Andy Fletcher - Landing Page Specialist

 

 

 

[00:00:04.720] - Martyn Brown

Welcome to the Vinyl Impressions Radio Show's syndication Podcast, where we bring you the groove and essence of radio all wrapped up in the timeless charm of Vinyl Records. I'm your host, Martin Brown, and on this show, we delve into the world of radio, exploring captivating interviews with station owners, talented presenters, and visionary entrepreneurs. Join me as we uncover the secrets of successful radio promotion and discover innovative ways to elevate your online presence. Whether you're a station owner, a show presenter, or a DJ, our guests offer valuable insights and strategies to help you flourish in the digital age. To get in touch with the podcast or share your thoughts, drop us an email at podcast@vinylimpressions. Club. For more updates and exciting content, visit our main website at vinylimpressions. Club and connect with us on our Facebook page, Vinyl Impressions Radio. Today, we're chatting with someone who I guess you could call a disruptor, as together with his business partner, he's become one of the major players in the field of lead and listener generation and funnel pages. In fact, you may have heard of Andy's company already because it's rather well respected in its field. It's called Convertry, and it's well worth checking out if you plan on having your own online radio station or you present a radio show to promote or any business, really.

 

[00:01:42.580] - Martyn Brown

In fact, I launched my very own vinyl impressions radio show syndication site on his landing page creator for my website. And he founded Convertry because he thought landing page platforms could do better things. Well, he invented the pixel perfect layout for a start. I think this is going to be a fascinating conversation. Andy Fletcher, welcome.

 

[00:02:06.900] - Andy Fletcher

Hey, thank you so much for having.

 

[00:02:08.230] - Martyn Brown

Me today. It's great to have you here. I think we should start in the time on a tradition, though, of going back a little while and finding out more about you and what got you involved in the.

 

[00:02:20.120] - Andy Fletcher

Online world. Yeah, sure. My background is all technology. I have a computer science degree for my since and after university I worked in a couple of tech jobs. And at one of them, I worked at this absolutely terrible startup where we did all manner of things that never worked. We burnt through a lot of venture capital while I worked there. I'd like to add that that wasn't... I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry for that. I'm totally totally totally totally at fault. And one of the things we did was celebrity websites. So my stupidest claim to fame is that I worked on the official website for Anton Dec, which also dates me rather a lot, too. So while I was there, I was like some of the other people were aware that there was going to be like somebody was needed for SEO. And a mate of mine there bought an SEO book because he knew I would read anything put on my desk. He bought it at lunchtime. He left it on my desk, knowing that I would pick it up when the senior managers were coming around looking for somebody to be the... Can I swear on your show?

 

[00:03:24.280] - Martyn Brown

Of course.

 

[00:03:25.020] - Andy Fletcher

Go right in. It was put partly referred to as the SEO bitch. And they were coming around looking to see who to make the SEO bitch. And sure enough, I was sat there reading this book on SEO. And the guy was like, oh, Andy, you know all about this? Fantastic. You get this new job. And I was like, wait, what? So that was the big set up. That's how I got started with online digital marketing, got into the idea of it. And at that point, learned some SEO skills, learned how to rank websites, learned about on page, all the typical stuff, but getting stuff ranked in Google. And then when that start up went belly up and they decided that paying us was optional, I went into business for myself doing SEO for clients and then making SEO products.

 

[00:04:08.910] - Martyn Brown

Great. So in terms of online, it's been one of those things, I guess. It's in your blood in many ways, right?

 

[00:04:15.400] - Andy Fletcher

Yeah, definitely. I'm definitely a child of the Internet. I grew up with it. I had my first computer when I was about 15, I think, and an Internet connexion at 16, which I still am I was then just the biggest nerd in the world. I can still remember my parents going away when I was 16 years old for the weekend. And I was super excited. Where all my contemporaries were super excited to get rid of their parents and have parties. I was super excited because it gave me unfettered access to the computer for 48 hours so I could learn HTML.

