How Personalization Can Turn Your Ordinary Website Into an Irresistible Sales Platform | Eric Melchor

Eric Melchor: The lady at the corner who sells flowers, maybe you engage with her on a daily basis just by saying, you know, waving or, smiling at her.

The person, the lady who walks her dog that you see, you know, in your neighborhood, smiling at them, acknowledging them. Or when you take your kids to the park and you recognize some of the other parents, you kind of acknowledge them. Those little, those are micro engagements, in real life.

Matt Edmundson: Welcome to the e-Commerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson, with an exceptionally croaky voice. Do forgive me, uh, the E-Commerce podcast is all about helping you deliver e-commerce wow. And to help us do just that, I am chatting with today's special guest, Eric Melchor from Optimonk, about how personalization can turn your ordinary website into an irresistible sales platform. Oh, yes.

Uh, but before Eric and I jump into that conversation, let me suggest a few other e-commerce podcast episodes that I think you'll enjoy listening to. Check out how to beat Amazon at its own game with Jerry, uh, Jeremy Bodenheimer. Uh, what a legend he was. That's available on the website along with the real personal touch, a sneak peek from the E-Commerce Master Plan Summit with our very own Chloe Thomas. What an absolute legend she is. That was an all. That was also a great conversation, so you can find those and our entire archive of episodes on our website for free at ecommercepodcast.net.

On our website you can also sign up for our newsletter. Uh, and each week we will email you these links along with the notes and any links from the conversation with our guests. Like Eric. Uh, they go direct to your inbox, totally free. Totally amazing. So do sign up for that. Now, this episode has been brought to you by the e-commerce cohort.

Uh, which helps you deliver e-commerce wow to your customers. Uh, you know what, I've, I've talked about this a lot. You know how I personally got siloed in my e-commerce business and it cost me millions. It really did. I just worked on one or two areas in the business. I missed the big picture and it, it, it was all kinds of problematics, let me tell you.

So, e-commerce cohort is here to solve that problem. It is a lightweight membership group with guided monthly sprints, uh, that cycle through all the key areas of e-commerce. The sole purpose of cohort is to provide you with clear actionable jobs to be done so you'll know what to work on and you'll have the support to get it done.

So whether you are just starting out in e-commerce or if like me, you are a well-established e-commercer, I encourage you to definitely check it out at ecommercecohort.com. Let me tell you, I've been in e-commerce for a while and I love some of the workshops in there. Just learned so much from doing that.

We do it with the teams, it's great. Uh, so do check it out, ecommercecohort.com, uh, or you can email me directly, [email protected] with any questions about cohort, I will try and answer them for you. Now, before I get into today's conversation, let me give a bit of a shout out to Matt Barnett, who, uh, apparently connected me and Eric today.

What was interesting was I thought the connection came from Dan Budai, uh, through Csaba, who is in Optimonk. Apparently it came from Matt Barnett, uh, who heads up Bonjoro. Now matt has actually been on the podcast, uh, if you remember, he talked about personalizing the customer journey to increase lifetime value that's available on the website. His company, Bonjoro, is a video retention platform. Uh, and you can find out more about Matt and what they do at bonjoro.com. Uh, and again, we will link to that in the show notes. So, Uh, big shout out to Matt. Matt thanks for that.

Uh, so let's talk about Eric. Eric is a personalization geek, which I just think is fantastic. Uh, he's apparently a mediocre tennis player, which means he's a lot better than me, uh, and a Texas expat living in Romania. His background is in identifying ways to increase customer lifetime value through video and web personalization, as well as partnership marketing. In addition to being the personalization ambassador for Optimonk, he also hosts a podcast called Innovators Can Laugh, which I think is a phenomenal name for a podcast.

So do check that out, uh, where he learns from innovative startups in the European tech scene. Uh, Eric, great to have you. Thanks for coming on the show, man. Uh, how are we doing? .

Eric Melchor: Hey, we're doing pretty good. Pleasure to be here. Matt been really excited about coming to, uh, to chat with you and, uh, I'm feeling good.

Think it's gonna be a good conversation.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Now, before we get into the conversation, uh, I said this at the start, I was not quite sure what my opening question was gonna be, but I'm gonna have to go with how did, uh, a, a guy from Texas end up living in Bucharest, right? Because it's not your usual path for a typical Texan. I'm not gonna lie.

Eric Melchor: Yeah. No it isn't. It started about 12 years ago. I was in living in New York City and I had been there about seven years, but I didn't wanna go back home to Texas. And there was this opportunity that I saw about a large media agency based in Bucharest, uh, was looking for talent from the west.

