John Corcoran 12:19
Yeah, that’s helpful. Talk to me about this a couple it’s kind of a classic tension between going super niche and broader and trying to open yourself to different types of clients. And it’s really encapsulated in your name around your decision decision. What what to name the business Conversion Fanatics, numbers is biz growers, business growers, biz grows super broad, right, versus Conversion Fanatics. Did you find it was hard in the early days to find clients? Or did you ever fear that you were you were too niche? And, you know, this excludes us from providing other services to clients?
Justin Christianson 12:56
Yes, many, many, many times. And we’ve tried it all, like literally, you name it. But what happened was as our tradition and you got to think this is eight years ago, when up to CRO wasn’t necessarily a term, you know? Yeah, it was very early. And people didn’t really understand it. They knew they needed a split test, but they didn’t understand what that involved. So it was very much an education factor that we had to educate the market very hard. So we couldn’t just go out and place an ad, generate a lead, do all of those things we can now because we’ve been doing it for so long. But before I go out and knock on virtual doors,
John Corcoran 13:40
yeah, greater understanding now of what the need is.
Justin Christianson 13:43
Well, it’s more mainstream now. Yeah. And we’ve got brand recognition in those elements. So it’s becoming easier for us to place it and get that predictive feedback. But before it was, it was hard, because we tried different packages, different pricing, different models, different. You know, we tried doing other services, like paid traffic, we tried doing all of those other things, and we just kept coming back to the core every single time. And it just became easier and easier. You know, when we continually push, we just keep preaching the same exact thing over and over and over. And we just use different vehicles to do it. You know, our philosophy on optimization. And marketing hasn’t necessarily changed at its core. But we’ve evolved, we’ve got smarter teams and processes and learnings and we get to see more beta and work with bigger brands. And we get to see all of those things that a business sees when you evolve. But you know, when it was early on, it was hard. I mean, we were sponsoring trade shows, we were going to events, we were speaking on any stage I could possibly get on it was I think one year I wrote 250 articles trying to Rainbow. I mean, I was banging out content left and right. Video, I mean, I was hustling and I wrote the book in that timeframe. I, you know, we did. I mean, then we found outbound marketing was, we figured that we could optimize that. So we could get direct feedback from that. So that’s the rabbit hole, we went down the page right out of Salesforce, and just pounded the virtual doors, essentially. And we got really good at it. We mailed I don’t even know 600,000, some odd contacts, between email, phone, direct mail, all of the traditional kinds of solutions versus placing an ad and getting them to come to you. And it worked. Well, we grew about, I mean, 80% of our growth for a few years was that, wow. And then everything. Like I always say, marketers ruin everything. Is it saturated? Everybody started scraping LinkedIn and doing I mean, look at the cesspool that LinkedIn is now. Yeah, I don’t even need a shower after just going in there. But yeah, you know, there’s some people that are doing it, right. But there’s also people not doing very well. So we took a bit of that and ruined it for everyone else. Oh, yeah. And that’s why I say marketers ruin everything. But it’s funny to see the evolution of that. So our emails stopped getting responses and things started dwindling and dying. So we had to adjust. And what we’ve found is I know you’re a big proponent. Obviously, we’re on a podcast right now. Sure. But you’re a big proponent of podcasts. And one of the things that we leverage and have for a couple years is a podcast, not only me as a guest, which it’s fewer and far between, because I’m not actively seeking. Yeah, to be a guest right now.
John Corcoran 16:42
But well, this is gonna change everything for you for sure.
Justin Christianson 16:45
I mean, it’s fine. That’s what I always say, yes. That’s, that’s the thing. It’s, it’s funny how that goes, I never I don’t care if you’re a brand new show, and I’m episode two, you know, yes, it’s or, you know, I’ve been on, you know, some pretty massive shows. And it’s, it’s pretty humbling at the same time, but I also want to come from the place of giving rights in the marketplaces, which is how we built the entire company. It’s just that we are educated so much. And yeah, we continue to do so. It’s funny, I
John Corcoran 17:15
was your funny education was your original concept. And you didn’t, he changed the business model or the way that you generate revenue, but it’s still core to what you do.
