Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Launch and Scale podcast. This is episode four, and I’m Khierstyn Ross. In today’s episode, we are going to be taking a look at what is my recommended software stack to use when building up an engaged audience for your product online. And this question was inspired by really Fernando Perez. He emailed in asking how we can incorporate click funnels into our overall plan? So I’m going to spend the next few minutes of this episode really diving in to help you simplify that process because I know that when you’re getting started online there could be some confusion as to which software solution do you actually need and what is it for. So, when you are building up a targeted audience of people to reach out to when building up that audience in anticipation for your product launch or even a new business that you have, you can have contacts in different areas. You may have friends and colleagues on LinkedIn that have messaged you to say, “Yes, I really want to help support you.” You may have people at work, you may have people from an existing customer base or email list that all say yes, “I’d love to be kept in contact and let me know when you’re launching.” And the problem with that is if you look at managing communication between multiple platforms, you may get overwhelmed because some people are your friends and you may think that they need different information on the product then a new email subscriber, and how really do you compartmentalize that data? So the answer is that you want to have one central spot online where people go to sign up for information to get updates on your product launch. So that’s the very first thing is any communication you have, don’t complicate it. You want to have one universal spot where everyone goes to not only learn more about your product but be notified when you’re live. So you want to have one spot online. This is a landing page. So a landing page is going to be a one-page website with a little bit of product information on your product, of course, and information on when you’re launching, and you want to have this website on a domain that is relevant to the product you’re launching. So it could either be yourproductname.com it could be yourpersonaldomain.com if you don’t currently own something that’s having to do with your product, but have one central spot online where people go to subscribe and join your mailing list, so that’s one thing. One kind of software we need to look at is what to do to build a landing page? That’s phase one is landing page software. And the second one is when people actually go to this landing page online and they like your product information and they want to join your mailing list to stay up to date with your launch updates and get notified when you’re live then you need to have a spot to actually organize and manage those email addresses. The thing is that when you are managing multiple hundreds of people that want to stay in contact with you, think of how crazy that’s going to be to try to manage all that communication in Gmail. It’s going to get lost and it’s just going to be a bit of a nightmare. So you want to have, the second kind of software you want is an email CRM system where when someone inputs their email address on the landing page, that that landing page software will push that email onto a list in a software that will keep that nice and organized. And so that’s where we get into an email CRM system as well. And then when you actually go to email your full mailing list, you can do that from one spot where you can automate emails and do a bunch of cool stuff. So those are the two kinds of software I want to look at is what is the recommended landing page software we need so that you can go in, don’t worry, you don’t need technical coding skills to do this. There’re a lot of really simple, straightforward solutions that give you landing page templates you can use. So the first one is what is my recommended landing page software? I have a couple, depending on your budget. Personally, I am a massive fan of ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is a software that is $97 per month and I am an affiliate of ClickFunnels, but I’m a mega fan of Russell Brunson and the work that he does. I love ClickFunnels because they have really awesome templates and their builder is so easy so I can customize anything that I want to. And I found that when I was trying other landing page software’s a couple of years back that I got really frustrated by how clunky the system was and how not easy other software’s were to use. And so when I moved over to ClickFunnels, it’s just, it’s stupidly easy, which is awesome. So I love ClickFunnels because it’s super customizable and you get really good analytics to tell you really how your landing page is performing in terms of how many people come to the page actually subscribe. And so that was excellent for me. That’s more of the higher priced option. If you are on a budget or you don’t want to spend $97 a month, other popular solutions, you could look at our Wix or Squarespace. They also have great builders, not necessarily as customizable as ClickFunnels. However, those are two lower priced software’s that end up being around the range of 20 to $40 per month. That’s my first recommended software stack. And so Fernando, if you’re, of course, you’re listening to this, but you’re wondering how to incorporate ClickFunnels into your overall plan, it’s going to be to create that one spot online where people can go to learn more information about what you are working on. That’s one thing. The second kind of software that we talked about is once people actually subscribe to your landing page, where does that information go? So the recommended software that I use is ActiveCampaign. Another popular solution is MailChimp and they start at, if you’re just getting started with email marketing, they start around $9 per month and then they will increase in price based on the number of contacts you have. So that’s more of a solution that you grow into. So those are the recommended software’s I use and that’s really how the funnel works online. Where I find people get really stuck is when you do some research, you may look online and say, “Okay, well I need a website and a landing page and they’re all these things happening and I don’t really know. Maybe I need multiple landing pages for the different kinds of people I talk to. Maybe all these things.” So just when you’re setting yourself online with your landing page, just keep it simple. You don’t need multiple URLs, you don’t need multiple landing pages, you don’t need all this fancy software. Just keep it really simple with what you need. Send everyone to one spot and that’s going to help make your life a lot easier and make sure that you are keeping the same conversation with everyone so that you don’t have all these different communications. So the other thing, I guess one common question I get, is what if you are coming into this episode and you say, “Okay, well I already have a website,” what do you do in that case? So again, you have two options. If you’ve already built out a full website, then I recommend if you are planning on doing paid ads or sending people to a page, then I would still build a separate landing page specific to that product. Because if you already have a website where you’re selling three to four different products, if you send traffic to the website where it’s not specifically talking about your product, you’re actually going to lose a lot of people because they may not know where on your website to go to find out more product information about the new launch. Right? So you want to have again, one central spot and if you have a landing page, what we did with Foundr is we did something, I don’t remember the exact URL, but it was something like foundrmag.com/kickstarter so even though foundrmag.com was a full digital publication and it was their main business, Nathan didn’t want to muddle the message on that by advertising the whole Kickstarter project all over his main page. So we had a designated spot, a designated landing page that again, you can use Squarespace, Wix, or ClickFunnels to set up, and then you would just set up a subdomain or a separate page on your website where you direct all traffic to. Again, just keep the conversation simple. So that’s another easy way that you can really just navigate and set yourself up online so that you don’t have literally a hundred different things going on. Keep it simple. One landing page. I love ClickFunnels, but again, if you don’t want to use that Squarespace or Wix is good. If you do want to test out the different software’s, see which one works for you. I highly recommend that. I have links to all three software’s that you can access by going to Khierstyn.com/lso4. So in the show notes, so you can go down to recommended resources and there will be links to the software’s that we talked about in here. And apart from that, my name is really impossible to spell, so it’s K-H-I-E-R-S-T-Y-N. So again the link for that is Khierstyn.com/lso4 and apart from that, if you are working on building up your E-commerce brand or are looking to launch a product in the near future, let’s talk, you can schedule a strategy consult with myself and my team by going to kiersten.com/schedule again, that’s K-H-I-E-R-S-T-Y-N.com you’re listening today, guys. We will see you next time.
