Inbound Success Podcast

Jul 8, 2019

Personalization can improve conversion rates by, on average, 10X, but only 4% of businesses say they're using it.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, RightMessage founder Shai Schechter talks about the lessons learned from his review of 500+ landing pages and calls to action and why personalizing your website copy can dramatically increase conversion rates.

Shai's process for personalizing is simple. Ask your visitor a question, and then use their answer to deliver website copy that speaks directly to their needs. The results are conversion rates 10X higher.

Sounds simple, right?

So why are so few businesses doing it?

In this week's episode, Shai shares a simple, straightforward, and easy solution that makes implementing personalization - and getting crazy good results with your conversion rates - a no brainer.

This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford, Connecticut, and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including HubSpot Co-Founder and CEO Brian Halligan, world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel.

Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS."  

Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live

Some highlights from my conversation with Shai include:

• RightMessage is conversion optimization software that helps people get more email subscribers and sell more via their websites.
• It does this by allowing the user to create a popup on their site that asks a simple question of the visitor, and then use the answer to that question to dynamically deliver personalized content on their website.
• It can be used on any type of website and is installed by simply pasting a line of javascript code into the backend of the site.
• Shai worked with more than 500 websites to test out different approaches to personalization and learned that by personalizing calls to action, he could improve conversion rates, on average, by 10x.
• There is a long list of variables that can be used to drive personalization, including both implicit and explicit data.
• The process that RightMessage uses to personalize content begins with a popup that asks the visitor a simple question. In Shai's experience, "What brings you here today?" is the question that performs the best.
• He suggests that the best way to get started with personalization is to target website visitors that have not already subscribed to your email list, and use what you know about visitors to customize the value prop on your call to action for subscribing.
• On average, Shai said that 20 to 30% of visitors answer the question in the popup, and then 20 to 30% of those who answer the question convert on the follow on offer.
• Data shows that 94% of customers think personalization is critical to the success of their business and only 4% of businesses say they're doing a lot of personalization.

Resources from this episode:

• Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS"
• Visit the RightMessage website
• Check out RightMessage.com/impact for a special offer just for Inbound Success Podcast listeners
• Follow Shai on Twitter
• Connect with Shai on LinkedIn
• Email Shai at shai@rightmessage.com 

Listen to the podcast to learn what Shai learned from analyzing more than 500 landing pages and CTAs, and how those insights have helped him 10X conversion rates.

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Shai Schechter who is the founder of RightMessage. Welcome, Shai.

Shai Schechter (Guest): Hi, thanks for having me.

Shai and Kathleen recording this episode together .

Kathleen: Yes, I'm happy to have you here. This is such an interesting case of how you came to be on the podcast and it's a first for me.

I got you as my guest via a tweet. You had tweeted out that you had learned a lot about what makes a great opt-in form and CTA and that you had worked on more than 500 websites and had seen conversion rates of up to 10X and I was literally just browsing Twitter and saw this and thought, "I need to talk to this guy." So, the power of Twitter, right?

Shai: Right. I don't know what made Twitter show it to you. Maybe we'll never know but I'm glad you saw it.

Kathleen: It's the black magic that Twitter does behind the scenes but it happened and that's all that matters. Before we get into that actual story of what you did and what you learned talk a little bit for me about your background, about what RightMessage is and what led you to start it and what the company does.

About Shai Schechter and RightMessage

Shai: Yeah, sure. RightMessage is essentially conversion optimization software. It's something that people use on their websites. It helps them get to more subscribers to their e-mail list and helps them sell more to those people.

But what it's doing differently and what's making it prove quite effective for the people using it is that it's all about kind of saying, not everyone in my audience is going to be the same so how can I segment them a little bit? How can I understand the different kinds of people coming to my site? How can I learn who's coming to my site and then use that to pitch more appropriately to them.

And so to say, not everyone who comes to my site is looking for exactly the same thing and the same copy isn't going to resonate with all of them. So maybe we can ask them a question. Maybe we can learn something about them. Maybe we already know something about them because of how they've been interacting with our site or with our company and use that to really say, "I'm not going to just blast every possible call to action at you at once. I'm going show the one thing that's relevant to you right now."

