Best Checkout Page & Marketing Strategies For Your Clients
With Special Guest C Shakhawat Sultan From WPfunnels.com
Discover the insider secrets to creating the best checkout page and implementing effective marketing strategies for your clients in this exclusive video. Learn how to optimize conversion rates, increase sales, and enhance user experience through proven techniques. Don’t miss out on this valuable knowledge that can take your business to the next level.
#1 – Can you give us some info on Wpfunnels? What are some of its key products?
#2 – What was the business logic connected to offering WPFunnel and Mail Mint as two separate products?
#3 – What are the main things people need to know to make a practical Checkout page experience?
#4 – What are some people’s biggest mistakes in connected marketing automation?
#5 – How will AI change marketing and email automation in the next 18 months?
#6 – If you return to a time machine at the beginning of your business journey, what advice would you give yourself?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
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The Show’s Main Transcript And Links
[00:00:01.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks. It’s another WP Tonic show. We’ve got a great guest. We’ve got Sulton from WPfunnels.com We’re going to be discussing everything about funnels, email marketing, and landing pages. It should be a great conversation. I’m going to do my countdown, and we’re going to go straight into the podcast part of the show. So three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS. Got its show 899. Oh, my God, getting close to the 900. Oh, dear, oh dear. We’ve got a great show today, folks. We’ve got Sulton from WP WP Funnelz. It’s a leading plugin in the email marketing optimization space. It’s a great product. We offer it as part of the WP tonic package. It should be a great show. So, Sulton, can you give us a quick 10, 20-second intro about yourself and WP Funnelz?
[00:01:10.810] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Okay. Hey, everyone. Nice being here. Thanks for having me. I’m Sulton. I’m the Marketing Manager at WPFunnel. WPFunnel is basically a sales funnel builder in WordPress, which is basically the first tool with a visual funnel canvas where you can plan funnels visually. At the same time, we have our own tool called Mailment, with which you can do email marketing automation. So we have these two tools under the same umbrella, and we are helping our businesses to scale up their marketing campaigns and boost their revenue using these two tools.
[00:01:43.600] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. I got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:50.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas, and I work directly with WP-Tonic and Lifter LMS with Learning and membership websites.
[00:02:01.500] – Jonathan Denwood
It should be a great show. We’re going to go into the key parts of these products, plus we’re going to be into what have been some of the business hurdles that WP Funnel has faced and how they’ve attempted to get over them. It should be a great show with some great insights. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a couple of significant messages from our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve got a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and also services for the WordPress professional. Plus some great deals from our major sponsors. If you want to find all this and get these goodies, all you have to do is go to WP-Tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Whatnotes. Com/deals, and you’ll find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. But it’s well worth visiting and using the links, and that supports the show and it also supports the sponsors. So let’s go straight into it. What are some of the…
[00:03:26.840] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’ve already mentioned it. Is that in WP Funnel, you got the two? You got the marketing optimization plugin, and you also got the email. Are there any other products? And what’s the history of the company? When did it start, and why was it starting?
[00:03:47.540] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Okay, so basically, currently, we have two tools under the same umbrella, WPFunnel, and Mailment. So these two combined create a sales funnel journey plus email automation. You make a complete sales process. So how it started was back in 2020, our company’s founder, Lincoln & Slam, was trying to optimize our sales process. So we all work together to improve everything. So he was trying to find better ways on how to increase sales. So he found out this tactic of using sales funnels, and he tried to find solutions in WordPress. However, in WordPress, there are some tools that are there, but it’s a bit complicated to use. At the same time, the SaaS tools that are available are pretty expensive. So when we look into that picture, we came up with a thing that, okay, we’re not the only one facing this. I’m sure many other companies are facing the same situation. So that’s when he came on to us. He went to our developers and said, hey, I have a challenge for you guys. I know you’ve been doing great work, but I have a challenge. Why don’t you try to find a solution to this type of product?
[00:04:51.320] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So, at that time, our UX designers and developers started researching. Our marketing team started researching, and we came up with a solution: sales for a builder with a visualized output. So the specialty of WP Funnel is you can imagine your funnel journey and you can easily edit it within WordPress using your own page builders and everything. So we looked into the other tools and what complications they have because a big problem with marketing is that the more time you lose, the more money you lose. So the other tools require you at least 30 to 40 minutes to create a single page, a single strategy. So what we aspire to do is maybe we could reduce the number of clicks and reduce the number of time required to create the whole marketing strategy. So, by the end of our entire challenge, we managed to create a tool with which you can create a sales funnel in as little as 15 minutes. So that was where we managed to get the output. And so basically, when we first launched, it was back in 2021, we threw in our own website, and then we had a little run in And then from there down the line, we are here.
[00:06:03.990] – C Shakhawat Sultan
We have launched Mailmeet just last year, which is for email marketing. So when you run a sales funnel journey, you need email automation there because email marketing is definitely the best marketing tactic you can use. So you must have that. So these two work together quite well. And that’s where we are today. So if you ask about email automation, Mailmeet is something that will Excel because you might think that, hey, this is for WP funnels, but No, this is the product in itself, which is pretty good with this email marketing features. It’s better than most of the tools out there because, again, we have researched our other tools. We have seen how difficult they are, and we’ve made sure that those difficulties are not in this tool. So that’s the motto. We want to make sure that our tools are easy to use. It saves marketers time so that you guys can use it to scale up your business and then focus on more important things while automating the main sales process.
