In the old days, businesses created websites that simply displayed static information: the services they offer, an “about us” description, and their contact information.

These days, website visitors expect more. We’ve become accustomed to using sites like Amazon to buy anything and everything. We go online to make our haircut appointments. We book entire vacations on Expedia.

People use websites to actually get things done.

And they’ve grown to expect this type of dynamic experience from big players and small businesses alike.

Thanks to Ontraport’s Dynamic Content Management System (CMS) and others like it, creating a dynamic, personalized web experience (also known as a web app) is no longer out of reach for small businesses.

Here are five reasons why upgrading your static website to a dynamic website will give your customers a better experience and help you grow faster:

1. More personalized customer experience

When customers interact with your business online, they’re looking for personal attention.

Why do you suppose we repeatedly buy from online sellers like Amazon? It’s likely not because of the products they offer — it’s the shopping experience. As soon as you open Amazon, it’s like they’ve read your mind: You see tempting offers for your go-to shampoo that’s getting low, your dog’s favorite treats and a pair of shoes you were eyeballing the other day. You can find what you need with minimal effort. Not only is this convenient, but it also shows you that Amazon is in tune with what you want. You feel seen.

This is how you want your customers to feel when they interact with your business: understood, cared for, and treated like a familiar friend.

Static websites can offer some surface-level personalization like one-click upsells, on-page recommendations and displaying the visitor’s name, but to create a fully interactive experience, you’ll need a dynamic website. Dynamic websites change for each visitor based on their actions.

For example, say you run a membership site where you share courses and content about cooking and meal planning. Three subscribers log in to your site: a busy parent who needs meal planning tips, a college student trying to eat healthy on a budget, and a vegetarian who loves your meat-free recipes.

With your courses built on a dynamic website, you can offer recommendations personally tailored to each member. You can promote a “Quick and Painless Meal Planning Guide” for the busy parent, a “Healthy Recipes on a Budget” ebook for the college student, and a “Meatless Masterclass” for the vegetarian — all from the same dynamic page.

Your customers will find what they need quickly and know you understand their interests, while you’ll get more opportunities to build lasting relationships.

2. Added convenience for customers through self-serve portals

We love getting things done online because it’s convenient. Why call a salon if you can book your haircut in seconds online? Why wait on hold with a local restaurant if you can make reservations from their site? Accomplishing those little tasks online is faster and easier — and your customers feel the same way.

So how do you deliver that convenience in your own business? With a dynamic website, it’s easy — you’ll be able to add all kinds of self-service elements to your online experience, without coding or developers.

You can tailor a self-serve customer portal for whatever needs are most important to you and your customers.

For example, you might launch a payment center for customers to see past purchases, pay bills and update their credit card details. You can also give them the freedom to manage their own account by offering a space to update passwords, email addresses and other details. Or you can allow them to make appointments, check notes from your consultation and send you messages.

By making these tasks easily accessible, it’s more convenient for your customers, and it takes these items off your team’s plate.

3. Better customization to reach your business goals

Say you offer classes or courses that fill up quickly, and you want to show customers how many spots are left for each one. Or you sell physical products and want to remove sold-out listings so you don’t confuse potential buyers. Or maybe you offer a range of different services, and you’d love to help your clients find what they need with a personalized survey.

These kinds of custom experiences make it easy for customers to do business with you because everything is smooth, simple and specific to their needs. The result? More clients who buy from you and stick around.

You likely already have some ideas about how you’d like to customize your site, customer journey, internal workflows and more — but to put those ideas into action in the past, you would have needed to hire a developer and buy various pieces of technology.

With Ontraport’s web app capabilities, you can easily create these experiences to fit your vision, without any code. You aren’t limited to a predetermined set of features: You can customize your web app to make it as unique as your business, without sacrificing your time or outsourcing a developer to do it for you.

Want to try out Ontraport’s Dynamic Content Management System (CMS) for yourself? Sign up for a free, 14-day trial — there’s no commitment or credit card required.

4. Stronger competitive edge to win over more customers

Many small businesses already do offer some of these interactive, convenient experiences, but not through their own web app — through a third-party app instead. For example, if you run a yoga studio, you might use something like MindBody for class registrations. Or if you own a sushi bar, you may use GrubHub for online orders.

These platforms have been a go-to for small businesses because it was previously nearly impossible (and very expensive) to create these experiences on their own site.

But there’s a downside: These apps make it a lot harder to stand out from the crowd. They’re designed to promote thousands of different businesses at once, which makes it easy to get lost in the shuffle.

You could offer all that convenience and engagement without being listed right next to your competition and paying extra fees. Clients could book your yoga classes right from your site, or your sushi bar could have its own takeout portal. With a dynamic website, that’s all realistic — and it’s all under your control.

You won’t have to pay extra fees for middleman platforms like MindBody, GrubHub or Amazon, you won’t be restricted by the constantly changing rules in outside apps, and you won’t be relying on a third-party site to give your customers a great experience. And the best part? You won’t be pitted up against the competing yoga studio across the street.

5. Less maintenance, more time for things that matter

Maintaining a static website takes a lot of manual work.

For example, say you’re running your blog with a static page builder. When you want to post a new article, you add the headline, content and images to a template, then voila! You’ve got a new post. Seems simple enough, right?

Except your work doesn’t stop there. You might want to add your new article to a list of recent posts. Or include it in the author’s “about” page, add it to your newsletter, or promote it on your homepage. If you want your new content to show up anywhere else on your site, you’ll need to either add it manually to each page or deal with tags, plugins or custom code. Not so simple.

