How Well Do You Know Your Supplement Buyer?

In this episode of the Health Supplement Business Mastery podcast I focus on knowing your customer, which is the secret ingredient to more supplement sales.

Bobby Hewitt:
Hey, in this episode of Health Business Mastery, I’m bringing back my previous guest, Scott Zeltan from visiopt.com, the AB split testing tool that is really fantastic. I highly recommend it. They have a done-for-you version and they also have a version where you can just use it yourself and it’s a self-serve option.
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about really understanding and knowing the customer, how to do that deep dive level research which everybody skips, and really uncovering what the deep desires and pain points of your supplement buyers really are. A lot of copywriters think they know what it is and a lot of even supplement business owners think they know their customer best, but very few of them do, this research that Scott and I will get into on this episode of Health Business Mastery.

Looking at the market, understanding the marketplace awareness, going back to Eugene Schwartz, going back to what offers people are buying, what messages people are hearing, seeing, I think that’s definitely an important step in the research, understanding the marketplace. I think the other part is understanding what people are doing like an on-page research with some of the tools you mentioned like the heat tracking tools, scroll tools, so they’re looking where people are clicking and how they’re moving on their site. If you’re using a VSL, looking at that … I do tons of VSL breakdowns, where I’m actually looking at minute-by-minute drop off and comparing at what points the cliffs are at and then doing AB tests around that specific drop off point looking if we can get the people to stay in the VSL longer.
So there’s that level of research. I’ve also done research on the customer level using the jobs to be done framework, which is that could be a whole nother discussion in and of itself, really interviewing people and talking to them.

Scott Zeltan:
I love that you actually said that. Personally, from an impact standpoint, first of all, I agree with everything that you just went over. Of course, I think that the biggest part of research that people are missing is really at its core level, which is understanding their customer at a deep emotional level, understanding all the value propositions that their product has to offer because sometimes they’re really laser focused on a couple from the funnel hacking that we talked about, and then we go deeper, and I think understanding, and I’ll tell you where I personally feel this lead, aside from the technical that you spoke about, meaning minute-by-minute.
When we give it a bigger, broader picture of the customer, who they really are, what are their fears, what are their wants, what are their desires, what’s their heaven and hell look like, what does … We break it down. We’ll do things like the seven deadly sins and we’ll break down what does that look like for this particular thing. What is the core emotional desire? Then for each of these things, how is their actual customer describing that? How are they describing that pain because I think that’s what opens up the floodgates for things to be able to test that most people don’t understand, at least from my imprint, meaning, I think some people get stuck, and so they go to a copywriter and say or if they’re working with one where they’ll write let’s say 10 different headlines.
One of my biggest pet peeves, and this is not a down on copywriters, it just is, they will give you 10 of the same headlines saying of the same emotional state headlines. It’s not their fault. It’s how they’re trained unless you give step-by-step. So one of the big things we talk about is semantics separation, meaning, you can take the same, offer, the same page and test widely different, right? There is a big difference. Let’s take the obvious, right? The dumb down there. There’s a big difference between an avoid headline and agreed headline, right? These are polar opposites. There’s a difference between a fear and an enjoy headline.
When you start breaking down all the different value … Let’s take value propositions, all the different, let’s say, categories, hook type categories that certain functions have, and then you break down and make a list of the features, and what this is the way we approach it generally. So we end up with a long list of value propositions, what we refer to as categories and features. Then you break those down. So the old, I think it was Clayton Makepeace, could be anybody but feature, right? Okay. What are the benefits?
Well, if they really sat down and they don’t, each of those 10 features of their product, supplement doesn’t matter, they have at least five to 10 different benefits. Then when you look at how each of those benefits can be dimensionalized, going back to that meaning, how do they look in the copy on the page? You start to end up with literally hundreds of different possible variations. So we as a company, when we’re recommending, we start with this research and we hand this research. We then turn it into hundreds of headlines, hundreds. We don’t intend to test hundreds of headlines, but those headlines, hooks, and ideas become subheads on a page. They become slash images potentially on a VSL. They become different copy pieces throughout a page.
So I think that the goal, at least there’s a lot of goals, in addition to looking at drop off, which I think is really important or the tools that we spoke about is really important, I think that this kind of testing enables people to really maybe hit onto that differentiation that you and I were talking about previously. How do you really get down to the differentiation? So we always start with the competitive research. We get a complete view of both direct competitors and lateral competitors and start there, but then dig deeper.
There are a few tools that can very easily, even though we go really deep and we have a whole Trello board that we’ve made out on our steps and our processes and you hit upon, I think is probably the most powerful one of all, and the toughest to get businesses to do is to the interview. I think talking about that is awesome. There are a number of ways to go about doing it. Most business owners, and this is not a snap on them, but back to needing the easy button, most business owners, I believe, want to … Well, I sent out a survey.
Well, first of all, the survey is usually leading. So it’s not the best way to get. I would argue to your exact point, and I tell this all the time, if you can speak with six of your best customers, and that’s a whole trick in itself, identify who is your best customer. Many times the business owner is not the best person to tell you this, right? It’s somebody in customer support or, really, you need to get with different person, but if you can talk with them and continue to probe, “That’s interesting. Can you tell me more? That’s interesting. Why?” We’ve had people cry for certain things. We weren’t trying to do anything there. People will spill their hearts and then you get to the real reasoning behind.
So actually, I love it. That’s the area of research that we start and focus on that most people there. I think that a potential mistake, and I don’t mean this wrong there, is that there is all huge value to all the technical, technical observational optimization, so things like you mentioned. It’s smart. You have a VSL. Let’s look at where the exact drop off is. We can test certain things in there. We can test new patent interrupt at that point. We can test a bottom third that pops up with a teaser that’s going to come up to get them through that little hump. It could be a lot of things and little things that you can test to improve the quality of a VSL and push people through without redoing that entire VSL.
I think that’s brilliant. It’s something that had just like, I believe, that Google Analytics has stuff to value. We, of course, built in heat maps and recordings and scroll maps for a reason, but at the macro level, at the biggest level going, I think that the number one problem with all of this or two problems side-by-side is they don’t truly understand their customer for the exact reasons you and I spoken about. They have funnel hacked. Everybody is following the leader, so to speak, and so they all assume everything’s working. So that’s as deep as their understanding goes and we know different to that.
So I believe that even if they do some simple things, getting on the phone is the best, I think even a supplement company like here’s another idea, and it’s just one of many. If you go on Amazon and look at books in your topic, you can look at supplements if there are similar supplements, but let’s assume there’s nothing. There’s always something on the problem. You start looking at those negative reviews and you actually go through a formal process to physically go through and look at the word cloud, look at what’s coming up over and over. You have a list, all of a sudden, of real objections. You now start to get a list of what is real value propositions because people assume they know.
You start to get words because people can be brutal, completely brutal in these things. What words they are using? How do they describe their problem? How do they describe the issue with the product? Anyways, I know I’m going off in a lot of the directions, but I believe that that kind of research to truly understand customer, that’s what really can feed an optimization program and not just relying on if it’s a larger company, just the original copy, which is what most people do. They come and then they try to write a few different headlines. So that’s the area of research that I’m partial to and I think has that big lever and big swing that also ties in with the rest of the company.

