A Napier Podcast: Interview with Sarah Bond - Lucky Orange

In this podcast episode, we interview Sarah Bond, Vice President of Marketing at Lucky Orange, a website conversion optimization tool.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Sarah Bond – Lucky Orange

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sarah Bond

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing b2b Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in b2b marketing today. Welcome to the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I’m joined by Sarah bond. Sarah is the Vice President of Marketing at Lucky Orange. Welcome to the podcast, Sarah.

Sarah: Thanks, Mike. Excited to be here with you today.

Mike: It’s great to have you here. So, I mean, the way we normally start is asking a little bit about career history. So can you tell us a little bit about your career and how you’ve ended up at Lucky Orange?

Sarah: Absolutely. So I actually have a little bit of a secret. Although I’m vice president of marketing. Now, I’m actually not a marketer, by background or education. My career has led me into marketing. But I actually got my start in graduated from college with a degree in public relations and advertising. And as soon as I graduated from college, I, my first job was serving as a leadership consultant. And from there, I jumped into actually doing journalism, and was writing for a weekly newspaper for a while, you know, I love writing, it’s one of my passion areas. So I did that. And then after I got done doing writing, I said, you know, I really, really want to get into public relations. And so my next job was doing agency side public relations, and did that for a while and then moved over into the corporate world, doing PR for a fortune 500 healthcare technology company. And it was while I was doing PR that my manager at the time came to me with an interesting opportunity to move over to the marketing side doing digital marketing. And it was real leap of faith. For me, I think at the time, I knew what HTML stood for. But I had no idea what online marketing was what paid search was, I didn’t know anything about websites other than publishing news releases to websites, and my role is PR. But I kind of made that leap of faith. And I learned that I really enjoyed the digital marketing side of things. And from there, just kind of use that as a jumping off point to do a variety of different marketing and comms tasks and have led internal communications teams, I’ve led brand strategy and brand identity, as well as in house creative services team. So graphic designers, video production, and all sorts of different marketing, ranging from Product Marketing focused on go to marketing strategies, and just really the gamut of anything and everything marketing, to even doing some civic engagement strategies. And all of that kind of broad marketing career led me to Lucky Orange a great opportunity to get in with a smaller company than where I was at when I left the company that I had previously been at. It was about 22,000 people. And so I made the jump to a company of less than 20 people and absolutely love it, and couldn’t be happier than where I’m at, at Lucky Orange where I get to do a little bit of anything and everything marketing and communications related.

Mike: That’s, that’s great. That sounds like a fascinating career, and probably not something you had like this 1020 year career plan. It sounds like it was very dynamic.

Sarah: It definitely was, it was one of those, say yes to the opportunity when it arises, type of strategies. And if you had asked me when I first got started my career, I would have told you, I’m going to be doing public relations for my whole career and would continue on with that. But really, when the different opportunities presented themselves, I jumped at it because I love learning new skills and new tasks. And it is what really keeps me energised and excited about my career and being able to dive in and get my hands dirty and marketing. I just really I love that opportunity and have been fortunate to have a career that’s given me a lot of opportunities to continue to grow and stretch my skills.

Mike; Oh, that. That’s awesome. That sounds great. Right? So before we dive into the company and what you do, I’ve got to ask what you must get asked all the time. Why the name Lucky Orange.

Sarah: It’s an interesting name, isn’t it? It’s definitely not one that you can infer what we do just based on the name. But that’s a little bit by design. When our founders were coming up with the name for the company. They wanted something that was interesting and differentiated in the market space and that would allow them to grab people’s attention and they really landed on Lucky Orange and we’ve kind of embraced it from there and incorporate it in everything that we do.

Mike: That’s great. So I mean, it’s certainly memorable. I guess that you know, the things that have asked that is, so you’re Lucky Orange, I’ve got no idea from the name, what you do, can you tell us what you do?