With a dynamic website, the process of launching and maintaining your content is much more streamlined. You only have to fill in your headline, copy, images and other details in your database once. After that, your content will automatically populate on dynamic web pages across your site where you want it. So if you want to add your new blog article to your list of recent posts, your homepage and the author’s profile all at once, you can do it with a single click.

This convenience doesn’t just apply to blogs. It works for all kinds of content and simplifies web maintenance across the board. For instance, let’s say you’re hosting a webinar and one of your speakers just dropped out. In a static website, you’d have to track down every page that mentions that speaker and manually make adjustments. But with a dynamic website, you can update your database just once — and that speaker will automatically be removed everywhere on your site.

When you aren’t slowed down by tedious web maintenance tasks, you’ll have more freedom to build your business. You’ll open up more time for your most important projects, and you’ll be able to implement ideas faster.

Your static website has served you well — but if you want to show customers you care, stand out from the crowd and create one-of-a-kind online experiences that set you up to scale, a dynamic website is the way to go.

Already thinking of all the different ways you can use a dynamic website in your business? Sign up for a free, 14-day trial of Ontraport to start getting your ideas up and running in no time (without coding!).

The post 5 reasons to replace your static website appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Online Content

Use the following resources to put your ideas from this issue of Modern Ontrapreneur into action.

Build your own web apps with Dynamic CMS

Feeling inspired after reading “What is a web app?” on page 18? Watch our Ontraport University course for step-by-step instructions on creating apps of your own.
Learn more ▸

Implement the 3 building blocks of a web app

Once you’ve read “The 3 building blocks of a web app” on page 39, use these resources to put your ideas into action:
Learn how to set up custom objects ▸
Find out how to publish dynamic content ▸
See steps for building dynamic blocks ▸

Watch Matt’s live app building session

See how Matt Kostan and Ontraport CEO and Founder Landon Ray built the travel retail business web app in the article “Bringing their vision to life” on page 45.
Watch it here ▸

Watch David’s live app building session

In “Bringing their vision to life” (page 49), you read about the web app David built that matches his clients with the right injury recovery program. Now, watch David and Landon set it up, step by step, in this live app building session.
Watch it here ▸

Build your blog from scratch in Ontraport

As you read through the “5 steps to building a blog in Ontraport” on page 51, use these Support Center articles to guide you as you build along:
Create custom object records for your blog posts ▸
Make a dynamic template for your blog posts ▸
Create blog categories with dynamic blocks ▸

Or, launch your blog in minutes 

Ready to bring your dream blog to life after reading “5 steps to building a blog in Ontraport” on page 55 but don’t want to start from scratch? Skip the setup and launch in minutes with our prebuilt blog app.
Launch a premade blog from the App Marketplace ▸

Build your courses from scratch in Ontraport

Read “5 steps to creating a course in Ontraport” on page 60, and use these Support Center articles to help you get started:
Learn more about dynamic pages ▸
See how you can use different dynamic page types ▸

Or, launch your course in minutes

Inspired by “5 steps to creating a course in Ontraport” but not ready to take on building your course from scratch? Here’s more info about the prebuilt course template we talked about on page 61.
Launch a premade course from the App Marketplace ▸

Get the skills to build any web app you dream up

Ready to dive into Ontraport’s Dynamic Content Management System (CMS)? Here’s how to access the free Ontraport University courses on page 76:

What is a web application?

Learn exactly what makes a web application different from a website so you can start imagining the possibilities for your own.
Watch now ▸

The 5 functions of a web app

Dig into the five key functions common to web apps and how to handle them using Ontraport. Get ready to draft ideas for what your app will do.
Watch now ▸

Dynamic pages

Create a dynamic page by designing a dynamic template which uses data from your records to create new pages automatically.
Watch now ▸

In the App Marketplace

Looking to launch your web apps fast after learning about our new App Marketplace on page 19? These done-for-you apps are officially in your account, ready to customize and launch:

Blogs
Courses and Lessons
Forums
Virtual Events
Surveys
Deals and Companies
And more coming soon!

Learn more in the Support Center

The post The Web Apps Issue appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Your team members are often interacting with your customers, and their own satisfaction and passion for their work always shows through. So keeping your team members happy is just as important as delivering on your promise to your customers.

At Ontraport, for example, our Operations and Leadership teams view each employee as one of their customers. Whether team members are relatively new to the company or have called Ontraport home for a long time, we’re always thinking about how we can keep them happy and engaged, challenged but not overworked, and equipped with everything they need to succeed. Just like customers, we’ve found that happy employees will usually stick around for a long time, stay engaged in their work, and be more likely to refer us to their friends.

Sara Hetyonk, Ontraport’s VP of People Operations, says, “Good employers care about their team members as people. They realize employees represent the company’s mission and provide them with the tools they need to be successful in their role.”

There are several ways businesses of any size can address their employees’ needs and let them know how valuable they are to their operation. Here are four simple ways to increase employee satisfaction in your own business:

1. Providing employee benefits

Salary isn’t the only thing employees are looking at when they’re considering job offers. In fact, many employees are just as interested in the benefits offered, the company’s culture, and opportunities for career growth. In one study, participants reported they’re twice as likely to value those factors over a hefty salary when choosing a job. Three out of five employees even said they’d take a 50% pay cut for a role they really love.

Regardless of the size of a business, there are a lot of creative ways to make employees feel appreciated that cost companies nothing yet make a big difference for their employees.

“Providing an amazing benefits package costs a lot of money,” Sara says. “One of the concerns business owners may face is not having the resources to dedicate to covering health insurance or providing meals. Before being discouraged about what you can’t provide, it is important to consider what you can provide. And small gestures go a long way.”