Kathleen: If I understand correctly, is it looking at information on visitors and I presume that those visitors will have been cookied in order to deliver that information? Is that accurate?

Shai: Yes, the absolute ... So we don't do any of the kind of ... We don't do the stuff that Facebook's doing where they're following you around the internet, none of that. It is literally maybe, "What are they reading on my own company's blog right now?" Or, here's a question to them like, "What brings you here today? Why have you come? How can we help?" And they give you that little bit of information and you can then help them. You can then give them a better experience because of what they've just told you.

Kathleen: Then that information is used to effectively dynamically update the information on the page?

Shai: Yeah.

Kathleen: Correct?

Shai: Absolutely.

Kathleen: Okay.

Shai: And that may just be the call to action itself. It may be ... You know, if they tell you that they're really ... If you sell courses to help people get started with business and they tell you that they are really struggling with finding out what their audience needs then right there and then let's say to them, "Here's my course that helps you with that exact thing. I've got a whole suite of e-mail courses that could help you or I've got a couple of ... there's a webinar coming up that would be perfect for you. I'm going to suggest you do that. I think that's going to help you the most right now."

Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, does it work on any website regardless of how the site is built? In other words, if my site is on WordPress versus Drupal versus custom html, can I use RightMessage regardless of platform or CMS?

Shai: Yeah, absolutely. It's like it's one line of Java script you put into your site, so pretty much any website, or landing page builder or whatever, lets you do that. We don't replace your website builder and we don't replace your e-mail list. We essentially just tie the two together and say, "Now your website can do the same kinds of things that maybe you're already with your e-mail marketing where you're sending different campaigns to different people. Now you can do that on your website or any website.

Kathleen: Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. What led you to create it?

Shai: I am a developer by craft. I'm a software person and so to me when I started ... I was consulting a few years ago and I'd had a couple of software products in the past as well. So when it came to kind of saying, "Right, I need to grow this consulting business. I need to learn how to market this business. I'm not going to rely on word of mouth any more." It wasn't for me a reliable way to grow a business and I started learning more about marketing. I started doing ... I had my website and I was learning how online marketing kind of worked and because I had this software background, to me a website was something that ...

Most websites that I dealt with had been web apps, right, where everyone sees a different experience because you log in and then you see something. I see something different on my Facebook then you see on yours, right? So I was making these marketing websites for myself and for clients and to me it was like, "Why would I put an opt-in form to join my newsletter at the bottom of a blog post to somebody who's already on my newsletter, right?"

Kathleen: Yeah, correct, 100%

Shai: Right. It's not good for me because that's a bad thing. If someone's on my newsletter the last thing I want to say to them is, "Join my newsletter." That's a wasted opportunity to say something more effective to them and it's very unfair to them. They don't want these pop-ups in their face being like, do this thing that you've already done.

To me it was really common sense to sort that out. It seemed like a very natural thing to do but I think that's because my understanding about websites is that website changes. It's different for different people.

So I started doing this stuff and marketers around me were like, "How the hell did you just do that?", right? They had no idea it was possible. When I was speaking to developers they were like, they saw it as an obvious thing to do but when I started helping marketers do this on their own sites, then developers would be like, "Why is anyone paying you money for that?" The marketers are like, "I had no idea that you could do this."

Kathleen: That's so great. I feel like some of the best ideas in the world are the things that for some people have been staring them in face forever, but for other people, it's like revolutionary, right?

Shai: Right. Yeah, it's just we're like in two separate worlds and if you can intersect them a little bit. Then a friend of mine, a man called Brennan Dunn, he's kind of come to the same realization on his own. He had kind of an educational product website. He was selling courses to help freelancers. He came from the same background as me. He also worked in software and then moved heavily into marketing and he was doing the same thing I was helping my clients doing. He was doing it on his own sites and he was also seeing these amazing results.

When someone started his on-line course, his free e-mail course, he'd ask them a question about themself and that was very easy for him to do because he's just wrote some custom java scripts on his marketing site. Then later on after they'd been through his free e-mail course he would promote his paid course using different language depending on what they had said when they started the free course. So based on why they said they wanted the free course he then pitched how the paid course could help you do that exact thing.