 

[00:04:49.870] - Martyn Brown

And then fast forward, you started Convertory, which was really established itself as one of the major players in how would you describe that? I used it initially for a landing pages, funnel building.

 

[00:05:02.990] - Andy Fletcher

Yeah, definitely both, I would say. We have a lot of people that use us specifically for landing pages and then plug in other best in class tools. And then there's a lot of people who use us as like a full stack funnel builder.

 

[00:05:15.290] - Martyn Brown

Right. So for anybody who's maybe not come across Convertry before, maybe you could just give us a bit of background as to, first of all, how it came about, but secondly, how it's evolved since it started. I know it's got radio presenters on it.

 

[00:05:30.810] - Andy Fletcher

Certainly. So Convertry is actually the punchline to a joke, a really bad joke from an Internet marketing conference in summer 2015, something like that. I was on a panel of digital marketers, like more tech-focused digital marketers answering questions about how software gets built and things like that. And my mate, Jay, who is sat at the back. And sorry, before I tell this story, I would like to point out that alcohol was involved in this event because, of course, it was.

 

[00:05:59.960] - Martyn Brown

All the best stories are out there.

 

[00:06:01.740] - Andy Fletcher

And it will make me sound like slightly less of a jerk when I tell you the punchline. So anyway, my mate, Jay, I'll stick his hand up and he's like, Andy, you're a developer. It's 2015. Why when I get my developer to... I say like, I want to move my logo to the other side of the page, I want to move the sign up button a bit to the right. Why does it take him so long? Why is it so expensive? Et cetera, et cetera. And at the time, my answer was, Jay, speaking as the developer that has to it for the people like you, off. And I got a laugh from the crowd, and it was funny. But that thought really nagged at me why at the time was it so hard to get pages live? There was all kinds of page builders that promised the Earth. But if you wanted to do anything that was slightly off piece, certainly if you wanted to take advantage of breakthroughs in page speed technology or anything like that, you just couldn't. It was really hard. You had to custom code stuff, you had to hire developers.

 

[00:07:02.500] - Andy Fletcher

And that was pretty wild given the number of page builders that were already on the market. So that's when we started putting together the first version. At the same time, my business partner, Neil, was reading all of the page speed reports coming out of Amazon and Google where they were talking about how you lose, at the time it was 40 % of your traffic. If your pages didn't load in three seconds, it's now up north of 50 %. And we realised we could combine these concepts of you put a thing on a page, you hit publish, and where you put it is where it appears. That's it. You don't have to understand responsive technology and rows and columns and all of this complicated stuff. It's a simple thing. If you can use Word, you can use Convertory to make a page. And then that page will load really, really, really fast. And that makes such a big difference to add spend to any landing page.

 

[00:07:52.650] - Martyn Brown

It's one of those things, isn't it? I guess once you've set up a website using something like WordPress, you know how much of a challenge it can be to actually set up a page. Enough of my audience have tried it for radio stations. So was that part of the thinking behind Convertery, as in we just want to make this super simple for the end user?

 

[00:08:14.950] - Andy Fletcher

Very much so. The goal was as simple as it can possibly be. We wrote it on, we made all of the developers working on it, print out the words just like Word and stick it up on the wall. Right. So every time we developed a new feature, they would often ask us, oh, how should this bit work? What's the decision? And I tap the sign every time. I want a 60 year old to pick this up, move some things around, start typing and be like, oh, it's just.

 

[00:08:43.910] - Martyn Brown

Like Word. And you have achieved that. I mean, if anybody who's not used ConvertV yet, it's definitely worth getting an account so you can see just how simple it is. What are the advantages, though, Andy, of not using WordPress? Because WordPress has become a bit of a default in terms of online websites, especially for radio presenters.