[00:06:58.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, that’s great. So you You said your team and you started it three years ago, but what was the background of the company before WP Funnel? Were you doing a lot of WordPress work? Was it agency or was you building other plugins or technologies on other platforms?
[00:07:18.550] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, initially, our company is basically called Coderex, which is a WordPress development agency. But after that, we had our own plugin development flagship called Wrex Team, where if you have heard of WP VR, that’s our tool, Product Fit Manager, that’s our tool. Those are our own tools that we have been running for a while with that, over seven years before we went into WP Funnel. So WP Funnel is basically something that we created a long time later. Our main team initially started as an agency. We used to provide services. We provide a service to 500 clients already, very large clients with Coderex. And then our other two tools, like WP VR, is right now the number one VR tool in WordPress. And we used our expertise to bring it into WP Funnel’s mailman, because these are more mainstream tools. So all of our tools have the same purpose, increasing business output. So WPVR helps with realtors, realtors increase their sales. Product Fit Manager helps any e-commerce business increase their sales. Then we came on to WP Funnel and Mailman. These two are there to increase sales for any type of business. So that’s where we are today.
[00:08:37.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, that’s great. Sounds like you got a great history with WordPress. I’m going to throw it over now to Kurt.
[00:08:44.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
Hey, I get the question, and I think I identify with it because I struggle with this myself sometimes. It’s, what is a practical checkout page experience? What are the main things that people need to know about creating a It’s a typical checkout page experience? I think we see things in platforms we download, we start to use, and we take it for granted. But there are other elements to check out that I don’t think a lot of us really address.
[00:09:12.880] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Definitely. Well, you see, here’s the thing. When you set up a business, all right, one of the crucial parts is to check out, because when a person is at the checkout page, he’s there to pay. I mean, the person has literally thought about paying. That’s why he’s in the checkout page, right? And at At this point, what you need to focus on is closing the deal, other than focusing on increasing sales or anything additional. The main focus should be how soon the customer can complete the payment process. So the first thing you need to focus on is it cannot be cluttered. There cannot be too much colors. There cannot be too much elements in the checkout page. It should be solely focused on checkout. The second thing is do not use any distractions like ads or ads And since many people do that, I don’t know why. I mean, a person is ready to pay, why would you distract him with something else? There’s no meaning to that. And also a third thing is sometimes for, let’s say, high ticket businesses, businesses that sells products with thousands of dollars. At that time, it’s better to simplify the process maybe with a multi-step checkout.
[00:10:21.180] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So initially, you just pick up their basic information and then separate it a second form for collecting their payment information so that it’s It’s easier for customers to focus on. So the main goal here at the checkout is to not distract the customer. That’s what everybody misses. Most people that fail with the checkout is they create some distraction. And the more you can reduce the distraction, the better. The easier it is for the customer, the sooner they get to take a decision. You want to make upsells, don’t do it at the checkout. Do it after the checkout, maybe with a post purchase offer or maybe with an email. But don’t do it on the checkout page. On the checkout page, the highest you can do is add a relevant product which they have to use together maybe, or else don’t. I mean, if someone is buying a phone, yes, you can offer a headphones there as a small order bump, they can add it. That’s fine. But if someone is buying a phone and you’re offering him a higher model of a phone on the checkout page, that’s a distraction. Now he’ll think that, okay, let’s check that out.
[00:11:20.190] – C Shakhawat Sultan
And once he starts checking that out, he might think, okay, I need time to think. Then he doesn’t check out at that time and he end up not completing the process. So And that’s the idea here.
[00:11:32.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. So if I understand the answer correctly, if I’m selling something that’s 10, 25, $40, having everything on one page, check out, simple, boom. If I’m selling something that’s It’s $1,500. I probably just want to collect name, address, blah, blah, blah, then go to the next page and do credit card information.
[00:11:53.720] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Exactly. Great.
[00:11:55.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Okay.
[00:11:56.160] – C Shakhawat Sultan
That’s what works most. I mean, I’ve worked a few clients in the past. I I’ve talked with many people, and that’s what everybody have used, because when it’s a large payment procedure, people need to think a lot because it’s a lot of investment. So the least you make them think while they’re filling forms out, the better. So you separate it out so that it feels like it’s a simple checkout process. They go through it smoothly.
[00:12:22.550] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I don’t mean to drive down too hard on this, and I usually don’t take this much time. But when you mentioned the a post-purchase upsell, you had mentioned either refer them or redirect them to a post-purchase offer or an email. Now, in your experience, if it’s a high-ticket item, let’s say it’s a $5,000 training thing or whatever, What do you think has the better conversion, the redirect with the immediate offer on a page or an email that’s sent like an hour later?
[00:12:54.150] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, it doesn’t have to be one of the other. You can use both. Basically, when you have a $5,000 product, you don’t really sell it directly. You first have to gain trust from the customer. So what usually such businesses do is they use a tripwire funnel. The concept is initially you sell them something very cheap to get a taste of your product or maybe offer them a trial to understand your product. And then you nurture them with emails. So after you nurture them into emails, you then take them to your main product offer. So you are still making a post-purchase offer. You’re still making them sign up for something now. But that’s because you want them to first understand that you are the real thing. So once they try out your product initially, let’s say they paid seven dollars to get access to your tool for, let’s say, two months. So once they use it with their business, they know that, okay, this is something that’s really good. So at that time, during those two months, you’re sending him emails with more information of how to make it more useful for the business to nurture them.
