Personalization timing matters – Avoid these common mistakes ft. Eric Melchor

AI-Generated Summary

• Focus on the product page instead of landing pages or the home page for experimenting and impactful changes in conversion optimization. Personalization and creating a delightful customer experience are key for retaining interest and increasing conversions. Avi, a successful brand, used dynamic content and UTM parameters to personalize the experience from ad click to website interaction, leading to efficient scaling with Facebook ads and substantial revenue growth.
• When it comes to segmentation, brands need to adapt based on their unique attributes and audience. A checklist with about 30 questions helps brands determine their specific needs, from international traffic to cart abandonment rates and email/SMS list growth. Scoring each opportunity based on reach, implementation time, and effort helps prioritize actions. Personalization can be a low-hanging fruit for marketers, but you need to know what to look for to benefit from it. Tools like optimunk simplify the process with a drag-and-drop interface.
• The future of conversion rate optimization (CRO) and experimentation is dynamic and ever-evolving. As the digital landscape changes, brands must adapt to stay relevant and competitive. Personalization is becoming a crucial aspect of CRO, allowing brands to tailor the customer experience to different segments. AI is playing an increasing role in CRO, helping with tasks like generating smart headlines for A/B testing. CRO experts bring diverse skill sets to the table, and working with experts can provide valuable insights for brands. AI is also impacting information-heavy websites, potentially reducing traffic as search engines provide more information directly in search results. Brands are exploring unique personalization techniques, like personalized unboxing experiences, to stand out and connect with their audience.
• Shoppable videos are becoming a significant trend, especially among younger generations. Websites without product demonstration videos are seen as outdated. Brands need to keep up with evolving customer expectations, including video content. Working with partners to fulfill customer journey needs is essential for staying competitive. Zero party data, obtained through direct interaction with customers, is becoming crucial for personalization and targeting. Brands can ask customers questions and use their responses to improve the online shopping experience. Privacy concerns can be addressed by adhering to GDPR requirements and ensuring data security. Engaging with customers through surveys and interactive content can significantly increase email subscription rates. The key is to make the interaction fun and valuable. Applying experimentation techniques to personal life, like making better choices for health and personal growth, is a common practice among CRO experts. Experimentation and optimization principles can be applied beyond digital marketing to enhance various aspects of life.
• Experimenting with a shake inspired by a 60-year-old doctor who feels young at 42. The shake contains ginger, green jalapeno, protein powder, blueberries, spinach, ginger, green jalapeno, vanilla, and almond milk. The experiment aims to improve digestion and overall well-being. Personal branding can be a powerful tool to advance in one’s career. Creating a podcast or conducting short interviews with experts can help build authentic and rich relationships with a broader audience. Short interviews with other experts, even if they are not directly related to CRO, can attract attention on social media and broaden your reach. Attending events and conducting quick interviews with event attendees is a great way to connect with new people and increase your personal brand awareness. Eric Melcore can be found on LinkedIn and through Optimum’s website where he hosts free CRO workshops and provides valuable resources.

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AI-Generated Transcript

Eric Melchor 0:00
Forget any landing pages, forget the homepage, focus on the product page, because good changes that you make there in terms of experimenting or any changes that you may make could have a really, really, really big impact.

Khalil Guliwala 0:17
Hi everybody this is Khalil Guiliwala at Experiment Nation, and we’ve got an amazing podcast today with Eric Melchor at optimonk. Teens also April. He’s also a podcaster in the innovators can love Podcast coming to you from Romania. Eric, please introduce yourself to the audience.

Eric Melchor 0:33
Yeah, this is Eric Melchor here on the personalization geek at optimonk. And that’s right. I’m a Texan living in Romania.

I’m a mediocre tennis player. But I do play tennis with Roger Federer. That’s right. I go to YouTube. And I look at Roger Federer highlights and pretend that I’m playing against them, you know, by swinging the racket. So that’s one of my hobbies that I enjoy. And I did a big career change career change a couple years ago going from corporate America, and the retail energy space into the SAS in the startup space a little little over two years ago. So that’s been pretty exciting. But really, back to optimonk. We are personalization in CRO platform.