 

[00:09:05.660] - Andy Fletcher

Certainly. So WordPress still has its place. We still run our own blog on WordPress. It's definitely not a either or thing, but there's big chunks of the experience that WordPress makes really hard for people. With a tech background, I've worked on a tonne of WordPress sites, and it's always the same sticking points. Things like the security has been compromised, like some update, they forgot to run it, they haven't logged in in a little while, they come back and the site's been compromised. Things like, WordPress itself is simple-ish and it just works. And then any time you want to do something, it's like, oh, you need a plug in for that. And then this plug in isn't compatible with that plug in. And this plug in doesn't work with that theme you've got. And this theme has this other file that you have to connect to that plug. And it becomes this mess of tech when a marketer just doesn't care. It's not what they're interested in, and nor should it be. They want to focus on, How do I write a compelling message? How do I build a simple page that will generate me leads and make me sales?

 

[00:10:08.360] - Andy Fletcher

And what we've set out to do with Convertry is just push all of that into the background, let us worry about all of that technical stuff so marketers can focus on marketing. Got you.

 

[00:10:18.550] - Martyn Brown

And I guess in recent years, a lot of people now when they're visiting a site, they're doing more so on their mobile device than on a desktop device than ever. How is that affected Convertory and how you developed Convertory itself?

 

[00:10:37.660] - Andy Fletcher

Yeah, that's a really good question. So Convertory gives you a mobile specific mode, which to our knowledge, hardly any other builder out there does. Whereas most give you, it's a responsive design. So you design the desktop page and then it will produce the mobile mode based on that. But whatever it produces, that's it. You can't really influence it that much. With Convertory will still produce an automatic mobile mode for you, but then you have complete control. You can move things around, custom fit it, change all the scaling, change any part of it you want to really craft that mobile experience. And that makes such a huge difference to conversion rates, even simple things like being able to hide certain things on mobile, maybe shrink the headline font down, or just swap the ordering around by simply dragging things up and down the page, makes a really big difference to that mobile conversion experience.

 

[00:11:30.050] - Martyn Brown

And that's super important these days, I guess, because more and more people are using their mobile device for more things than ever. So I guess it makes sense that when you have, what you call it, a mobile-first approach?

 

[00:11:45.830] - Andy Fletcher

I wouldn't say that I'm a bit reticent on the whole mobile-first thing. I still encourage people to think about the desktop experience and then scale it down to mobile. The trying to design mobile first and then add things into the desktop, I find, causes people to leave out key elements they really wish they had on a mobile device. Makes sense. So generally, we encourage people. It's like build the desktop version, generate the automatic mode, and then think about what stuff you're taking out rather than building one thing and then adding things in and being like, Oh, yeah, my testimonials should really be on the mobile site as well.

 

[00:12:25.780] - Martyn Brown

Makes sense. When you have a site with Convertory, because it's not just about landing pages or the funnel that you build, it's also about the checkout process, I guess. People can buy merchandise from radio stations, et cetera. Convertory is really good at being able to have... Well, it's almost like an all-in-one solution. But if you don't want to use Convertories built in checkout, you can, I guess, attach others as well. Can you just talk a little bit about what you are finding now out in the real world and how people are paying online? Because before, I guess, it was so difficult to get out your credit card and enter all your details. But now with things like Apple Pay or Google Pay, mobile wallets, I guess, has that made it easier? Or are we still in the infancy of that?

 

[00:13:21.700] - Andy Fletcher

We're definitely still in the infancy of that. Our industry has a bit of a fetish with the latest, greatest technology. And while Apple Pay is big, all of these wallets are big business now. But compared to the number of people that don't have it, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, they have a credit card, they know how to type digits into a box. And I think a lot of people are very focused on these. How can I make it easier for the user by having these no typing your stuff in Apple Pay style stuff? But what they're doing there is optimising for the subset of people who are right at the cutting edge and they're going to make it work whatever your UI looks like. Whereas your average user doesn't understand that stuff, doesn't want to understand that stuff. They understand. They've got a card, they type the numbers into a box, and then they've bought your thing. And we find optimising for that side of it generally produces a better result than going, have you got an have you got an Apple wallet? How about one of these Google things? What about Amazon Pay?