[00:13:58.200] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So that’s email automation. So you’re sending them a series over the next two months. At the end of the two months, you send them an email with a link to the offer, the post purchase offer. Hey, I know you’ve been using it for two months, and I really don’t like to beg, but I know this is going to make some money for your business. So here is something. I have a special offer that you cannot refuse. Take a look. So it’s going to click, it’s going to open and the offer is going to show, hey, I have a huge discount for you, a 60 % off just for you because you have gone through this process and I don’t want you to feel like you’re missing out on this and I want you to use it for a long time. I want your business to scale. So use this tool, just 60 % off, it’s yours, and you start making millions. So something like that. So that’s how the offer pages work. So you need to use a nurturing email series and then make an offer. But this usually is case for high ticket products.
[00:14:52.010] – C Shakhawat Sultan
If it’s a cheaper product, then it’s more effective if you make an immediate offer. So when someone is at the checkout, it’s, let’s say, a $50 product. Immediately, you take him to an Upsell offer where you, say, add a relevant product or a complimented product or maybe a higher number of products. So let’s say someone is buying a T-shirt. So immediately redirect them to an absolute offer. They’re like, okay, buy three T-shirts and you get an extra $50 off. So these things work really well when the products are more affordable, the amount people can spend at a time. So $5,000 is not something you can spend every day. But $50 is something you can spend with a significant decision. So that’s how it works.
[00:15:32.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
Excellent. Thanks for driving down on that for me. Jonathan?
[00:15:35.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, sure. So with WP Funnel and Melmin, you decided to have two separate products. What was the logic behind that? I think you hinted at that earlier that Melmin is a really totally separate product which can be utilized without WP Funnel. But there must have been a bit of a discussion I would imagine, about having two separate or combining them in one. So maybe you can give some insight about how that discussion went and why in the end you decided to have the two separate products.
[00:16:16.900] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, there’s a lot of reasons. Initially, when we thought of creating email automation, we wanted to make it for WB Funnel only, because that’s what the community was demanding that’s necessary for any funnel journey. But But as we went into planning and development, researching, we found out that email marketing is actually a huge market in itself. So there are businesses that can run with just email marketing, even without any sales, or without any landing pages. They can make money just by emails. It’s totally possible. So once we see that industry and we see that, okay, we have a user base that’s using funnels, but email marketing has a lot more use in WordPress. So when we see it that way, it’s more logical that, okay, we can invest a separate team for an email marketing tool. We can invest a separate team in a funnel building tool and then make both of them compatible so each of them can use each other or people who doesn’t need the other one, they can use a separate tool. That’s We’re totally up to them. The second reason behind this is when we look into WordPress. So if we want to create email marketing into WP Funnel, the plugin would get quite heavy.
[00:17:26.870] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So we don’t want to make the plugin too large, the plugin files too large and input too many features into one tool that makes it quite heavy for WordPress. It’s not a SaaS tool. It’s not our own server. So it’s a lot of weight there. So we decided, okay, if some people want both of them together, they just can use two tools or else one person might just say, hey, I have my own email marketing tool. I don’t need mailman. So I’ll just use WP Funnel and I’ll be using my other email marketing tool. So that’s the whole scenario behind this. And at the same time, The third logic is a business decision. Basically, when you create an email marketing tool, you invest a lot of time. You need a complete team to develop that. So basically it would be more feasible for us rather than increasing the price of WP Funnel, make it a separate product and charge for that. Because if we were to invest in adding email marketing within WP Funnel, that means the price of the product had to go up. And because we had to make up for the investment we were making.
[00:18:30.100] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So that would make it difficult for many people to afford either one of them. So rather we kept the prices affordable on a separate level. Those who need both, they’ll pay for both of them. Those who doesn’t need both, they’ll just pay for one of them which they need. Those are the three reasons we decided that these two should stay separately.
[00:18:51.090] – Jonathan Denwood
I think one of the great strengths of WP Funnel with Melmin is The way I place it is that it’s a… Because it is also… I don’t know if you would agree with this or disagree. It also is a CRM to some extent as well. But what is a CRM? It’s such a broad… A CRM can be such a broad animal that it’s almost lost its meaning. I don’t know if you would agree with that, Sulton, but what I like about the combination is we offer it ourselves, but we also offer Fluent CRM and CART Flows. But your product, it really seems to cover the whole journey from building a landing page because you provide a small library of templates, don’t you? Landing pages. It provides the marketing optimization in this visual builder, which I really like. Then you got the… With Melmin, you got the email emails. So you seem to have integration, which most of the other products in the WordPress space don’t seem to have. Would you agree with that? That’s the notes that I’ve outlined?
[00:20:29.980] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Yeah, well, it’s totally as you said, basically, when you look at W Funnel and Mailment, you get the feeling that you’re using a SAS tool because most of the SAS tools provide all of this into one package, right? But you don’t get it with the tools that are in WordPress right now. So that’s one advantage we have. And in regards to CRM, you can say to some extent it’s a CRM for people who use CRM to store customer data. But a CRM is much broader. There is things like inbound customers, the customer satisfaction, I mean, what’s it? Customer support control, things like that.