Justin Christianson 17:25
Yeah, I’m still educated. I mean, every time I get on the phone, every time I do anything, I’m very just giving with my time and value and whether we can help or not, I’m going to help you at some point. And I’ve just lived by that my entire career. But podcasts have been a big lever mover, we sponsored a lot. That’s awesome. Continue to do. So we just signed a big sponsorship deal with Entrepreneurs on Fire. I was just on that show. And it was, you know, and we sponsored some other podcasts leading up to that. And we kind of figured out the pieces that kind of go in for that, coupled with some paid media and some some other content pushes, and building that social awareness. And that’s really what’s been driving us mixed in with our referrals. Because, you know, when you do good things, people tend to refer you to others. Right,
John Corcoran 18:18
right. Yeah. But it’s good to diversify and have multiple different sources. Tell me about some of the challenges you’ve had you talked a little bit about, you know, the differences between what you bring to the table your business partner brings to the table, but your business has grown tremendously 1000 something percent. What have been some of the challenges with building out the team and any particular big challenges or crises? You’ve had to overcome it?
Justin Christianson 18:44
I mean, no, no major. I mean, there’s obviously been some because we’ve all lived through a lot of cycles. Yeah. But I remember we’ve had some challenges with hiring the wrong people, which I’m sure every business goes through that brings bad toxic culture into the business, which literally saturated everything else, where you couldn’t even walk into the office without being really tense. We don’t have that anymore. We’ve solved that problem. That was a big obstacle for us. You know, when we hit the pandemic, and everything shut down, we thought we were like, we were talking like, what are we going to do? Are we going to close the doors? Or what are we going to do? You know, we thought we were going to be 50% down, because everybody was panicking. And I know a lot of businesses that Yeah, little did we know that e comm would do what it did. Yeah. And it literally went the other direction. And we grew triple digits here. Well, we had to figure out very quickly how to be efficient because we were no longer in the office. We were no longer together four days a week, at least. We didn’t have those regular touch points. So we found out the inefficiencies very quickly. Yeah. And we’re able to expand that into being Virtual now and being more efficient than we ever were. We’ve had those challenges, of course, other business challenges where we, you know, spent our last, you know, wasn’t sure if we’re going to be able to make payroll because we just spent our last money on a tradeshow event sponsorship. And, you know, we’re just trying to do the best we can. But we’ve learned from every single mistake we made, at least I like to think so. But, you know, there’s always more to learn and more to evolve, and we come up with new challenges every single day. But, you know, we’re, we’re in a good place. And, you know, we’ve built something pretty substantial. And, you know, we seem to be doing good work. And I kind of continually tell our staff that too, it’s not about us, it’s not about our clients. It’s about the millions of people that we have an impact on. And we were impacted. I think we did a tally 140 some odd million unique visitors last year? Well, some of our marketing got in front of us so you know that that’s impacting a lot of people with some cool products and services. So,
John Corcoran 20:59
yeah, you ever turn down a product or service be like now we’re not going to work on that?
Justin Christianson 21:04
Oh, yeah. All Time. Every I mean, there’s one. See, there’s one this morning that somebody reached out to me, and I was like, I didn’t know I
John Corcoran 21:15
was supposed to be rational. But I What, why did you?
Justin Christianson 21:19
I mean, I’m quick to say no, if we can’t help, you know, it’s just just, I don’t want to force a relationship and then have that animosity there.
John Corcoran 21:27
So there wasn’t any personal reason behind the product itself.
Justin Christianson 21:30
No, but not that we’ve had a few of those where it’s just like, can we don’t quite align with that,
John Corcoran 21:36
um, like, I just had someone reach out to be a guest on my podcast, and it was he’d started like a cannabis cigarette company and was like, I’m not gonna interview it.
Justin Christianson 21:47
Like, I mean, we’ve done I had a, I had a cannabis company. It’s like, I can’t
John Corcoran 21:51
help you there. I don’t have anything against cannabis. But uh, but it was like it was selling cigarettes, basically. You know?