Mm-hmm. . And, uh, I was intrigued and so I went ahead and applied and lo and behold I got the opportunity to come work here for a year. Oh, wow. And that's where my wife, she was working for a sister company, for the PR agency. And, uh, working in the same building. We ended up, uh, hanging out. And when I came back to Texas because of instant messaging and Skype, we were constantly communicating and, uh, being the romantic guy that I am, uh, we met in Paris, we met in Barcelona, came back to Bucharest a few times, and I convinced.

Convinced her that Houston was this beautiful cosmopolitan city. Mm-hmm. and that she would love it there if she moved over there. I even bought an aprilia, uh, 200 cc, uh, scooter. So I was trying to make it appear as European as possible.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Yeah. I like that style, man. Style points. Well done.

Eric Melchor: I bought her this helmet. It was this white helmet with pink polka dots. Mm-hmm. . Oh man. It was, it was fantastic. We had so much fun in that scooter. She ended up coming over. I said, let's give it a shot for six months. If it works out, great. If it doesn't, hey, at least we tried. It did work out and three years later we got married and we have two, uh, two little ones under the age of five, uh, right now.

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: Oh, wow. Well, congratulations. Uh, that's awesome. Yeah. So your wife is from Romania.

Eric Melchor: Yeah. She's from here. Uh, we moved here about two years ago when Covid happened. Mm-hmm. . And, uh, at that time when remote work started, uh, we, we had been talking about coming here for a variety of reasons, but when Covid actually happened, we felt like, Hey, this is probably the perfect time.

We gotta work from home anyway. Uh, we have your family over there who can help out with the kids. Mm-hmm. , uh, let's see if we can make it happen. And we made it happen. And now the time, it's flowing by. The kids are having a great time. Uh, couldn't be happier. I mean, it's really a different lifestyle than what we had back in Texas.

Yeah. Back in Texas. You know, you're driving 30, 45 minutes to get anywhere. Here I walk my kids to school. There's a beautiful park nearby. Uh, there's cafes and restaurants. I'm living the European lifestyle, Matt. I'm living the European lifestyle. That's what's going on here..

Matt Edmundson: So along with Emily in Paris, we have Eric in Bucharest. That's the new Netflix series, right?

That's the way it should be. . Yeah. That's awesome, man. That's awesome. So, well, congratulations. That's brilliant. And how is your, uh, your Romanian, by the way, your language skills, are they, are they increasing or do you just forget about it when someone speaks English?

Eric Melchor: I, no, I'm taking it serious now because my kids speak Romanian at the dinner table now and they're in a local school. So they picked it up pretty fast and now they're fluent and they say things now that daddy doesn't understand and I figure I better learn right now because they could be cussing me out in a couple years and I have no idea what they're saying. And I'll just be nodding my head yes.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And your wife could be joining in that conversation and you just, you're just none the wiser. Uh, so yeah, always good to learn the language. So that's how you ended up in Bucharest. That's interesting. That's fascinating. So how did you end up getting involved in the whole personalization scene?

Eric Melchor: Yeah, so when I, when I got here, I was taking little videos of my, of, uh, of my, my son and daughter, you know, going down the slide, climbing a tree, uh, and sending those videos to my brother and sister and my parents back home. And I just thought, You know, this is really cool, uh, that I can send these videos to them.

And then one day on LinkedIn I noticed somebody talking about how they received a video from, uh, a company and they were welcoming them. And I looked further and it was a company called Bonjoro. Yeah. And I was very intrigued. And, uh, don't I, when I researched them and they happened to be looking for somebody who could lead their partnerships program, and, uh, I went ahead and reached out to them and it worked out.

They ended up, uh, hiring me and I was with them for over a year as, uh, sort of, you know, partnerships manager. One thing I discovered there that kind of led me to my new position at OptiMonk was the power of segmentation. Mm-hmm. . And so at Bonjoro, for anybody who signed up for a free account, uh, everybody at the company, uh, we would try to send them a personal video.

So I would send maybe 20 videos a day. And, uh, we had a little kind of like question at the beginning of the free trial that said, what industry are you in? And so some people would select e-commerce or sas, or maybe agency. Mm-hmm. or education. And so rather than just sending a generic video, I started segment segmenting them and changing what I said and then also including a different call to action.

So if somebody was from the e-commerce space, the call to action would be a link to a case that was specifically about and how an e-commerce brand, uh, started welcoming and thanking their customers with Bonjoro. And it led to, you know, maybe, uh, 50 more customer reviews. Yeah. And then also a lot more repeat customers.

And I noticed that the engagements and the click-through rates and the open rates were much, much higher, uh, because of the segmentation. And so to me that was just very, very powerful of how, you know, once you started utilizing segmentation, uh, you're just gonna get a much better result because people, people, you know, they feel like, oh, well they're actually speaking to me, or at least to the industry that I'm, that I'm in.