Here are some examples of unique benefits Ontraport offers that you can consider applying in your business to increase employee happiness:

Flexible PTO: Taking time off is essential for team members to take care of their mental health, enjoy their hobbies and relationships, handle personal responsibilities and more so they can come back feeling refreshed, inspired and ready to hit the ground running again. Since we don’t limit the number of PTO days available, employees don’t feel pressured to avoid taking days off and actually end up being more responsible about how many days they miss.

Volunteer days: If there’s a cause that one of our employees is passionate about, we care about it, too. Everyone on the Ontraport team gets two paid volunteer days per year that they can use to give back to the community.

Focus days: Another simple perk companies can offer is a work-from-home day. Since adjusting to the pandemic, working remotely is already the norm for so many of us; however, setting aside one day every so often for employees to unplug from work chats and meetings to focus on a specific project can help reinvigorate their passion and avoid burnout.

Tuition reimbursement: Investing in your team members’ personal and professional development pays dividends in their work. At Ontraport, we provide $1,500 in tuition reimbursement per year that employees can use for classes, books, workshops and more, whether related to their job or not.

Catered meal program: The way to someone’s heart is through their stomach…right? Whether that’s true or not, we ensure our employees are well-nourished through our on-site cafe, which provides breakfast, lunch and snacks throughout the day. While it might not be realistic for every company to offer this perk, offering catered lunch to employees once a month or celebrating team members’ work anniversaries with a paid meal can make them feel appreciated.

Pet insurance: Consider offering employees who have furry members in their families the opportunity to sign up for pet insurance through your company. While Ontraport employees still pay out of pocket for pet insurance, they are eligible for a group discount, which helps them save money.

Fitness discounts: When our employees feel good physically and mentally, they’re better positioned to be rock stars at their jobs. Reach out to a local gym or studio and you’ll likely find that they’re willing to offer a group discount that you can extend to your employees, which they’re sure to appreciate.

Half-day Fridays: This is a free benefit that can encourage your employees to strike a better work-life balance. At Ontraport, we work an hour longer each day Monday through Thursday so we can leave the office by early afternoon every Friday. We end up working the typical 40-hour work week, but we spread it out differently.

Health and wellness reimbursements: Everyone has their own way of managing their physical and mental health. To give each employee the resources they need, we offer flexible reimbursements for their health-related purchases. Everyone on the Ontraport team gets an annual stipend to put toward home office equipment, mental health support, family planning costs, and even wellness purchases like camping fees and workout gear. Even if you have limited resources, a little bit of support can go a long way in encouraging work-life balance.

2. Following a set of shared values

As our business grew, our leaders Landon Ray and Lena Requist wanted to ensure Ontraport didn’t lose sight of all the principles that our one-of-a-kind company culture was built on. Over time, they found that there were nine main values that contributed to making each Ontraport employee a good fit with the company.

To keep these values top of mind, we regularly acknowledge team members during our weekly company-wide meetings if they’ve been an outstanding example of one or more of our values. We also hold an annual awards event to recognize those who have exemplified each of the company values through their work, attitude and contributions to Ontraport. Our aim is for our employees to be inspired by their colleagues and see that the work they do truly matters.

To come up with your own set of company values, consider what characteristics are most important to you when hiring employees and what qualities you’ve found in successful employees. Then simply document them and work them into your hiring and recognition processes.

3. Keeping the team connected

Some companies take pride in being a tight-knit group — it’s often what makes their employees stay around for years.

Maintaining a warm and friendly company culture has always been a priority at Ontraport, and we believe this plays a key role in why our team meshes so well. Our Operations team supports our culture through fun and engaging events. With morale-boosting team-building days, annual summer soirees and holiday parties, virtual baby showers, birthday and work anniversary celebrations, we are often celebrating and getting the team together.

Keeping the close-knit vibe can be tough in the midst of all the challenges brought on by COVID-19 and remote work. But even if miles separate you and your employees, it’s important to make sure your team is well cared for. To keep our employees engaged (even virtually), our teams have Zoom happy hours, participate in virtual yoga classes, and regularly share in Slack channels about recipes to try, music recommendations, photos of pets and more.

As our office reopens and our team shifts to a new hybrid work environment, we’ve also kicked off biannual week-long company retreats at our Santa Barbara headquarters. With the whole team on-site for a week, we’re able to touch base on company goals, meet remote teammates in person, catch up over happy hours and more.

“Feeling connected and engaged is essential in making sure employees feel fulfilled,” Sara says.

4. Holding each other accountable

One of the most important things business leaders can do to increase employee happiness is create a space for open communication and feedback. The office is not simply a place where work gets done; employees should know that they’re supported and cared for. When people know that their employers have their back, they’re more likely to thrive and be engaged in the workplace.

By giving team members the opportunity to share any issues or roadblocks they may be facing, making leadership accessible, and being receptive to feedback (as well as being willing to make changes based on said feedback), companies make it clear that they prioritize what their employees need to be successful. With a survey automation tool, you can touch base with your team without adding to your workload. It’s well worth your while to make sure they’re getting what they need.

Even through the ups and downs of the pandemic, our company’s commitment to transparency and accountability hasn’t changed. Everyone at Ontraport is asked to participate in regular reviews and weekly check-ins with managers, fill out weekly surveys about their work experiences and send questions and comments (anonymously, if desired) to our CEO, Landon Ray, to address in our all-hands meetings.

“Sending a survey with benefit options or even a survey to find out what is going well or not well in an employee’s role can illuminate needs you might not have thought of,” Sara adds. “Listen if someone is having a tough time, and ask what you can do.”

Overall, engaged, motivated, happy employees will usually work to prove they want to be there and want to see the company excel. This enthusiasm, in turn, will often reflect in their customer interactions and contributions to the company.

