229 – Creating Custom Sales Funnels For WooCommerce with LaunchFlows

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community.
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Hello there and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once again, this is episode number 229. Entitled creating custom sales funnels for WooCommerce with launch flows. It was published on Thursday, the 13th of May, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a couple of short bits of housekeeping before we begin. If you haven't checked out the page builder summit, you've got just one day left.
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This is episode number 229. And I'm joined today by Spencer foreman from launch flows. Now this is going to be right up your street. If you are a woo commerce user. And you've been curious about whether or not it's possible to modify the way that will commerce handles things. Yeah. The idea of this plugin is that it enables you to do things like instant registration for onboarding new users or prospects.
You can create all the bumps variable products in one page checkouts, you can do upsells and down sells donations and instant payments. Custom. Thank you as a next step payments. In other words, it completely modifies the process of setting up how your checkout process works in WooCommerce. And I'm sure we could all agree.
There are benefits to doing exactly that. So it's a really interesting podcast, especially for those of you who are using WooCommerce and would like to adapt and modify the checkout experience. Just before we start the podcast, I would like to say that Spencer has given WP Builds listeners a really generous 25% recurring discount on unlimited site memberships.
What you'll need to do is go to launch flows. Dot com and enter the coupon code WP Builds, which is all lowercase. And you'll be able to get yourself 25% off, as I say, it's a recurring discount. So it should last for the lifetime of your account. Also, he's decided that he's going to give a one that lucky person, a year's on limited use subscription, and Oh, you get to decide who that is.
So I'm going to do it in this way. If anybody's listening to this podcast, write me an email. At [email protected]. Explain why you would like to have the unlimited one-year subscription. So launch flows. And if I like the look of your email, then I will reach out to Spencer and hook you up. I hope that you enjoy the show.
Hello there. Welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once again, you have made it to the content of the podcast and this week, it is an interview episode. We have these every couple of weeks, one week it's me and David Walmsley chatting in a sort of debate format. And then the other week, it is me talking to somebody and I'm talking to somebody today.
I am joined by Spencer foreman. Hello. Hey, good morning. A yeah, we just had a chat about that before we started. It's a, it's the late afternoon here, but Spencer is in. I'm going to say Chicago. Indeed. Okay. And he's joined us today to talk about his WordPress product might as well get the URL right out of the way I find that's the best way to do these podcast episodes.
Spencer's just say the URL and then somebody can listen to it whilst there. Deciding what your website offers them. It's called launch flows.com. There are no surprises. It's exactly, as it imagined, launch flows.com. And although it's a bit of a banal question I'm going to ask, what is launch
Spencer Forman: [00:06:32] launch flows basically makes WooCommerce do the things.
You always hoped it would do. And in layman's terms, that means it allows you to have sales, functional sales funnel functionality. Whereas I'd like to say WooCommerce out of the box is a bit more like a home Depot.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:48] Yeah. Yeah, that's a nice way of describing it. So when you say sales funnels, let's drill down into that.
What are the bits and pieces that you believe are missing from a typical WooCommerce store? So anybody can set up with commerce, you click a few buttons in the WordPress backend, and you're basically done. You've got a shop, but it is let's say it's not optimal in certain situations.
What is it specifically point by point that you have decided is lacking and what do you provide as a solution?
Spencer Forman: [00:07:16] Terrific. Yeah, the. The first thing I'd like to say is that the developers of WooCommerce have done a really amazing job because on a daily basis with consulting, I find that I have to recommend various plugins.
And if you were going to get married to just one plugin in the entire WooCommerce, sorry, in the entire WordPress ecosystem, WooCommerce would be the plugin. And the reason for it is that they've compiled into the plugin features and functions that are really essential to any modern business. Even if you're not selling something, but just offering something for free, it allows you, for example, to have the login and registration and the, my account area and a bunch of other functionality with regard to custom profile fields that you would otherwise have to either use other plugins to achieve.
Or you'd have to code in yourself or use a custom theme. So onto the box, WooCommerce is an amazing product and it's also backed by an incredible team. Mike jolly the lead developer and a team of literally hundreds and thousands of people working on it, however, by their own admission. And I've heard this before from other folks on your show.
Woo. Commerce has to please all people, it currently has more than 23% of the e-commerce marketplace and millions of shops. So they're running a very fine line between adding the new features or the features people need versus not breaking the functionality that's already there or ruining people's initial expectation.
And to my earlier point, the main problem with WooCommerce is that. As primarily a marketer and a person who delivers marketing solutions with automation and so forth. I find that in today's world, no one has the time or the inclination to be treated as a stranger who is wandering the aisles of some shop, right in the UK.