Yeah. So while this is going on, as you mentioned, I'm also hosting a, uh, a podcast where I interview, uh, European startups. And one of the startups I interviewed was Optimonk. And, uh, I interviewed Csaba Zajdó, who is the founder of OptiMonk. We had a great conversation. He told me about his background as a professional e gamer, one of the best in Hungary.

And, uh, he founded a company that was like the Shopify for Hungary. Mm-hmm.. And he, of course, he's the co-founder of OptiMonk. Well, we had stayed in touch and, uh, you know, we were in communication and he reached out and he said, Eric, you know, I know you, you're really good at this personalization thing. Uh, that's one to one.

you know, but if you ever wanna consider taking it on a much bigger scale, uh, personalizing visitors, you know, not just one visitor at a time, but hundreds or even thousands of thousands of visitors, uh, with personalization. You know, we love to, to chat with you. And so we, you know, I kept that, that communication going with him.

Mm-hmm. and, uh, now it was very intriguing because I do love personalization, I think. Mm-hmm. giving that, that audience, that, that, you know, that surprise and delight feeling of really speaking to them, communicating to them, uh, whether it's through video or through your own website, uh, it's something I'm pretty passionate about.

Mm-hmm. . And so, uh, I took him up on his offer and now we're trying to give SMBs and. You know, any brands that wanna go out there and compete with the big giants like Amazon and Etsy, uh, the tools and uh, the platform that they can implement personalization strategies and campaigns for their audience.

Matt Edmundson: Wow, there's a lot there, Eric.

Uh, this is a fascinating journey, isn't it? So you started out with Bonjoro, and like we said at the, in the intro, Matt's been on the show, Bonjoro, great company. Do check it up, bonjoro.com, uh, with the videos. So the first thing I picked up on was you were doing videos. But you are segmenting the videos into industry so.

the level of personalization. I think this is an important thing to say right at the start, isn't it? How you can, you can have different levels of personalization. I think when people think of personalization, everything has to be personalized to one specific person. Uh, but actually you can, you can, uh, personalize to a group, can't you?

Or a tribe of people, uh, like the e-commerce guys, like agency. You can make things a bit more sort of headline is that is, and that's what you did with Bonjoro. Now with Optimonk, um, it, they, they do have this, uh, incredible system which sort of niches it down even more, right? It takes it the sort of one stage further. Have I understood that right?

Eric Melchor: Well, not exactly niche down further, but I'll give you a few different examples, right? Let's say you have a visitor that comes to your website and you don't know where they came from, and you're not asking them to, you know, uh, sign up a form that a, that specifically asks what industry are you in? Uh, but there's certain things that you can do to make their experience a little bit better than just serving the generic uh, experience.

So take for example, global e-commerce. Mm-hmm. right now, Shopify's reporting that the global e-commerce market is about $5.5 trillion this year. And that's gonna continue to grow. But unfortunately, a lot of retailers, they're missing out on capitalizing on this global, uh, the global audience because of little things like, for example, in the checkout, if a person has to reenter their address in the checkout, usually about 25% of people will fall off there.

Right? Mm-hmm, or if there's no delivery date provided about another 30% will drop off. Right? Well, we have a brand that's using OptiMonk. They're called Woodhouse Clothing, a US retailer. If you go to their website from Romania, where I'm at right now, or Hungary or pretty much any other European country, after you get to their website and you've been on their website for a little bit, you'll actually see a side message appear that will say, welcome Romania.

All of the prices that you see are in Romanian, lei mm-hmm, which is their currency. Uh, there's free, uh, orders or free shipment for all orders above 500 lei uh, of course we ship to your location and, um, There, there's also a little bit of delivery information that will show in the little side message.

Yeah. The person didn't even have to go searching for that information. They didn't even have to, it just came up. Right? Mm-hmm, they're, they're preeminently answering the questions. That you're probably concerned about. And so just from that little experience for a global visitor to your website, it does so much, it builds trust.

Mm-hmm, it lets the person know, it reassures them that, hey, they do deliver there. And then also all the prices that you see there already include the taxes, uh, for that local, uh, for that region or whatever. So that's a really, a good experience. It's not necessarily a personalization, uh, at to, at the one-to-one level, but it's actually a better experience for, for global traffic coming to that, coming to that website.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Now you've actually, uh, I've got him. The reason I'm looking to my right, if you are watching the video, is I actually have this on my screen. You sent me, didn't you? A, a document with this as an example, we ship to Romania, uh, to Romania. Welcome. Just three simple bullet points, gives you all the facts and information, um, shopping your local currency, free shipping on all orders above, uh, 560 ron, what's the, what was the currency?