Khalil Guliwala 1:14
Bruins Eric So so maybe you can take a look. Well, what are you focusing on right now at optimonk?

Eric Melchor 1:19
Yeah, so right now, we’re focused as an evangelist, we’re really focused on sharing with agencies, integration tech partners. And then also e commerce brands, what they can do with CRO conversion optimization and personalization. So when most people think of CRO they think of, you know, the popups that appear different tactics that you can utilize, to try to get somebody’s email address, make the quick sale, we’re saying take a step back. Treat your visitors like people don’t treat them like traffic. I mean, cuz you know, you wouldn’t walk into h&m and all of a sudden start hearing from, you know, one of the employees there, somebody’s asking you, hey, give me your SMS phone number, and I’ll give you a coupon. It just doesn’t work like that in the real world. And so why are we doing that in online and on the the online space? And so we’re trying to give brands the opportunity to create a really delightful and enjoyable customer experience in real time on their website. And why do we feel like this is important? It’s because if you go back in memory lane, think about your first crush that you had, maybe it was junior high, maybe it was high school. And when you thought about this person, you know, they were captivating, they were all they were all you thought about, you know, whatever your parents were telling you, your teachers it went through one year and at the other because your thoughts were consumed by this other person. Well, over time, the interest starts to fade in that other person, because we’re human, that’s just natural, right? So when a person has the highest interest in your brand, or service is when they first discover you, when they first click on the ad, maybe it was a Facebook ad, maybe it was an affiliate link, maybe it was a blog posts, right, in the next 10 minutes. It’s crucial, that’s when they’re really, really interested in you. But most marketers have been designed to think personalization really applies to email marketing, or SMS. So they start focusing on those channels when it’s already a little bit too late, because the interest has already significantly faded. Ever since they first discover you. I mean, just within the first hour, an interest in a brand really goes down. So we’re saying hey, we’re missing out on a big opportunity here, you can really capitalize increase your conversions. Reduce Carter bandits, grow your email subscriber list when you think about, you know, applying really smart conversion optimization tactics and personalization for your website.

Khalil Guliwala 3:38
And again, I think what you gain the core to is the fact that is ever getting we’re getting led so much by the channel for getting to the human element to this right. I think when I think of sort of, you know, the human element, it’s also it’s ultimately, you know, the memorable journeys, how do you how do you build these journeys, that someone you know, the fact that they’re, they’re forgetting about your brand, you know, exponentially Have you make it so that they remember and recall you later on?

Eric Melchor 3:59
Yeah, so again, it’s really about the real time experience. If we look at let’s say, like a brand like Avi, this is a brand that was bootstrapped for $10,000. And in three years, they went to about $3 million in ARR annual revenue. And when you watch videos of the founder, Roanoke Shaw, he says, one of the reasons that they were able to be successful is because they had a heavy emphasis on conversion rate optimization, and they were able to scale efficiently with Facebook ads, which is quite really quite uncommon in the past couple of years, because of iOS 14, the average cost per click for Facebook has skyrocketed. So not many people are able to scale, you know, with Facebook ads, but they were and one of the tactics they did is because their main product, which is a protein shake has many different value propositions. One of the propositions is, you know, grow healthy hair fast. And so their Facebook ad may say, Are you balding? Do you want to grow healthy hair fast, and when somebody clicks on that ad, they get to a landing page and the headline is very aligned very similar. To the ad they clicked on. But they have another value propositions like the best tasting collagen protein. And so when somebody clicks on that ad, they go to the same landing page. But the headline is tied to the ad, they click on, OK. And they do this with other value propositions by not creating duplicate or multiple landing pages is just one landing page. But they’re able to use this feature in the platform through dynamic content and UTM parameters. So that’s like, that’s just like one example of a successful brand that is really trying to personalize the experience from the time the ad was clicked to the time that you know they’re on the website and then also finishing up with email marketing with advanced segmentation. Hi,

Rommil Santiago 5:41
this is Rommil Santiago from experiment nation. Every week we share interviews with and conference sessions by our favorite conversion rate optimizers from around the world. So if you liked this video, smash that like button and consider subscribing it helps us a bunch. Now back to the episode,

Khalil Guliwala 5:54
I think you’ve prepped really good point about personalization, right? The idea is, you know, from start to end, the content must make sense. But as technology, we don’t want to have 15 pages demand and you want maybe one page with dynamic content. So when it comes to different types of segmentation, is there a process you you work through to understand sort of know what those different value propositions army how to prioritize them?