Bobby Hewitt:
Yeah. Reddit is also a great place-

Scott Zeltan:
Reddit is perfect. Yeah, that’s great. Great. You can actually get too. You understand a little bit with the operators, how to search Google, Reddit. You can come up with stories that a copywriter never would’ve dreamed of. I love it. You’re exactly right. They will talk and pour their hearts out.
I remember a offer in the tinnitus space, which I knew nothing about before, the ringing in the ears and how many people really actually have the problem, but when we did this as part of our process, one of the stories to your point on Reddit was a story of several people that were considering suicide because it was getting so bad. Well, you can’t, literally can’t have a copywriter make that stuff up. It poured out in such a genuine way because you really started to get a feel for just how bad the pain is, and they’re describing their process and their visits to the doctors and what they went through, and that’s just, of course, one example, but your point is if you’re paying attention and you don’t just do that as a one off, if you truly organize this and then put it in a format that everybody can use and that’s what we try to do.
So we go through some of Eugene Schwartz’s stuff, right? Market sophistication, but not just in general. What does it look like to this market? What else are they seeing or state of awareness, and what do they see and what are the problems? By the way, that was his whole thing is state of awareness. You have to differentiate. That’s where it came up, I believe, probably one of the first to illustrate the new mechanism and how to describe your new mechanism. All of this stems from the research. So if they go through it, it can actually be fun digging in.
I would say if somebody spent a week, have one person on their team and you can train anybody to do this, that’s really interested and really likes to learn and get some, and then you could put in a format that everybody from the ad buyers to the optimization specialists, the people doing the actual testing can use, it’s invaluable. Then you take a process of understanding how to take that information and split it like you and I were talking about earlier into its categories and dimensionalize benefits. You end up with literally hundreds and hundreds of different potential variables to test.
Now, clearly, nobody can test all of that, but what that illustrates for people is that, “No, your testing isn’t just, ‘Oh, my God. My copywriter can’t come up with another headline.'” Now this permeates everything that they have.

Bobby Hewitt:
Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Going back to how do we find these people, you’re absolutely right. The top buyers and, honestly, five or six of them is enough. You don’t need to interview hundreds and hundreds of them. You’ll start to see the same stories come over and over. The top buyers are a great way to do it, and just go back to your data. Go back to who is the highest lifetime value. Who are the people who bought several times in a 30-day, a two-week period, whatever makes sense for your product?
One of the things I also like to do is look at another five people, a colder buyer people because now you get both sides of the spectrum. What I generally do there is I send out a survey. It’s all open-ended questions or the first two are multiple choice just to get them started into the rhythm of answering, but then they go all open-ended. Then the final question is essentially if I’m looking to follow up with some people on a phone call, if I promise not to sell you anything and reward your time because, generally, these calls are about 45 minutes per person and I’ll just give them a $25 Amazon gift card.