He was also tracking results and those kind of results we were both seeing these really high, really high conversion rates. We ended up, he was the one that kind of said, "Why are we sitting here helping marketers do this one by one. What if there was something where they could do this themselves?"

So you don't have to write any code. You can just point and click and set this up for your own sites and we can help you make it easy as possible to see these same conversion rates that we were seeing.

Kathleen: How old is the company now?

Shai: What I've just described was all happening about two years ago, a little bit more. In the end, we officially launched this product a year and a half ago.

Kathleen: Wow.

Shai: It was never meant to be ... we didn't go all in on this right away. It was meant to be a little evening project and we'd kind of throw it together. He had a bit of an audience for it. I would build it over the course of a few days and it kind of ended up growing a lot bigger by accident.

Kathleen: Which I suppose is what happens when you have product market fit.

Shai: I guess so, yeah.

Shai's Review of 500+ Websites (and Lessons Learned)

Kathleen: Well, that's great. Thank you for sharing that story. Now you mentioned when you sent out your tweet that you had worked with more than 500 sites and were able to glean some insights from that. Can you talk a little bit about what led you to look at those? Are these sites that are using RightMessage?

Shai: A lot of them are. What really happened, when we started, when RightMessage started it was less about the opt-in forms and the calls to action on your site and it was more about you can personalize everything, right? You can change your headline. You can the testimonials. You can can make your entire site dynamic to who someone is and that does really help conversion rates. It's also really overwhelming to get started with. When its like, "You can change anything on your site", people were overwhelmed.

So what we started doing is kind of working really closely with people who were ... Some of them were customers. Some of them were people who had been customers but they had decided they weren't ready for it yet, as returns. Some of them were people who we thought this would work really well for but again they kind of saw it as overwhelming and what we wanted to do was find out what is important to them right now? What would they want to ... What are the metrics they're trying to improve on their website?

And what it came back to time and time again was by looking at the data of what personalization was working really well for the people who were doing it and looking at what it was that people wanted to be doing better on their site, all of it pointed to it's the calls to action.

It's those points, those make or break point where you're saying to someone, "Now I want you to do something. Now I want you to sign up for my e-mail list" or "Now I want you to take a free trial of my product" or whatever that next action is.

Those were the trigger points where the people who were doing a little bit to make those dynamics, make those personalized we're seeing 10 times higher conversion rates than the people who weren't. That's why we need to focus.

Kathleen: Can you talk a little bit about ... You talked about how you could either use data, it sounded like data on their behavior or answers to a question to fuel the personalization. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what have you seen in terms of that initial collection point of information, if you will. What is most effective?

Shai: Yeah, absolutely, and that's the important part, right? If you don't know something about somebody there's nothing you can do to talk to them in a way that's going to resonate. So we split into the two that you've just described there you've got the explicit and the implicit.

So you've got the explicit profiling which is asking them a question and we've started to gather a lot data about what the best questions are to ask. A lot of it boils down to it's really common sense stuff in the sense that it's exactly what you would ask them if you were chatting to them face to face, right? And that might not just be on their website either. That might be questions that you've asked them in a survey that you sent out to your list, for example. Anytime where they actively tell you something in a form or in a survey.

Then you've got all these implicit things where, which are things like, "Have they already bought from me?" "Are they already a subscriber on my e-mail list?" They didn't have to tell you those things, you can see those already.

Kathleen: Yeah, the latter sounds like they're more kind of where they are and which stage they're in of their buying journey, if you will.

Shai: Yeah, absolutely, the stage that they're in. If you've got a blog and it's got different categories what you'll often find is that somebody is kind of binging articles on one specific category because it's the one the care about right now. That again can tell you ... They're answering the question of which category are you interested in without being asked it.

So the categories do that and that also includes things like ... You've also got if somebody clicks through to your site from someone else's site, what does the site that they clicked through from tell you about who they are?

Kathleen: That's interesting, yeah.