You don't want to be the person who's wandering around marks and Spencers or Sainsbury's or something, or in the United States wandering around a target store or a Macy's. You want somebody to greet you at the door and say, Hey Spence or, Hey Nathan, I know exactly why you're here. I know everything about you.
Here's the thing you were gonna look for delivered to you in a bow, right? When you drive up to the store and especially with what's happened with COVID. If you don't provide that experience of understanding what the customer needs and giving it to them and then offering them the various other things in your sales, a ladder or a sales funnel, then you're missing a tremendous opportunity because everyone else is doing that.
And people will gravitate to the thing that is the easiest, the lowest friction and the most satisfying, but really more importantly, that sort of strokes their ego in a way that lets them know, them and care about them. And so those are the things that we really fell in the pieces with launch flows.
It was a product that came about from my experience, working with one of the other. Early adopters in the commerce plugin space for sales funnels, where they built a product, but they did it in a way that I felt was too heavy handed. And since I've already been working with plugins, we've authored or other plugin authors, I decided to do it in a more direct and lighter way while staying focused on the two things that really people need, which is a sales funnel experience.
And also being able to modify the look and feel of the checkout in a way that matches with their sensibilities. Some people come from ClickFunnels, some people come from a Shopify or a, an outside Kartra Kajabi, but many people just want it to work with their current theme. So for example, if you're in a buddy boss environment, or you have a particular work, WooCommerce or WordPress theme, you don't want to have to fight to actually make the checkout page, have only the pieces you want to show.
But at the same time using a page builder, it's nice to be able to just literally make a custom layout with only the components having no coding experience required. That was a long answer, but essentially we give you the sales funnel capabilities without really modifying WooCommerce's core behavior.
But we also give you drag and drop design capabilities that out of the box, make it easy to emulate where you came from, like a third-party service or to give you the look and feel of a custom checkout. Somebody else has demonstrated is working. But do it with out any design skills or coding skills.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:24] Got it.
Okay. I mean like WordPress itself, isn't it. It's WordPress is catering for the masses. It can't try to do everything for everybody. If it tried to do that, it would fail for most of the people. And I guess the same is true for WooCommerce. As you said, it brings a whole raft of. Incredibly useful features out of the box, but it's not configured to be optimal for everybody.
And as you described, you've got this kind of experience, which you want to, which you want to deliver for your customers, but. Here's the bit where I'm struggling to understand if we, if you make the analogy that it's a bit like arriving at a shop and somebody greets you at the door and they say, Hey Nathan, Hey Spencer, I've got this thing and I've got it in a box for you.
I'm pretty sure that you want to take it away. Let me just reveal slightly what it is. Okay. Great. How do we, how are we doing that? What does it actually look like? Cause obviously we're familiar, we know that shops can try to emulate on online what they are like, but they're not the same animal.
We can't actually be greeted at the door and so on. So what is it that you're doing? How are you getting data to provide an insight into what people might like? How does that actually look on the screen? Where are the pixels going? And so on?
Spencer Forman: [00:12:33] Yeah. And that's a great question. And I'll try to summarize it briefly enough so that we can fill in the details.
The first thing is I think the key concept is people need to understand what marketing automation is. So whether you do marketing automation through some of the plugins that work directly with WooCommerce, or you use a, another plugin that I'm involved with WP fusion, that allows your WordPress site to connect directly to your favorite CRM.
The point is, imagine a giant machine. Which is your factory, that's your sales funnel. And you're going to pull up a pour a bunch of ping pong balls into it. If you take that group of ping pong balls and you divide them up between those that you've never met before, and those that you have some sense of who they are because of things they've done in the public space, you can say the cold leads and the cold prospects are the ones you don't know.
And for those, you may just want to have a little bit of a relationship with them before you pour them into your machine. Maybe you want to have an email or send them to a free webinar or just put them on a traditional email list. But for those that have initiated some kind of, Hey, I'd like to know more or Hey, I'd like to click through and go to your actual website.
Those are the ones we let into the machine. Now, the neat thing about e-commerce is it provides all the tools in its raw form for us to register and automatically log somebody in. And we theoretically with the raw WooCommerce could sell them quote, unquote, a free. Or a paid product that delivers something of value and in the process that allows them to self identify immediately where they came from more info about themselves, what they really want to see in the future and so forth, because we're allowing them to see things on the screen first that attracted them.
Then what they decided to say yes or no to, and all along the way we're tracking them, giving them tags that let us build a dossier if you will, of themselves. But we can also ask them personal questions. What's your favorite color? Where are you from is, do you prefer chocolate or vanilla?
