How To Use Website Data To Convert More Customers

Jeffro (00:01.26)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today’s episode features Matthew Stafford, a seasoned entrepreneur and e-commerce expert with decades of experience helping brands scale from the ground up to seven and eight figures. As the managing partner of Bill Grow Scale and a sought after speaker, Matthew has mentored thousands of business owners and played a key role in helping e-commerce brands achieve lasting success. So in this episode, we’ll be diving into the key lessons he’s learned from scaling these e-commerce brands and how those lessons can be applied to service businesses who are looking to grow. We’ll also explore kind of the power of data driven decision making and how it can be a game changer for businesses in any industry. Welcome to the show, Matthew.

Matthew Stafford (00:38.803)
Thanks for having me.

Jeffro (00:40.666)
Absolutely. Now, Matthew, you’ve helped a lot of businesses scale beyond the million dollar mark. What are some of the most common pitfalls you see businesses fall into when they’re trying to grow?

Matthew Stafford (00:51.054)
I would honestly I would say the most common once they’re already hitting a certain level of success most of them have hit this the level of success that they believe deep down what they deserve and so I think a lot of times finding out what their money story is or what their mindset around how much money they’re earning is probably one of the biggest downfalls. And also like it’s, it almost throttles their level of success until they get that under control.

Jeffro (01:23.595)
How do you help someone break through that?

Matthew Stafford (01:26.99)
it’s fairly simple. really once they’re aware, then, they can, they can let that go. A lot of times they’re just actually not aware. I think it was, Carl Jung said until you make the unconscious conscious, you’ll go through life and call it fate. so asking questions like, what do I have to believe is true in order for me to think this is successful or what do I have to believe is true for me to get the results that I’m getting, even if I’m working hard. A good example, I’ll just use myself as an example. One of the unconscious beliefs that I had was suffering equals strength. So if I could suffer, it would prove to everybody else that I was strong enough to go ahead and do that. And what a terrible belief. Like literally figure out ways to suffer in order to prove that I was good enough or strong enough.

And believe it or not, like we all have those little idiosyncrasies that were a lot of times we’re not aware of until they’re pointed out to us.

Jeffro (02:34.303)
Yeah, no, I fully agree. There’s a book called The Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harvecker. He talks about some of the same stuff and it’s some of that you just get from your parents. You don’t even realize it’s there. But once you start kind of looking and finding it and again, making yourself aware of it, then you can change it.

Matthew Stafford (02:50.402)
Yeah, I truly believe that being in business is the ultimate inner game. It doesn’t matter how good you get at it. The business is going to constantly show you where you’re not doing well or what you’re not doing good enough or what you need to change. it’s constantly moving from one to the other to the other.

Jeffro (02:57.471)
Agreed.

Matthew Stafford (03:13.664)
And so if, long as you understand that and you don’t look at it as frustrating or it can be frustrating, but you don’t look at it as, unachievable or you can’t overcome it. You just realize it’s part of the process and then it doesn’t, it doesn’t weigh you down near as much. And you can move through those a lot of them much quicker.

Jeffro (03:35.316)
Yeah, I mean, it acts as a forcing function. You kind of have no choice but to get better.

Matthew Stafford (03:38.284)
Yeah, yeah. It’s a filter. mean, it takes the people who don’t really want it out and the people who really do want it are going to prove it through sticking to it.

Jeffro (03:42.56)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (03:50.42)
Yeah. All right. So coming back to kind of just the business side of it, you know, and your experience, are there any key turning points or milestones that a business should look out for when they’re aiming to grow past seven figures?

Matthew Stafford (04:03.113)
Because my expertise has a lot to do with websites and how people interact with them. I would definitely say that if your website, if you drive people to your website, then the usability and the clarity of your website can make a massive difference. We’ve taken companies that were doing 400 grand a month to two and a half million in six months. And we’ve done that over and over and over. And a lot of times that is literally just

Jeffro (04:09.98)
Mm-hmm.

Matthew Stafford (04:33.93)
the difference between many times it’s removing a lot of stuff from the website because people don’t realize how busy and how distracting the website is when really it just needs to answer a few questions and people will then call, which is what most service businesses want is want the call.

Jeffro (04:53.151)
Do you have a process for how you look at a website to figure that out or is it just kind of intuition based on your experience?