Shai: So yeah, you've got little insights like that as well, but if you're just kind of getting started asking them works really well. I think it also helps, it makes for a softer pitch, right? If instead of saying immediately, "Join my course", "Buy my thing," if you first ask something you're getting that, it's kind of that easy yes. Then you can use that immediately to say, "Right, based on what you said, here's what I think you should be doing."

Kathleen: Now I'm assuming there are, some questions are better than others in the sense that it could be tempting, for example, to say, "What's your budget?" That's a very bottom of the funnel almost, like, sub-funnel question.

Shai: Yeah.

Kathleen: Have you seen the most success of much more top of the funnel, kind of softer questions?

Shai: Yes. "What brings you here today?" is essentially the softest and best performing question. The first question that we see.

You can follow that up with something that's more about the person, maybe their industry. It depends what's going to be relevant based on the field that you are in, but yeah as a first question, it's like the, "What brought you here?" "How can we help you?" kind of question works really well.

It makes sense, right? If you're in a store in the real world and the shop assistant comes over to you and they start with, "What industry are you in?" That's a little bit harder, harsher.

Kathleen: Awkward.

Shai: Yeah, it's kind of like, "Why do you want to know?"

Kathleen: Exactly.

Shai: Where as like, "What brought you to the shop? What are you looking for?" Okay, I immediately ... I know why you're asking. It's clear how that's going to help, it's going to be in my interest to tell you. That works really well as the first question.

Kathleen: Are the questions generally, well I guess this is a two part question. Let me ask you first, does RightMessage have a feature that allows you to create and present that question or is that something that you have to do for your own website?

Shai: Right, yeah, no, so that's what RightMessage'll help you do.

Kathleen: Okay, and does that manifest as a pop-up?

Shai: Yeah, so you choose. You've got a whole suite of ... If you think of any opt-in widgets at all, it's essentially the same options, right? You can show a sticky bar at the top or bottom of the page. You can put a pop-up module in the middle of the page when they, if they go to leave the site. Or it might just be in-line, kind of an embedded widget at the bottom of a blog post or a little slide up toaster widget in the corner.

It's all of those things. It's whatever you want to be doing, probably whatever you're doing right now. We're just sorting those out.

Kathleen: At the risk of getting super technical and a little too technical even for myself, you know I've had varying experiences with pop-ups. I know that there are some that Google doesn't like because they create a poor experience and there are some that because of the way that they load can slow page load times. Can you talk a little bit about the way you built the product and how it impacts those two factors?

Shai: Yeah. We're very much about ... I don't know if you've seen, there was one of these little fake gif video things going around recently. It was like the state of marketing in 2019 and it was just these pop-ups everywhere. We're trying to do everything we can to be the opposite of that. A lot of that does come down to ... A lot of the reason that you have all these competing pop-ups everywhere is because you're not sure what to pitch someone, right?

You've got your e-mail opt-in but then what if they're ready to start a trial? Okay, so we've got to put a pop-up for the trial over here. Then at the end of the blog we're going to put something else. You've got all these ... Often the reason you have all these competing, all these different pop-ups is because you've got all these different things to offer.

One of the things that we're trying to make really easy to do is to say, if you know which one thing this person needs right now you don't have to go bother them with so many touch points, right? You can be consistent with it. It doesn't have to be from a pop-up. You might just want to do one pop-up. You might want to do no pop-ups at all. It might just be that you have a soft pitch at the end of your blog article, right?

In terms of the Google thing we don't ... Google, especially on mobile really doesn't like the 'in your face' pop-ups. If you're on mobile then automatically they overcome a much softer, it's a little trade right at the bottom so it's not in the way of the content at all.

We're not doing that because of Google. We're doing it for the same reason as Google, which is that it's a bad user experience. For instance, when someone has come to your site for content and then you put something in their face that interrupts that content, yeah I understand and agree with why Google doesn't like those things and we're trying kind of do the same.

Kathleen: Does the pop-up load asynchronously?

Shai: Yeah, so it won't slow down the sites or anything like that.