And by recording that with their profile, because they're logged in and then having their profile details available to us locally and in a CRM. We can now respond by pulling out from our own data, which products which offers, which services, which events and so forth would be more attractive to somebody based upon an assumption of past clients and so forth.
Then not, and in the process, it's really the same as a relationship in real life. If you were looking to date. You would look at some pretty pictures and you'd pick this person or that person and say, Hey, I'd like to get together for coffee. I remember in the old days, coffee in public. Maybe once again, so you don't expect to say, Hey, I'd love to marry you the first time you see them first, you go for coffee and spend 15 minutes.
And if they give you the sense they want more, you say, Hey, I'd love to have lunch or something more. And if they agree, you move to the next step. That's the metaphor between cold leads and people that you admit into your site on a free product. Now out of the box. Will commerce has behavior is more like the home Depot.
It is, you walk into the door and there are thousands and thousands of potential choices, all on shelves. And you're hoping to find that little guy in the orange vest to lead you around to the place you got to go. But most people don't actually even know when they get there, what they're looking for.
And so the difference is that there will be some shops. That need that shopping experience. We have clients that have tens of thousands of skews of plumbing products, or screws or nuts and bolts and so forth. But even for them, we can get them closer to delivering a personal experience by putting the person through a very short sales funnel process at the beginning to eliminate all possible things that would not be of interest.
And then either filter or faceted search out the things that are and in doing so we can then apply the other things that are personal, such as let's say, somebody came from a particular website. Maybe we want to auto apply a discount or maybe want to give a personalized message. The point is that launch flows allows woo commerce with your favorite page builder, to just simply tweak the products in a simple way to deliver that kind of personalization.
Without any technical skills, whereas will commerce out of the box sort of just gives you the here's a shop page with, 30 items per page unaided page, you click one item. It takes you to the single product page where it's the same. Then you have to click add to cart. Then you got to go to the cart page.
Then maybe if you're ready, you can go to the checkout page, but the checkout page looks the same for everything. And there's no upseller down sell or cross sell or order bumps or anything. With launch flows, you can meet somebody on a free offer, bring them in and learn the key things about them. First name, last name, email, favorite color.
Immediately give them a free product. But then because you see how far they've watched a video or what they've done, you can say, Hey, Nathan, here's an offer for you. Can, for $10 more, go ahead and get the full course. And if you choose, yes, it takes you down one path if no another. But when you decide to say yes, I want to buy.
It takes you immediately from clicking the button, to a custom checkout. That could be very streamlined and look exactly like you wanted to look from something else that you feel is popular. Maybe like a Shopify store in server. So we give you the ability with no technical skills to deliver the literal high Matchu.
Let's get to know you click here to buy to your right out the door and then to follow up from there with any other things you want. But yet we're still. Using just Stockwell commerce.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:11] Yeah. Going back, what appears to me like the first step in this process would be, onboarding and user registration.
Do you provide features within launch flows to, to ask additional information at the point where people are actually signing up? Can you use additional fields and so on? What's the scope of what you can get in addition to the normal WooCommerce stuff at that point?
Spencer Forman: [00:18:35] Absolutely. And it's a great question because one of the key design choices I made, as I mentioned as a consultant, both for the authors and the makers in WordPress, as well as for the end users, I'm blessed with the ability to see both sides of the table.
And my philosophy in WordPress is that it. Grew up as, and I was here since the beginning as a gigantic potluck dinner, but the downside of anybody being able to bring anything they want to that dinner is that you end up with 47 meatloaves and 22 tuna casseroles, and everybody is competing with overlap.
Whereas in today's 20, 21 and beyond, I believe it's important to just have one or two or three or four, maybe a half a dozen select plug-ins. The do specifically the thing you need them to do and not to take over the other jobs. So to your point, when it comes to onboarding out of the box, there are dozens of ways you could onboard somebody, but they always leave you with a little bit of, I got to do one more thing.
So I have to add another plugin. WooCommerce allows you to register and log somebody in for free. What we made launch flows do is usually two techniques. The one is the streamlined instant registration that is that we took the core capability and we tweaked it in a way so that instead of having it be a true checkout, that shows somebody, you just bought a product for $0 and here's your receipt for a $0 transaction.
And here's all the other junk on the page, including the junky checkout with all the standard fields. Instead, we made it possible in literally under one minute. You could literally create a free product, create a blank page, say this is my registration. And then immediately give somebody a beautiful, gorgeous, streamline, just register here with no problems and in doing so they don't get any receipts or order information about a registration, but they do get all the benefits of being immediately in your system and immediately into whatever page they want.