Matthew Stafford (05:00.32)
No, it’s certainly we do have a process. It’d be really difficult to go through that here. But what I can say is one paradigm shift that I encourage every owner to do is stop looking at your website as the owner.

and trying to tell everybody what you can do for them, come to your website as a consumer looking to solve a problem and see, find out how easy it is for them to figure that out. And so by switching from being the seller to the guy that needs to consume the website to figure out the answer to their problem, doing that alone will a lot of times give you a lot of ahas. And then one phrase that we use all the time and we teach us is make it so simple that Homer Simpson would understand. And if you’ve done customer service at all, like you realize like there’s it’s crazy what people will write in that they don’t understand. Common sense is just not that common. And so you really have to look at it through the lens of how can I make this so simple that even Homer Simpson would get it. And when you do that, I promise you’ll watch the number of leads and the number of calls that you get will go up.

And many times people think like, if I don’t answer all the questions, they’re not going to call. The truth of the matter isn’t that 20 % of what you do creates 80 % of the results. So figure out what you do better than anyone else and make sure that you explain that really, really clearly on your website. And they’ll assume you do a bunch of those other things.

Jeffro (06:35.998)
That makes sense. Yeah, simplify, remove the distractions, don’t make people feel overwhelmed. And of course they’re gonna be able to find what they want a little bit easier. So I like that, shifting the perspective to that of the customer. But there’s also a data-driven component, I imagine when you’re split testing things, whether that’s images for a product or service or the copy, the headline, can you talk a little bit about the ways that brands can use this data to improve?

their offerings and the customer experience and things.

Matthew Stafford (07:06.39)
Yeah, a hundred percent. So we tag everything with Google Tag Manager and then that basically filters the information as it goes into Google Analytics and you can look at it. So by doing that, we can know that if someone clicks on a button, if they’ve ended up clicking to call or if they’ve submitted a form or all of that. And so after we track that data on the website for long enough to figure out what people are doing,

Then we can start reverse engineering what’s happening and figure out how to make it clear, how to make things shorter. And another thing would be the demographic data of the people that you serve and the people that visit the site. if it’s say you service something that has to do with an older generation, like 50 and above, well, they’re not going to want a whole bunch of small texts and asterisks and different things like that.

They want the bullet points and to be able to read it easy and figure it out. And so there’s a big difference in how a website that serves, you know, 30 to 50 year old women or 50 to 70 year old men. But most of time the site owner doesn’t think about any of that. They just think about what they’re selling and how do I tell them everything that we do.

Jeffro (08:28.734)
So that makes a lot of sense, fully agree. Is there like one or two really important data points or metrics that you think business owners should pay attention to when they’re trying to scale and grow?

Matthew Stafford (08:40.906)
Yeah, one I would say micro commitments and another principle that we use for a website is called the hierarchy of focus. So when you land on somebody’s website, you want the next most important action that you want them to take to stand out from anything else. So if it is to, you know, fill out this contact form or to give us a call or to find out which or to figure out which product we offer that.

solves that give them, action that will give them the filter, give them an action that’ll give them a submit form, et cetera, but make that the only thing on the page, that stands out more than anything else. And when you do that, it’s called the hierarchy of focus. Your website will actually work a lot better. A lot of times people don’t understand that. they’re like three or four called actions on the same page thinking that that’s going to give the people options.

And really what it does is it’s like, I don’t know what I need. I’ll just come back later. And so now you’ve lost them.

Jeffro (09:48.093)
Yeah, because they’re likely not going to come back. They’ll find something else or forget about it. yeah. So you really need to map out the customer journey and what you want it to look like and then kind of lay the breadcrumbs to help them follow that path and be the guide essentially for them.

Matthew Stafford (09:50.722)
Right. You’ll find an easier solution.

Matthew Stafford (10:05.418)
Exactly. Like I always tell everybody your homepage has two main functions. One, did I land on the right site? Can I trust them? And then easy navigation to what I’m looking for. So if you have four services, you don’t put all four of them on the homepage. You literally give them navigation to your services. They’ll click to your services. And if we get them off your homepage onto like the thing that has like four squares that would show you the services that you offer. They click on the one that matters to them and then the rest of your languaging and the rest of your intention is all put towards letting them know about that service. That way all the other stuff isn’t clouding it and creating the cognitive load that makes them just like go. It actually tires out their brain. They don’t even know why they don’t like it, but their brain is tired because it has to filter through all this stuff in order to get the answer that they need.

Jeffro (11:02.0)
Don’t make them work for it. I also want you to talk a little more about micro commitments. You mentioned that earlier. Can you talk about what qualifies as a micro commitment?

Matthew Stafford (11:11.34)
Yeah, any button click, any move to the next page. There’s a couple of reasons why that’s good. One, they’re more invested. So the farther they click in and the more actions they’ve taken, they feel like they’re along there. They’re kind of taking the process with you. And so that is good. The other thing is it also shows Google that your pages are relevant and then what you’re doing matters. And so they’ll give you more organic traffic. Like that’s one of the crazy things you don’t realize how much traffic Google serves up organically based off of people clicking into your site deeper because they’re using that metric as, we showed this page, the people took another action, showed them another page, took another action. So Google says, that’s a good experience. We’ll serve this one over top of these other ones where people hit it and they bounce.