[00:21:06.970] – Jonathan Denwood
The reason I’m interrupting is I think you made a great point because that’s what I was hinting there as When I put the original question to you is that there’s a sales-oriented CRMs like Salesforce or some other like. But then you got something… I wouldn’t call something in the SaaS area like active campaign, a true sales-orientated. It’s more email and marketing optimization. But I know loads of people… I classify sales more like HubSpot or Salesforce, but there’s loads of people that utilize active campaign as their only CRM, but that’s more in the SaaS world. I I see that as one of your main competitors. You seem to offer a lot at a much more affordable price than something like ActiveCampaign because they’ve also increased their prices quite a lot recently, haven’t they? What do you think about that? I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I thought that was a useful point to make.
[00:22:23.050] – C Shakhawat Sultan
No, it’s totally fine. Well, to be honest, we are not going for a competition with SaaS tools, even though a lot of features Which is similar. What we would say is that if you’re using WordPress, then yes, we are a competition to that because if you’re using WordPress, it’s more sensible to use a tool that’s already in the platform. Why would you go outside? So use Mailman at that time. We have everything they are providing. So why use an external tool that costs more, is more difficult to use? Just come to us. So it’s not just about active campaign. If you’re using any email automation tool, just try Mailman out if you’re into WordPress. If you’re outside of WordPress, sure. Or you might have different scenarios that you want to use it. Mailman doesn’t work outside WordPress, so I don’t have any reason to compete there, right? So if you are using WordPress, it’s always more sensible to use a plugin that works within the WordPress, what should I say, environment. So you need a tool within that rather than finding an external tool where you need to set it up a lot of complications.
[00:23:24.680] – C Shakhawat Sultan
It doesn’t work all the time as well. So you don’t get a lot of automations there that you might be getting with Mailman. So that’s the advantage we provide. So we definitely checked out a lot of tools before creating Mailman so that it gets super easy. We want to make sure that it aligns with WordPress, but also it’s easy for people who use email marketing outside of WordPress. So you can think about this way, that there are very few tools in WordPress that provides email marketing. Very few. Most of them are SaaS tools. So we have to make sure that our users can use this tool. So we have to make it somewhat easier than the SaaS tools. At the same time, we need to make sure that it’s definitely better than the ones that are within WordPress. So that’s what we aimed for. So in our case, we have mainly wanted it for the funnel people, the people who use the double funnels. But then when we came into the market and we now want to serve everybody, now we have to provide the features that SAS tools are providing. So we have a lot of features that you would normally get with the SAS tools, but not in WordPress, but you will get that in Mailman.
[00:24:32.760] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So that’s how things are working. For example, if I give you an example, we have AI integration to generate subject lines and the email copy. So basically, you can connect it with ChatGPT account and then provide instructions within Mailman to generate those subject lines and the email copy. Those are some things that you usually get with SAS tools, not in WordPress, but we brought it in because that’s something people would find useful. So that’s just the idea.
[00:25:00.580] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Before we go for a break, I’ve got another quick follow-through question because I think the main purpose of this, I wanted you to come on the show because you’ve been very generous. We partner with WP Funnel. It’s our second main partner. We only have two partners that we really work with in the marketing optimization, and WP Funnel is one of them. We have a lot professionals listen to this podcast, WordPress professionals, implementers, developers, Sulton. So what is its integration with WU and also something like WP Fusion? First of all, what is its integration with WU? Is it very good?
[00:25:52.950] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Yeah, well, WP Funnel is built for uCommerce. Basically, if you create sales funnels, it works with O’Commerce just as smoothly. At the same time, Mailmin has automations for O’Commerce, and pretty soon we are going to be releasing the feature of editing the transactional emails as well. So right now, we cannot edit the transactional You can just edit. You can just run email campaigns, automations based on user actions in your uCommerce store. So for example, if someone places an order, you can set up an automation workflow for that. If someone registers to your store, you can set up an automation for that. Those things are And basically next month, we’ll be working on editing the transactional emails as well. So our email builder is basically unique. It’s a drag and drop email builder, which you don’t usually get in WordPress. So that’s something that makes it super easy to design the emails. So we’ll be allowing you to design your transactional emails with that. So at that time it will be completely integrated with do commerce. So that’s the only thing missing. I’m just saying we have abandon card recovery. We have email campaigns, we have email series, we have email automation workflows.
[00:27:00.230] – C Shakhawat Sultan
That’s the only missing Lego to make it a complete solution for who comes. And if you talk about WP Funnel, it has a direct conditional integration. Basically, you can set up conditional funnels. For example, you can define that, okay, if someone purchases this specific product, then he’ll be taken to a custom funnel, a custom checkout page, where he’ll be made personalized offers just for that customer. So for different products, you can have different types of funnels. You can even make conditional dynamic Upsell offers. So you can set it up like this, that, okay, if someone buys a T-shirt in Upsell, offer him three T-shirts. If someone buys a T-shirt in Upsell offering three T-shirts, if someone buys a pen in the Upsell offers three pen or four pen. You can create dynamic offers like that for uCommerce. So that’s a direct integration of WP Funnel with uCommerce, where you can set up conditional funnels. In fact, you can actually replace the traditional uCommerce checkout with WP funnels and have Yeah, have your own custom checkout page.
[00:28:03.940] – Jonathan Denwood
And what is its integration with WP Fusion?
[00:28:09.110] – C Shakhawat Sultan
We currently don’t have any integration with WP Fusion. It’s part of her roadmap later this year.