You want them to be directed? If you wanted to add additional custom fields, Instead of us building the functionality in there are over a dozen free or paid plugins, including the free one we love. It's called a WooCommerce checkout manager that allow you to take the three types of already made WooCommerce checkout fields.
There's billing fields, shipping fields, and additional fields. So what we do is we say for any virtual products, we're going to dedicate the billing fields to this purpose. And if it's your favor, like we saw yesterday with a client that you really must take their phone number. No problem. We just use the free plugin to say that when you display the billing fields, please show the phone field as well.
And so as a result, we've got a free lunch of being able with no cost, no complexity. To let somebody add any custom fields they wish and even create new fields. And those can be shown at the checkout of the instant registration, which by the way, doesn't look like a checkout. It looks like any other, give me your email and I'll give you the free thing, but it's amazing because the net result is one click of a button.
Register somebody logs them in, sends them all the transactional email receipts. You want them to get here's your login information, Nathan, if you want to get back in, but also can with launch flows, look like you want act like you want and take the person where you want, including into a lesson or a course or an upsell.
Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:48] that's really nice. I guess the next question that comes to mind is where do you, so you've managed to gather all of the details. Obviously you're trying to encourage people to come back as often as possible. Presumably at that point to upsell them, or I guess if maybe they've actually bought something with real money to down, sell them on things and upsell them on different things and so on, where do those bits and pieces surface.
In the website, are you all about the checkout or you can you deploy this in a, typical WooCommerce store where there's products with variations and all of that stuff?
Spencer Forman: [00:22:16] That's a great question. And this is a key differentiator because. The beauty of WordPress. And I say this with due respect because I represent or have been hired by many of the lead authors to give them advice.
And so we all have freedom to build the thing we think is suitable. And since I've had relationships and continue to have relationships with certain key plugin authors, I didn't want to build a plugin that hijacked the WooCommerce checkout process. And I think that's the biggest differentiator between what launch flows does and all the other competitors, including.
Some very nice products that you've had on your show. But when I listened to that show, I heard the words and we hijack the checkout. One of the other leading competitors in this space, the one that was enlisted my help for marketing and stuff did the same thing. They hijack the checkout.
Here's how launch flows is different with launch flows. There's only three things you need. For most cases, you need a product. You need a checkout page and you need an optional. Thank you. You can have any number of thank you, pages or custom checkout pages. And of course, any type of product, what launched flows does in a nutshell, is it the product level?
We provide some additional options so that a product has some additional DNA built into it. So when you go into the e-commerce traditional products set a page, there's just a tab now for launch flows. The let you tell that product how to behave. Where to be sold and what to do after it's added to the cart and in doing so, we eliminated all the hijacking of the normal WooCommerce checkout, which quite frankly, leads to an infinite amount of trouble.
Again, with due respect to all the other ideas of how to do this, I cringe when other plugins hijack the checkout because. There are so many amazing ad-ons for WooCommerce. And guess what? They're all expecting the hijacking not to be taking place. They're looking to show up at the airport and the plane is supposed to be there for WooCommerce, but when something else takes it away and moves it to a different URL or modifies its capability, a lot of bad things happen.
And so with launch flows, we make sure that nothing gets modified at the core of WooCommerce. It's a little bit more like a three-card Monte. So if you have a product and you want to sell it for a certain amount of money, you can dictate where's the custom checkout page. This should be going to, we give you what we call a direct checkout link.
That can be used anywhere on your site and a button or link, or it can be offsite in your advertisement. So you could send somebody directly from your Facebook ad or a YouTube video immediately into a checkout. We give you widgets that allow that product. To now do things it's not allowed to do and will commerce standard.
For example, what, if you want a one-page checkout experience, you can literally take any product variable, simple subscription and so forth. And have it show up on the checkout page with check boxes or radio buttons or a button to immediately add it or remove it. You can even take a one-page checkout with a product and make it that no matter what, just by going to that URL.
That product is always going to be in the cart no matter what. And it applies to things like discounts and order bumps. We give you widgets that don't have to only be on the checkout page. In fact, one of the most useful cases is let's say you had let's take through, you're going to onboard somebody for free to your demonstration course.
Or maybe a sample of, WP Builds podcast or something. What if in the middle of your learning management system, like LearnDash or lifter lesson three was actually a billboard to upsell people. Would you like for $10 to now get the full course or the full access to our library? Yes or no? Just drop a widget into lesson three, put the product ID number you're done.