Eric Melchor: Well, they call it Ron, or you can call it Lei, but they have two different terms, Ron or lei.

Matt Edmundson: Okay. Uh, all duties and taxes are already included. No hidden hidden fees. Continue to shop. Um, or you can change your shipping country. And I thought that was very clever, uh, for a website that has a lot of international visitors.

Um, and so you're right. That this personalization is not at the one-to-one level, but actually we've started it straight away. They've come to the website and we've started to understand them and we're like, oh, you are, you are from this specific country, so let me show you some information here. Um, I thought that's very clever and, and very simple.

Yep. To do, I would've thought, um,. So what are some of the other things that we can think about from a personalization? So we can think about people coming from different countries and we can give them information, which will be helpful. Yeah. Uh, what, what else is, is kind of obvious to think about?

Eric Melchor: Okay, so if you're a brand, you're thinking, well, that's great.

You know, for, for a website that gets a lot of international traffic, my website doesn't, you know, what can you do for me? Well, let's talk about the one thing that you probably wanna do, and that's continually build your email list because email, marketing, email, you know, visitors from your email have the highest conversion rate out of any other channel out there.

If you get a returning visitor that comes back to your website, they're usually gonna spend, uh, sometimes two to three times the, the average dollar amount versus a new visitor. So how can we increase subscribers so that way you can get them on your database and you can, uh, segment them and do email marketing.

So right now, a lot of brands, they just have the traditional pop-up. You go to their website, you scroll around a little bit, and then you'll probably see a pop-up that says, give us your email for 10% off. Okay, that's okay. It's not really a good experience. You're probably gonna see a conversion rate of around three or 4%.

If you wanna triple that conversion rate, there's something that you can do, which is called a conversational pop-up. And if you don't know where your visitor's coming from, this is a very smart way to find out data and details about them so you can segment them and start serving them content that they're really interested in.

and then also, uh, get them onto your mailing list. And so you could start, uh, segmenting them for email marketing. So the way a conversational pop-up works, let's say, um, let's say you sell wine and somebody comes to your website and, uh, they click on a page or a blog post that's specifically around Cabernets or Merlots or some other kind of red , wine mm-hmm. .

You can have a little message that appears that just says something about, Hey there, how about 10% off your next purchase in a red wine recommendation? All you do is just let us know which region do you like? And the regions could be different choices, like Portugal, Argentina, France, South Africa, the states.

You're not asking for an email. All you're asking is for a little micro engagement. Asking them, yeah, which region do they like? You know, what's their preference? And we get a huge percentage of people that do take, uh, that go to the next step. And let's say they click on Argentina, and then the next message could be, great.

Here's your 10% off coupon purchase. By the way, would you like to see these articles on Argentina wines? So you've done a couple of things here is you start personalizing their experience in real time. Mm-hmm. while they're on the website. And then two, uh, you start, you know, you're giving them that discount offer.

Maybe they're not purchase ready right now, but at least they know, you know, that they have something. So if they do decide to come back, they can make that purchase and they've got that discount coupon code. And so once you, you share those articles with them, you can even go a little bit further and say, okay, great.

Would you like to receive content about Argentinian wines? If so, you know, please give us your email address. And what we're seeing is that a lot of people opt to do that because of the first micro engagement. Once you get someone. Committed or saying yes with the first question, the chances of them taking action and doing something else that you're asking for really, really increase.

Yeah. So once they make that first election, their likelihood of them to give you their email because they know they're gonna get content specific to them. Yeah. Really, really jumps. And so now you've got somebody that's, uh, that subscribed and you can start segmenting through your email marketing efforts, which means you're gonna get a lot more people coming back coming through Email who spend a lot more money than first time visitors.

Matt Edmundson: That's really, uh, again, a lot there, Eric, isn't there? I, and I, and I, I've jotted a few things down in my notes. I'm intrigued by this term. Uh, micro engagements or micro conversions, uh, as it's sometimes known. And historically, websites, e-commerce websites.

you either buy or you don't. And then we, we kind of woke up, didn't we? And we kind of went, uh, people aren't always ready to buy. Let's try and get their email. Uh, you either buy or you don't, or you give me your email address or you don't. And then we were kinda like, uh, even that's a little bit complex.

So then we inputted the Facebook pixel. Uh, so we're like, well, at least we can get something from them, even if they don't give us their email address. And then of course, apple screwed up the Facebook pixel no end. And so, What you are talking about here, these sort of micro adjustments, uh, or these sort of micro engagements, uh, micro adjustments, uh, micro engagements, um, is, is is quite intriguing to me because you are, you are getting a series of small yeses, a series of small engagements, aren't you, which makes it easier and easier and easier to, to do things like give email addresses, which is notoriously quite difficult to get out of people these days.