The post Want Happy Customers? Start With Your Team appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Online content

Use the following articles to convert your Modern Ontrapreneur inspiration into action.

Using the Trends dashboard

Learn how to analyze your business data in “See your data visually with Trends” on page 6, and use these tips to put it all into action in your account.

Read more ▸

Set up and track UTMs

Learn how to use UTMs to collect first-party data about where your leads and sales are coming from as you follow along with “Apple crushed Facebook’s ad tracking. Now what?” on page 16.

Read more ▸

Set up your Facebook Conversions API integration

When you’re ready to set up your integration with Facebook’s Conversions API from page 16, use these resources to get started.

• Follow along with this video tutorial from our CEO and Founder, Landon Ray, to configure your integration. You can learn how to find your Facebook pixel ID here and how to get your Facebook access token here.
• Get Landon’s advice on what kinds of data points to share with Facebook and how to do it in Ontraport.
• If you have questions along the way, check out this Facebook User Community post. Here, you can see questions and tips from fellow users, and add any questions or tips you may have.
• Want to see the original webinar where Landon explains Apple’s iOS14.5 release and how it affects you? Watch it here.

Set up Deep Funnel Conversion Tracking with Facebook

You might wonder what’s next after you read “Apple crushed Facebook’s ad tracking. Now what?” on page 16. Use this article to learn how to optimize your Facebook ads based on events deeper in your funnel.

Read more ▸

Add contacts to Facebook custom audiences

Feeling inspired by the retargeting article on page 20? Here’s how you can use Ontraport’s built-in Facebook integration to automatically create custom audiences.

Read more ▸

Get to know Ontraport’s new mobile app

Want to learn more about our new Ontraport mobile app on page 48? Use these resources to see how to use it in your business.

Learn how to use the app ▸

See what the app can do for you ▸

In the Systems library

Setup Wizards Library
Browse our collection of prebuilt systems to learn more about the Setup Wizards from page 40 — and all the other done-for-you systems available in your account.

Read more ▸

Membership Starter Kit
Get your entire membership site up and running in record time with the same prebuilt system Molly Ola Pinney used in “Thriving through the pandemic” on page 34.

Download here

The post The Data-driven Marketing Issue appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Web apps give visitors the highly personalized, engaging and convenient online experiences that are increasingly expected in the marketplace. As the first no-code web app builder that is truly meant for non-technical users, Ontraport is opening up a world of opportunity for small businesses to offer experiences on a level playing field with enterprises.

“Customer expectations continue to rise. For businesses, meeting those expectations is mission critical – and exceeding those expectations is a real competitive advantage,” commented Landon Ray, Ontraport Founder and CEO. “In the near future, customers will expect an app-like experience from every business they interact with. This is precisely why Ontraport is delivering the no-code technology that enables organizations of any size to create rich online customer experiences without the time and cost associated with developer-driven legacy approaches. With our platform, developing web apps is a straightforward process that saves both time and money.”

Ontraport’s Dynamic CMS combines the platform’s drag-and-drop web builder with its customizable, relational built-in CRM database, making it possible for businesses to easily create apps powered by their data. They can create customer portals and self-service centers, blogs, online courses and membership sites, online directories, knowledge bases, user-generated content, and other interactive experiences — all without being encumbered by technical roadblocks or hefty developer bills.

More About Dynamic CMS and the Ontraport Platform

Ontraport’s Dynamic CMS is bolstered by the platform’s robust CRM and automation feature set — giving web app creators one central software solution for all their business and marketing needs.

With Ontraport, businesses can leverage features such as a customizable CRM database, an advanced visual automation builder, enterprise-grade email and SMS marketing, online payment and subscription management, sales pipeline management, and marketing tracking to manage and choreograph complete customer journeys. They can take customers from web app and payment to email follow-up and more via one seamless platform — without the need to buy, learn and integrate multiple software products.

Other key features and benefits of Ontraport’s Dynamic CMS include:

1. A simple drag-and-drop editor – Designed to allow non-technical users to intuitively and visually create dynamic web applications, the Ontraport platform requires no coding knowledge and is built with small businesses – not web developers – in mind.
2. No limits on traffic, users or data storage – With a scalable relational database, Ontraport is one of the only no-code web app builders that eliminates size and capacity limits so that companies are not forced to switch platforms as their business grows.
3. Customizable data – Users can input, access and update data manually, via online forms, through direct import or via the Ontraport application programming interface (API). They can also create custom record types to store and relate data for their web apps, without being restricted to preset options.
4. Personalized content – Using customer data stored in their CRM database, businesses can provide individualized online experiences, such as showing relevant offers to visitors based on their web app navigation or purchase histories or different courses to members based on their subscription level.
5. Password protection – Users can build secure, password-protected applications, including sites that offer access to online educational courses, customer self-service portals, or confidential document centers.

Growing Customer Success

The Ontraport platform is being embraced by businesses across numerous markets, ranging from business and lifestyle coaches to personal service providers and marketing agencies.

The Global Society, an organization that supports Australian university students traveling abroad, plans to use Ontraport’s new Dynamic CMS capabilities to expand its offerings. According to Chief Operating Officer Rob Malicki, “There have been lots of things on my wish list for the business — but just the idea that we would need to get another piece of technology to do those things has been discouraging. Now we can do it all in Ontraport, which allows us to build something incredibly complicated without additional complexity and cost.”

Rachel Jones, business strategy coach and co-founder of a small business advisory firm the Bold B, has seen firsthand the cost- and time-saving benefits of the integrated Ontraport solution. “We had a client using another software that had gone through three different developers and spent over $80,000 to get her site to work the way she wanted — and it still was never completed,” she said. “All of the functionality she needed is available in Ontraport and would have saved her so much time, money and stress.”