Now. The cool thing is. None of the normal WooCommerce behavior is modified. So if you still have your good old fashion home Depot shop on the other side of the website, no problem. And then we do things that follow up. So for example, You can Daisy chain different things together. You can go from a page to a product, to an upsell, to a thank you to a post.
Thank you, offer to your, my account and so forth. But when you do this with the marketing automation capability, each one of the things somebody sees or views or clicks or buys gives more information to you, that's memorialized about their preferences. And so it allows you to have conditional. Options along the way.
Let's say you offered them product a at the beginning and they bought it and then they took product B and step two. If down the road you were going to try to upsell product B again, you looked silly, but with launch flows, it's possible to know that somebody already has that in their cart.
Or that they've already bought it. And in doing so you can then offer a sort of an alternative, like product C at the end, instead of the B again. And so it's just a really simple stacking Legos together method that you just check some boxes and choose some pages versus hijacking the checkout to a different process altogether, or to making all these extra flows and steps and having to set each one of them up individually.
We just prefer to reuse what's already there. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:19] The Lego analogy is really nice. The idea of stringing all these different things together. I guess the sky's the limit, you could make it as complicated as you like, or as simple and straightforward as you'd like, just to give us a, just to give us a real concrete understanding of how this works.
Give us a run through a nice automation, which either you or a client or somebody that you've come across as yeah. Dom, which was really effective that you can describe in just a few simple steps, from the start, right to the end. Yeah.
Spencer Forman: [00:27:46] Sure the most typical case, cause we're heavily involved in learning management and in today's world, most people offer their products or services online.
So let's say you have access to a library of videos that teach people something like photography. If we start at the very beginning, you first want to differentiate just between people who are strangers and people who you think are close enough to be interested in your free product, right? For those free product people.
You're going to use our instant registration, whether you jazz it up with extra fields or not. I do recommend the people ask as little. As possible first. So I want to have coffee with somebody who I want to maybe go out with, I'm not going to ask them for their social security number and their ID and their address.
It's Hey, what's your email, right? That's not going well. It's just human nature. Because once once you have their email, you own them to quote Russell Brunson. You can get back to them. So we get them in with instant registration because launch flows makes that simple and easy. You can use the out of the box design of your theme, or you can use something drag and drop with Elementor and so forth.
But the point is they immediately get taken where you want them to go, which in this case would be to the deliverable of the thing you promised. Like here's my free sample course now. In doing so they're registered, logged in, you automatically have sent them their credentials for getting in you've tagged them.
So you know that this is how they got in and that they're interested in this free course. Now I would then offer them at some point, either in the middle or at the end of that free course, the upsell and the upsell would be a sample or a time trial or the actual maybe discount on the full course. Hey, while you're here, Spence, why don't you get the full course for just $10 more click this button. We have either what I just described, which are your order bump, widgets that allow you to put something in any page that it would throw it to the cart. You can use our direct checkout link. So if you already had a fancy design or you're on Facebook, you just have a link that's useful anywhere, or you can use our upsell widget, which is a neat way of giving them a.
You know this or that choice, I guess I would love this or no, thanks. In which case you can, offer another thing or not. So if they took it, what we always want to do is ask for their credit card. Launch flows allows you using the security of whatever gateway Stripe is sorry, whatever gateway will commerce is using to store their credit card for one click, future use, we don't store it.
We don't change the protocol, but what we do is make it that let's say. Once they've logged in and tried the sample and they take the trip wire product, the $7, $10 upsell, you get their credit card or PayPal payment once from that point forward, they never have to fill that out again unless they want to change it.
So let's say they take the course, but I have a service that helps you with your learning, how to do what's in the course. Once they've started the course, I may actually offer them. A combination of a followup email as well as something in less than three. Hey, are you enjoying this course? By the way, I have a, a concierge service that goes along with this.
If you click here one click, you can immediately get that now. And we can be on a call in 20 minutes. And when they press the button with launch flows, they get a nice onscreen little, one moment it checks them out and then it gives them the deliverable to maybe my Calendly, where they can register for the call, or it will take them to some other thank you, page that's drag and drop custom to show what they got, but what are the next steps or how to proceed?
So the whole idea is I'm tracking their behavior. I'm memorializing it, but I'm customizing it. And I'm using the info that I've gathered to drag and drop simple deliver custom next step, going back to my original point. Compare that to home Depot. Hey, my toilet's broken. I got to go to home Depot to get the parts.
I don't even know what a toilet looks like inside. How am I going to fix it? Versus I drive to home Depot and the plumber guy is there waiting with the parts that I need to get started and offering to do all the things I need before I even have to think about it. Yeah. And that's,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:41] that's the difference.