Jeffro (12:07.376)
Right. And I think a lot of people don’t even realize that Google has that much data. But if someone types a query into Google, like, how do I fix XYZ? They click on a result. They hit the home page. 10 seconds later, they hit the back button. They’re on the same search result page. Google now knows, OK, that wasn’t a good result for that query. So next time, you’re not going to be up as high.

Matthew Stafford (12:25.272)
Right? No, not at all. Yep. And so we always say that, it really works very well to have an FAQ on your site that answers like the top six most asked questions about what you do, because, the questions that are like, like a, like a buying question, like someone saying, where can I get this product is probably looking to buy it compared to someone searching for a recipe that uses the product. So they might already have the product, they’re looking for a recipe to use it. Google is gonna serve them someone totally different based off of the question that they answer or ask compared to that. So by putting answers that would answer the questions that people type, that would be looking for what you do, you actually give Google a whole bunch more signals to say, hey, this is a relevant site for that.

Jeffro (13:25.358)
Yeah. And of course, using the FAQ schema to make it easy for Google to find it and display the results. I’m also curious to know, do you find it’s better to just have text FAQs or add in videos?

Matthew Stafford (13:37.966)
Text works very well. Yep, text works very well. If you do have videos, typically those are more for information, like informational demonstration, but you just gotta make sure that all the schema is correctly marked until Google knows what it is.

Jeffro (13:55.717)
That makes sense. All right, so as you’re, let’s say, you know, we’re going through this, we’re optimizing our business, we’re growing, we’re scaling, improving the website. There’s going to be a lot of tough decisions along the way, right? So how do you guide entrepreneurs you work with through these challenges, especially, you know, when they’re faced with the increasing cost of investing in marketing or expanding their team, everything that kind of comes with that.

Matthew Stafford (14:19.158)
Yeah. So I, most people don’t understand it when I say this, but I don’t believe that a company has a marketing budget. And what I mean by that is your marketing should never cost you money. It should either be breakeven or profitable. And if you don’t know what your numbers are, then that’s why you have a budget is because you don’t know your numbers. And so I really believe that as your website works, works better and you know, how what you’re paying per lead and how many leads it takes to make a sale and what your average sale is, there should be no budget. It should literally be, if I can acquire a customer X amount, I want as many of them as I can. And even if it’s at break even, if I know what my average time that a customer stays with me, especially in a service business that has repeat things, I would sell hundreds and thousands of customers breakeven if I know that 40 % of them are going to continue with me for the next three years it wouldn’t matter. So the budget should literally be based off of breakeven or profit and then figure out what you have to do to get inside of that and then spend as much as you possibly can.

Jeffro (15:34.254)
Yeah, whatever extra cash flow you have, if I can spend a dollar and get two, well, I’ll do that all day every day. It’s kind of like the Costco rotisserie chicken, you if you can get people in the door for a $5 chicken, even if it costs you eight or 10 bucks to make it, you know they’re going to spend more just because they’re now in the store, right? You’re going to make that back pretty fast. So same idea.

Matthew Stafford (15:36.866)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Matthew Stafford (15:53.762)
Yes.

Yeah, yep. And we did a bunch of work with Guthrie Rinker that they could go six months in the hall with proactive knowing So if their average customer was costing them $200 a month, they could spend or was making them $200 a month. They would spend $1,200 in the hole to acquire that customer because they knew that their metrics would support that. And so that’s why Proactive got so big and so much and dominated that space because they knew their numbers so well, they were literally willing to go six months in the hole knowing that they was going to come back to them on the outer end. And then they ended up selling it for $1.4 billion and kept a royalty. And yeah, it’s pretty amazing story.

Jeffro (16:42.425)
That’s a great example of trusting your data, right? If you have good data, then why not leverage it? Use that information like they did. Go big.

Matthew Stafford (16:53.6)
Yeah. And I will say that’s our secret sauce that makes everything that we do predictable is data. We do split testing and all kinds of things on websites all day, every day. And we have for now the last 10 years and we still in our split tests, probably more than half the time either break even or, or lose. And so if we’re doing this all day, every single day, and we do that many tests,

Jeffro (16:58.937)
Mm-hmm.

Matthew Stafford (17:23.738)
we want that data that makes what we do a lot more predictable. We can go through and put a bunch of best practices in and make sites work way better. But then once you get down to those little tweaks, it just, it’s really sites are contextual and it matters who your audience is.

Jeffro (17:40.663)
Yeah, and I think for service businesses especially, who have kind of been in the more traditional mindset of marketing and networking, getting referrals, how do you help them kind of shift to this more website-centric, you know, digital approach where you can measure everything and you should be measuring everything in order to figure out how to get more customers?