Sarah: Absolutely, really at the core of what we do is we help people who have a website, understand what people are doing on their site, so that they can improve their conversions on that site, whether it’s an E commerce site that’s looking to grow sales, or a b2b site that’s looking to generate more leads. And we offer a suite of tools that help people understand website visitor behaviour. So from heat maps and session recordings that let you see the most popular parts of your site to drilling down into what a very individual user is doing to surveys and live chat that allow you to engage directly with a person who’s on your site to ask them firsthand what they’re struggling with, or what they’re interested in, to really get that into in the understanding of the customer so that when you understand them better, you can create better experiences, you know, if you’re a user experience designer using Lucky Orange tools, you can not only create a really beautiful website experience, but one that’s also highly functional. And that converts to someone who’s a solo entrepreneur who’s trying to understand why they’re getting all this traffic, but why it’s not converting and turning into sales or leads.

Mike: Right sounds like there’s a lot of things there. So I mean, you’re packaging different tools up, I mean, maybe we can just go and explore some of those products kind of unpack the the tools first. So I think the first thing you talked about was understanding recording user sessions. So, you know, this is a technology where you’re watching what people do on the website. I mean, can you give me some examples of what marketers might do with that data? How they might use it?

Sarah: Sure. And like you said, Mike, it, it is for those who are unfamiliar with what a session recording does, it really is like watching a playback of what someone did on your website. So with a session recording, you can see the pages that they navigated to, you can see where they clicked on those pages, where they scroll down a page, maybe where they hesitated where they move their mouse. So it really is a helpful tool to let you see what they’re doing. And, you know, we as a marketing team, at Lucky Orange, use our own tools on our website to understand what people are doing. And there are several different ways you as a marketer might use them. Let’s say you just launched a paid advertising campaign, and you want to see what people from that campaign are doing? Well, you can filter by source, you can filter by any UTM parameter. And you can see, okay, my people coming on my Google PPC ads that are coming to my site from those ads, I want to watch and see if they’re going through my page and scrolling through my page. And one of the things that we found very helpful, particularly when we have landing pages created for a specific campaign is to see just how much of the content people are consuming. And one of the things that we found after we launched our new website is that we have a very large video block on some of our pages, and that some people just scroll right past that.

So we’ve used that information to try and recreate the hierarchy of information to put other information that we think is more compelling on those landing pages to the top so that we can optimise that page to increase the odds that people will hit that call to action. So it can be very helpful in that regard as a marketer to do that. And also, if you’re very content heavy site in our content marketing team likes to use our session recordings to see just how far down the page somebody’s reading into their content. You know, there’s, you can look at Google Analytics and see time on page, but you don’t know if they just opened up that browser and they’re sitting there. But with a session recording, you can actually see, okay, someone is actively reading my content and making it all the way down to the bottom of the page. And there’s another tool that when we we switch to talk about heat maps, that can be really helpful from that perspective, too. But it’s really great to let you see kind of the the guts behind what you might surface up in Google Analytics of highly traffic pages, high time on site, but what are they really doing when they’re on that page? That’s what a session recording can help you understand?

Mike: And with those session recordings, you’re effectively looking at individual users. Is that right? That’s right. Yep. So you’re playing through individual users now. You just mentioned heatmap. So explain that. To me, that sounds like what you’re doing is aggregating those individual users to try and give an indication of what’s interesting. Is that is that as a good understanding of what it does,

Sarah: yeah, we should have you on the marketing team. Yeah, I mean, you explained it very well. A where session recording allows you to see what an individual person on your site is doing. A heatmap gives you the aggregate view of what people are doing on your site. So it lets you get a feel for those areas of your site that are getting a lot of engagement, or conversely, no engagement, which can be really, really helpful. Because in my past life as a digital marketer, for a very big company working on website redesigns, you kind of get into this design by committee process where every single line of business is going to tell you they need to be in the top navigation of the website, because they are the most important thing. And they are absolutely what’s drawing people into your site, because everyone’s looking for their content. Well, a heat map can actually prove or disprove some of those internal stakeholders, because it can show you well actually, on our main navigation, we get the most clicks on these lines of business, or these subjects or these topics. And we’re not getting a lot of clicks here. So as a marketer, you can use that to refine what you’re actually showing, and hopefully get people to the content that’s most meaningful to them, so that they stay longer on their site. And there are some other ways that you can use heat maps to there’s a version of a heat map that’s called a scroll heat map, that instead of showing you chunks of the site, you know, clip clickable elements where people might be clicking on this will show you how far down the page a person, the majority of people scrolled.