Scott Zeltan:
You know what? I’m smiling from ear to ear here because you’re the first person, I swear this, that’s ever … We follow the exact same process. I mean, we have questions. If we’re clients, we’ll give it to them and tell them to send it out. We will take cold buyers or if somebody has opt in, non-buyers. Why didn’t you buy? You’re exactly right. We do the survey because the survey will be telling. You can tell by how in depth. You will get some one sentence answers, but then you’ll get other people because they’re asking yes no questions or questions that they think that they should hear, but by doing this the right way, an open-ended, in a nonthreatening way, and also by a little tip that we had to say we let them know exactly how long this is going to take at the beginning. Expectation is not too long, but you will have some people that will write speeches, meaning they will really pour their heart out, and that’s valuable and that’s where most people stop.
Like you said, “We’ll give you a $25 gift card,” which by the way is nothing. I do want to say a side note. If you do that digitally, most people won’t use it. You can give them, just a little tip of people who are doing this, they can give them six months or three months or whatever to use the gift card. If people are worried, which they shouldn’t be for six, but if they wanted to do more and worried about, most people don’t even use the gift card and then you can use it for … but that’s a side note.
The point was, to your point, they pour out their heart. Those are the people that when they also check the box and you get on the call with them, and we mentioned this earlier, to my surprise when I started this, by the way, when you’re talking to them, I always think and I know I’m aging myself a little bit, Larry King method of interviewing. Larry King, for those that haven’t paid attention to, he just loved, whether you liked him or hate him, whether he was corny or whatever, but the one thing he did have is a intense interest in what he was talking about and who he was talking to.
So you can write some general questions when you’re on originally, but continue to push and ask the question why and what made you feel that way. It’s not in a slimy way. You’re not selling them anything if you’re generally interested and people love to be heard. So this is not only a profitable process. It’s completely enlightening and it’s fun.
I probably mentioned this earlier, so forgive me I’m repeating myself, but I had for a fitness coach in this case, and some people would tear up and some people cried. It is phenomenal. The stuff that comes out of that is genuine. You will have at the end of let’s just say maximum like we talked about here 12 calls. You’ve got on a phone for 12 people and you record it. I assume you give them permission to record it so that other people can go through. You can transcribe it, but the value that comes out of that I would say will change your business if you put it to use. It will inform literally everything else that we’re talking about. If you ever had to worry about or thought you worried about, you didn’t know what to test. You are going to hit the button on the head.
In addition, when we talked about earlier things like categorizing, dimensionalization, everybody talks. I used to hear a term. Get inside the head of your customer. Meet them where they are. The big question is, okay, it’s a nice term and people have used it for ages, probably before our time, but what the heck does it mean? Well, this is what it means. People will genuinely tell you their feelings. So as long as you’re willing to dig because they’ll start usually, forget what it is. I had this, it’s five or seven questions deep for the same question. Eventually, they’re going to start by giving you an answer that they think you want to hear. As long as you’re genuinely interested and you’re kind and you ask, “Why? How did that affect your life? What would you change about that?” you can dig through questions that not only go into really their core emotions as to really why they were looking for a solution.
You’ll understand what other solutions they tried, why their solutions didn’t work for them, how they felt about it, what they told their … In certain supplements it’s going to differ, but what they told their friends and family versus what they were really thinking. So when people start talking about getting inside the house or feeling like you’ve read their minds, there is literally … We have a thing on Visiopt that we made a character and whatever, and it was basically Cody, Cody the caveman to Cody the converter, but sometimes I talk about it in terms of caveman testing, right? This does not feel fancy. It doesn’t feel like all the bells and whistles of some kind of tool, but I’m super glad you brought it up because it is the number one most important thing.
I will share a quick story just to show you because there’ll be people listening that will listen and say it’s a good idea or won’t do it or will object. So we had a fairly good size company that I broke through. They paid us just in addition to we offer sometimes some done with you services, so we would meet with their team, and we went through this step-by-step and said, “Look, let’s do this. We’ll help you. I’ll do some of the interviews with you, for you,” et cetera, right? Just-

Bobby Hewitt:
Because it’s really tough to do a done-with-you. You can’t really do a done-with-you on the calls. That’s really tough because if someone doesn’t know how to propose the questions, how to-

Scott Zeltan:
Right. I wanted them to see. They could see, we could record, they’ll start to get a feel for what would involved, handoff, and they made excuses as to why it wasn’t appropriate for their company. It was like hitting a brick ball, and we talk about the easy button in a previous conversation and how not only just supplement buyers, I loved your analogy and it’s not a down, it’s just a fact of human nature that everybody wants that easy button, they made a bunch of excuses and reasons why and they never did it and we couldn’t get them to do it. They felt, “Well, we sent out a survey,” and when I looked at their survey, I don’t have the specifics, it was nothing. It wasn’t going to giving them any real information.