Eric Melchor 6:14
Yeah, so one of the things that we recommend is we actually have a sort of like a checklist. And we give this to anybody who’s interested in it. And because every brand is different, Coolio conversion rate optimization is not the same for every brand. So when this checklist you may have questions like, is more than 20% of your traffic International? If so, there’s an opportunity to create a personalized welcome for your international visitors. Right, you can have somebody if you go to Woodhouse clothing, they’re a US based retailer. And if I go to their website, and I’m here in Romania, I get a nice little message. When I go to their website, it says, Hi, welcome. We shipped to Romania, all the prices include taxes, you can shop in your own currency. And if you spend more than 500, late, which is the local currency, shipping is free. That is a really nice personalized experience because it establishes trust in the brand. And it lets me know right away, I’m not going to be wasting my time not knowing whether or not they deliver to my location. Right. So again, that’s one question, you go through this checklist. And another question could be, you know, what’s your abandoned cart rate? Because if it’s higher than 68%, then we have some tactics that you can do to try to reduce that. Another question could be, are you growing both an email and an SMS list? Okay, here’s some tactics that you can do to get both increase the subscription rates for both your email and SMS list. So it’s, every brand is unique, every website is unique, we go through this checklist, it’s about 30 questions more or less, you can knock it out within half an hour, you may have to go into Google Analytics and do a little bit digging around. But it helps you be smart, it helps you be a smarter marketer. And it helps make your your E commerce or just your site in general just become smarter. And so you know, what are the low hanging fruits that you should you should tackle first, you know, based on priority, and we actually score each of these, each of these different opportunities or issues. And the score is based on the expected reach the implementation time and the amount of effort. And so you know, right away, like, Hey, what are the top five tactics I should focus on once you finish this checklist? So we don’t want to waste anybody’s time. It’s like Google Analytics, just because you have it and you turn it on, you’re not really benefiting from it unless you go in there and do some digging around and creating some specific reports. Same thing with the platform like optimonk, unless you know what to look for, you’re probably not the best fit for you. But I will say it’s designed for marketers, no coding background, necessary drag and drop interface. I don’t even know HTML, and I can do it. So it’s really simple. It is.

Khalil Guliwala 8:43
Yeah, no, it’s amazing. I think that’s what we experienced as marketers, sometimes, you know, you go into places and it’s, it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s kind of doing a checkup with your car, you can go to your car and say, Hey, I think I think my car is on good, my brakes aren’t good. But there’s another element where you say, hey, I can get someone to take take a look at my entire car, and tell me what I need to fix, you know, from A to B to C and what needs to be prioritized. And it seems like you’ve got a model, or some kind of like, you know, a way to kind of help someone take their car, which is their their website and our marketing campaign, analyze it quickly within an hour. And again, help them prioritize, and also any stretch across all these different dimensions? And of course, no in at the same time, are they certain, you know, the certain swell of bugs, let’s call them issues that people like, or there’s something that’s so recorded it you know, I always was interested in know, given that you’re working first time clients, are they are there any issues that keep popping up that surprise you that kind of you say, Hey, I wonder why everyone’s dealing with the same issue.

Eric Melchor 9:39
Yeah, so one of the things it’s not really an issue, but I liked it. A lot of people like to start with the homepage to start optimizing or AB testing experiments. And this is really interesting because one of our partners, couple of our partners Wiz Khalifa leg, and he’s the founder of invest. It’s a CRO agency based out of Chicago and another person a CRO expert by the name of Richie Rich Rawat, he calls himself the product page guy, when we spoke with them, because we partner with them, they both told me that when they when they think about CRO, they first start with the product page, forget any landing pages, forget the homepage, focus on the product page, because good changes that you make there in terms of experimenting, or any changes that you may make could have a really, really, really big impact. And so it’s not really an issue that I see across brands, I wouldn’t call it an issue. But it’s more than one of those insights from experts that hey, if you’re if you’re thinking about CRO sure the fun stuff is like in the welcome pop ups, creating conversational pop ups, abandoned cart, you know, ideas to reduce abandoned cards, or increase average order value. But a lot of people skip optimizing the product page. And that’s where you’re probably going to have the biggest return on investment.