To learn more about Dynamic CMS and other Ontraport offerings, please visit www.ontraport.com

The post Ontraport Empowers Entrepreneurs to Create Web Apps Without Code appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

It’s a system we’ve all grown accustomed to — but things have changed.

Since Apple’s iOS 14.5 release in 2021, Facebook pixels can’t always see who’s visiting your pages anymore. As a result, Facebook can’t build audiences like it used to.

Apple’s changes may mess with Facebook’s tracking and targeting — but if you’re an Ontraport user, you’re ahead of the curve. Between our integrations with Facebook custom audiences and Facebook’s Conversions API, you can retarget for any conversions documented in your account, even if Facebook can’t track them, and even if they didn’t happen online.

For example, you can notify Facebook whenever a sales rep marks a lead as qualified in Ontraport, you make a sale offline, or a customer makes a new subscription payment.

Plus, you can still capture details about your page visitors with Ontraport’s built-in tracking and use that data to retarget them on Facebook — even if you can’t rely on pixels anymore.

You’ll be able to create all kinds of Facebook custom audiences for a precise, personalized retargeting strategy. Here are four audiences you can create to get you started.

Audience 1: Contacts who have opted in to any of your top-funnel channels

The first list you should create is made up of everyone who has opted in to any of your top-of-funnel channels — for example, signing up for your newsletter or opting in for a lead magnet. You can use this “Opt-ins” custom audience to do a few important things:

First, an opt-in audience is great for moving your new leads through the next steps of your funnel. After contacts opt in, nudge them to sign up for a free trial, sample or demo (or whatever your next step is!) with a Facebook ad campaign. Just select your “Opt-ins” custom audience when creating the campaign, and only the people on your list will see these ads encouraging them to take their next step.

Second, you’d be missing out if you didn’t use your opt-ins to create a lookalike audience. This means you’ll use your “Opt-ins” list to find and target more people with similar interests — a strategy that gets you more high-quality leads and, in turn, lowers your cost per conversion.

Finally, you can remove existing leads from your cold advertising efforts so you’re not wasting ad dollars by showing ads to people who’ve already opted in. This is easy to adjust in your targeting options on Facebook. Simply exclude your “Opt-ins” audience from any of your cold advertising campaigns.

To set up your “Opt-ins” audience, you’ll need to create a simple automation in Ontraport like the one below. Then Ontraport will automatically add people to your Facebook custom audience labeled “Opt-ins” when their contact is first added to your account, when they submit a form to share their email for the first time, when they’re tagged as an opt-in, or anything else that may indicate a new contact. If you want to adjust or update these settings over time, you can do it all within this single automation.

Audience 2: Leads who express interest in specific categories

Once you have a custom audience for people who opt in at the top of your funnel, you can segment those new leads into smaller audiences based on the specific content they opted in for.

This makes it easier to move contacts through your funnel in less time, since they’ll get more frequent interaction with your brand and product. It’s also a great way to get more personal in your messaging, since you’ll already know a little bit about each lead based on what made them share their email address with you.

For example, say you’re a marketing consultant who offers two different lead magnets in exchange for new email addresses. Maybe one of them is a guide on how to build a successful membership site, and the other is an ebook about how to analyze marketing campaign data. In this case, you’d create two Facebook custom audiences: one for the leads who opted in for your membership site guide and one for those who opted in for the marketing data ebook. You’d be able to retarget leads in each audience with ads that reflect those interests. This is just one way to do it; don’t be afraid to play around with different segmentation strategies until you find one that clicks.

Just like the “Opt-in” audience, you can set this up with a single automation. Simply add triggers that coincide with your audience’s varying interests, then link them to the appropriate Facebook custom audiences. So for the example above, you’d add one trigger for people who fill out the opt-in form for the membership site guide plus a second trigger for the marketing data ebook. You’d end up with two audiences: one for membership interest and one for marketing data interest.

There’s one important thing to keep in mind for these retargeting messages: your CTA. The whole point of creating this audience is to move new leads into the next step of your funnel, so make sure your CTA is pointing them in the right direction.

For instance, you might offer a free membership strategy session to those who opted in to your membership site guide, while promoting your marketing analytics services to everyone who opted in to the marketing data ebook. You’ll seamlessly guide them one step closer to a purchase — which is where our next audience comes in handy.

Audience 3: Opportunities who are qualified to buy

So far, you’ve got a general audience for anyone who opted in at the top of your funnel and some specific audiences for those who opted in through certain interests. Now, you can create a Facebook custom audience for prospects further down the funnel: leads who are just about ready to make a purchase (also known as qualified leads or opportunities).

Contacts are ready to join this audience when they’ve shown some kind of serious interest in your product or service. This can come in a few different forms, depending on your business. For SaaS products, you might drop contacts into this audience after they sign up for a demo or free trial. If you’re a consultant, you could add leads after they’ve scheduled a free consultation with you. Even something as simple as visiting your pricing page can indicate that a lead is getting ready to buy.

When people show this kind of serious interest, you won’t want to leave their decision to chance. It’s the perfect time to encourage them toward a purchase — because you know they’re already thinking about it.

So for your “Opportunities” custom audience, you’ll want to really start honing in on the sale. Use CTAs that drive people toward a purchase and make your messaging highly sales-focused. This isn’t the time to beat around the bush; these leads have seen what your business can do, and they’re just a few steps away from buying.