How To Get Started With Personalization

Kathleen: Okay. That's great. You ask, you present ... to go back to what we started with. You present the visitor with this question and it's a soft kind of introductory question that allows you to learn something about that person and then RightMessage then gives you the ability to begin to customize things.

I imagine knowing, like, I'm a marketer. I know marketers pretty well. I imagine that the temptation as a marketer would be to go down the rabbit hole and spend a lot of time trying to personalize too many things. My guess would be that there are probably a few small things that you can do. It's that 80/20 rule, right?

What are the 20% of things that will give you the 80% of results? If somebody was to just dip their toe in the water at this do you have typical advice you give them about what the few low hanging fruit things that they should start with that are going to give them their biggest bang for their buck?

Shai: Yeah, absolutely. We actually just this week started this recipe book of really simple and high converting things that you can do.

But at it's core, so yeah, if you're just getting started I would say wherever it is right now that you're pitching that first thing to people which may be an e-mail course or joining your e-mail list or some other thing that probably isn't your kind of main end-of-the road, ultimate most expensive product or service, where ever you're doing that right now on your website just switch that to ask one question first.

Then if they are anonymous, if they haven't joined your list yet then pitch that list. Pitch it exactly like you were doing before just change the working to describe the benefits and one of the benefits of it as being related to the things they just answered.

So look at your list and look at what are the main reasons that people might want to join their list. Or if it's an e-mail course, what are the main reasons that people join it? If you don't know that yet then maybe it's time to survey people who have already done it or ask them just after they've joined, "What was it that made you join?" You can then feed that back into what your multiple choice answers should be to the question.

Once you know that, ask the question and based on the answer pitch your entry level product or e-mail list or whatever it is in a way that describes how it helps with that thing that they just said.

Kathleen: That's great and it's pretty simple and straight forward.

Shai: Right, and the conversion rate increase even of that, I've seen people go from 2% opt-in rates to like 20% opt-in rates.

What Kind of Marketing Results Can Personalization Deliver?

Kathleen: That was going to be my next question. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the results you've seen for companies that use this?

Shai: Yeah. You do see some variant. It depends on where people are doing these pitches and who their audience is as well but a lot of people, when they set up the basic thing that I just described, it's fairly typical to see something like, and it's hard to give typical.

Depending on where you're doing it you might get 1 or 2% of people answering the question but it's also, it's very common to see 20 or 30% answer, especially with a question like, "What brings you here today?" So yes, 20 or 30 and I've seen it higher than that as well. I'd say 20 to 30% I would not be surprised if somebody set this up for the first time and was seeing that kind of answer rate.

Then the pitch that comes after it, that kind of initial opt-in pitch, you might see the same again. You might see something like 20%, 30% act on that. It depends. It depends on the audience but something like that is not at all unusual.

Kathleen: Which is a very strong conversion rate. I mean, most companies that I see, their conversion rate, their visitor to lead conversion rate, is usually somewhere around 1 to 3% on their website.

Shai: Exactly, exactly and it depends. It depends where it's coming from. It depends, you know, is this brand new to a blog? It depends where the traffic is coming from. It depends where this traffic has come from. It depends where you're doing this pitch and all of those things but yeah, if somebody was getting a couple of percent opt-in rate before I would be very surprised if they didn't see that more than double when they start doing this.

I think it kind of ... It almost makes sense when you stop and think about it, right? If someone is on your website they're trying to figure out whether you can help them and anything that you can do to make it easier for them to translate from what they're reading on your site to have that apply to their own life, is going to make it more likely that they ... If someone's not sure that you can help them they're just going to bounce.

Kathleen: Yeah, I mean fundamentally we're all lazy, right?

Shai: Right.

Kathleen: We just are, all of us. As a business the more you can cater to that and hand or spoon feed the answers that somebody's looking for the better you'll do.

Shai: Yes.

Kathleen: It's just the truth about human nature.

Shai: Yeah, it's the difference between the sales person who reads off a script versus the sales person who finds out a bit about you and what you need and then tailors everything, explains how the product can help you specifically. Or like the real estate agent showing you around a house. They either just describe each room or they find out what kind of person you are and then they paint the picture for you of how, to help you see yourself living in that house.