Justin Christianson 21:56
Yeah, I had a large porn site reach out to us not long ago. Yeah. And I didn’t even reply. I was just like, Yeah, I mean, they teach their own, but I was just like, I. Yeah, I just can’t see. Bringing that kind of tension. And just to chase a buck. Right. You know, and I love we’re fortunate enough. We don’t have to, and I think there’s some power in that. But yeah, I mean, I tell people No, all the time. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s just,
John Corcoran 22:28
yeah, there’s real power in that. Talk to me about a fitness client that came to you. They had an under 1% conversion rate. So 100,000 visitors are coming to their site, and 1000 actually do anything. They were doing a $250,000 a year selling hard fitness hardware equipment and take them along.
Justin Christianson 22:52
Yeah, at that time, 250 a month. Tell us so they were doing decently. I mean, yeah, decent scale product, usually kind of where we fall in is kind of that north of 1 million revenue. Yeah. And up. So they were a couple million in revenue, and they turn their yearly into their monthly? Well, through expansion. Obviously, it’s not all us because they did some great things on the traffic side. But we were able to optimize their site quite well. And, you know, we were able to optimize the site quite well, it took them from sub 1% to four and a half, I think was the peak, and we basically took their average order value, and upped it by like 50 bucks. So we Yeah, they were able to scale, they’re getting VC interest now, for the venture capitalist raise and even talks to potentially IPO down the road. So, you know, they’re, they’re bigger, they have a couple different brands, but, you know, it’s, it’s pretty cool to see kind of how that’s evolved, you know, and seeing how, you know, over the course of, you know, 14-15 months, we were able to dramatically help scale this company.
John Corcoran 24:05
Right. Right. And you intentionally have now you focus on e-commerce. Correct.
Justin Christianson 24:11
You still have some outside some subscription companies, some lead gen stuff that we do, but I would say 97% of what we do is e-commerce.
John Corcoran 24:19
Yeah, cuz it’s not natural, or it’s obvious the benefits for them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Talk to me about what you’re excited about going into the year we’re recording this the beginning of 2022, e-commerce has exploded in growth. And so many companies have realized they need to go through this digital transformation. So there’s greater awareness now than there has ever been of the type of work that you do and the importance of the work that you do. But at the same time, you know, the ball is constantly changing or the game is changing, I imagine for you.
Justin Christianson 24:53
What are you excited about? Um, well, I’m kind of excited about the more adaptation of probably a then a lot of it, I still don’t think it’s there yet from a user experience perspective. But it’s getting there. And we’re looking at that for some things in the future. But I think it’s going to be hard to remove that personal element. But I think the combination of the two, it’s going to be able to help some of those predictive behaviors in the visitors journey. Yeah, on the customers in particularly personalization aspect and expanding on that,
John Corcoran 25:28
I could certainly see software platforms like these conversion rate optimization, websites, or software, or you mentioned, like Leadpages or something like integrating AI into them. But to my knowledge, I can’t imagine they’ve done that yet. It’s probably down the pike.
Justin Christianson 25:45
Yeah, there’s some spin ups that are trying, but it’s not, it’s not there yet, still the manual element. I’m also watching closely, and pivoting to more broad optimization versus very linear, because attribution is becoming harder and harder. You know, who knows what iOS 16 is going to do to Facebook, you know, and they’re tracking and you just never know what and then what Facebook alone is going to do with their ad platforms, what med is going to do? So we have to kind of be mindful of that overall omni-channel approach and very holistic approach optimization and experience optimization, because there’s some things you can’t necessarily quantify. So we have to be very mindful of that. And that’s kind of the direction we’ve been shifting over the last about year or so is just being very more holistic in the approach, and not so black and white is hey, we changed the button color and our rates are lower than the conversion rate.
John Corcoran 26:42
So what does that look like when you say holistic, just looking at the entire business looking at other pieces that people touch or that a buyer touches?