And on a scroll heatmap, you have what’s called the effective fold, which, you know, if you’re thinking of it in terms like a newspaper, it’s that point where 50% of the people are falling off. So it’s effectively where the fold is that on your website. And when you’re thinking about something like blog content, or even a product page, where you’re maybe listing out a lot of features, a scroll heatmap will show you how far down the page most people are making it. So if people are stopping reading before they’re getting to your calls to action, or if you’re looking at it as a content marketer and saying, Man, I put all this time and energy and hours of work into creating these long form blog posts, but nobody’s reading them. What a gift is that to be able to go back and say, I don’t need to waste my time on these long posts anymore. Maybe I can write shorter, concise content that gets people there quickly and gets consumed all the way through. So they’re really great analytics tools for marketers to be able to have to understand visitor behaviour on your site in aggregate, but also at the individual user level when you want to dive in deeper.

Mike: Awesome. I mean, in terms of making these recordings, so you’re not watching people’s eyes? Are you tracking the mouse? How do you understand what people are focusing on?

Sarah: Right? So a heat map is capturing where people, there are several different types. So it clicks heat map will capture where a user is clicking, so wherever they click their mouse, and you can see some interesting behaviour from that if you dive in and start studying heat maps, because, of course, you expect to see people clicking on things that are clickable, but a lot of people will also click as they move down the screen where you might see clicks in random areas. Or you might uncover issues on your site where people are clicking things that they think aren’t that should be clickable that actually aren’t. So that’s something great that you can pass on to your user experience or development teams. But there are also moves heat maps that allow you to see where someone moves their mouse across the screen. So it’s not capturing the click, but it’s actually following that mouse movement. And there are some common things that you’ll see user experience designers are familiar with an F shaped pattern, when it comes to consuming content on a website. And you’ll see a lot of users will move their mouse as they read that content. And so if you’re trying to kind of break out of some of those I hate here, people consuming this an F shaped patterns, you can study one of those mouse movement heat maps to really understand that. So that’s, that’s really what we’re tracking is the movement of the mouse across the page. And you know, some things that we also capture. Lucky Orange allows you to see events within the system that happen like when someone highlights text will trigger an event that shows you someone as actually paying really close attention to this text. They found it very interesting. You know, I I like to think of it kind of how if you read on a Kindle, where when you have those popular areas that people read that kind of shows up in your Kindle text is underlined. It’s sort of like that, where you can see people found this text really interesting enough so that they highlighted it. So we do capture things like that. And also things like rage clicks when someone clicks on an element quickly and repeatedly. We surface that up so that you can quickly find some of these pain points that people are experiencing on your site without having to sit and watch through a lot of recordings individually.

Mike: As fascinating. I’m interested because a couple of years ago this recording of user sessions got a quite a lot of bad publicity but To clean I think Europe around confidentiality, privacy and GDPR. I mean, what’s the situation now? What do you do to ensure privacy?