[00:28:14.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, yeah. You must do that because a lot of people utilize that. It should be on top of your list if you want my advice. Maybe you don’t. No, it’s a great product and a lot of people combine it with the tag in power that WP Fusion offers. So Hopefully you’ll do that. It seems like you’re on it. We’re going to go for our break now, folks. It’s been a great discussion. We’ve got some other great questions. I think it’s something definitely you want to look at, WP Funnel. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast, a feast of marketing, optimization, email questions, landing page. I think we’ve done a good job in highlighting the power of WP Funnel and if you’re a developer, why you should be looking at it. But before we go on in this great interview, I just want to point out that if you are building a course, a membership website for a client or a community website on BuddyBoss, why don’t you look at becoming a partner with WP Tonic? We offer fantastic hosting and much, much more aimed at you, the WordPress developer or individual professional that’s building this type of website.
[00:29:40.470] – Jonathan Denwood
And we offer a fantastic package to Find out more, all you have to do is go over to Wp-tonic. Com/partners, Wp-tonic. Com/partners, and see what we’re offering, and book a chat with me, and we can go through how we could work together. So let’s go. I’m going to throw it back over to you, Kurt.
[00:30:08.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Excellent. Well, you’ve given us some great insight as to the power of your tools and what they do. And now I’m curious, what do you think are some of people’s biggest mistakes connected to using these marketing automation tools?
[00:30:26.430] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, I think the biggest mistakes that I have seen people do is they plan as they go. In any marketing strategy, planning comes first, and you need to invest a lot of time into planning and research. And when you are creating marketing automation, if your flow is not properly organized, properly planned, then you’re giving the wrong message to the wrong people and it doesn’t work. So for example, if I talk about a few minutes ago, I said you could add a conditional funnel for people. Now, if someone is buying a T-shirt, And if you’re offering him, let’s say, a pair of earphones, let’s say. Now, how is that relevant? That’s not relevant, right? Someone wouldn’t think about headphones when they’re buying a T-shirt. So when you’re planning this funnel journeys, you should think about, okay, what products am I offering? Okay, what pages I should be including? How many landing pages or how many emails should I use? Some funnels usually have two or three landing pages as well. It depends on what type of funnel you’re using, right? So you can decide, okay, do I need two landing pages? Do I need one landing page?
[00:31:32.690] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Okay, if I have the checkout, what checkout should I be using? Should I use a multi-step checkout? Then should I make upsell offer? If so, how many upsell offers should I make? Okay, if I’m going to use email automation, how long is going to be my email series. And the way to plan that is you need to also decide on the journey you want your customer to go through. So initially you take them to a landing page. You decide, okay, what do I want my customers to think when they’re in this landing page? You write a copy for that. So once they’re happy with it, they go through to the checkout. Let’s say your main aim was to get them to sign up for a free trial. So that should be your main focus on the landing page, showing the benefits, the use cases, and then focus on the free trial. So once they sign up, they should be going to a checkout page where they just get a free trial. It’s not a checkout page. They’re just signing up for the free trial. And then you decide, okay, now they’re on the trial, I want them to take a journey from learning about my product to implementing it and then finding out what’s more.
[00:32:32.800] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So I would plan maybe a three to four email series where initially I’ll give them a good welcome, warm welcome. Hey, welcome to this. This is the tutorial. If you need help. Then two days later, I’ll send them a tactic. Okay, this is a great tactic that I think you can implement. Check it out. And then maybe two days later, I send you an email. Hey, this is a use case one of our great customers created. Check it out. They have just created this and they’ve got this much success. Then four days later, I send them another one saying that, hey, I think you have used it for four or five What’s your take on this? What questions do you have? I asked them a few FAQs. So things like that. So this whole planning should be done before you start creating your funnel journey. Don’t just plan as you go. Don’t just sit down and say, hey, first let me create the landing page. Then I’ll think about the checkout. No, plan it first. The planning should come first. If you have it all planned out, then you use any tools, it’s going to work.
[00:33:23.500] – C Shakhawat Sultan
It’s not about using WBFanals’ mailman. When you’re a marketer, you should be first planning it. Once you have the plan ready, obviously the plan has to be based on your research. You need to have proper customer research. You need to have proper data, data-driven decisions. So after that, you make a plan, and then you dive into the sales funnel. Okay, creating your funnel. Don’t create it as you go. It never works. You always make a mistake here and there. And especially if you’re selling high ticket, one single wrong word can change the whole context of the funnel journey. And people will leave. Don’t do that. I mean, you brought the customer. It’s a very difficult thing to do. You’re either running paid ads or you’re doing marketing, some sort, bring in the traffic. But just because of not planning properly, you’re losing them. Don’t do that. So that’s the biggest mistake people make with marketing strategies. But I would also like to add one more thing that people do. This is something they do before planning, right? But the other thing people make a mistake is after setting up the funnel, they don’t track the performance.
[00:34:30.120] – C Shakhawat Sultan
You have to track the performance. You need to check out the analytics. You need to see where things are not working out so that you can improve it because no funnel is perfect on the first go. No marketing activity is perfect on the first go. You run something, check it out after one week, how is it performing? If any area you see is dropping off too much, improve that. Run A/B testing, make it better. But do analyze your analytics. Do find out what’s performing, what is not. So these are the two things that people don’t want to do. The first one, they make a mistake because they think they can plan as they go. The second one, they’re just ignorant because they feel lazy to track that. Because analytics is a lot of data. It takes a lot of work. And most people don’t want to do that. They’re like, oh, I think it’s going to work out. Come on. But no, it doesn’t work that way. You have to track that.