I really like that as a, as a concept. So you are, you are using the system, the personalization idea, um, as a strategy to create these micro engagements, right?

Eric Melchor: Absolutely these micro engagements, you can also, they're also in real life, Matt, and what I mean by real life is that they mean so much to us. We don't even notice it, but especially during Covid, when everybody's remote working from home, what matters is, for example, The lady at the corner who sells flowers, maybe you engage with her on a daily basis just by saying, you know, waving or, smiling at her.

The person, the lady who walks her dog that you see, you know, in your neighborhood, smiling at them, acknowledging them. Or when you take your kids to the park and you recognize some of the other parents, you kind of acknowledge them. Those little, those are micro engagements, in real life. You know, and in person. And so what Optimonk has given you the power to do is try to create those little micro engagements. On your website, and so typically everybody talks about conversion rate optimization, and those are the little, the little hacks that you can do to try to get somebody to download a white paper or subscribe to your newsletter or even get the quick sell, right?

We're saying think long term, think about customer value optimization, where instead of trying to get the quick win, just try to help the person. Mm-hmm. , you know, you, you really don't know what stage they are, uh, in their life cycle. I mean, out of every a hundred people, there's probably only three that are ready to buy.

So quit trying to get the quick win for all 100 people and focus on educating, you know, and servicing everybody who comes to your website and you can do that. And so if they're a returning visitor, don't give them the same re experience as a first time visitor. You know, give them the experience where they left off of, you know, Hey, here's the products that you were looking at previously.

If you're a, uh, a visitor that's coming from a channel, that has a very high bounce rate. You know, if you go into Google Analytics and you, you filter by channel and you notice that, wow, I'm getting a lot of visitors from Instagram, but they've got the highest bounce rate, then maybe you should serve a little message that says, you know, welcome.

We love Instagram. Welcome. Can you please let us know what you're looking for? because if you wanna continue getting, you know, a high bounce rate, then do nothing. Yeah. Uh, but if you wanna really find out what is the issue at hand, you can just kind of ask them for, you know, one question, help us out here.

You know? Yeah. How can we help you better? What are you looking for? And so personalization can be used in so many different situations as a surprise and delight from the first example, if you're a global visitor, or from trying to find out what are some of the pain points as to which channels are performing low.

Uh, the source of traffic and trying to get feedback for those channels, returning visitors, giving them a different experience. Mm-hmm. . And then also the conversational popups or gamification, you know, trying to engage with people and get that zero party data. You don't know anything about them, but you're, came to my website.

Maybe if you're like a fitness and health website and you really don't know why that person's there, you know, ask them and say, Hey, uh, 10% discount if you just answer this question for us. Are you here to, to to lose weight, to build muscle, to sleep better? Give them some choices. Yeah. And once they make that choice, then you could, you know, serve them your best articles or case studies related to the topic they chose.

And, uh, you know, ask them, would you like further information about this? We'd be happy to share it with you and, and ask for their email address. So that's, that's what we're talking about, is giving those micro engagements, you know, putting it in the digital form, which is mm-hmm. , uh, the website experience.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. No, brilliant. I like, and it's a great strategy. Um, Eric, you know, and, and, and one that. I'm a big fan of, you know, the micro engagement strategy and, and that I like how you put it. That just comes down to being helpful. Uh, how can you help people, you know, the, the basics, the fundamental principles of marketing.

Just be helpful and you'll be amazed how that works. What I can hear in people's heads though, right? Uh, because, um, part of me would be the same way. Listening to you talk, Eric, that sounds wonderful. But it sounds horrendously complicated, uh, to try and create that level of, um, personalization.

On my website, I can hear the developers all around the country kind go yes paydays coming now because I need to do this, this, and this. Yeah. Um, does it have to be that complicated or can we simp, is this actually attainable for the regular Joe for want of a better expression? .

Eric Melchor: Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it is. My two favorite words, uh, when we talk about personalization are, are no code.

And it's about as simple as taking your kid to Home Depot. Do you have Home Depot over there in England?

Matt Edmundson: Uh, similar We have b&q.

Eric Melchor: Okay. B&Q. Here in Romania, you have Dedeman. And what I mean by that is the other day I took my son to Home Depot, but I didn't tell him, Hey, we gotta go to Home Depot. Come with me.

I said, son, Hey, you know how you like climbing that tree? Well, we're gonna go to a place that has all these different pieces of wood. And wood comes from trees and there's different shades, different colors. They even smell different. Some are big, some are little. And uh, this place is huge and you're gonna see all these different pieces of wood. You wanna go?