Matthew Stafford (18:03.554)
Yeah, so I’ve had brick and mortar businesses, I’ve had service businesses, and the truth of the matter is every single business has the same metrics. They deal with a customer. So all you have to do is look at your website as your conversation with those customers, that it’s having them while you’re sleeping, it’s having them while you’re off doing other things. If it’s not communicating well, or it’s not communicating like you do with your customers, then that needs to change. Because that is how people are gauging how your interaction is with them.

Jeffro (18:39.734)
Yeah, I remind my clients too, like your website is the hub of all your marketing efforts. They all end up there, whether you’re handing out a flyer or business card or telling someone, yeah, check out my website. They need to go there. And so your website needs to do its job to move them to the next step.

Matthew Stafford (18:55.916)
Yep, 100%.

Jeffro (18:57.912)
Otherwise you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. Do you think looking ahead, you know, the market’s always changing. We’ve got AI, there’s new tools coming out for how to measure things and all these tracking programs. You’ve got Google Analytics and HiROS and some of these other ones. What does that look like? Is it going to get easier to track data? Is it going to get harder? Because at the same time, we’ve got all these privacy laws and restrictions on devices and things. So how do businesses kind of prepare for that and stay ahead of the curve?

Matthew Stafford (19:27.918)
I truly believe it’s going to get much easier. think our job will be to use these tools to get even deeper insights, not just cookie cutter approach.

Uh, and so we’re, we’re working on, um, using these AI using AI to analyze websites, look at data and GA four, try to give us predictability of like, you know, we’re saying like, okay, this site, uh, captures leads at 30%. We want it to be at 50 % in the next 90 days. What would we have to do in order to do that? And we feed it a bunch of data and then interact with that. So I believe that, uh, the simple, the simple stuff that we do will go away. Like it won’t right now, people pay us for that. I don’t think that they’re going to pay us for that in the next six months to a year. And I really believe that we’re going to need to what I call behavior changes. It’s not going to be a change this button color, change this text because AI will do it automatically based off of the profile of the person that clicked on the page. So your page might show 30 different ways.

to 60 different people and that’s gonna all be based off of their past history what they do if it’s a 60 year old demographic it’ll increase the font on your website etc so I honestly believe it’s gonna get easier for the end user and it’d be a little more difficult for the store owner they’re gonna have to stay ahead of it because if they’re not their competitors will and it’s just a matter of Again, who’s conversing with your client in a way that makes them feel comfortable, easy to find what they’re looking for so that they know, like and trust you or they learn to know, like and trust you.

Jeffro (21:18.155)
Yeah, no, and I think that’s important to realize if you’re not a tech savvy person, then you either need to get somebody on your team who understands how to read the data. Maybe that’s a marketer who can interpret that data as well, or hire someone who does, right, and who does this all the time, who can actually help you make those decisions.

Matthew Stafford (21:34.572)
Yeah. And if you don’t, your competitors are going to, there’s always somebody that wants it. There’s always somebody that wants it worse and they’re going to be willing to put in the work. And that takes us back to kind of full circle where we were talking about, business being an inner game. if you’re not willing to do the things that make you uncomfortable and look and learn, the things that are going to make your website work better, your business will suffer for it.

Jeffro (21:37.748)
Yeah. So you’ve got to assume you have no choice. Yeah.

Jeffro (22:03.68)
Yeah, can’t just do it when you feel like it. You gotta do what’s required.

All right, well, Matthew, think there’s a lot of lessons here that the service businesses can learn from e-commerce and even just this data-driven approach on websites. So I really appreciate you diving into that and sharing your experience with us. You guys at home, Matthew’s links will be in the show notes, so be sure to connect and follow him. I have one last question for you, Matthew. Is there one common mistake you’ve seen that can sabotage growth, even when a business seems to be on the right path?

Matthew Stafford (22:35.296)
Yeah, I would say information overload. For sure.

The first three to four months of us really working hard on a lot of these sites, we’re finding people’s paths and then removing stuff. And it’s not adding new things. It’s not putting more stuff there. People think more is better. And essentially what that does, many times it creates a paradox of choice or just confusion. so 100%, it’s easy when you’re really busy to think like, we’ll add this and then we’ll just be busier and we’ll add this and then we’ll be busier. And what actually happens is it actually starts going the opposite way. They’re really busy. So they’re adding stuff, trying to offer more things when really it ends up clouding why they were working and why everything was working in the first place.

Jeffro (23:29.568)
Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thanks again, Matthew, for being here. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. Stay focused, get that clarity, and I’ll see you guys soon in the next episode. Take care.