"You have kids? This room would make an amazing playroom."

Kathleen: Right.

Shai: That would be ... they're not going to say that.

Kathleen: There's your man cave, right?

Shai: Right. Exactly, exactly.

The other thing was, so I was just listening to your, you had an episode with Rev.com, with Barron a few weeks ago and when he was talking about the audience research they were doing, that really resonates with me because that's the same kind of thing. They were going and asking their audience all these kind of questions about why they had used the product and what they were doing before and all those kind of things and they'd taken that and used that in their marketing. They'd taken those phrases and that became the subheading on their website.

Other people would come and read that and they were like, "Yeah, I certainly ... This really resonates with me" because it was real language from customers, from other customers who were like them. So we're just doing that in real time.

Kathleen: It's so simple and it seems so obvious just to use the words the customers use but it's amazing how few companies actually do it.

Shai: Yeah, I saw a statistic recently that 94% of customers think personalization is critical to the success of their business and 4% say they're doing a lot of that.

Kathleen: That's an incredibly wide gap.

Shai: Yeah, and the mismatch, then they dug deeper and they're like, "What's stopping you?" It was all like, "It's hard to know where to start" and "We don't have the tools. We don't have the technical capability to do that."

How Hard Is It To Implement Personalization?

Kathleen: So to that exact point, how technical do you need to be to set this up, to use it, to run it, et cetera?

Shai: You don't. You need to be able to install a little java script or have a developer who can do that.

Kathleen: I was just going to say, so if you can't do that, if you have somebody who runs your website for you, whether that's in your company or an outside contractor, this is what, a five minute job? A one hour job?

Shai: Yeah, that part is like a one minute job. It's copying and pasting. It's the same as if you were installing Google analytics on your website or any of these other things, that is you copy this and you paste it into your website builder. Then from there it's literally a point a click kind of, "Here is a ..." It's a flow chart builder, right? You start building out these parts. Is the person on my site anonymous? Yes? Let's ask them this question and then let's pitch them this offer.

Kathleen: A series of if/then statements kind of.

Shai: Essentially, yeah, with questions along the way and an offer at the end to buy it. Then you hit, Publish in the corner. You press the Publish button and whatever you've set up will immediately go out and be live on your site.

Learn More About RightMessage

Kathleen: Great. Well, if someone's interested in learning more about RightMessage, what should they do?

Shai: They should go to RightMessage.com. In fact, they should go to RightMessage.com/impact. I'll set something up there that will get them something that the ordinary folk don't get.

Kathleen: Aaah, special offer. I will put a link in the show notes for that.

Shai: Yeah, I'll sort something out for your wonderful listeners.

Kathleen's Two Questions

Kathleen: Great, thank you for that. I'm curious to get your take on the two questions that I always ask my guests. Company or individual, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Who do you think is doing really great work with inbound marketing right now?

Shai: I like this question. It's a difficult question, you know?

Kathleen: Well, there are so many possible answers. I'll just preface it with, it's interesting to see the direction that people go. Some people provide answers that are within the marketing world of marketers doing inbound marketing really well. Others come with these examples that are just from out in the wild and both are equally fascinating so I always love hearing what people say.

Shai: Yeah. For me at the moment kind of the inbound, kind of the good inbound marketing is the non-obnoxious, not in your face, the softer marketing, the educational marketing. I think everyone is starting to or a lot of people are starting to move that way. They're kind of tired of the in your face stuff.

When I think of who's really good at that it's people like, I keep getting e-mails from Ben Orenstein at Tuple who just every e-mail I get from him I'm like, "He is not trying to sell me right now" but it makes me want to buy. It's so, here is tons of value and here's some cool stuff. You're learning about the product along the way but it's not a hard pitch. We love that.

Kathleen: It's interesting that you say that because I'm, somebody once said to me and now I've become a big fan if it and I wish I could remember who first said it, that the best sales people do not sell, they help people buy. It sounds like that's exactly what he's doing in those e-mails.