And he is like, his eyes light up and he is like, yeah, dad, I wanna go check this out. He's like, excited to go with me to Home Depot. I'm going there to get a part for the toilet for Christ's sake. Right? So, you know, we're driving over there. He's excited. I can see the expression in his face. We get there, it's a huge place.

And he's like skipping, where is it, dad? Where is it? And we go there and he's like, can I touch it? Of course you can. You know, go touch it. Go play with. I took an extra 10 minutes out of my, just out of my day, and turned this trip to Home Depot, into Disneyland. Okay. Yeah. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it was a memorable experience.

For my son by taking that little bit of extra effort mm-hmm. and making it enjoyable. So if you're a marketer, there's no code. It's designed for marketers. You don't need a, a big IT team, you don't have to have any coding experience required. We've got the Guide to optimization playbook where we have I think over 30 different examples and, um, Step-by-step instructions on how to implement these different personalization strategies.

We recommend you don't recommend all 30 or do all 30 at once. You know, let's start with the low hanging fruit first. Um, but yeah, there's really no big effort required. If I can do it, pretty much anybody can do it.

Matt Edmundson: If I can do it, anybody can do it. Uh, such as the cry of, uh, a lot of people around me. If I can do it, you can do it. It'd be fine..

Eric Melchor: I don't even know html, that should tell you something.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, at least I've got that on you. Uh, you may be better at tennis, but I can do html. Um, so, okay, so the Optimonk platform sounds pretty straightforward and simple, but what happens if I'm not signed up? Is there any, how is there sort of low hanging fruit that could benefit our listeners who aren't using, uh, Optimonk.

Eric Melchor: Uh, yeah, we've got a, we've got a free plan. Uh, you know, try, try us out. I think it's a 14 day free plan. And, um, you know, it, it doesn't matter what size of store you have or size of business you have, we're really designed for e-commerce. But we're getting a lot of, a lot of SaaS brands and companies that are starting to use those too, uh, because they realize that they can start segmenting the experience for different visitors coming from different industries.

Mm-hmm. , and there's some other cool things and features that we have that they enjoy. But yeah, regardless of size, feel free to check it out. We have over 500 five star reviews on Shopify, and there's more than 40,000 users that are currently using Optimonk right now. Mm-hmm. . And we have direct integrations with so many different platforms.

MailChimp, active Campaign, woo Commerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, uh, but yeah, pretty much every email platform or CRM that's out there.

Matt Edmundson: Brilliant. Brilliant. Well that sounds very thorough. Um, but if you are, uh, if you are just starting out, right, so let's, uh, I get the level of personalization. Um, and how that works. If I'm a big company, I ship worldwide and it's like, Hey, you are from Romania.

Let me provide this information for you. Right? And, and you and I can see the, I can start to segment data cuz I've got copious amounts of data, I've got lots of people coming in and there's different ways I can plan it and think about it. It's brilliant, it's wonderful. Loving that. Um, what about, uh, the husband and wife who are starting a little e-commerce site as a side hustle around their kitchen table?

they're, you know, they've, they've just gotten signed up, I don't know, to Squarespace, cuz it's the cheapest e-commerce platform out there at the moment. They've got four or five products, uh, and they make them with a, I'm making this along. Uh, they make them with, you know, one of those, uh, laser machines.

They personalize Yeti mugs or something. Do you know what I mean? That's what they do. Okay. how does personalizing, how should they think about personalization at that stage of their, their business? And by the way, if you're listening and that's you and I've described your business, awesome. Tell me your website and I'll promote you on the show.

Uh, but carry on.

Eric Melchor: Yeah. You know, for a small store, you're probably doing some light advertising, maybe some Facebook ads or Google paid ads. So I would probably start off with, uh, trying to save the cart abandonments, right? Seven outta 10 visitors would typically leave items in their cart and leave your website behind.

And so one of the things that we have is, some nice little messages that can appear. If somebody leaves their cart, you can offer maybe a 10% discount or something to encourage them to return whenever they are ready to make a purchase. We typically get, you'll, you'll get a lot of new email subscribers based on that little, hack alone.

so that's something that you can do. Another thing you can do is have like a little nano bar that can be at the, the bottom of your website. And, um, as per, as people are continuously scrolling through your website, they'll see that little message. It's another great way to collect emails. Uh, blend jet is one of our, uh, Shopify e-commerce stores that uses Optimonk and I think they, they generated or created over 20,000 subscribers within a few months, uh, from just having that little nano bar, uh, at the bottom of their website.

