Three Things I Improved Immediately After Lift Off Summit

Last week I wrote about my experience running an online summit. I talked about marketing tactics, money, and even the hours I put in. One thing I didn't touch on was how educational Lift Off Summit was.

I've been in eCommerce for over 5 years and I'd like to think I know a lot but when it comes to marketing I'm still learning. A lot in fact.

There were three things I learned while recording the interviews for Lift Off Summit which were so powerful I immediately implemented them. And I want to share them with you.

1️⃣ Maximize Your Welcome Email

I absolutely loved my chat with Paul Jarvis. He talked about lots of great stuff like how the best skill you need as a marketer is empathy. <- That kinda blew my mind.

The most actionable takeaway I got from Paul was that the welcome email is the most opened email. That means if you want to share something with your audience it better be in your welcome email.

Before this interview my welcome email was super basic. It basically just said hello. Immediately after Paul's interview I set about making the welcome email more useful. I mentioned the All-Access Pass for the summit. Not a hard sell but a mention so it's on people's minds. And actually 28 people clicked on it.

And I also wanted to inject my personality in the event. I want people to know me. They're not just signing up for some corporate event. There's a real life person running this event. So I worked with Bob to create a bit of personality to the email.

And we actually got compliments on that gif! People were laughing. What a great way to start a new relationship. 🙂

See more

The gif in the #liftoffsummit of @bobWP and @BFTrick doing a virtual high-five is priceless.

— Tonya Mork (@hellofromTonya) June 14, 2017

By adding a bit of personality and mentioning my product I made my welcome email so much more effective.

2️⃣Tell People Why They Did Something

I have to admit I wasn't sure how the Building Trust session would go. I know Chris Lema is an amazing speaker. But maybe it would just be a boring topic and even a great speaker couldn't make it interesting.

But I was totally wrong. Chris did an amazing job with that topic. He talked about his experience selling software to large companies. And one of the really interesting things he talked about was how people buy things.

People buy things with emotion. Almost every decision we make in life is an emotional decision. And then after making the decision we justify it with logic. That's why Chris suggests giving people those logical reasons after they purchase.

So after someone buys a product tell them the 5 benefits they'll get out of it. And they'll internalize it.

I did something similar with my Thank You For Subscribing page. It used to just say “Thanks!” and that's about it. But after talking with Chris I put logical reasons in there.

You're just helping people understand why they made a decision. This way they feel better when someone asks why they attended. You gave them a logical reason and they'll use that when talking with other people.

Just like with the welcome email this was an area of the eCommerce process which I was basically ignoring. And I wouldn't have thought about it unless I talked to Chris.

3️⃣Personalize Content

I loved talking with Nathan Barry about how you can keep customers around. I assumed he had a million different newsletter campaigns setup. But he actually just has one main campaign at any one point and he personalizes it based on what products you've bought.

I always assumed you should send entire emails to different segments but that's so much more work. When you can write one email and add an extra paragraph for a certain type of user that's so much easier.

I immediately started doing that. And it's not that hard with MailChimp. Here's one of the emails I sent out in the middle of the summit:

Notice how anyone who isn't a VIP (someone who hasn't purchased) get's a message to purchase. Someone who has already purchased doesn't need to see that and I don't want to drown them in messaging that's not useful for them.

Conclusion

Even as someone who thinks they know quite a bit about eCommerce I learned a lot. Three of the lessons I learned were immediately useful. They took less than two hours to implement and they helped out a lot.

So even if you think you know everything (cough like me) make sure you're constantly learning. eCommerce is a huge and complex field. There's countless areas to optimize and make better and you need to be constantly learning to take advantage of it.