Bobby Hewitt:
It’s always horrible, always horrible, the surveys.

Scott Zeltan:
Always.

Bobby Hewitt:
Most of the customers do.

Scott Zeltan:
By the way, it’s not that hard. You don’t need to be a genius. There’s been, by the way, I know that there’s been events where people have charged, really, and this isn’t an exaggeration, $15,000 for people to go in a room and to learn how to do what you and I are talking about here. It just is, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated. I’ll go back to the Larry King style of being interested and understanding. We know what answers we want, what questions we want answers to, but it’s not like the old, “What’s your number one challenge?” Well, everybody freezes up on that. You’re going to get what they think they want to hear.
If you start asking, “Man, I’m super glad that you purchased the product. How’d you find us at first?” You start off slow, right? You start digging and go deeper, “Man, what kind of problems did you have that caused you in the first place to even search for such a thing? Really? Really? What did that look like? Jeez, did that affect this or what areas of your life …?” You genuinely are interested? It is gold and leads me to … I used to love and if anybody wants to, they have shorts on YouTube. There used to be to show you what I consider the real pros. Forgive me. I’m not downplaying anybody in our industry at all, but outside of our bubble, I used to love Billy Mays and I’m sure everybody has seen one of his commercials.

Bobby Hewitt:
Absolutely. And

Scott Zeltan:
There is a series. Unfortunately, he died too young, but there’s a series, I wish I could remember the name of it, but if you look up Billy May’s TV series with Ed Sullivan, I believe, is his partner’s name, his last name’s Sullivan, but they have it on YouTube and they have these episodes, but where it relates to here is we see the, let’s say the fancy or maybe not so fancy TV commercials that he would have on TV. They would always start with the product and go face-to-face with their potential customer every time. There was not a time that they didn’t … If it was a product for beauty that they wouldn’t find themselves inside of beauty salons and talking with the customers, and having people try the product in realtime, and doing a version of what we’re talking about now.
When we contrast that to what people do today, and look, we’ll put most of us because I don’t like to use the word in a derogative way, but people hiding behind email, text or even our basic surveys. I mean, I know that there is tons that you and I can talk about and give people a lot of tips when it comes to the research aspect of it, and maybe it may sound to somebody listening, “This guy’s going way overboard,” it really is that powerful. Again, I tend to get excited by this kind of stuff, especially where, I’m not exaggerating, you’re literally the first person that brought this up during a conversation and we bring it up all the time, and as they illustrate it, most will either ignore it or will actually fight us on it.
I know that podcast goes out, a lot of people go to a lot of people and people listen to it, and I would honestly say that if they even took their best shot at it and just had interest and spoke with customers, even if they weren’t perfect at, it doesn’t matter, they just have a general genuine interest in people, the value of what comes out of it is spectacular.

Bobby Hewitt:
100%. I use, just to be clear, I use the surveys to gather a little bit of information with those open-endeds. The real purpose of it is to cherry pick the people to talk to.

Scott Zeltan:
Yup. Exactly, and that goes back, and I’m just curious from your standpoint. Do you do similar to what we … When you’re cherry picking, your cherry picking because the length of their answer tends to indicate, at least from our standpoint, the passion that they have or the depth of the problem that they have and how much they’re willing to share.

Bobby Hewitt:
Yup. It’s always a correlation with the length and the emotion of the response. So they usually go hand-in-hand. So it’s either the long ones or it’s the long ones that are also the emotional open-ended responses are the ones that I want to talk to. Even when talking to them, it’s like bringing them back to that state. Like you said, the beginning is really just rapport, getting them to talk. Then once they start talking it’s like, “Okay. So wait a minute. Let me make sure I got this right. Let me follow your story. You fell and then you went to the doctor or how many doctors did you see before then?” So it’s bringing them back to that emotional state because nobody can really talk about what other competitors did you buy or consider. That’s a really complex question, but to talk about it in terms of a story as if you’re watching a movie brings them back to the point where they were looking for the product, to the point where they had that emotional discovery, where they had that low emotional state.