That's really that I think you've explained that really well. Like I've got a really concrete understanding of how that works now and in the in the checkout. Yeah. You're doing a lot of stuff as well. We've got the option to upscale and downscale again, just for the purposes of clarifying on audio.
What does that look like? What would somebody see with a kind of out of the box launch flows? Checkout page.
Spencer Forman: [00:32:04] Watch for those to work with any of the standard editor page stuff. They don't like to call it Gutenberg, but Gutenberg or classic, it will work with Elementor divvy, Beaver builder, any of the other ones via short codes, but really we've also built in presently a deep integration with the widgets of Elementor, which by the way, Does not require elements or pro.
So yeah, there's been conversation lately about know elementary is amazing, but some people are put off maybe because the pricing, you only need the free Elementor, but the point would be whatever your fancy, you can use either the short codes with some parameters or maybe elementary free inside of a DV site or inside of a Beaver builder, just for those particular pages.
And it gives you a convenient way to use a widget. Or a short code where you can take the components that you already would have in a normal WooCommerce checkout, your billing fields, your shipping fields, your payment thing, your payment button, your order review, and it's supercharges them, but it also divides them up or slices them.
If you will. Like with an Exacto into independent pieces that you can either shuffle around in different spots, hide. Or restyle. So if you found a beautiful click funnels, checkout experience that you're like, I got to have that with normal WooCommerce. It isn't possible with some other, checkout products for WooCommerce, the plugins like you've had on the show, they offer you a Shopify design and that's it.
Whereas with launch flows, you literally can just drag and drop the pieces you want, where you want them style them to look like you saw and you're done, but then. Functionally, if you wanted to have on the page, an order bump, just drop the order, bump widget, and put the product ID on. Maybe put a nice little red dash line around it to NA, or if you want to do something that's really hard and WooCommerce, let's say you wanted to create a subscription product that had a choice between pay one time, pay every month, pay every six months or pay once a year.
Impossibly hard to do with WooCommerce. They don't allow you to put products on the normal checkout with launch flows. Piece of cake. It's just one variable product. You put all four of the variation IDs with little widgets, make them look like you want with radio buttons or sizes, drag and drop. And then you've got the ability for somebody on the actual checkout to choose which you know, which variation they want without having to leave the checkout page.
So we give you the capability of both the layout and design. But we also give you the mechanical functionality. And then also it was posed in another interview, but this is popular. Maybe you want a multi-step checkout. So as I described, it's ideal to get the person's email first and last name first, no matter what you do, it's really great to sell them the tripwire product to get their credit card on file.
So if you can move them through those two steps, launch flows makes it that all of the data that they add is either stored. Permanently to their profile or at least memorialized in a way that it stays chill through the entire process so that you can ease them through, bit by bit. Oh, what's your name?
Oh, Nathan. Sure. Oh, did you have a card handy? Oh, okay. We'll take that. Oh, here's a thing you might be interested. Would you like to sure. Oh, what about the next thing? And we can just. Ease them through the coffee to lunch, to dinner, to meet the folks. And then,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:20] it's nice. That's a really nice description.
I'm actually looking at a part of your homepage, which has probably about two thirds of the way down. Don't know if that'll still be the case at the time, but it's a nice description of. What you were just saying in terms of putting anything on the page, in this case with elemental, there's a kind of like a donation form where you've obviously put three examples of what you could pay.
Here's $25, here's $50 or $75. And it just shows, shows how straightforward that would be if you've used a page builder and put buttons next to each other, this is totally within your wheelhouse
Spencer Forman: [00:35:52] now. Yeah, indeed. In fact We have the key functionalities they're listed on the homepage.
There's only five of them because you don't need more. But in one of them, we found that one of our clients actually WP fusion is an amazing plugin gift WP. So there are companies and organizations that do charitable work that need heavy duty. Recording and memorializing and documentation of charitable donations, but there's still an equal number of people who are freelancers or who are small, startup charities.
I just want to be able to let somebody pay me any amount of money. Yeah. Like one of our clients is Carrie Kreiger over at save the frogs who does an amazing job. He knows that people will donate hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they just have different flavors of what they want to do. So to be able to just let somebody have a simple $0 product.
Like I just described to set up and then have a widget where you just put it on the page, even with elements are free and immediately somebody can either click a button that you designed to say how much, or they can put a number in a form field and click donate. And it immediately takes care of everything.