[00:35:18.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that came up for Jonathan and I on a couple of recent episodes where we actually discussed, you have to know what your offer even is and who your target is. And that’s all part of that planning, right? If you’re selling the wrong thing to the wrong people, you ain’t going nowhere anyway.
[00:35:32.730] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Yeah, exactly.
[00:35:34.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
The other thing was you mentioned the word mistake three or four times in your answer. And so I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is they don’t audit or they don’t actually test their funnel as if they were a test client. I’m amazed at how many funnels I get sucked into that don’t even work. The link is dead or it doesn’t go to the product or whatever. Whatever. What percentage of people do you think launch a funnel and don’t even check to see if it works right?
[00:36:07.920] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, I think that’s over 60 % because most people are new into this because you see, Most of us, if you talk about me, I’ve been in this industry for a while, but most people that are running funnels nowadays with all the AI coming in, they don’t have any experience into marketing. So they just take a course, see that, and just create the funnel, launch it, and they’re waiting for results. It doesn’t work out. They come out and complain that the course is not good. It’s not working. But you have to track back. Nobody does that. So a lot of people don’t do that because of the experience. You can see that due to the availability of courses and AI, most people are also refraining from going to agencies to run their funnels. But if you look at big companies, the companies that are actually earning millions, they always prefer agencies. Why is that? Because they know that experts are good at this. Experts Experts will track back, experts will improve and get results. But the people who are doing it individually, they don’t find it that fascinating. They feel like, okay, checking the analytics is a boring thing.
[00:37:10.380] – C Shakhawat Sultan
I’ve got this course, this course is going to get me success. And they just leave it like that. And it doesn’t work. So that’s what’s happening nowadays. If I talk about 5 or 10 years back, it wasn’t the case. The percentage should be a lot low. But if I talk about now, it’s a lot because most people are doing that, thanks to AI and courses. Come on.
[00:37:29.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. Jonathan, I’ll toss it back to you.
[00:37:33.610] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, just a quick follow-up for your question before going on to the next one. Is also, I think the other fantastic thing about WP Funnel and Melvin is that you provide some really great analytical screens and you make it reasonably easy to monitor and observe what’s going on in the campaigns. I think it’s one of the strongest You have spent quite a bit of time, it looks to me, building that out. Am I correct?
[00:38:06.080] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Yeah, it took us a lot of hard work. Initially, it wasn’t that efficient, but then we… I mean, basically, when we first launched, it wasn’t too efficient. It was just the bare bones. But then we invested some time checking out other tools, checking out what’s necessary for marketing and optimized it. Basically, we had to find out what metrics are the most important in each campaign, and we included those. We decided that, okay, we do not need to distract people with things that they don’t need and also inaccurate data. So that’s what we focused on. And if you look at WV Funnel now, you can have separate analytics for each page in your funnel. So you can actually find out what each And every page is working on that. You can find out how much revenue you’re earning from each upsell offer. So that’s how we optimize it, because I think that’s what marketers need to make decisions that, hey, if this upsell offer is working more, then this is the format I should be using in the future. If this is not working, then this upsell offer is probably wrong. I need to work on that.
[00:39:04.090] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So you can find those analytics on each page. And at the same time, if you look at Mailmint, we have separate analytics for each email campaigns where you can get more details. Plus recently, we are working on the campaign 360, which means you’ll get insights on the whole campaign, like what each and every customer is doing. Those are coming up maybe early next month or something like that. So we’re on the process. So we know that analytics is one of the most important parts of email marketing, because email marketing is always about testing and getting better. It’s one of those areas in marketing where you have to test. There’s no chance of ignoring that. So you always optimize, you always check out the data, you always improve. So we’re working on this analytics so that marketers can find this tool, one of their best friends.
[00:39:52.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Obviously at WP Tonic, we provide really fantastic hosting. We specialize in the support of Lifter LMS, LearnDash, and BuddyBoss, eLearning and community. Does WP Funnel work quite well with Lifter and LearnDash and BuddyBoss?
[00:40:15.170] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Right now, I think it works with tutorLMS and LearnDash. We haven’t worked on an integration with Lifter yet. That’s probably going to be worked on later on. We haven’t decided a time frame for that. It’s in our list. But directly right now, it works with tutorlms for uCommerce, because tutor. Lms is a uCommerce plugin. So it works naturally. At the same time, we have created a separate add on for learndash. So you can actually create a unique funnel for learndash, which I think doesn’t exist in WordPress before our own plugin. So I think that’s something many people can check out, the LMS add on. With that, you can create a funnel journey without u-commerce with learn-dash.
[00:40:56.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think I strongly advise to look at Lifter LMS because they’re doing some fantastic work there. And also with WP Fusion because I think they’re two fantastic teams. And I think it’s been a benefit.
[00:41:11.560] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Fusion is already in our plans for maybe the next quarter. But for the Lifter, we haven’t planned yet because we need to plan on how to integrate it with the formal properly. We need to check out Lifter more deeply. We haven’t done the full research yet on Lifter. So we did think about it when we were talking about LMSs, but Landesh was the first one we went for, and we haven’t yet integrated with any other yet. So hopefully, when we get into that, we will probably look into Lifter at that time.