Scott Zeltan:
… and frustration, right? I love that you brought up the doctor. I mean, think about that, right? What did you do when you first had this pain? Most of them, “I went to …” and how’d you … I mean, most times they felt frustrated. The medical system is not the most enjoyable system. I mean, that doesn’t anything against modern medicine, it’s just a fact, right? They’re like factories usually. So they’ll explain to you their experiences and that’s when their frustration got better or they took pills and, “How did those pills make you feel? Did they have any effect?” Like you’re saying, draw out the story.
As you’re talking about that, I’m thinking about Jerry, another guy I really love, Jerry Spence, the attorney. He used to be my favorite attorney. If you haven’t heard, people listening there, he used to be something in the courtroom and a lawyer, but he almost never lost a case. I also, by the way, always wanted, even though I live in Southern Florida, he has this very cool jacket his wife would make with the fringes. Anyways, he was a cool guy, but his whole way of winning and the way he would eventually teach the lawyers was to draw out the story from the witnesses in a natural way. He would start at the beginning of the story.
You started and you prompted me with that with that question about when you went to the doctor, which is obvious for a lot of supplement scenarios, but how that can start to dig and weave a story and how you can dig that out. I remember Jerry Spence always talking about the details, the details in that story and they will spill details, and if not, you were just indicating that you do the same thing. You were asking not only about the emotion they were feeling, but a way to get to the emotion is to talk about the details, “Oh, yeah. How many days after this happened there? Did you have to wait at the doctor’s office? I know, I hate it, right?” These little things start coming out of the story, which by the way, anybody can then use legitimately into the story because their story, everybody thinks …
I had a mentor at one point years ago that stuck with me, and not only what is the problem, what is the unique, right? We don’t all know about the unique cause, the unique mechanism in the supplement industry, the unique problem. The problem isn’t that you have X, Y, isn’t that you’re eating too many? Calories. The new problem is that you is insulin resistant. Okay? So there’s your [inaudible 00:29:56] right? That’s the new problem. Then the new cause is really your new mechanism, and so the way we handle it. Well, the new problem, everybody thinks that problem’s unique to them. Everybody thinks that the problem’s unique to them.
I had a mentor taught, why do they feel that problem’s unique to them? That is a trigger. We’ve all heard, “If I can describe the problem better than you can, then you will trust me with having the solution to that problem.” It’s part of rapport building, but it’s a lot of truth. A lot of it in the supplement markets because of the emotional state and we were talking about in a previous conversation. They all feel, right? “I am gaining weight because I just had two kids. That’s my unique problem.” Of course, that’s a simple variation, but everybody feels there’s a specific reason to their problem.
What comes out of these conversations among a lot of other stuff is not only why they feel that problem is unique to them, but a typical experience, and what I was getting at how you can use this is that the six people that you’re going to talk to, if you have, and I will clarify this by say six good conversations, if a conversation goes done and you may have that, they just may not be as giving on a call, you want six what I call full conversations, and you’ll know it when you have it because, really, the floodgates start opening.
These can be applied to literally everybody else. Everybody thinks it’s unique. So when we talk about getting inside the heads and talking about what kind of conversation’s going on or even if that experience of going to the doctor and waiting an hour or whatever it is and then going back and still in pain and having to potentially, let’s say, give up three days at work and trying to get a promotion and worried, whatever these fears that are going on. When you start describing them in your copy on your page, in your, potentially, your supporting testimonials or wherever else that may be in your imagery, in your emails, in whatever, it feels like it picks up a magic button.
To me, at least in our experience, in a world of copy, meaning people copying each other’s funnels, most of the time this goes a layer deeper or two or three layers deeper that your competitors don’t get the nuances to really copy because they really just won’t copy the specific nuances.
So anyways, I went on maybe a little bit too long, but I absolutely love it, and I do agree that there’s a lot of stuff we do, but if you can do one thing in your business and by the way, then repeat it. We mentioned the other way is when somebody leaves. I understand that it’s profitable to maybe another area where once you apply this to the basics, it’s profitable to try to save customers, and that makes sense. I would make the argument that it may be even more long-term profitable to understand potentially why somebody cancels the subscription, why somebody returns it. Understanding that, what kind of pain, what else they tried and tested, what was their reasoning beyond superficial layers, there’s just incredible gold.

Bobby Hewitt:
100%. This is where the conversion optimization crosses over with the copywriting because a lot of these research methodologies are what really good six-figure copywriters do, and that’s where it gets a little, I guess, a little bit fuzzy because so much of it is copy, but it’s really not just copy, it’s presentation, it’s expression of the copy, it’s the design of the thing, it’s the offer. It’s like some of the things you hit on. It’s putting those things in key points like using testimonials to get over objections, using guarantees to reduce friction and reduce anxiety and to minimize all that. It’s-