Khalil Guliwala 10:54
Okay, I think that makes absolute sense. I know when you speak, I am certainly a sort of the I think the sort of the the channels we’ve all kind of gone through of optimizing our homepage or landing pages are important. But you’re saying is actually your product page is actually where the person adds the item to cart and checks it out. Right? That’s that that is a last mile of that journey. And insights Oh, their pay off.

Eric Melchor 11:15
Yeah, and the way Richie Rawat put it was that listen, at any time out of 100 people that come to your site, 3% are ready to buy. But there’s about 17% that are on the fence 80% are not going to buy, they’re just not. But there’s 17% that are on the fence. Let’s figure out how do we get those 17%. And so there’s different things that you can do like on the product page, you know, a B test different testimonials on the product page, a B test adding different descriptions. If you know that people are landing on the page from specific type of campaigns, then you could cater to those campaigns, for example, you know, blingy, yet is is a really successful ecommerce brand. Launched in 2018, they appeal to all kinds of people, people who like to go to the gym, also working moms, right. And so if you know that you’re doing ads for people who go to the gym, and they clicked on that specific ad, then you can actually have a personalized experience on the product page where the copy is really aligned around people who go to the gym. But if you have also ads that are designed for working moms, then you can have copy on the product page that is really designed around for working moms. So that is something that I recently learned. And again, it’s listening to other experts who are experts in CRO in this field, that’s one of the things that I really learned is when we work with other CRO experts, every every expert brings something different to the table with some are really good with the product page. Others are really good when it comes to let’s get the biggest return off of our media spin. Like the folks that AVI and then other people are also just really good. Like when it comes to like the copywriting and the branding. When somebody gets to like the homepage, the imagery, you know, things like that everybody has a different skill set. And the more that you work with and the more that you come across wisdom, the more that you appreciate that. Okay, yeah, CRO, one expert can be completely different than the other one. But if you go back to the foundations and go to the checklists, because that’s where you can get a good basic understanding of things that you should focus on. If you’re getting more than 20% of your traffic from international, then you should probably do something for those visitors, you know, if you’ve got a high abandoned cart rate, you should do something to try to reduce that. If you’re trying to collect both SMS and emails, here’s the best tactics that works. So I would recommend going through that checklist. There’s also a tactical library we just wrote out, it’s optimonk.com, forward slash tactical library. And you can actually buy filter depending on what your goal is. Maybe your goal is to increase email subscribers, or maybe to increase your average order value, you click on the filter, and then we’ll show you the various tactics that you can do when it comes to CRO or personalization. So that’s a really neat feature is becoming very popular, highly recommend that to anybody who’s more curious and wants to learn more.

Khalil Guliwala 14:00
Brilliant. I think that’s a UK right now we’re living in an age of again, the age of chat GPT there’s information everywhere. I think right now, it’s question of how do you prioritize? What do you focus on? I think that what sounds amazing, is that you’re focused on giving people tools to help them prioritize help them understand what they should put the energy was put their focus on, well, ready for those immediate wins?

Eric Melchor 14:22
Yeah, yeah, we’re starting to invest a little bit more in AI, we just rolled out an AI smart headline generator. And so if you’re, if you want to AB test, like different headlines on your website, and you can’t really come up with any on your own, you can just use our generator or no recommend like five or six headlines that you can a B test, which is which is pretty cool. It kind of like, does the thinking for you in that aspect.

Khalil Guliwala 14:42
But I think I’m really curious to understand a bit more about it sort of, you know, is given that given given the people that you’re working with clients, right. One thing we noticed that people ask is, you know, as CROs they’re also they’re also working as consultants, working with different teams, different sort of internal stakeholders, any economic what have you You found as a biggest challenge is working with clients in terms of getting that buy in or helping them maybe even translate these very, very, you know, complex ideas of CRO to internal staff. Like what what’s what’s, what’s that process been like for you?