[00:41:40.790] – Jonathan Denwood
That’d be fantastic. So let’s move on because you’ve touched, you remarked a little bit about AI, and I utilize quite a few AI tools, and it’s really made me much more productive and helped me personally. But also, I think for for very understandable reasons. It’s also been utilized almost in everything. To say it’s a throw… Obviously, I feel there’s a lot more real power there than a couple of years ago, people were talking about Web3 and integrating blockchain. To some extent, I just think that was When anybody ever tried to explain to me how that would actually really work, they rapidly lose me. I’m not the sharpest tool, but I’m not the bluntest tool in the toolbox. But I really think AI… Because I’m utilizing the number of tools, but I also think it’s been utilized too widely. I’m sure in WP Funnel, you’re having a lot of discussions about how you’re going to integrate AI in your core products over the next year, 18 months. What’s your general view? Would you agree with what I’ve said myself? What I have been some of the discussions in the company about how effectively you can integrate AI.
[00:43:23.110] – Jonathan Denwood
So it really does offer some real value to your end users.
[00:43:29.190] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, in WP Funnel, we haven’t yet planned for AI because Elementor has done that for us, to be honest, because you can write the copies using Elementor AI. So that made it easy for us. We didn’t have to do that. Initially, we were thinking of it, but most of the users of WP Funnel are using Elementor.
[00:43:49.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, that’s funny. What’s your position around Gutenberg as well, if you don’t want me to ask? Because you mentioned WP.
[00:43:59.650] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Yeah, It works with Gutenberg. It works with elementary. It works with DV. And it breaks is coming up pretty soon. So our tool works with almost any builder, just that these builders have their dedicated blocks or modules or what you want to call it. So basically In Gutenberg, we have our own blocks and people can design. We also have templates for that. In Elementor, we have our own widgets. People can design the pages however they want. Just they need to use this widget so that the funnel works functionally. So basically this buttons, let’s say in landing page, there is something called the next step button. That’s what people use as the action button, the CTA. So if someone clicks on that, then they proceed to the next step of the funnel. So similarly, the checkout form that you see, it’s actually our widget. It’s not really the short code. It’s our widget. You can customize it completely. Those are basically the benefits you get when you use the compatible builders. But for other builders, let’s say, Zion, so you can use a short code for that. We have short codes. So it It works with any builder.
[00:45:01.080] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So in case of AI, since we don’t use our own page builder, we’re letting people use their own page builders however they want, or you can use our templates. We have created templates for you. So if you want to write copies in Elementor, they have AI integration, you can use ChatGPT. So that’s pretty easy. But if you look at Mailman, we have already integrated AI, as I told you. In email marketing, you just need two areas of AI. One is writing the subject line, another is writing the content, the copy. So basically, I’m We’re talking about generative AI here. So we have already integrated that. You can easily give instructions on what subject line you want, and you’ll get 10 subject line suggestions. It’s a unique UI. You can look into our video on YouTube where we have demonstrated that how this works. It’s not the same UI as other tools. We have our own unique UI where it’s more easy to choose what subject lines you want to select. So you tell the tool that, okay, I want a subject line where I want to give this message. Our tool will automatically give you 10 suggestions.
[00:46:01.410] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So you have to choose which one you want or you can say regenerate. It will generate 10 more. So that’s how we integrated AI into Mailman for subject line. Same thing for writing the email. When you’re building the email in the text area, you can always activate AI and then give instructions on what to write, and AI will generate it for you. So we have already integrated AI into Mailman. Now, obviously, we also want to go further than that with AI. We have discussed a lot of things, for example. Now, initially, we thought that maybe we could create an AI instructive funnel generator. So if someone can say, hey, I want to create a funnel with this many steps, then AI will automatically bring out, okay, so these are the steps you might use. Whichever the customer chooses, that will be generated. So that’s something we have discussed, but it’s not something that’s possible right now with a lot of complications involved. We have done some R&D in that. So even if we want to move to those advanced AI things, it’s going to take some time because we need to create a lot of things on our own that doesn’t don’t exist at all.
[00:47:01.390] – C Shakhawat Sultan
So it’s time consuming. We need to invest time in that. So before we go there, we are polishing the tool as itself so that even without AI, the tool is really good. We are giving all the necessary features, and then we’re going to move into the advanced AI, or if necessary, basically. Initially, most of our people don’t need AI, as I said. For generative purposes, it’s already there. If we want to make some other advanced innovations, that’s going to be in the future.
[00:47:30.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I totally understand because it’s very… If I’m just trying to place myself in your shoes and the company’s shoes. It’s a very tricky thing, isn’t it? Obviously, you don’t want to be seen falling behind your competitor in the WordPress space or the SaaS space. But on the other hand, it could be a total time, waste of time and resources if you choose the wrong pathway. I think It’s very, very tricky at the present moment. It’s probably best just to concentrate on utilizing it, like you said, to really polish what you already have or add, and then look at any fundamental changes further on. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:48:20.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I guess I get to take it from AI to science fiction. If you had your own time machine, if you were a fan of Doctor Who and you had your own TARDIS, and you can go back to the beginning of your business journey, what advice would you give yourself?
[00:48:37.700] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, I think I would say create an AI tool because I And if you look at last two years, everything is AI. There’s nothing you see that’s not AI. Even as a joke, there’s a tea stall in our area that’s called AI. So you understand? So everything is AI. So So if it was five years back, if I had the decision what tool I want to create, maybe create an AI tool, then I would be ahead of the competition back then. So that’s something I think I would advise myself.
[00:49:12.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’s interesting. I really wonder how far it’s all going to go. I mean, I think we all have the same daydreams, right?