It used to be that you could create these custom audiences just by adding a Facebook pixel to your pricing page or the thank you page for your demo request… and you still can. But because third party cookies are on the way out, Facebook’s losing track of too many people now. Fortunately, Ontraport’s tracking is based on first party cookies, and that means you still know who’s who and can build these audiences using the custom audiences feature.

This is even easier to set up in Ontraport than the first two audiences — you can simply add a few new triggers to the automation you create for Audience 2 above. These triggers will really depend on your business and customers, since there are so many ways to indicate that a lead is ready to buy. You might use page visits, form fill-outs, email clicks or something completely different to add people to this audience.

Audience 4: Active customers

Eventually, some of your leads will make a purchase. Nice! When that happens, add them to a new Facebook custom audience for your existing customers. At the same time, you’ll want to remove these new customers from all your previous custom audiences designed for leads to exclude them from irrelevant marketing.

You’ll be able to use this audience to keep your customers engaged and offer upsells. You can also create a lookalike audience based on this group to find more leads who are similar to your customers and improve the performance of your cold campaigns.

The way you structure these audiences will depend on your business model. Here are some popular examples:

Customer audiences for subscription-based businesses

If you sell a subscription product, such as a digital membership, use automation to keep an up-to-date audience of all your active subscribers. You can use it to show ads encouraging subscription reactivations, subscription level upgrades, or engagement on your membership site.

To create this audience, add a new trigger to the same automation you’ve been using for Audiences 2 and 3. When someone starts paying for a new subscription, they’ll be removed from any previous “Opt-in” or “Opportunities” audiences and added to your “Active Customers” custom audience.

To be sure that the audience stays accurate over time, you’ll also want to add a trigger to remove cancelled subscribers from your “Active Customers” list. (Pro tip: Add those cancelled customers to their own custom audience to occasionally retarget them with a re-engagement campaign).

Customer audiences for ecommerce businesses

If you have an ecommerce business with multiple products or services, try splitting your custom audiences into categories so you can target customers with related products or upsells.

For example, if customers previously bought shoes from you, you might retarget them with ads for similar shoes or shoe polish. To do this, you would set up an element to your post-purchase automation to add contacts who purchased shoes to your “Customer: Shoes” Facebook custom audience.

With these four types of audiences, you can use Facebook custom audiences to earn more leads and sales, retain customers for longer, and even boost your revenue by upselling and cross-selling.

Note for Ontraport users: As of 2021, Facebook changed the way contacts are added to custom audiences. You can no longer add someone to a custom audience unless you made that audience yourself via Ontraport’s Facebook custom audiences feature — so we’ve released a new feature that allows you to do just that. You can find more information about how to set up Facebook custom audiences with Ontraport and details about what changed with the latest Facebook updates here.

The post How to retarget on Facebook in a post-iOS14.5 world appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

This sparks a few questions: Do entrepreneurs have the necessary resources to keep operations running smoothly? Is there a better way to approach time management for small business owners? What’s the best strategy to get long-term growth without burning out?

To learn more about these time management and technology trends in small business, Ontraport conducted a 2021 survey of business owners in the United States. Over 500 entrepreneurs responded. They told us about:

• The kind of web presence they currently have
• What they know about today’s business technologies
• How they handle time management and hands-on tasks
• Whether they’re ready for big tech changes in the future

Here are the top takeaways:

The post Survey Results: Technology Trends in Small Business 2021 appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

The research also reveals just how many tasks that SMB owners are handling on their own, rather than automating or outsourcing to colleagues or third party providers. These tasks include responding to customers and prospects, setting up appointments, reviewing and storing leads, sending and confirming payments and refunds and tracking business statistics.

Key Data Insights

Business owners are bogged down by daily tasks: Most (40%) of respondents reported spending between one to five hours weekly on tasks that can be automated, while 13% spend a staggering 20+ hours a week on these tasks. What would business owners rather be doing with this time?

• The general consensus is that they would put that time back into their business (62%).
• The percentage of respondents that would reinvest time saved into their business is higher among men (66%) and extroverts (67%)
• More women and introverts would use that time to spend with family.

Owners want to simplify their business through a single platform: Sixty-four percent of survey respondents said they use between two and five software tools to manage their marketing, sales and overall online presence, while only 32% use a single platform. An overwhelming majority (84%) said that they would switch to a single software platform if it was capable of performing all of the functionalities they needed. Despite this majority, the survey revealed some interesting outliers.

• Those making under $100K were the least likely amongst all respondents to dedicate time to finding a single platform for their needs, indicating that they are spending far too much time on daily tasks to dedicate their time to research elsewhere.

Based on these findings, Ontraport, which offers business owners a no-code automation platform to manage their business online, believes systemizing and scaling through automation is the answer for faster growth and fewer headaches for SMB owners.

“With the right technology, business owners can earn back valuable time to focus on the bigger picture,” said Landon Ray, founder and CEO at Ontraport. “Automation does the job of multiple employees, handling tasks that entrepreneurs typically take on themselves. The burden of day-to-day tasks should not fall on their plates when their time and energy is better served elsewhere.”

Ontraport’s solutions remove the burden of daily tasks and technology by providing everything an owner needs to run their business in an easy-to-use and centralized platform. With Ontraport, a business owner can manage their sales and customer relationships, marketing automation, website pages and forms, payments and more without having to leave a single interface.

“The power of automation is in providing the freedom for small business owners to step away from working as employees inside their businesses and into the role of CEO,” Ray said. “With the right technology, business owners can save as much as twenty hours a week handling sales and marketing tasks all from a single platform. The right software solves these frustrations and limitations resulting in more growth with less work.”

Methodology
The national survey of more than 500 small and medium-sized business owners, ages 18 and over, was conducted in June 2021 by Propeller Insights on behalf of Ontraport.