Scott Zeltan:
Well, no. I’ll tell you, I love that you’re talking about this because what you are illustrating, at least to me from my personal point of view, is that we have a lot of moving pieces on that one page, on a page funnel, whatever we want to call it, throughout any of your marketing materials. You talk about things like, okay, I hear human nature, but in your words, how things were expressed, what they look like, what they sound like. What we start to understand is that it’s not about, “Okay. We hacked …” This is the pain point and this is the way they’re talking about the pain point.
What we have to understand is that when we look at all of this research, we end up like I’ve talked about previously with things like value propositions or potential hook ideas or categories come out at you or benefits. So we have features that are important and when you start breaking these down by all of these items, each of the individual items that come out and you look at where should they be tested on the page, what should they say, how do they look like to the customer.
So when we take my simplest example only because I believe it helps illustrate, but I apply this to everything. You just went through a really good list to illustrate all the things in a page that, and I know we could keep going, but when we simplify it, feature, each feature has five benefits. Each of these five benefits can be dimensionalized. Let’s take it small five different ways. When you get done from your small group of features, you now in the very basic of sense have potentially 50 different ways to talk about the features of a product spread through.
Now, we add on that. Where should it be presented on the page? At what time? We add in design. What should that actually look like? We add in there one of my favorites, shouldn’t even be in there at all. By the way, I’ll give a little tip. So people sometimes ask me, “What’s your favorite testing tip?” or whatever like this, and for us, we take the whole thing we’ve talked about as a system. So I really don’t believe in necessarily best practices. I believe in like we’ve been talking about, understanding the whole picture, which all starts with research, but it just popped up there. I call it the great disappearing act. Meaning, many times people throw too much on a page or in a thing and taking away, I talk about semantic separation, which put simply is big differences in your copy.
So if we take this to imagery, which by the way, we could have a whole talk about it, people generally throw them into a sales letter and have no idea. A man versus a woman is going to have a different emotional response than a man with a woman, than an older man versus an older woman versus a family versus the pain of a product versus the enjoyment of a product versus the product in use.
So when you start to think of a page in the world like this, it shouldn’t become overwhelming, although the way we put this, it feels that way. What it should be designed to do is to show everybody that you don’t have to just test. I know I’m simplifying and I don’t mean to doing that. Headline one versus headline two or the color of that button. I know people be listening to this go beyond that, so I’m not trying to be demeaning. What I’m pointing out is you end up with so much to test that your testing program … Then we talk about how do you get into design of experiment and test this, but anybody that does just the basic of steps that we talked about here and then really thinks about that and thinks about their current pages and their current funnels and the different ways that this can be expressed on the page like you spoke about should have enough testing potentially in their thing to last them, and I don’t think I’m the exact, a year.
So when people ask, “Well, do I run this for …?” No. You’re never done. I know, by the way, you work with companies and offers where you continually, you know this, it’s continual improvement in the market. The other thing is … So I love that you came up with that list because, yes, I think that also, and I don’t want to say this in the wrong way, but at one point, you talked about tapestry, pulling the string, and if I’m correct, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that’s part of what you’re talking about, all the different nuances.
I look at it as don’t get overwhelmed by that, get excited by that because if you have something that is, let’s say break even, you now have, definitely, you have a win on your hands. If you are somebody listening that has something successful and you’ve been running it, but maybe margins may be fine or maybe margins are starting to slip like we’ve talked about in previous conversation, this is your ticket to true differentiation. This is your ticket to the general terms we’ve heard, getting inside the head of your customer or your client and to the point when great copywriters talk about the fact that they write it and people think that they’re talking just to them.
I’ll add one more thing and probably I always say that. What did somebody call it? Colombo of the … Oh, yeah, one more thing in the thing. Again, it was before my time, I saw a rewind, so don’t age myself too much, but you mentioned copywriters, and I just want to say something about that and not to … They’re phenomenal, some phenomenal copywriters, and most of the people listening, hire copywriters and it enables them to be successful. You were talking at the beginning, I think, very wisely, well, this overlays into copy and the thought process that started to go through my mind there that we talked about a lot of times is I definitely think there’s a lot of good overlap there for a lot of reasons.
I think when you’re optimizing, it’s all about emotions and triggers and understanding basic copy, but what we’re talking about is maybe going to a layer that the copywriter doesn’t and understanding. So I believe, depending upon the size of your company, there can and should be a very good collaboration.
The other thing I also like to say, if you have something that’s working from a good copywriter, the person doing the conversion rate optimization, that’s doing this process, I say this tongue in cheek, can beat the copywriter and they can’t because a copywriter, if we think about their process, does a certain amount of research. I would argue that, and I agree with you, old timers, it’s all about research, research, research, research. Everyone they talk about the secret of their copy. I don’t think as many are doing it today. They believe and they work in a market and I’ve heard the term being thrown around like I understand the core emotion and they spit it out, meaning they spit out the copy.
So I would just like to add, and this is not because, again, I believe conversion rate optimization and copywriters and media buyers all work hand-in-hand as a team. This isn’t to create a riff or a rifle there, but I don’t believe that most copywriters do the level of research that you and I are talking about and that should be done and is easy to do. So I believe that you can prove to the copywriter through testing these variables and elements in different types of format what is working and what isn’t working, what’s working maybe better, what’s triggering, and find a way there to supply this research back to the media buyers and the copywriters so that it becomes one big circle where the optimization that you’re doing can also feed additional bits of copy, whether it’s an email copywriter or whatever else.
So forgive me for going on to long that you brought out a bunch of stuff there and so I don’t want it to come across like we’re fighting copywriters on some sensational headline. You could beat any copywriter out, which by the way, I do believe that’s why for the record, for the record, that’s why we could take a “fully optimized offer” where they paid somebody to write copy for other or maybe it’s in house where they have a successful run and why you and I can come in and improve conversions sometimes by 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 percent. That’s where it comes in as a team. So I know it’s a mouthful.

Bobby Hewitt:
I think you’re giving some of those departments too much credit.

Scott Zeltan:
I’m trying to be very nice but-

Bobby Hewitt:
I don’t think a lot of media buyers would know the first thing to do with that information.