Sarah: Absolutely. And I think that’s a great and very important question. And it’s one we take very seriously because our tools are designed to help people who have websites create better experiences on behalf of the user. And that’s really our goal. And with the user, the end user in mind, whether it’s a b2b customer, or it’s an E commerce shopper, which is the reason why we are GDPR and CCPA compliant. But we also take steps to ensure that we’re really focused on the behaviour on the site and not the information that’s being entered into the site. So we automatically block the recording of any keystrokes. So when a visitor to a website is typing information and on a site, you won’t actually be able to see in that recording, if they’re typing in their username or their password, instead, you just see Asterix reflected in the recording, because we really do value that privacy of the person visiting the website, we also have tools where we allow our customers to surface up to their website visitors, here’s the information that we’re recording on you, here’s how to manage that. And here’s how you can opt out of that if you don’t want that information recorded. Because it really should be a diagnostics and an understanding tool. It’s not about gaining the visitors information. So we really do take that seriously. And we also offer a layer of protection above that where people who are managing their websites can say, I don’t want this information to come through. So I want to scramble the text. So instead of saying, You seeing on our website recording where it says click here, you can actually choose to have that text randomly scrambled so that you can still do all of the diagnostics, things that you would be able to do. But you’re not capturing that in a recording, which financial institutions, for example, find very helpful because they may have someone who’s coming in and helping audit the site or do some troubleshooting. And they don’t necessarily want the person watching the recording to see that information. So they can use tech scrambling features so that you can still understand if there’s an issue on a site where maybe there was a button error, you can still see that without seeing the actual information. And you can designate parts of the site as sensitive data collection. So if it’s something that wouldn’t normally be flagged, you can go above and beyond by designating CSS classes as sensitive and we won’t capture that information.

Mike: That’s really cool to know that you’ve got that protection. I think, particularly for users, it’s important to know that protective protection exists for sure. So I’d like to move on and talk about some of the other features in Lucky Orange. We’ve talked about, you know, recording user sessions. And we’ve talked about heat maps, you know, to quite technical web design things. You know, the next thing I’ve seen on your website is live chat, which is just completely different. So explain how that fits into a, you know, a package of products. That includes a very technical products. Why Why did you go to live chat?

Sarah: Absolutely. So I think a lot of people do look at that, especially when they compare Lucky Orange to our competitors who don’t have live chat and you say, why is live chat tucked in there? Well, at the end of the day, when our founders created Lucky Orange, what they were really trying to do is create software that allowed them to better understand people who are coming to their website, and recordings and heat maps and form analytics are great tools to allow you to retro actively go in and study that. But when you couple our Live View tool, which lets you see what people are doing on your site, right now, with something like live chat, you have the opportunity to see people who are struggling on your site and reach out to them and say, Hey, how can I help you? Is there something you’re looking for. Or if you see a technical issue happen when you’re using that live view to cobrowse with a customer, you can go in and chat with them and resolve it so that you’re not only trying to optimise for conversions, but you’re really saving the sale are saving the lead before you lose that lead, which we think is really critical.

And there have been studies that have shown when you couple live chat with live view that people have an close to 90% higher satisfaction rate than they did on sites where they don’t have that opportunity to chat and to cobrowse with a support agent. And we just feel like it’s a really great opportunity to not only help customers when and where they need it. But when you pair it with a tool like surveys where you can proactively reach out to people where you think maybe they’re having an issue or maybe you’ve watched session recordings and you think I see a lot of people getting hung up on my shipping and return policies page. I wonder if there’s a problem there. Well You can trigger a live chat to engage people when they land on that shipping policies page. Or you could have a survey, which we offer within Lucky Orange to ask people, do you have any questions? Do you need more information that we’re not providing and get some of that firsthand feedback so that it’s not just one directional, but you really to understand that customer experience, have the opportunity to study what they did, but also to engage with them while they’re on your site, which we feel like is a really important part of that sort of closed loop ability to understand customers better.

Mike: And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you mentioned something, I think it’ll be quite interesting to our b2b audience, which is form analytics. I mean, a lot of b2b websites, it’s all about generating leads, capturing leads, I’m really interested, you have some examples of how people have used those form analytics to improve conversion rates?