To learn more about Ontraport and how it can help SMB owners better manage their business, please visit www.ontraport.com.

The post Half of Entrepreneurs Believe They Cannot Step Away from Their Business for Even a Week appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Of course, Ontraport has a lot of tools built in, so it would be reasonable to imagine that this thing is simply a bigger tool kit. Perhaps you think, “Hey, I know I need a hammer and a saw and a drill. I could go get those separately but Ontraport is a tool box with the hammer, saw and drill all-in-one, and that’s convenient because I don’t have three bills to pay, and I don’t have three logins, and I have one support team to talk to … so that is why Ontraport is a good idea.” 

That is not why Ontraport is a good idea. 

Yes, it’s convenient to have a bunch of tools in one kit but what’s important and unique about this platform is the data.

What’s important about the data? Let’s think about this in two parts. Part one is “Why is data important in my business?” and part two is “Why is Ontraport the best tool to manage and use data in my business?”

Part One: Why is data important in my business? 

First of all, what do we mean by “data”? Specifically, I mean information about each individual customer or prospect on your list. Interest data, demographic data, data about the history of your relationship, and so on.

Why is this important? If we want to grow our businesses, and particularly if we want to do that using the internet as a source of new leads and customers, it’s important to appreciate a couple of things. 

First, we need to create a system to get customers. The internet isn’t a place to go fishing for customers. You don’t toss a line in the water a few days a week and hope to hook something. Instead, the internet is a place to create systems that draw customers to your business in a measurable, repeatable and scalable way. 

Second, you have to appreciate that it is wildly competitive out there. You’re not just competing with everyone who sells what you sell. That is, if you’re a plumber, you’re not just competing with other plumbers on the internet. You’re competing with every other business in the world who is vying for the attention of your audience! And that’s a really competitive landscape. 

People have a limited amount of attention and all the marketers in the world are competing to try to grab the attention of your prospects. Someone’s selling them clothes, and someone’s selling a skateboard, and someone’s selling a course on how to succeed with potted houseplants. And if someone’s willing to pay more than you are to grab that attention, they’re going to be the one who gets that attention — and you’re not. 

It’s not just a matter of competing with our direct competitors. It’s a matter of competing with every other ad that’s getting placed in front of your audience. 

And if you’re going to compete in a landscape like that, you’re going to have to be good. This is prime time. It’s real work, and it’s not easy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you. 

So the question then is: How do I succeed at this challenge? What works? What do I need to do to effectively compete and get attention from my audience online? 

If we just think about that for a second, we find that the answer is obvious. People pay attention to what’s interesting to them. It’s that simple. What’s interesting to anyone — apart from grumpy cat photos of course —  is solutions to their problems. 

And if people are only interested in their problems, it’s your job as a marketer to get in front of them with a message that specifically, directly and precisely answers how and why you are the best solution for solving their exact problem right now. 

Saying, “Hey, I’m a good plumber if you need anything” no longer works. It may have worked 10 years ago because it wasn’t so competitive on the internet yet, but today that message doesn’t fly. It will fail every time, and you’ll be wasting your ad dollars trying to promote that message. 

What does work is to say, “If your toilet is overflowing right now, I am your best choice because I specialize in overflowing toilets and here’s why I’m better and here’s proof.” 

That ad cuts through. That’s the person I’m calling because when I have a problem like an overflowing toilet, I don’t care about trenchless pipe replacement or installation of new bathrooms or any of that stuff. The guy I want is the guy who’s an expert in my particular problem. 

Now, none of this is to say that you need to limit your business to only solving one problem. Most plumbers offer all sorts of services. The goal is to demonstrate why you’re the very best choice for bathroom remodels to the folks who want to remodel their bathroom and why you’re the very best for drain-cleaning jobs to the folks with clogged drains.

If you doubt that this strategy is as important as I’m claiming that it is, think of this: two of the three most valuable companies in the world, Amazon and Google, owe a very large part of their success to doing this exact thing better than anyone else. 

Google runs the world’s biggest ad network, and they’re successful specifically because they put the most relevant ad in front of each user better than anyone else. Why? Because that’s what works. Similarly, Amazon figures out what you want to buy — often before you even know it — and puts it right in front of you, better than anyone else. They do it because delivering the right message to the right person at the right time just works, and they are successful because they’re great at it.

Part Two: Why is Ontraport the best tool for the job?

In order to deliver the right messages to the right people, you’ll first need to figure out what each individual’s problem is. How is that done? Well, it’s done using data. 

There are several ways that we can find out what prospects’ problems are or what’s going to be interesting to them, and Ontraport built this particular set of tools — this drill and this saw and this hammer — specifically because they’re the tools you need to gather the data to understand what problems your individual prospects have. 

How do you figure out what problem your prospects have? You figure it out just the way Google does, by looking at:

• What ad they click on 
• What pages they view 
• Which ebook they download
• What they’ve purchased in the past 
• What their sales rep says they are interested in 
• What they tell you in a form, in a dropdown
• What links they click in an email 
• And so on…

Ontraport is the tool that is best designed to gather, and store, and segment and then use that data so you can deliver the kind of relevant, targeted, specific communications that cut through the clutter of marketing messages that everybody is inundated with today.

Gathering data about your prospects and customers

When you use Ontraport, there’s a lot of data that you can gather about your prospects and customers that is very challenging, if not impossible, to get when you use disparate tools to perform the same jobs in your business.

For example, Ontraport automatically tracks your contacts’ visit history, page by page, across all your websites. In order to gather that information, your web servers need to be able to identify specifically who your visitors are, and this can’t be done unless your web forms and email systems are tightly connected … which they are not if you’re using separate hosting, email systems and form builders. 