That's an amazing option for somebody who does not need all the other heavy duty stuff that you know, a proper. S, dedicated donation plugin with, yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:03] Just put the button up there, you wanna sponsor the podcast or do you wanna yeah just hit, donate to the donate to this, donate to that.
Yeah. I can see that. That's just really quite compelling. For
Spencer Forman: [00:37:13] freelancers, even, let's say for example, people don't realize, and this is not a popular use case, but we don't tell anybody we do this ourselves. We do consultancy that's our bread and butter. You need an extra hour of consultancy.
Maybe I have a different deal with you than somebody else. What a pain it is to have to create, an extra product or go through the whole pie. Just have one of these on a page. And just PayPal does, or, Citibank just go to that page and they are, you can type a number in how much do you owe me for the extra hour?
Click the button. Done and done. You get the receipt, the invoice I get paid. Everybody's happy. Yeah, that's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:44] great. And on the homepage, just under that, actually you highlight some of the plugins that you're I don't know how deeply integration is, or indeed you're just surfacing some which, work and.
Are easy to configure. You've got WP fusion which I would imagine most of our listeners have come across before. Obviously got lifter learn dash to LMS is you mentioned elemental, because I guess you've got tighter integration in there and obviously commerce are these, do these all have special integrations?
Other things that you've done in ways that they connect better than other solutions.
Spencer Forman: [00:38:15] Yeah. And that's a great question because those are the ones that we actually have code based integration with. But, and this is, I can't emphasize it enough really. Launch flows works with everything we have not yet found any.
I I could be wrong and I love it. When somebody finds something that I say and I'm wrong, I give them a pony. I publish a gift of a pony as a reward on their Facebook page to say, I'm sorry I was wrong. But to date, I have not found anything. With the exception of some of the things that hijack the behavior WooCommerce.
Okay. That won't work with launch flows because again, the fundamental premise for why I built this plugin, instead of continuing to support the other plugins that were doing this stuff is because I found that is the thing that needs to be true. If you are in the Lego ecosystem. And you say, wouldn't it be cool if I, the Lego block that had square little numbers on it, stead of circular guess what you've just done.
You've just alienated yourself, your customers and your plugin from every other, Lego block that's ever been made in the last 60 years. That's what some of these plugins are doing. And I said, no, So if somebody finds something that launches doesn't work with, please let me know and I'll try to make it work or figure out why it isn't, but otherwise you can use everything under the sun, but because of That's why I wanted to clarify.
There's not a real need for all these integrations. The w the ones you mentioned are key, because for example, the automation capability of WP fusion, where I work closely with the author, Jack Arturo, that is such a fundamentally important plug in anyway. Elementor, as I said, we work with all the page builders or the native editors, but I really wanted to make a dead bang, easy to use the best.
Page builder the free version of it for anybody just so you can drag and drop a widget instead of putting parameters in short codes and the other ones like lifter LMS we work closely with, Chris and Thomas and I love their product. So we wanted to make it that people could just immediately do, like I described, make a lesson and have an upsell in it and so forth and yeah.
And their own.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:15] Okay. That's really nice. Now I have to confess you have the, Bravo for the most straightforward pricing in the WordPress ecosystem. There's one price, which is, not something you see these days. Normally there's a big panel of different options. Run us through the pricing as of the date we're recording, who knows maybe this is about to change, but right now we can get this for.
Spencer Forman: [00:40:37] You can get it for 25% off, but here's what I want to also, I want it, I want to give your audience a deal because this is an interesting thing. My. First 10 years in the WordPress space. We're teaching people how to do marketing and build websites for other businesses and had a great amount of success and building an audience.
But the thing I told people was that you need to treat your online customers, just like you want to be treated in a real world. The nonsense and shenanigans that go on and certain online websites with pricing is insulting or in some cases, illogical to normal peoples. Brains right. You go to a grocery store to check out and they don't make you, for example, pay for everything, go to the parking lot and then bring you back in and tell you if you return everything, we'll give you a better deal.
And let me swap the pricing and stuff. But yet that seems to be the way people want to do upsells and down sells and stuff and digital. So here's the pricing. We don't do lifetime pricing. That's the number one question I get because there's no way that I would be able to fairly tell anybody I can support the software into my, the infinite future when WordPress is moving so fast.
I really do believe in the next three years, we're going to be doing things differently in WordPress. However, Unlimited pricing or unlimited use is important to me. So the current plugin retails for $300 use it everywhere and anywhere you want to. I have a standing offer for again the show hosts like yourself who are gracious enough to have me on it's a 25% standing discount you would use in your case.