Scott Zeltan:
Well, I think I shared on one of our private conversations, there’s a meme out there somewhere and I don’t know I should produce it, but it’s really like the fight between the media buyer and the conversion team and it’s all about like, “It’s your fault,” “No, it’s your fault,” but yeah, I understand exactly what you’re saying because they will blame what’s going on in variations that naturally take place with the algorithms and day-to-day. Take one, Google and Facebook, which I’m intimately familiar with, and they may have and be put in a different pool or an algorithm change may have been made on their end and, of course, it’s always the flight, “Well, it’s your test that you’re doing, building here.”
No. It’s really testing is the ultimate necessity. As we talked about previously in a previous conversation is that what makes media buying work, and I know, listen, I know that this may be subjective, but what makes media buying work is the offer and what makes the offer work is how well it converts. Ultimately, I like to hammer home this point. It’s all about what you do on page. We’ve all heard and we know about the complexities and we’re not simplifying it and you talk beautifully about the tapestry and all the different elements that can potentially go into and have to be thought of, but ultimately, it’s pulling this lever about constantly working towards improving your conversion and, as we talked about, improving your economics, improving the quality of buyer, which when we, at least when I and I know you, when we talk about improving conversions, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about something just about how much people clicked through from a land or two. We’re talking about this whole thing and it’s not as complicated as people think.
I mean, selfishly, again, we believe our tool makes it easy, but I don’t care, regardless what tool, this is valuable for people to understand that in the 80/20 world, the time 80% would be much better off focusing on what you can control, and I know this is an ongoing theme that you and I talk about versus what you can. So you can control how well your page converts without guessing. You can control this and it doesn’t have to be by guesswork because you can start it off with the proper type of research, which when you have an inquisitive mind and you really are interested in what people have to say is going to open up your doors to testing variables like we spoke about when you take that information, plug it into your own system.
I mean, teach people that understand how would this look. Get outside of your own head, “How would this look and all the different ways it can look?” Then you put that into a testing program and improve your conversions. That 80% will take care of the rest. I know you’ve seen this because you brought up media buyers there. When conversions increase, what happens? Well, we send all the metrics, the sub metrics that I like to call them, the secondary metrics that none of us really know but that places like Facebook and Google like, right? When things convert better, what happens? People spend more time on site. Bounce rate goes on and whatever else that they’re looking for, all naturally get better.
When you convert more, you are sending better information to the pixel, so that makes that better. When that happens they send you a larger pool of buyers instead of sending … You have an overall universe and they’re sending you this, they increase, so now they’re able to send you more traffic and the general of the quality of that traffic goes up. It’s like that rising tide saying where it lifts all. It’s the same thing. So I just believe, and one of the things I’m super passionate about as you can hear people probably saying, “He’s talking too long,” or whatever, but that I’m passionate about is that if you spent the time here, you wouldn’t have to worry about the algorithms as much.
I’ll share a vague story because it pertains, but we actually are spending seven figures on Google, extremely successful full supplement offers, fully compliant and, occasionally, because we happen to be really good friends and I also have background in media and something will go wrong with the thing and he thinks it’s an offer burnout or thinks it’s, et cetera. I’ll let you know that he tells me now, he put a sign up on his desk there, right? It’s the offer. Stupid meaning, and I don’t want to simplify that. Only focus on two areas and, of course, one is beyond what we’re talking about. One is front end creative, and the other one takes place on page, and over and over again, that always takes care of all the problems.
When we’ve been through, is there some red flag up? Did an algorithm change? Do I have offer burnout? That’s a big one, right? I think they had offer, I’m not saying offers don’t burn out and that algorithms don’t change, but 99% of the time, it had nothing to do with offer burnout or anything else. It literally had to do with, I’ll extend it to these two levers, front end creative and what’s taking place on page. So we’re in an industry that keeps growing and we’re in an industry where there’s a lot of super smart people, which is great, but because we’re all entrepreneurs heart and we’re all subject to this, we have that little shiny light going over there and we tend to lose focus even as a company, even as an organized company as to where the resources should be spent.
if people tried it, I told people if they just improved their testing program, just did the basics that we’re talking about here, always run a test, do your research like we’ve discussed and that could be hours. We could talk about all different ways. I think we brought up … Really, I’m glad that you brought it up because it is by far the simplest and probably, well, without exception, the most effective. There are a lot of other ways. There’s a lot of public data available. I think we mentioned Amazon reviews. You can look at feedback in social media. You mentioned Reddit and Reddit stories that can come up. It goes deep and you can get all that, but I think that if people did one thing and that is, I guess it’s more than one thing, but do the research and create a testing program so that you’re always going to test to make sure it’s a statistically significant result and whether you win or lose, take that as the data and move into the next.
In the next 12 months, in the next six months, they would be at, even if they didn’t have let’s say certain inside knowledge that we share or do and that if they just did that, their business would be in a completely different place in six months from today and they would be … Not the compliance doesn’t happen in this arena, but they would be far less worried about algorithm changes or what’s happening from day-to-day.