[00:49:20.530] – Jonathan Denwood
But it’s like, how far is it really going to go?
[00:49:22.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
And what would life have been like if you would have gotten in super, super early?
[00:49:28.080] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Yeah. Well, to be honest, if you ask me, after five years, I’m really concerned how many real marketers will be there because AI is dictating everything. So most people don’t even understand marketing, and they’re doing marketing now. So I don’t know how many of them will actually realize that when If something works, there’s going to be a lot of limitations. So to be honest, I’m expecting that the online businesses will have a lot of difficulty the more AI grows, because people will more be bored with this things because It’s pretty apparent that this is not done by a human. Most of us can realize that. And if it’s a good marketer, they change it. They make it sound like human. But nowadays, I can see a lot of websites, they’re just using generative AI and releasing it out there. And pretty soon people are going to get used to that. They’re going to know that, okay, this is AI. Now, I don’t want to read this. If you think about it five years back, if you wanted to learn something, you go to Google, there’s a blog, you had some belief that, okay, this is written by an But now, how many of them are actually written by experts?
[00:50:34.130] – C Shakhawat Sultan
We don’t know. It could be written by AI. So it’s really difficult to trust. And most marketers will not be genuine market. They’d rather be AI marketers. In 10 years time. That’s what I’m thinking it’s going to happen. But generative AI is going to be something that’s going to be used a lot, basically. It’s being used already. So it’s going to be used a lot over the next 10 And pretty soon, I think that’s going to change. This is a fictional belief of mine that I think AI will be more towards visual AI in the future than generative AI. People will focus on creating complete live ads, live demonstrations with AI, than focusing on generative anymore because the written things are losing their trust and credibility. So I think that’s where things will move in the future.
[00:51:29.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of insight what you just said, but I think we utilize AI on the blogs, but I do edit them, and we tend to add video or the podcast or audio to show that it has had human input and it has value. But I totally agree with you that a lot of people, but are in In a way, abusing, but it’s for understandable reasons. But I think you would be advised to mix it with elements that show that it’s had some human input into it. So I think it’s been a fabulous discussion. I think the other thing is, I think, especially for the WordPress professionals that listen to this particular podcast, is Do you have a very active Facebook group? Is there a way for people to join your Facebook group and find out more about WP Funnel and Melmin?
[00:52:43.750] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Yes, we have our own Facebook community. It’s called the WP Funnel, the sales funnel community for WordPress. If you go to Facebook. Com/groups/wpfunnels, that’s our group. Anyone can go ahead and join. You will get all the updates about our tools, plus you can discuss about funnels there. So we have our own community.
[00:53:06.480] – Jonathan Denwood
And like I say, I highly recommend it, Tribe. Like I say, we have two solution that we offer our hosting clients or when we’re building websites out, and we found it fabulous. So we highly recommend WP Funnel. If you’re looking at, especially with combining it with Melmin, you have a system where you got the optimization, the landing page, and the email all combined in one system for your clients. So go and have a look at it. So what’s the best way to find out more about your own thoughts on that? Are you on Twitter or Facebook yourself, because obviously you’ve shown that you’re an expert a lot of marketing, so I’m sure that people will want to follow you. So what’s the best way to follow you personally?
[00:54:06.880] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, you can follow me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. So in Twitter, it’s x@sultanroyal1. That’s my idea. I’ll share it with you.
[00:54:16.960] – Jonathan Denwood
You can share it with me. Put it, email it to me and I’ll make sure it’s all in the show notes. Which is the best way? What about Facebook? Are you on Facebook at all?
[00:54:27.950] – C Shakhawat Sultan
I’m also on Facebook, but I’m more into LinkedIn and Twitter professionally, but I’m okay with it. If people want to reach me on Facebook, it’s the same name. They would find me.
[00:54:37.290] – Jonathan Denwood
With all these different platforms, it all gets confusing. Yeah. What’s the best way for people to learn more about WP Funnel apart from Facebook? Do you think the Facebook group is the best way for a WordPress professional, or are there some other resources like the WP tonic YouTube channel? Is that quite active? Would promoting the YouTube channel for WP Funnels would be a good idea? What’s the best way for them to find out more information?
[00:55:10.850] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Well, they can visit our website initially, which is www. To w. Getwfunnel. Com or they can join the group or visit our YouTube channel, which is in the same name, WP Funnels. We have all of this active. I mean, we regularly post videos. We periodically share content. You can also subscribe to our blog blogs in our website so that you can periodically get updates on our new articles, new updates. So all of those are active. We have a whole team working on this. So we have a separate support team to help you out. If anybody needs help knowing more about the tool, you can contact us for your contact form. In our chat service, we will reply to you. We also have a free version of WordPress to check out the tool’s basic features, which you can try out for free. So all those are ways you can get to WP Funnel and move it.
[00:56:04.340] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:56:10.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
Like our esteemed guest, you will find me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt Bonomen on LinkedIn, so I’m easy to connect with. Anything Manana Nomas online typically leads to my agency. And I’d love to chat with you about business and helping you out.
[00:56:25.920] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. If you want to support the podcast and WP WP-Tonic, go over to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel and subscribe there. You’ll see all the interviews and other resources about learning management systems and building community websites. It’s a fantastic resource. If you can go over and then subscribe, that would be much appreciated. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[00:56:55.960] – C Shakhawat Sultan
Take care, everybody.
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