 

[00:14:23.690] - Andy Fletcher

Have you got in? And your average user is like, No, no, I don't.

 

[00:14:27.280] - Martyn Brown

Give me the box. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I guess, though, in the future, that's going to become more and more relevant, isn't it? That most people will end up with some digital wallet. I mean, I guess the most well-known is PayPal, which isn't without its flaws. We know. But would you say there's a move towards the online wallets?

 

[00:14:51.190] - Andy Fletcher

Oh, definitely. They're coming. They're here in a fairly big way, and they're only going to get bigger. We've just noticed this theme of people obsessing over the cutting edge part and ignoring just the big bulk of users in the middle who don't really get it. Maybe they've got Apple Pay set up on the phone and they know how to waive it at a checkout rather than waving their card at it. But for online purchases, we're just not seeing a lot of that stuff yet.

 

[00:15:20.890] - Martyn Brown

Yeah, makes sense. Now, being in the advantageous position of the owner of a platform, I guess you get to see the various ways that people are using the software. So what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making online?

 

[00:15:36.960] - Andy Fletcher

Oh, there's a really good question. So I would say probably the biggest mistake is trying to be too clever and too fancy. So a really good example is everyone comes to our platform wanting things like fancy animations when study after study after study has shown they ruin your conversion rate. People don't... Animations appeal to the person that has to look at the site seven times a day for a year, whereas somebody just trying to get the information gets distracted by things moving around and fading in and dancing around the page and all of that. Your average user is very happy to start at the top. And maybe they'll skim read, maybe they'll read the whole thing, but they're very happy to just know that all they've got to do is pull that scroll bar down and get to the end. Yes. You'll notice a really big theme in a lot of what I've been talking about here, and that's like a focus on simplicity first. Everyone online is obsessed with the latest widget, the latest craze, the latest this, the latest that. And a great many people would sell a great many more products if they would just focus on the basics.

 

[00:16:47.710] - Martyn Brown

It's the old Kiss principle, isn't it? The keep it simple process.

 

[00:16:52.320] - Andy Fletcher

Absolutely that. There's so many parts to this that you just don't need. And some, like Wrangled guru who has said, oh, you must have this magic thing or you can't sell online. And this just doesn't make a difference a lot of the time.

 

[00:17:09.720] - Martyn Brown

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in terms of funnels and funnel creation, I know some people go, What is all this about? I know the idea of building a sales page, having a buy now button at the bottom, and that's it. Can you just maybe elaborate a little about what is a funnel and how Convertry can help people create these funnels?

 

[00:17:31.720] - Andy Fletcher

Yeah, of course. That's another great question. So we think about funnels in a couple of different ways. The first most important one is the idea of the positive and the negative action, which makes everything so much easier to test. So with a typical website, you'll find, and I imagine anyone listening has at some point logged into Google Analytics. You've maybe got a WordPress blog, you've installed the plugin that you put Google Analytics on it, you log into Google Analytics, analytics. You're like, how is my website doing? And then you log in to Google Analytics and Google Analytics is like, here is a load of random data. And you're like, no, no, no, how is it doing? And it's like, no, I can't help you with that. It'll tell you that a bunch of people clicked on this page, a bunch of people clicked on that page. But it's very hard to determine what people actually did and didn't do. Where did they drop off? What made them buy? What didn't make them buy? That's where a typical website falls down. With a funnel approach, we have each page has a specific action. So as talking about a sales page the way you just did, we have a product for sale.

 

[00:18:38.720] - Andy Fletcher

And ideally, we have no other links on the page other than the ability to buy the product. So everyone that comes to our page either buys the product or they don't. So when you look at your analytics, you don't have to look at it and go, okay, so three % of people bought it and seven % of people went to this other page and then one % of that, it's like on this page, five out of 100 people bought the product, and tomorrow we're going to try and make it six out of 100, which makes everything about it just so much easier to think about than the complexity you get from a typical website.