Sarah: Yeah, I certainly do. And I can tell you, as a b2b marketer, myself, when I came to Lucky Orange, this was one of the tools that, you know, my jaw kind of hit the floor, because as a marketer, in a b2b organisation, you really want to generate those leads. And that’s what you’re handing off to your sales team. And that’s, you know, how you get business done at the end of the day. And when I learned that there was a tool that allow you to see which fields people were abandoning, I just couldn’t believe that this wasn’t more used throughout the industry, because it is really powerful. I mean, if you’ve got a form, and a lot of times, you know, when marketing’s working with sales, they’re like, Okay, what is all of the information, we need to populate every single form in our CRM, so you get these really long fields. And this is where form analytics can come in. And be very handy because it helps you understand where people are dropping off. And one of the examples that we’ve seen is that when people are filling out a form on a website, they don’t want to talk to a person on the phone. So when you ask for that phone number, a lot of people will abandon the form at that field, because they don’t want to give their phone number. So that is one really great piece of insight that we’ve seen for b2b marketers is, if you don’t need that phone number, if you can build the relationship first with them via email, do that. And then once you’ve gained their trust, once they show further signs of engagement, then you can ask for that phone number down the line. Another thing to look for on forum analytics is fields that get repeated because this is often a sign that your field may be confusing, or it may need some more instruction. So if you can do some of that inline description within your form fields, you know, we’ve all seen that in forms where it asks for a phone number, but it has very specific expectations. Or if it asks for an address, if you’re trying to get that information, and it wants it in a very specific format that people if you don’t explain what that format is, then people will have to continue to repeat that field. And oftentimes, they’ll abandon because they just get frustrated with the form fields.

Mike: That’s, that’s fascinating. So you can actually see in those analytics, where people are submitting the form, getting an error and then having to reenter it. So you get to see those and always live those problems with users. That’s awesome. So you’ve got all these tools? I mean, one of the things one of the other features you’ve got is conversion funnels, which I guess is, you know, is ultimately what we’re trying to do, you’re trying to make the website more effective at converting visitors to become customers or leads. There’s lots of different conversion funnel tools from you know, Google Analytics all the way up. Can you tell me a little bit about what Lucky Orange does and how you differ from some of the other suppliers?

Sarah: Sure. So you can look at a conversion funnel and other tools like Google Analytics. And for those who aren’t familiar with conversion funnels, it’s essentially a predefined set of steps that walks you through the pages that you expect someone to visit on their way to conversion. And a conversion funnel will show you as they go from page to page or step to step on your website, where they’re dropping off. And we’re lucky orange is different than a tool like Google Analytics is that let’s say you’ve got a four step conversion funnel. And you see that when people get to that third step, they drop off. Well, you can dial into that third step, and you can watch a session recording from there to see and understand exactly why someone’s dropping off. And you simply can’t do that in a tool like Google Analytics, because they don’t have that capability. And so you not only know where people are dropping off, but you have the opportunity to watch some of those recordings and see, is it a technical issue that they’re encountering? Maybe that’s preventing them from getting to the next step? Or is there something that you can infer from while everybody’s looking at this stuff? Shouldn’t when I look at this page and I study these session recordings, it seems like everyone’s hovering over the price or hovering over this piece of information.

And then they’re abandoning. So that could be an indicator to you there. And you can take that information, if you know that people are abandoning on that third step on that third page, right before they convert, you can set up a survey, or you can trigger a live chat so that when people get there, you can ask them for more information, is there anything I can help you with today? So you can take that hypothesis that you formulated by watching those session recordings, and then do some first person research with those people who are coming to your website to, you know, either do a survey that you can have running when you’re not available, or use that live chat when you are available to trigger on that specific page to try and get a better understanding of why people aren’t converting?

Mike: Oh, that’s awesome. I mean, there’s other features as well, we haven’t had time to cover. I mean, one of the things I have to admit is I do this podcast for selfish reasons, I want to learn things. So I’m gonna take advantage of the opportunity. You know, there’s so many different tools you’ve got there for optimising websites. If I was looking to optimise a Napier website, I mean, where would I start? How would I begin?