WP Builds a lowercase as the coupon code and the price would be two 25. For unlimited years. And that includes support, which I am notoriously well known for in a good way. So whether you go directly through our email support or you go through our Facebook page or a group, I mean at launch flows. But I will announce that what I am planning to do is release from popular demand.
A single site use the price is not established, but it is likely to be in the range of one 49 to one 99. Or what I like to do is round it off. It'll either be one 50 or 200, but the point is there, there've been a lot of people who've said, what spends, I love that I could use it. I really only have one site.
And so I think we're at the stage of growth where I'm prepared to release that. So for right now, the official as we do today is unlimited use. Two 25 net after the discount for any of your listeners and that's a standing offer. So as you suggested, maybe it'll end up on your deals page, and we also are extremely liberal with the test case.
So for example, you can use the full feature product with a full WordPress website by going to launch list.com and clicking the free demo. It's a full site you can have for as long as you want, typically it's seven days, but. Whatever, it's not going to get you anything cause we disabled the email, but it'll give you full use of all of the features for those who buy the plugin.
We have a no questions asked 30 day refund, which I'm shocked to think nobody else has thought as being standard. There are some sites that literally balk at giving your money back, but can you imagine if you went out to buy a tuxedo or a dress for a wedding and they said you had to buy everything without trying on the shoes or the tie or the waistcoat or anything?
That's ridiculous. So in the WordPress space, we like to make sure buy it, try it, do both. If you like it, keep it. If you don't give it back. And if you liked it after you kept it, tell your friends. Yeah. Nice.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:59] And also it's just suddenly occurred to me that you're probably the only plugin that I can think of where the process actually ends in a zero.
It doesn't end in a nine or a seven. There's no subtle psychology going on. It's just, it's 300 bucks. I
Spencer Forman: [00:44:12] like it. We talk about this because my expertise is in marketing. So whether I'm marketing advice that I'm providing to the plugin authors or it's to the end-users, I think we've matured, as let's say, is a capitalistic world.
Those of us in the Western, the capitalistic world and those games that we played when we were kids. Don't really apply anymore. Sure. There's something about sevens and nines and maybe people still respond to it, but let's be honest. It's so much easier to just go right to the number, because at the end of the day, that's, what's really going on.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:42] You can say to yourself easily, how much will I have left after 300 is removed from my account. Yeah. So we're heading over to launch flows.com. That would be my advice. It does sound very much like we're going to have this on the WP Builds deals page. So go and check out. WP Builds.com forward slash deals.
You'll be able to search and filter for launch flows on there. I don't know if I'm going to mention this a new, you might say, no, this is something I don't want to do, but in when we talk to them email and so on, you mentioned that we might well have a deal for giving an unlimited license away.
So keep your ears peeled.
Spencer Forman: [00:45:18] Indeed. We're going to give away one free copy, a full year unlimited use. I'll leave it to your designed and technique for how you'll do it, but I would love it as a whatever, if it's a contest or whatever you call it. But yes, I'm giving one of those away to a lucky
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:33] listener. Oh, that's very kind.
Thank you. We will make sure to coincide the episode with such a thing. We normally do something like a raffle or something like that, but we'll make it happen and we'll make somebody smile. As I said, head over to launch flows.com. Get yourself get yourself a free demo, which seems to last for a very long time, check it out.
There's a video right at the top, which you can watch and it gives you a real understanding of how it all works. And as you scroll down, the images will certainly will. Yeah. That will give you confirmation of what it is that we've been talking about today. Launch flows.com. Thank you very much, indeed, for chatting to us today.
I really appreciate it.
Spencer Forman: [00:46:08] Nathan I really enjoy. And I'm grateful that you've had me on the show I've been listening to for some time. I also do enjoy your this week and WordPress show. So thanks again for allowing me to come on. Yeah, you're
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:20] very welcome. I hope that you enjoyed that podcast episode.
Always nice to chat to somebody new and today chatting to Spencer foreman about launch flows and ways of working. Adapting your woo commerce checkout experience. That was certainly interesting. And I learnt a lot. I hope you did. If you did, please head over to WP Builds.com. Look for episode number 229 and leave a comment there or head over to our Facebook group.
WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook. And you could search for two to nine. And leave a comment over there instead, if you prefer, don't forget right at the top of the show, I mentioned that Spencer is going to be giving you a recurring 25% discount. If you keep your membership active, you use the coupon code.
WP Builds over at launch flows, dot com and one lucky person is going to be getting a free one year unlimited subscription to launch flows. And the way that you're going to get that is to write me an email admin at wpbuilds.com. And I will pick my favorite and pass your details over to Spencer.
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