 

[00:19:14.030] - Martyn Brown

Makes sense. I guess my big question to you, Andy, on more of a personal note, are you a Cody yourself? Is that how you came up with the idea for Converterie?

 

[00:19:26.830] - Andy Fletcher

Yes. I think I mentioned I have a computer science degree. I'm a completely nerdy techy guy. I fell in love with digital marketing. I fell in love with the I love direct response marketing online. This idea that we can tell how our marketing is doing, we can runwe can run an ad on Facebook and then people come to our landing page, and then we know how much we spent for those clicks. And of those clicks, how many people made it to the page? Of the people that made it to the page, how many people opted in or how many people bought? Everything is just so much more measurable compared to, well, I stuck 5,000 flyers out there and I don't really know what happened because I can't tell which ones produce the callbacks, or I put up a load of billboards and I think my calls have gone up, but I don't really know how. I love that aspect of direct response online, which is where my tech skills got converted over into marketing skills.

 

[00:20:21.850] - Martyn Brown

Right. Okay. And in terms of your team now, obviously, Convertory is a major platform. I'm sure there's not just you, Andy. How big is the team?

 

[00:20:31.760] - Andy Fletcher

Yes. So contrary to some people's belief, we still get some people who email support and be like, Hi, Andy. And it's like I'm really flattered. I'm genuinely flattered that people think that I still write all the code and answer all the support things and do the webinar. I do everything. However, it's true. I don't. There's a team of 20 of us now. It's grown almost in spite of me at times. We've got an incredibly talented team that handle a lot of the day to day operations now.

 

[00:21:02.940] - Martyn Brown

And how do you keep the team motivated? I know radio stations get this. I guess this is the insatiable beast in many ways. It's never actually finished, so it must be quite difficult for you as CEO to carry out that motivation, coming up with the ideas to continually evolve the platform.

 

[00:21:24.390] - Andy Fletcher

Yeah. So we've never really struggled with a motivated team. We seem to be really good at recruiting just really driven people, people really excited to build the next feature or design the next feature or answer support questions or whatever it is. We've got really lucky in the staff that we've been able to hire. They do a fantastic job every day. And my job is to feed the pipeline, it's to talk about what's next. But I rarely have the issue where it's like, oh, I've got to motivate them today. They will show up really wanting to play wanting to add the next feature.

 

[00:22:02.290] - Martyn Brown

Nice. I mean, it sounds like a great team. Whereabouts are you based?

 

[00:22:05.570] - Andy Fletcher

So I'm in South London. I'm in Stratham Hill. Way, way back when I was first getting started online and seeing some success, I was like, me and my business partners, we were mimicking what we thought business was. And as we got money, we got an office in central London, and then we got some staff in the office in central London. And I'm sure I don't need to tell you that was really expensive.

 

[00:22:26.880] - Martyn Brown

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

[00:22:28.030] - Andy Fletcher

So now I work from home. I'm sat in my garden office right now. I live at home with my partner, Sarah, and my cat, Rufus. I'm sat in my garden office, and then the entire team is spread all over the world.

 

[00:22:39.990] - Martyn Brown

Great. Like most big companies these days, that's the way to do it. How important, though, for you, Andy, is the work-life balance?

 

[00:22:48.750] - Andy Fletcher

Not important at all. I'm a complete workaholic. I love it. This is my hobby. This is my passion. This is my job. This is what gets me up in the morning. This morning, I woke up at 1:00 AM with my brain buzzing with ideas, and I got up and I started writing them down because I was awake. I love doing this.

 

[00:23:08.620] - Martyn Brown

Well, that goes some way to show how important convertory is in your life, which is great. What is the benefit, though, of being based in the UK, would you say, rather than being based anywhere else in the world?