Bobby Hewitt:
100% agree. It all comes back to basics, right? Blocking and tackling, that’s how you win the game.

Scott Zeltan:
It’s 100% true, right? It’s the way to put it, always the basics, right? If we look at most successful businesses, they may do a lot of different things, but I think we both know a lot of people in the industry that, look, there’s a million things you can do, even social media and this and that. Really, it’s really back to the basics. Find traffic, do the research, but we do find traffic, send it to a page that converts. Do more of that, right? Improve those conversions not through guessing, not through throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall. In my opinion, if I had to implore people not by making a tremendous amount of changes to a page and having page A versus page B, but isolating the variables, understanding what can be tested on a page, which is literally everything, and intelligently both what’s there and what’s not there can be tested on a page and the thing and testing.
For people that we’re talking about here that may have a lot of VSLs, as well as sales pages but from a VSL, I’ll let you know that things in and around that VSL without changing that VSL will and can, since we’re talking about supplements, have a fantastic impact. We have seen … Now, you know we’re big on testing, again, the relationship, but we’ve seen combinations of different headlines with different splash images, with different calls to action, with even in one case it was different modal, the way it popped up different modal popups make enormous differences. Whereby if you had the average and somebody rewrites an entire VSL, VSL one versus VSL two versus VSL three, the control would still win.
So the lesson here is that you can test a lot of stuff without even changing the VSL, right? With changing what’s around it and how it’s worded and the splash image and then dig down, and you touched upon the technical side of testing, which was brilliant in that then these are going to be broad strokes. When we talk about semantic differences, these are going to be things in there, and then write your VSL so that you can change, if you can, just the hook or we’ve seen trends, and I don’t know what the proper terminology is, what I’ll call the pre-hook, the newsworthy intro in anything or at a drop off or things like popping up at your drop off or a couple of minutes before you drop off a really good teaser as what’s coming after the drop off and drag your customers along.
There is so much that you can do without having to get a brand new copywriter to write an entire copy. So I guess I just want to say that as complex as this potentially could be, you don’t have to. Even let’s take a presale page. We were talking at another time the mode, and I get this, is to write 10 different presale pages, but we’ve done multivariate smart relational tests on the same presale page without ever rewriting that presale page and doing the things that we’re talking about here in different locations and breaking apart, and that we’ve talked about this in other times, directly affects the quality of customer, the number of conversions and the profitability during the back end.
So people need to understand that there’s a lot of misinformation, I think, about testing. Maybe they’ve experienced it that it was too slow. Maybe they didn’t get enough of an impact, but again, not to feed the preacher trying to acquire or whatever the terminology would be, singing from the treetops, it is very powerful.

Bobby Hewitt:
Absolutely. Scott, if anybody is interested in testing and wants a killer split testing tool out there, I think they should check out visiopt.com. Tell us a little bit more in how they can get a hold of you and how they can get a hold of your tool.

Scott Zeltan:
Sure. They can visit, like you just mentioned, visiopt.com. That’s V-I-S-I-O-P-T dot com. We have a chat on there, as well as a phone number and reach out. We would love to talk with whoever’s interested. Our goal, by the way, will always be to make sure the tool’s appropriate for you and let you know how it can really help you out. Everything we do is based on getting, and this is something, by the way, I just wanted to mention this, ties into everything we’re talking about on ROI.
So the nice thing about what we do and what we sell is that you can see a real ROI. If you get, let’s talk small 20% increase in conversions, you’ve just gotten your 20% raise for your company month in and month out. So the tool pays for itself, but simply put, we are trying and I believe have successfully disrupted the testing industry. We allow at the core is a enterprise level testing module that is very easy to use. So don’t be scared off if you don’t have a lot of testing experience. You don’t need any technical experience, but one piece of code on your site, it loads lightning fast and then you can change everything and anything on your site, including scripts visually without ever worrying about dealing with your tech team or creating multiple pages and allows you to do what we talked about here, smart relational testing. Test a lot of stuff fast. You can get the equivalent of 4,317 split tests in a single test.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but we have some of the observational tools that we talked about done right like heat maps and recordings and scroll maps that allow you to go in a more technical methodology to be able to see what should be tested as well as, because we’ve touched upon it today and I won’t go through everything, but the last thing is we’ve talked about algorithms and iOS and everybody is having issues with tracking and both on our testing side and we have a module that you get included called campaigns that’s included is what we call our lost list tracking.
So you’re getting accurate tracking regardless of any iOS changes, regardless of algorithm changes, even if they clear cookies, which by the way, side note, is really very important if you’re doing testing and it’s very important if you’re running any kind of cold traffic. So at any rate, we could talk, but I’d rather have people, anybody that would like to increase their conversions and thinks that they may be interested, visit visiopt.com, reach out, glad to talk. As people can tell, I love talking about conversions. So we would love to talk about your site and you’ll guarantee one thing. Anybody would talk about, will come out with at least a couple of tips that they can apply to their business, so I’ll leave it there.