Sarah: Yeah, that is a great question. And it’s one that we get a lot from people. And I would say the best place to start is really going in and looking at those pages where you have a high conversion probability. And starting there and study those and figure out look at some session recordings on the pages that you know, are critical to conversions and see if you can uncover why people aren’t converting there. And then as a marketer, I would go in and analyse those campaigns where I’m spending the most money to get people to my site and see what I can glean from those.

Mike: That’s great. And you’ve got all these tools available for when you actually need to use them once you’ve done some investigation. I mean, perhaps, you know, one of the things we need to talk about is price, it sounds like this should be a very expensive package having all these different tools together. I mean, is it inexpensive product.

Sarah: It you know, for us Lucky Orange is a tool that we created as something to help us solve problems for our own small businesses that we had. And that’s something that we keep in mind from a pricing standpoint is that we certainly know there are a lot of our competitors out there who charge enterprise prices, and you won’t find those enterprise prices on their website. And that’s something that we keep in mind, when we’re pricing our products is that we do want to help small businesses, because that is how we got our start. And we certainly scale up to enterprise customers, we have fortune 500 companies who use our products and international businesses, Shopify Plus customers, big household name brands, who would recognise but we also have a lot of customers who are in that Shopify piece of the market, or who are just getting started, who desperately need analytical tools like this. And so that is something that that we do think about, and that we do factor in and we want to be affordable to those companies who, you know, are core to why we started Lucky Orange in the first place who, you know, we really want to help them succeed and thrive. And we don’t want Lucky Orange to be a tool that a small business owner can’t afford, because we really do believe these tools have the potential to help them grow and unlock their business.

Mike: That’s perfect and really good to hear. So, I mean, we’re coming to the, to the end of our time now. So I’m interested in anything we should have covered. Are there any secret features we’ve missed out or anything else that you feel you should tell us?

Sarah: Yeah, you know, I think the key to conversion rate optimization, which is what you use lucky, orange tools to do as a marketer is you have to be programmatic about it, you have to constantly go in and study the data, and that the insights that you gain and learn about your site on one day and the changes that you make that may be working, maybe need may need to be revisited in you know, a month or two months or three months and that it’s not a let me do it once and then I’m done with it. As behaviour changes on the on the internet as people’s consumption patterns change as what they are interested in, you know, popularity trends and fads changes. Conversion Rate Optimization is an ongoing process. And it’s something that if you are looking to do more of or to get started with I encourage you to think about the time that you’ll have to commit to it on a weekly basis and block out some time because it is something you know, studying data, anyone who dives in on the analytics, you know, you have to make time for it. And it is something the more programmatic you can be about it the more that you can dedicate time and resources, the better results that you’ll have because you’ve committed to going in and learning and under See any more about your visitors so you can make those more impactful experiences with your website?

Mike: That’s great advice. Thank you. So I’m sure you know, everyone’s excited and interested. I mean, everyone wants to increase conversion rates on websites. So if people have questions, or maybe they want to try the product, how can people go about, you know, either getting hold of you or testing the product for themselves?

Sarah: Sure, the easiest way to do that is just to go to Lucky orange.com. You can sign up for a free trial, you get seven days to test out the tool. And there are also free plans available. So if you try it out for seven days, and you want to keep going with it and want to play around with it a little longer than you can trial, a free plan on Lucky Orange. And that’s really the easiest and the best way to go in and learn more about it. And from our website. If you have more questions. Our support team is always available through our website, or via an email at support at Lucky Orange. And they’re an awesome group of people who love helping our customers. And it doesn’t matter if you’re on a free trial, or a free plan or a paid plan. We help all of our customers and support them equally.

Mike: Oh, that’s perfect. I’m sure people listening to podcasts will want to try it. I mean, Sarah has been really interesting talking to you about the tools and about how people can improve conversion rates. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being on the podcast.

Sarah: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Mike. Thank you.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.