Eric Melchor 15:14
Yeah. So I deliver a, a free CRO workshop every couple of weeks, and it’s free for anybody who wants to attend, you tend you get that checklist. And I read through about 20 different examples of CRO and what, you know what I see. I mean, there’s really the biggest question is, is it going to reduce my webpage speed, my website’s speed? And the answer is no, it’s not because, yeah, sure, there are things that you can do that could reduce it. But we adhere to Shopify as guidelines on to the minimum speed requirements that they ask for different vendors or apps in their ecosystem, we adhere to them all. So that’s the biggest question that we get is, is this going to reduce my, you know, page load speed with dynamic content or testing different images? The answer is no. Obviously, there’s things that you can do, like how you save the file, the file size, things like that, that help. But for the most part, the platform is very fast, and it’s not going to impact that in a negative way at all.

Khalil Guliwala 16:14
Okay, nice. You know, I think we talked about earlier, we talked almost about the President, we talked about AI, again, you’ve got this subject line, generate helping people, any sense of maybe where the future of experimentation is, is the future of CRO and maybe future this point is, is just six months ahead?

Eric Melchor 16:32
Well, I was listening to this interesting podcast, and it was something like, Well, Google AI, kill, kill Google or something like that. And it was saying that sites that rely on information, like they have a lot of informational pages, and they rely on links, people clicking on those links to find out more information and go to their website. Well, Google AI, what’s gonna happen is, they’re gonna, they’re gonna show that information right there on the search results. And so there’s gonna be a big, a big drop in traffic, going to sites that are really information heavy. And I thought that made sense to me, because I definitely see that I definitely see that being realistic, something like that could happen. But personalization, you know, we work with some interesting partners. One of them is Penny Brock. And they’ve got a way where, if you’re delivering like a product or a service, they personalize the unboxing experience. And so depending on who your segment is, you can get an insert that’s personalized, like with your name, and just specific information that’s really catered to you. So that’s, that’s a new brand that I think is out there, we’re excited to work with them and partner with them. And then I think the video is huge. So shoppable, shoppable videos, I think the younger generation is already used to it, I see people that are in their early 20s. And they’ve already gotten accustomed to it. So they’re not even, I guess they would consider a website that doesn’t have like videos, where somebody’s demonstrating the product, I guess they would consider those like outdated, you know, very, it’s very, like tick tock style. And so they got it, I can’t remember the name of the company, but they are based out of Romania to just in a different city, but they’re doing some exciting things around shoppable videos. So what we try to do is, hey, what are our clients need? Obviously, we can’t handle everything when it comes to the customer journey. But we try to work with partners that could fulfill those needs that are missing, or are they they need to in order to compete in the marketplace with other vendors?

Khalil Guliwala 18:31
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think I think as you mentioned, as well, that, you know, as you’re working with different car experts, you kind of you kind of see all the different students, everybody has some some they go to contents, and we go to products and go to analytics. And the idea is how do you how to be a part of the ecosystem benefiting from all the experts around you, while putting the client at the center? I think that’s sort of a very interesting way to kind of to tackle this.

Eric Melchor 18:52
Yeah. And I think most your experts would say that zero party data is the way to go. And that’s where you just immediately ask a question, I’m starting to see b2b companies do this, where somebody goes to their website, and they’ve got a little popup message that just says, We want you to get the most out of this visit, can you tell us what industry you work in. And then based on your selection, they can recommend what content for you to go or basically take you to the part of the website that’s probably most valuable to them. And this is this is like holding their hand and saying, you know, we don’t need to waste your time just clicking around, tell us who you are. And we’re going to take you to the part of the website that probably makes most sense for you. And we’re going to just see this more and more, I think. And the great thing about zero party data is that as you engage with these people, you can tag them, put them into segmentation. And so now you know how to better communicate with them as well. And so that’s, I always get excited when we see brands and our clients that are going that route and trying to get interest party data and do things like conversational popups. To welcome visitors even something as simple like, you know, if you’re an E commerce site, and you get a lot of traffic during seasonality, maybe for Mother’s Day, and you know there’s a lot are people who are coming to your site to buy a gift? Even something as simple? Like, you know, are you shopping for somebody else or for you give them a choice. And if they first say if they say for somebody else, fantastic, you know, here’s, here’s the latest trends that we have to offer, here’s the best, you know, selling products in May. Right? That’s very helpful. And I think brands who understand that are really going to succeed, and out compete a lot of the other brands, I think of Amazon. And Amazon is where they are because they didn’t focus on email marketing, you know, we don’t shop from Amazon, because we get good SMS messages, they made it very easy in real time with the one click purchase, being able to to read reviews of the product on the website, they were the first to do that, seeing product recommendations, which accounts for about 34% of their sales, right. So they really focus on the website experience. And that’s what we’re trying to do is give SMBs, those same tools, those those same capabilities to do the same.