Ontraport also automatically tracks each contact’s click history, purchase history, ad click history, any forms they’ve ever filled out, anything your sales rep ever says about them and any messages they send you. All this data comes into Ontraport, and it’s stored in that system for you automatically so that you can use that data in the future to deliver more relevant experiences and communications to each individual customer.

Storing data about your prospects and customers

Ontraport is also a better tool for storing your data in a couple of important ways. 

First, it’s all in one place. If you have Mailchimp and Shopify and WordPress and Pipedrive, for example, you’re going to have different chunks of data in all those various tools. For those of you who have been through that situation, you know that’s just not workable, because you can’t realistically take data from six different tools and put it together in a way that allows you to turn around and use it.

Second, Ontraport is extremely configurable, and you can store your data in ways that make sense for how your business actually works but are impossible using other tools.

Of course, Ontraport allows you to create fields and sections and tabs to organize your data and, with the Permissions system, you can make sure everyone sees the data they should be able to see, and nothing more. 

While there are lots of CRM tools that allow you to create custom fields and dump a bunch of data in there, one of the things that sets Ontraport apart from all of those tools is Custom Objects. This functionality gives you the ability to create different types of data and relate them together in a way that reflects how your business actually works. 

For example, most CRM systems will have three different types of data that you can store. They’ll have contacts, deals and companies. That’s very typical for a CRM system and it’s what you’ll find in Salesforce or just about any CRM system out there.

But if you have any other type of data, it’s basically impossible to store that data in a way that makes any kind of sense unless you’re using an enterprise-grade tool. 

The reason every enterprise system allows you to do this is because it’s crucial to be able to organize your data in a way that makes it useful. The reason no other small business CRM platform enables you to do this is because it’s hard to build and a little confusing to set up, and they don’t trust you to deal with it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Segmenting your prospects and customers

There are two main ways we segment our data using Ontraport. 

First, we have a very powerful tool called Groups which allows you to manually slice and dice your database in endless ways. This gives you the ability to see and communicate with a highly targeted group. For example, maybe you want to send a particular promotion to “everybody who has visited my website in the last 30 days but doesn’t own this product and has this particular problem.” If your data lives in several different tools, that project becomes overwhelmingly challenging to the point that you won’t do it. In Ontraport, it’s a piece of cake.

Of course, the second way to segment your data in Ontraport is to do it automatically using Campaigns.

Triggers, conditions and goals are all designed to allow you to segment your list as they move through an automated process so that you can target them with communication that is directly relevant to their problems or their stage in your customer lifecycle.

So, we’ve now figured out that Ontraport is the best tool for gathering the data, for storing the data, for segmenting the data; the last thing we need is to be able to use your data to create more relevant and targeted communications. 

Using your data to create relevant communications

It turns out that Ontraport was designed to leverage the data you have better than any other toolset you could use. Why? Because you’ve got email, SMS and a task management system for your sales team built in. You’ve got the landing pages built in which allow you to take the data in your records and deliver conditional, targeted content to each individual contact. You’ve got membership functionality built in so you can show each contact just what is relevant to them. These tools are all designed specifically to take the data you’ve got and use it to create and deliver more targeted, more relevant communication.

That is why Ontraport was designed and built the way it was. That’s why we have these tools instead of other tools, and that’s how you should be thinking about leveraging this platform. I know that a lot of our customers are using Ontraport as a glorified email system, or they’re using Ontraport as just a CRM system, or they’re using Ontraport as simply a replacement for three or four tools that you would otherwise buy separately. And don’t get me wrong, we love every client just as you are. But if you’re thinking about Ontraport in these ways, you’re missing the biggest opportunity that using a system like this provides to your business. 

I can imagine you might be thinking, “Ok yeah, Landon, I’m picking up what you’re putting down, but how do I actually get this job done? I don’t have the data that I need. What data do I need? How do I actually organize my business to make this happen?”

I get it. You’ll need to learn about segmentation, specifically what data you should gather, how to get that data, and how to effectively segment your contacts and prospects into usable groups. It will help to understand how to use those groups to deliver more relevant, more effective communications.

Ultimately, that is the goal, because one-size-fits-all messaging does not work anymore. If you’re struggling with marketing, this is the path for you: to break your audience apart into segments and to communicate with them about specifically what they’re interested in. This is what works today.

Fortunately, you have the perfect toolset to make that happen.

The post Why we designed and built Ontraport appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Your new default Dashboard page — Trends — uses line graphs to show you changes in your key business metrics over time.

Just click Dashboard from your navigation bar to check it out! Of course, you still have access to your Metrics page — just click Metrics on the left.

You have charts for:

• Contacts: Track your leads’ and customers’ actions from their very first click.
• Emails: Analyze email engagement, deliverability and campaign performance.
• SMS: Monitor your SMS campaigns and spot deliverability issues.
• Page Visits: See who’s visiting your pages and how each page is performing.
• Sales: Keep an eye on sales and refunds over time.
• Monthly Recurring Revenue: See how much you’re bringing in, and get a sense of what to expect over time.
• Payment Plans: Forecast future revenue, and keep up with customer billing.
• Tasks: Track your team’s productivity so you can better manage future projects.
• Campaigns: Monitor your campaigns to see what’s working and what isn’t.
• Calendar: Track past and future appointments to better manage your team’s schedule.
• Custom Objects: See data related to any custom object you create.

Note, charts that include sales data are not available for Basic accounts.

You can get as specific as you want by filtering any of the charts on your page. You can also customize which charts you want to see and the order you want to see them in!

Learn more here.

The post Feature update! Trends Dashboard Page appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.