Shai: Yeah, and it's also, it's people that aren't afraid to say, "Maybe it isn't right for you." The assumption of marketing is that, 'You should buy this" is flawed, right? It's, "We're going to help you figure out whether you should buy this. If you should then I want to explain why it would be good for you. If it is ... but it might not be and I'll take you too."

A lot of our customers are really good at this at well and it's kind of what brought them to us is that we also don't go for that hard thing. So Alex Hillman, Stackingthebricks.com and Pat Flynn I think is doing some really amazing marketing at SmartPassiveIncome. Josh Duty, Fearless Salary Negotiation, he's doing incredibly at SEO and then leading from that to courses in coaching and so on. Yeah, I'll stop there.

Kathleen: That sounds like some great examples.

Shai: Yeah.

Kathleen: Well, I'll definitely put those links in the show notes because those are some new ones that I haven't heard before and that always makes me excited.

Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly how do you personally stay up to date and educate yourself?

Shai: Yeah. So much of what I'm learning about marketing at the moment is just from interacting with our customers. I don't have ... There are very, very few websites or podcasts that I subscribe to and listen to every one. I wait until the smart people I have surrounded myself with recommend something or start talking about something. That's when I take note. That's also my hack for not getting overloaded by all the new information. It's just ...

Kathleen: It's easy to do.

Shai: And it also, it means you're getting so many ... You're learning so many strategies from people who aren't quite in your realm. Like we were saying at the beginning, right, you take marketing and technology and you put them together. Of course that happens. When we start working with our customers who are like in the Bee photography world. That is a real thing. Yeah, they take photographs of bees and and honey and it's like the stuff that they're-

Kathleen: That is incredibly niche. I love it.

Shai: They're going to have totally different kinds of conversations than I am and learning stuff. So yeah, just surrounding myself with really different people I found far more effective than following one source.

Also, just there's so much of these new marketing developments aren't new at all. It's all just kind of ... It's the old school marketing and then translated then now into the online space. A lot of that's what we're trying to do is taking stuff that makes sense in the real world and bring it on line. I find it's easier to learn about marketing from the old school. I try not to-

Kathleen: A few people have said that to me, that some of their favorite marketing books are the ones from 40, 50 years ago.

Shai: Hmm, 100%. It's the same in software. It's kind of the same in programming as well. There's these new technologies coming on the scene every week. Sometimes it pays to be just like, "The old stuff can work." Keep an eye on the new things but don't jump on them immediately. Will this really work in my business? Reason it out for best principles.

Kathleen: That's great advice because I will say I think one of the weaknesses of most marketers I know is they fall very easily for shiny penny syndrome where there's that new thing. They want to try it but it's easy to get distracted and spend a lot of time and resources chasing that new thing as opposed to investing in things that are going to deliver for the long term.

Shai: Yeah, especially when, like in the feedback look from trying sometime in your marketing to know whether it's working can sometimes be quite long. It can be really hard. You can try something new and you may not see results from it immediately depending on what it is but it may be working well and it may be about to work for your future. To that same thing is like, you start to see your metrics creep up. It could be from the thing you just did this week. It could be from the thing you did a few months ago and it's just taken time to really kick in.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Shai: So yeah, if you're immediately, it's like, "Oh no. I've tried this for week. It's not working. We've got to go and try something else" you're never going to, it's never going to work.

How To Connect With Shai

Kathleen: Well, it's so interesting hearing what you've learned through this process of looking at all these sites and I'm fascinated by what RightMessage can do and the fact that it's easy for anybody to use. If somebody wants to, has a question about what you talked about and wants to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way or them to do that?

Shai: You can always ... My DM's open on Twitter @ShaiSC.

Kathleen: This is how we met.

Shai: It is, exactly. S-H-A-I-S-C. Yeah, that's going to be the easiest way to get a quick reply from me.

Kathleen: And I can testify to that. It was very fast. I DM'd you and you responded right away.

Shai: Yeah.

Kathleen: Great, well I will but the link to your Twitter handle on the show notes and if you're listening and you enjoyed this, liked what you heard, as always I would really appreciate a five star review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice.

If you're listening and you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them.

Thank you so much, Shai.

Shai: Thank you for having me.