Khalil Guliwala 20:57
Yeah, you know, it’s easy, because you’re talking about I mean, it, the focus has been on personalization. And that depends on data. And something that I’ve encountered talking to other CRM experts is the fact that there’s sometimes this sort of hesitancy for companies to kind of get on board of personalization, because they think about data, data privacy stuff. And that’s kind of issues. How have you tackled them in the past? How have you kind of helped people walk them to understand where the data is actually beneficial to their marketing efforts? Yeah,

Eric Melchor 21:27
well, two things. I mean, first, we remember you through the browser, it’s mostly browser database. And so if you’re using a browser like Safari, then that’s not really good for us, because we’re only going to remember you for about maybe seven days, if you’re using Chrome, it’s much better, the browser can remember you up to about a year on average, right. But in regards to the other data, as long as you’re adhering to GDP requirements or any other, you know, requirements out there in relation to data, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t try getting zero party data, it’s you, it’s yours, the person engaged with you, the person made a choice. And there’s nothing that’s wrong with that. I love doing that. I love doing like different surveys in games. There’s a great website called week.com, I believe. And they’ve got subscriptions for different wines. And they have this really funny questions when you go through their survey. And it’s like, okay, somebody mix the Skittles and the peanuts, you know, which ones do you take out? And what’s your favorite food? Do you like? Is it Mexican food? Is it seafood is a Japanese food. And it’s just so engaging. And I think that, you know, subscription rates to that are something astronomical, like 60 or 70%. Because it’s, it’s engaging, and that’s what zero party data is, if you do it the right way.

Khalil Guliwala 22:44
Yeah, you know, and I think that’s it, like the ideas that we know is it’s not just about like anybody can turn Google Analytics on, was looking for this insights, finding a way that kind of captivates people looks for answers and gives them value. I think that’s sort of being a core what you’re talking about over here. You know, one question I love asking car experts is, is sort of whether they’ve applied any techniques to their own life, their own personal lives, you know, either getting healthier or getting smarter, just living, you know, living better lives. Any anything you’ve ever done, you experimentation on yourself,

Eric Melchor 23:14
Oh, God, I’ve probably been doing this for years, even before I jumped into the role that optimonk One of the things that I recently started though, is I read about this doctor who’s 60 years old, but he feels like he’s 42. And he has this shake that he drinks every day, and there’s ginger in it. And there’s green jalapeno. And there’s a few other things, but I thought that was really interesting. And apparently, those are natural foods that help with the digestion. And so I’m experimenting with that shake. I’ve got my protein powder, my blueberries, spinach, and I cut the ginger and I cut the green jalapeno and add some vanilla and almond milk and mix it in and it’s it’s pretty good. It’s a little spicy. Sometimes I put too much pepper. But it’s pretty good. You know if it helps me stay young. feel younger, then I’m gonna continue doing it.

Khalil Guliwala 24:05
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like as well. It’s not it sounds tasty. You know? You’ve got ginger, you got spinach. You’ve got good. Sounds, it doesn’t sound like a smoothie that you want to hold your nose for?

Eric Melchor 24:16
Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. And I most of the time I put blueberries but sometimes I’ll throw in a banana or strawberries. And it’s quite good. Especially if you use like chocolate almond milk or vanilla almond milk. It’s quite delicious. Yeah. What about you or what you call it? What do you How are you a CRO optimizing your life over there?