Justin Christianson 26:51
Yeah. So I mean, you’re looking at it promoting overall experience. So how the brand’s people interact with the brand, what truly matters to them as a visitor. And if we can create a better experience for them on site, using our experimentation and using, you know, qualitative and quantitative data, everything becomes more effective, not only does conversion rate go up, but average order value, revenue per visitor, lifetime value, return customer rate, customer support complaints, we’ve seen go down cost per acquisition, and then you have the viral aspect of it that you can’t necessarily quantify. So it’s like, Hey, I had this great experience on this website, you know, these products, amazing. Hey, my five friends here, here’s where I got it, you know, type situation that doesn’t necessarily come back to an attribution window. They’re not necessarily searching for it necessarily, right? They’re not getting shown an ad, unnecessarily. They’re not hearing a radio ad, you know, all of the omni channel approach. So we kind of look at things from an overall scalability month over month, quarter over quarter basis versus a very linear one. Yeah, you know, here’s, here’s what we made the change. And here’s the conversion rate, right? Because you can scale something without the conversion rate necessarily going up. It’s funny,
John Corcoran 28:04
Yes, yesterday, I just did a call with a gifting company. And they, they, they sent me this email to send me a gift so I can see what the platform is like. And they have this cute little thing where you click on the link, and then you go to the website, and you choose a gift. And then before you choose it, you like Scratch off the page kind of scratch card, like a scratcher type of thing. I’ve never seen something like that before. gamified it exactly right. And it was just like a minor little touch. But to what you were saying, like the experience that you have with the brand was such a nice touch that they did something like that. It’s nothing I’d seen before too.
Justin Christianson 28:39
Yeah. And that’s it too, it’s trying to do the same with being different, like, you know, at the same time, so coming up with clever ways to showcase different things and make people feel warm and fuzzy. And without using the tricks, gimmicks tactics to kind of do it but making it fun and exciting. And that’s a great example. Right?
John Corcoran 28:58
Just I want to wrap things up with my last question, my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of gratitude. So you know, if you look around, especially professionally at your peers and contemporaries, could be others in your industry could be mentors, but others that are doing good work today, like who would you want to just publicly call out and and recognize and by the way, I mean, I asked the exact same question of Martin McDonald. And I interviewed him and that’s, you know, I’ve known you we’d been connected on Facebook for a bunch of years. But you know, he said, he said your name and I was like, You know what, I’ve never interviewed him and Jeremy had Jeremy interviewed before, but I was like, I’m gonna reach out to Justin because he just raved about you. So who would you mention?
Justin Christianson 29:39
It’s funny because usually my go to guy is Marty. In this situation. It’s twofold. Marty and I have gotten to be really good friends over the years. And he’s, he’s one of the first that I call, should I need something or have advice. In fact, he does a lot of our marketing and helps us out on the paid and social side, but I’ve got a very small circle. have influence I guess you’d say my circles gotten really tight. And one other person that’s in our group with Marty is a guy by the name of Joey Gilkey
John Corcoran 30:09
who he also mentioned by the way, yeah, no, generally, yeah.
Justin Christianson 30:13
Joey is a very straightforward, very humble person for what he does. He not only just wants you to succeed in business, but he wants you to succeed in life and he shows that in all ways that I mean, whether it’s just us casually talking or it’s in a bigger setting. He just truly wants to make the world a better place and I’m grateful to call him friend
John Corcoran 30:44
Awesome. Yeah, another guy who probably keeps his chiropractor very busy, former professional or for collegiate athlete football players. Yeah,
Justin Christianson 30:54
he’s Yeah, he’s he’s got knocked around
John Corcoran 30:58
a little bit. Yeah, yes. Justin, this is a great place where people can go to learn more about you and connect with you?
Justin Christianson 31:05
ConversionFanatics.com is one spot. If you want to find out more information about my book all of that fun things read some cool blog articles or maybe you don’t but if you want to connect on social you can go to onespotsocial.com/JustinChristianson, all one word, that gives links to YouTube, my social channels, I’m accessible. So if anybody needs anything to let me know.
John Corcoran 31:29
Excellent, Justin, thanks so much. Thank you.
Outro 31:32
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.