this trust, this reassurance that, Hey, I can shop from this brand. I'm not gonna waste my time here only to get to the checkout page and realize, oh, I don't really understand their shipping information or their terms and conditions you get.
Right up front immediately. You feel reassured knowing [00:12:00] that, oh wow, they delivered to my location, so this is pretty cool. Let me, continue shopping. That's one of the little features that anybody who is, , selling globally to international, , visitors and customers should I highly recommend is just a a great way to, , reassure, global visitors that are coming to your
Claus Lauter: site.
Yeah, I really like that example. Obviously personalization, customization. For that specific shopper is very important. Now, question here from my side is Optimum, provides these dynamic popups. What kind of data can you pull and from where can you pull this
Eric Melchor: data? Yeah. Without knowing anything about them, you can pull from their ip, , location.
You can even have like a little nano bar message at the bottom that doesn't interrupt their experience. But if they're coming from Germany, for example, you could say, welcome from Germany, welcome Germany, and have like the little German flag there and let them know, in a very subtle way, like we ship to Germany, The IP will pull the location. , you can also pull by channel. if you're getting visitors, let's say from Instagram or maybe Facebook, , or even Twitter, you can actually have a little message that says, oh, you know, we love Instagram. Here's, a 10% offer just for you.
Or you can [00:13:00] just even use it via a survey. , we love visitors from Instagram. What are you looking for? And the reason why I bring that. Is because personalization, it may seem like, oh, this is a nice to have. But really it's about serving specific content to different segments. And one of the segments you wanna look at are those that are low performing.
So if you go into your GA account, Google Analytics, and look for segments or basically traffic by source and by channel. See which ones that have the lowest conversion rates or the highest bounce rates. Those are the ones that you need to look why are they leaving my site and not sticking around?
Maybe it's a segment that's coming from your Instagram, your Instagram followers. so instead of just, trying to get them to sign up for, a 10% discount, maybe you wanna ask them, , Hey, we love it that you're here. Can you tell us what are you looking for? And once you start looking at the segments that are low performing and trying to get feedback from them, and once you have that feedback, Then you can make changes to your website and, , start improving your conversion rates and improving those high balance rates as well.
Good point that you're
Claus Lauter: [00:14:00] touching on there. Homework before you start implementing a system like Optimum is quite important. just gave one example there on what you can look into Google Analytics and find out. Is there other parts or other bits and pieces of homework which someone should think about before they're starting working with a popup system?
I
Eric Melchor: think so. I think they should look at other brands out there who had success with the ultimate platform. , and that will give them ideas, , on what they should really kind of focus on. wanna use the Blend jet example there, a Shopify store. Founded in 2017. By the end of 2018, it was one of the most successful shop buy stores out there.
Over half a million customers. It was featured on the Ellen Show, but how did they get so successful? And there were some of the things that they did, very smart marketing activities they did using Opti Month. one of the things they implemented was They saved card abandon. So they had a little popup that appeared if somebody had filled out the card, but they hadn't made a purchase within a certain amount of time.
That alone by offering like a quick 10% discount and encouraging them to return whenever they were ready to make a [00:15:00] purchase, , they got like 15,000 email subscribers within a short amount of time. That was just one tactic. Another thing they implemented was this little nano bar. , it was displayed at the bottom of , the website.
you're scrolling, you would see it there. It wasn't really too intrusive, but it was great. If you signed up, you got like a 10% discount code that you can use whenever you were ready, and they got like 20,000 email subscribers within just four months. And then one thing I highly recommend, and not many advertisers do this, but if you're spending money on Facebook ads or Google paid media, One of the things they did is they changed, , the headlines of the landing page and to mimic the copy that was on the paid media ad.
they did that through using, , UTM campaigns, utm , segmentation that was in the ad itself. They brought that over to Alti month. They didn't have to create many different landing pages. They were able to just use their utm , coding. And, , so if a person clicked on an. That was about Blend Jet's portability.
The headline was around the portability, , benefits. But if it was around the self-cleaning feature, [00:16:00] then the headline of the landing page talked about the self-cleaning feature. , if it was about USB rechargeable, then the headline talked about the US , how easy it was to charge, and that was something that they did had.
It increased that convergence by almost 40%. , just doing that one little trick there. , that's very easy to do within the platform. Yeah, it's
Claus Lauter: a great tip. , I have used that in the past, and it's around , for many, many years. Very few people know about it. , do your homework if you're going for keyboards.
, just the tip there is don't use competitor s that will show up on your website .
Eric Melchor: That's a pretty good.
Claus Lauter: But other than that is a really good tip. Now, optimum obviously is available for Shopify as an app, and , I reckon you integrate in a lot of other, , apps. Is that right?
Eric Melchor: commerce, WordPress, , active campaign mochi? We have over a hundred direct integrations. , including Shopify, Shopify Plus. , , we're almost everywhere.
Claus Lauter: Cool. Before we come to the end of our coffee break today, just tell me a little bit about the pricing.
How does that work? Yeah. We have a
Eric Melchor: free plan, so you can try it out for, a couple of weeks. And, , it doesn't matter how small you are, I always recommend that, hey, if you're getting less than 5,000 [00:17:00] visitors, probably just wanna ask a simple question like, Hey, were you able to find what you were looking for?
? But if you're getting more than 5,000 visitors to your site a month, then that's when the platform Can actually improve your conversions, improve your email subscription rates, improve your, less card abandoners. That's when you should really start thinking about a personalization platform, so that way you're getting the best ROI for your marketing spend.
But we do have, three different, models. , it really depends on the amount of traffic, if you're getting a lot more traffic, then you go to the medium tier, and then of course, if you're getting a substantial amount of traffic, you go into the higher tier. , the last thing I would like to say, Claus, is that I have two words OPT and those two words are no code. Very simple to use. Design for marketers. A lot of drag and drop functionality. I don't have a technical background. I know how to use it and if I can use it, I'm pretty sure any other market out there can use it as well. Yeah,
Claus Lauter: that will be a too for.
lot of Shopify merchants that are small and medium businesses where a solopreneur or small teams that they don't need to outsource to implement. Cool. Where can people find out more about
Eric Melchor: Optimum? Yeah, I go to optimum.com o [00:18:00] pt i O k.com. If you're interested in worrying about personalization, we have a guide of personalization.
It's a really cool, I think it lists like 30 different examples of the various personalization tactics that you can implement with Optim month. , so check that out. If you just go to our website, See a link to it as well. Cool.
Claus Lauter: I will put the link in the show notes as always. Then you just one click away.
Eric, thanks so much for your time. I think that was a very good overview of what you can do and that popups are not really a boring thing and can contribute a lot to the results and, , success of your store. Thanks so much. Thank you Class.