Khalil Guliwala 24:33
Oh, different stuff. I think part of it is just like I mentioned in previous podcasts like I’m actually a very, very introverted person. I grew up with a speech impediment. And so essentially, I kind of sat down and kind of said, Okay, what do I need to do to kind of get better at speaking what do I need to do to get out of my comfort zone? It’s why I’m actually doing the podcast and the reason is just how do I get to a point to you know, live like, not just market products, but in some sense. Also create a market for yourself. I think that’s what that’s what I’ve been doing.

Eric Melchor 25:03
Yeah, no, totally agree with that. I was never been into the personal branding concept. But I landed this role at optimonk without having to submit a resume without having to interview simply because of a podcast I started about two years ago called innovators can laugh, where I interview European startup founders. And it just so happened, Shabazz shadow, who’s the founder of optimonk, he was a guest on my podcast. And we had a great time, we stayed in touch. And then a few months later, he started, he started pitching me optimonk, sharing his vision with me where he wants to take the company. And we discussed like, what my role would entail, what could it look like. And so this has really worked out for me in terms of getting out there trying to be consistent. And I’m, all I’m doing is interviewing startup founders, a lot of people, a lot of people who are more fascinating and interesting than me. But the fact that I share this on LinkedIn, people have gotten to know me through that, through that medium, and it’s, it’s worked out really well. The other benefit too, is whenever I go to different cities, I know people who are in those cities, I was in Sofia last week, and I got to hang out with like four people I had interviewed, and, you know, hang out with them, have some cocktails go to dinner, it was just, it’s just great. You know, I went to Paris, and I hung out with somebody I interviewed and he showed me like, some restaurants that you could tell only the local presion is go there and no tourists go there he was able to order for me and that that in itself, it’s not about really the money or anything like that. It’s just the relationships I’ve been able to grow through this platform through podcasting.

Khalil Guliwala 26:32
Yes, we’re doing a little more you talk about personal branding. And that’s something where a lot of CRM experts, you know, they’re I think they’re amazing at their jobs, but those trying to find ways to kind of kind of stand out from the crowd. So you mentioned the fact that you’ve got this podcast you created gives opportunities to create really authentic and rich relationships with people, anything anything, we suggest that CRO experts, you can maybe do a little more off, when it comes to maybe getting their brand out there being or being noticed by other people? Well,

Eric Melchor 27:01
I think I think one of the things that I’ve noticed is, even if you don’t do a podcast, you could do quick two or three minute interviews with other experts. And it doesn’t have to be a CRO, but maybe something that’s a fit if there’s an affinity or affiliated with CRO, and those attract a lot of attention. Because if you’d, if you share that on social media, like on LinkedIn, and you tell the other person, now you’re reaching an audience, that you would have never reached out, you know, otherwise, because people are interested in that person. And as a result they’re interested in find out who you are. And so I think that’s another good avenue that you can do, even if they’re just like quick two, three minute, you know, interviews, one question, when you get your thoughts on this particular question, let the other person talk. And then you know, you can just kind of edit that. And I think that’s something that I started to see with people going to events. And that’s how they’re able to connect with a lot of people is through these little, you know, quick, one to three minute interviews. So I think that’s, that’s something I would do if somebody’s trying to get, you know, more awareness for their personal brand.

Khalil Guliwala 28:06
Thank you so much for sharing that. Eric. You know, before we let you go, I want to talk to you in terms of anybody who wants to follow you. I know you’ve, you’ve talked about your podcast, you’ve talked about the CRO workshops you do, which have the which other questionnaire like if someone wants to kind of learn more about you a follow what you can optimonk What are the different ways they can they can reach out to you fine, yeah,

Eric Melchor 28:26
so LinkedIn would be the best one, Eric Melcor, on LinkedIn. And then the next one would be, that’s the main one, you can go to optimonk.com, forward slash bootcamp. And there’s a it’s a page about the workshop that I give every couple of weeks. And you can register there. It’s a free workshop, you get that free CRO checklist by attending. And so those are the main two things. optimonk Boot Camp, forward slash boot camp, and then of course on LinkedIn. Okay.

Khalil Guliwala 28:54
Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Eric, thank you so much for your insights and wishing best.

Eric Melchor 29:00
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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