Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listing to marketing school with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of marketing of school. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about how we live in a world where common sense is no longer really common. So, what do you think about how the world is today?

Neil Patel: Yeah. The world is really crazy, right. Forget all the political stuff that's happening. But, people these days, especially when it comes to marketing and entrepreneurship, they're like, "Oh, yeah. You just gotta do everything that's logical, and what's worked for other people."
Well, what's logical and works for other people has been seen so many times it doesn't work anymore. For example, eCommerce checkout pages. Here's a question for you, Eric, and I already know he knows the right answer. Does it convert better to have all the form fields on one page and make it simpler and easier for people, or does it make sense to break it down into two steps and make it more complicated and give people more clicks?

Eric Siu: Most people would say number two.

Neil Patel: They would say number two. As in which one's better? The more clicks.

Eric Siu: They want more steps. One ... oh, no, no, no. Most people are like one click.

Neil Patel: That's right.

Eric Siu: Most people want one-step checkout.

Neil Patel: But, you're saying number two. And why does number two convert better?

Eric Siu: Because, well, I've seen it convert better. Because when you do number two, instead of having everything on one page, it's less overwhelming, right?

Neil Patel: Yes.

Eric Siu: And you get people to micro commit.

Neil Patel: Yes.

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: What he's talking about micro commitments is when you get someone to put in their name and email address, and then they see the rest of the stuff, they're like, "Ah. Well, I've already put in my name and email. I might as well complete the rest."
And you roughly see like a 10% increase in conversions by breaking out your checkout pages into multiple steps. But, most people would be like, "That's not usable. It's just easier, and it makes more common sense to just have everything on one page." But, the world is changing in which what you think is best isn't always what's best for your business.
Another example of this is ... let's say you're doing a website, where you're letting people to buy your product. Now, Mike [Chang 00:02:20], I don't know if he does this anymore. He would have asked you to fill out a quiz or responses to specific questions to see if you qualified to buy his product. You're just like ... wait just think about that. He used to end up being, and he sells fitness products, where he just wouldn't let you click a buy button and buy right away. You would have to qualify yourself, and then you can end up buying his product, right? Again, think about that. He's saying if you meet the requirements, you can end up buying. If you don't, you can't buy. By doing that, he was getting more sales.
And Instant Checkmate does the same thing. Have you seen the Instant Checkmate site?

Eric Siu: No, what's that?

Neil Patel: Instant Checkmate is the people search site. So, you put in anyone's name, and then they make you wait like two minutes-

Eric Siu: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Neil Patel: Yeah. They make you wait like a few minutes before you actually see like the background check on someone. They have the information right away, and you would think showing people the information right away is more usable and convenient. But, by making you wait, and they keep doing all these searches, what they found is you're much more likely to convert because you've been waiting. It goes against logic and common sense, but that's what's working interesting marketing these days.

Eric Siu: Yeah. Just to give you a couple more examples. When you think about people are like, "Oh, you know? We should, we shou-" people are like, "Oh, we want to get results quickly." People are very fickly, right? So people don't write long form landing pages anymore, but here's the thing. When you look at long form landing pages, I actually just saw a James Altucher ad about cryptocurrencies, so I think he's doing something around cryptocurrencies now. And it is, man, it is super super long. It kind of goes against logic, right? People just want things quickly in today's world. One click upsell or one click buy from Amazon, right? Or, any of these eCommerce sites, but if you take this logic and also look at Facebook ads, too, there are people that basically write an entire blog post as the ad. They throw in emojis, things like that. Those convert better than the short form ones, right?
Why is that? Maybe it's because the product is higher priced or maybe it's a longer sale cycle, whatever it is exactly.

Neil Patel: And they're paying more per click with those longer form ads.

Eric Siu: Way more.

Neil Patel: So, not only is it more time consuming for people to read the ads, it's also costing them more money.

Eric Siu: Yep. Exactly. So, I guess our point here is that there's all this like blanket advice, and sometimes we're giving you all this advice. It doesn't mean you should just follow it blindly. Common sense is not common all the time, right. You've gotta think about maybe 50% of what we give you is true, but the other 50% is based on the advice or your experiences based on your industry and your knowledge of what's going on.

Neil Patel: So, in other words, with marketing, just because something seems common sense, doesn't mean that's what you're going to see everywhere anymore and that's what you should do. Because the chances are what people are used to, isn't what is going to cause the most sales and conversions or most visits to the website. You've gotta start thinking outside the box and doing things unconventional. Because if everyone's getting hammered by the same stuff with the same messaging over and over again, they're used to it. That's why you have banner blindness, but the moment you switch things up and do things that are out of the box, that's when your marketing starts exploding and growing in a really good way.

Eric Siu: That's why I think marketers shouldn't just study marketing. Neil and I read other ... we draw from other inspirational areas. It could be from other entrepreneurs, other people we talk to, how they run their business all the time. This is stuff that's not always out there, right? So, it's in your best benefit to not just pigeon hole yourself in a world of marketing. Draw inspiration, repurpose kind of what you know from other areas or what you learn from other areas, and you're going to be able to grow faster than your competitors.

Neil Patel: So, that's it from my end. I think that's it.

Eric Siu: Great.

Neil Patel: So, before we go. We have a episode from Problem Solvers from the Entrepreneur Network that we'd like to share with you. This is from the Hello Fresh CEO, and he talks about customer retention. He talks about cohorts, and basically they're doing pretty well because they just filed to go public. So, if you wanna check it out, just go to singlegrain.com/fresh and we'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.