And something else that you can do is, um, is tying the headline to your landing pages, to the ad copy of your Facebook ads and Google paid media ads. And so if you're running, um, you know, if you're running different ads based on different value propositions, then you wanna see if that value proposition is also on the headline or the, the, the landing page where people are going to.

Mm-hmm. it should be, right? Yeah. And so it's very easy to do within OptiMonk, instead of having to create, I used to use Unbounce, but instead, instead of having to create multiple landing pages, you can basically just take the UTM codes from your ads, plug those into OptiMonk, and uh, so if somebody's clicking on an ad about value proposition a.

Then the headline on the landing page will also reference, uh, value proposition A. So that's something else that you can do if you're doing paid media, we typically see, uh, bumping conversion rates from 20 to 30% for, for doing that.

Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm. , that was one of the things that Csaba said to me. Actually, I was speaking to him the other day, uh, uh, and he, um, he said to, he noticed actually, he's like, Matt, on your website you have this landing page, uh, for one of your products.

And he said, I noticed this ad on Facebook. He said, I think if you, rather than send em to, to a page which says this, if you send 'em to a page which says which related to the ad. So it was to do with our omega3 oil one on one of our websites. And it's like nothing fishy in our oil cause it's not made, made from fish.

Um, and he is like, why don't you change the pro, the headline on the product page to something like, nothing fishy here. So it ties in with the ad. Yeah. And I saw when I, when he did that, he had had, uh, had someone in his, his car, I'm really sorry I've forgotten her name now, but she put a little, a little screen thing together for me so I could see it.

And I thought, you know what, that is such an obvious thing. Why have we not done this on that website? You know, where we, um, where we correlate both the ads and the, the product page.

Eric Melchor: Yep. Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty simple thing to do within the platform. If you're running paid media, you wanna get the best return on investment on your advertising spend, and that's what the platform is really designed to do.

It's designed to get a better ROI for your paid media dollars, because if you're implementing personalization, the person is gonna have a much better experience once they get to your website. So if you're running paid media, you're gonna see a, a, a better return once you start implementing strategies like this one.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, absolutely. So I like that. I like that a lot. And, um, I thought that was very clever, uh, and very simple and very straightforward. So mom and pop, uh, the, you know, you've got this little, uh, couple making personalized Yeti mugs around the table. They, they can obviously personalize their, um, ads. And so, uh, you can do things like, um, if you're doing an ad for, say, Christmas gifts, for example, as you approach Christmas, then you can tie the, the, you can use optimonk can't you in personalization to tie that into the landing page better, which is great.

Um, they can obviously do it by region. What kind of gifts are you, are you looking to buy for yourself? Are you looking to buy a gift? Uh, if you're looking to buy a gift, is it for a, uh, you know, who's it for? What kind of age, gender, and so on and so forth. Um, what are some of the other quick wins that we should think about when it comes to personalization?

Eric Melchor: Well, no, I think they're the quick wins, uh, returning visitors. Mm-hmm.. And so, you know, you can have a little message that says you wanna see the products that you were looking at previously. Um, that's another quick win for returning visitors. And then we talked about the global visitors, international traffic.

Mm-hmm. , even if you don't, you don't wanna have a message that has all this delivery information. What you can do is just have like a little message that appears, maybe for somebody coming from Australia, you can have like a little image of the Australian flag. Mm-hmm. and it just says, you know, welcome Australia.

We ship to your location. Mm-hmm or something like that. Um, another thing, um, that b2b, uh, clients uses for is that we've got this little cool feature where if somebody starts filling out a form and they don't complete it, after a certain amount of time, a little message can appear that follows them on the website that says, uh, we noticed that your idle, uh, do you need any assistance?

You know, uh, please let us know, right? Mm-hmm. . And so it's just a nice reminder that, hey, they didn't finish completing that form. Maybe if they have a question, they can click there and either sync up to your check, uh, your little chat widget or your. Your chat email and they can leave a message as well.

So that's like another cool little feature, but it, it really depends where, where you are. I mean, if you wanna get more subscribers, there's a lot of things that you can do with Optimonk. If you wanna save, you know, abandoned cards, you can do that. If you wanna improve your, your media, uh, your paid ad, uh, return on investment, you can do what the head, the headlines and tie that to the, the ad itself.

Um, or if you just wanna get zero party data, you can have those conversational popups like we did with the wine example, like what region, uh, do you enjoy, you know, red wines from? And start to collect information, uh, about your visitors so that way you can segment them. And then now not only do you have their email address when it comes to email marketing, you know what content to to deliver to them.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no. So the systems then, um, part of me is thinking, well, how do you, how do you, how does it technically work? Does it, does optimum track with cookies, for example? And, and how does that work? Because I know Google's just about to turn all cookies off, aren't they, apart from on their own internal systems?