 

[00:23:21.060] - Andy Fletcher

Oh, there's a really good question. Certainly in terms of just core infrastructure, I think being based in the UK, this is going to be true of any first world nation, but the majority of the world's population didn't roll the lucky dice that I did to be born in a first world country. In terms of the UK over somewhere like America, though, or France, Germany, any first world nation, I'm honestly not sure it makes the greatest difference these days. We've all got really similar access to this global marketplace of talent and tools. And I often think it's like, I live in London because I live in London. I like it here. But I could do this job from a beach in Thailand or Frankfurt or New York or anywhere. I don't think it would make the greatest difference.

 

[00:24:13.180] - Martyn Brown

Yeah. Just don't tell, Sarah, that I think it's some good ideas. Anybody who's thinking of starting out making their first steps online, do you have any tips for anybody who's thinking about starting or growing an online business?

 

[00:24:29.270] - Andy Fletcher

Yeah. Get over the fear and do it. Just embrace the fact you're going to suck horribly and just get started. It took me so long to do the first few things, and I sucked. And I didn't want to suck. That was awful. I hated it, so I put off so many things. And when I finally got over my own ego and accepted that it was just better to do a bunch of imperfect stuff and learn some lessons, that's when things really started working for me. But that gap between wanting to do the thing and doing the thing because everyone's afraid, right? You don't want to have that feeling of just how bad you suck at it. But that's going to be true for the rest of forever. So you may as well embrace whatever the next thing is. I still suck at so many things in my job to this day, but my brainwiring is different now. And it's just like, cool, let's get up. Let's learn how to do it. Let's figure it out. Let's try a thing. And I wish I got to that a bit quicker.

 

[00:25:31.880] - Martyn Brown

I normally ask in these interviews, are there any tools or resources that you can recommend? So what do you think, Andy?

 

[00:25:39.500] - Andy Fletcher

Oh, I don't know. I mean, I've heard there's this really terrible Funnel builder that everyone should have... No. So obviously, I think people should come and check out Convertry. We've got a 14 day free trial. It's completely risk free. Like come and give it a go. I think it'd be really useful. I feel like I should mention some other things, though. So I'm currently obsessed with Alex Hormosie's $100 million offers book like most of the Internet is and his new book, $100 million leads, which is coming out next month, I imagine will be just as good as the first one. The dude is amazing. So for anyone listening that has somehow not heard of Alex or Mosey, you should definitely check out his YouTube and his podcast.

 

[00:26:20.720] - Martyn Brown

Great.

 

[00:26:21.600] - Andy Fletcher

I have learnt unbelievably much from that guy.

 

[00:26:24.780] - Martyn Brown

That's amazing. I mean, that's a great resource as well to share. How do we find the 14 day free trial that you mentioned?

 

[00:26:32.980] - Andy Fletcher

So www. Convertory. Com, and then just click the Sign Up button and it's readily available there. It'll give you a choice between whether you want to pay monthly or annual, but either way, you get to try it for 14 days before we build your card.

 

[00:26:47.600] - Martyn Brown

Great. And what's next for you, Andy? Is there something else you're working on?

 

[00:26:53.190] - Andy Fletcher

Yeah. So what's next is probably our Editor 2.0 project. Well, like Convertoryuser, editor, is it's been cutting edge the whole time. It's the core focus of our product. We see really big opportunities to take it to the next level still. So we're starting work on it at the moment. We're hopeful to have something out later this year. Certainly a bunch of beta tests and proof of concepts for how we take a lot of the core technology we already have and really level it up and push what's possible.

 

[00:27:28.270] - Martyn Brown

Excellent. Well, all the with that, Andy, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute education. Thank you so much for spending your time with me and my fellow radio station owners, presenters. We really appreciate it.

 

[00:27:45.870] - Andy Fletcher

No, thank you very much for having me. It's been.

 

[00:27:48.790] - Martyn Brown

Amazing to be here. Thank you for listening. For more details of any of our podcasts, please visit vinylimpressions.Club.