Um, apple have kind of screwed up tracking. So how do you, how do, how does it actually work where you, I understand if someone comes there and then you can ask them questions, but do, do you remember the information for the next time they come to the site.

Eric Melchor: Good question, Matt. So it's basically a JavaScript code that you do put on your website, and then it's also based on browser, browser activity.

So the worst case scenario, if somebody's visiting and they came through Safari, then we're probably gonna be able to track them for about seven days. That's the worst case. Mm-hmm. , uh, the average case is around 30 days. If they came in with Chrome and then if they came in with some other browser, like maybe Firefox, then the time can actually be even greater, like 90 days or even greater.

So a lot of it just has to do with browser.

Matt Edmundson: Okay. So you track it through their activity on the browser rather than through cookies and stuff. Okay. It's clever. Clever. I like it. I like clever. Uh, Eric, listen as we're coming towards the end of the, the show here. Uh, one question I've started to ask that I really enjoy, right.

As you know, this show is sponsored by the e-commerce cohort, which is all about, you know, using coaching and peer mentoring to deliver e-commerce wow. And so we've got all these cohorts who are, who are in the membership. We do workshops, uh, and you've just taught your workshop on how to do personalization, right?

The best, the best workshop you've delivered your whole life. You're so proud of it. The whole room's going crazy. Yay. Go, Eric. Amazing. And you stand up, you take a bow, um, and you go, you know what? I would just like to thank, dot, dot, dot. Um, who would, who would you be thanking like, uh, uh, a family member, uh, a mentor, authors, podcasters.

Who's on your list? Who's, who's had a big impact on you?

Eric Melchor: Uh, Casey Hill. Uh, Casey Hill. I worked with him when we were at Bonjoro. Uh, he's been a big impact in a few different ways. He's not only smart and, and just a variety of different categories when it comes to scaling a business. Uh, but then specifically around engagement and content writing when it comes to LinkedIn.

Mm-hmm. . Um, and then also, uh, working with different tech integration partners. Uh, so I've learned a lot from him and then also been able to connect with a lot of new and interesting different people, uh, through him as well.

Matt Edmundson: Casey. Well, fantastic. Very good. Very good. Uh, Eric, listen. It's been a privilege man to one, meet you and two, uh, chat through, I love some of the stories, uh, that you guys are sharing. Um, how do people reach you? How do they connect with you if they want to do that? What's the best way?

Eric Melchor: Yeah. So to learn more about website personalization and give us a try, just go to optimonk.com. Best way to reach me is just Eric Melchor through LinkedIn.

And, um, if you're interested in hearing about European Startup Founders, my blog, my blog, my podcast is innovators. Innovators Can laugh.

Matt Edmundson: Uh, which is what I just did. Yeah, I, I'm an innovator and I just laughed a little bit. Uh, no. We will of course, uh, link to Eric's info in the show notes, uh, along with, uh, all the free transcripts et cetera.

You can get them at ecommercepodcast.net, uh, or it'll come direct to your inbox if you sign up to the newsletter. All of that stuff will appear there. Automatically. All right. Uh, Eric, listen, thank you so much, man. It has been an absolute pleasure, uh, really enjoyed talking to you. Um, I, I, I really like this idea that personalization is not just about one-to-one.

As in, I don't have to find out your, your name is Eric. And write Hi Eric on the website for personalization to work. There's so much more to it than that. So many more nuances and I like the micro engagement idea. That is awesome. So, um, yeah, lots of good stuff, lots of notes. So phenomenal. Thank you for being on the show.

Genuinely, really, really appreciate it.

Okay, let me give a big shout out to today's show sponsor the e-commerce cohort. Do head over to ecommercecohort.com. Uh, for this new type of community that you can join. I think I've just said E-commerce podcast. I meant e-commerce cohort. Uh, so the show sponsors e-commerce cohort, not the e-commerce podcast obviously.

Be sure to follow the e-commerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from because we've got some great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them. And in case no one has told you today, you are awesome. Yes you are. It's just a burden you have to bear. I have to bear it.

Eric has to bear it. Awesomeness. It just kind of follows us around. It's the way it is. Uh, the e-commerce podcast is produced by Aurion Media. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. The team that makes this show possible is Sadaf Beynon, Josh Catchpole, Estella Robin and Tim Johnson.

Our theme song was written by Josh Edmundson and my good self. And as I mentioned, if you would like to read the transcript or show notes, head over to the website, ecommercepodcast.net, where you can also sign up for our weekly newsletter and get all of this good stuff directly to your inbox totally free.

Uh, that's it from me. That's it from Eric. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.