Jaime Smith is the founder of CF Pro Tools, a SaaS-based software that allows you to add missing features quickly and easily to your ClickFunnels pages. With users like Russell Brunson, Dean Graziosi, Tony Robbins, and Frank Kern (to name a few), CF Pro Tools has quickly become the #1 resource when you want to increase your funnel conversions, average cart value and funnel profits. With over 70 different add ons to choose from, CF Pro Tools has over 50,000 add ons created and serves more than 30 million requests per month. Jaime has been a student of online marketing for over 15 years and is probably more passionate about marketing than he is about technology.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Jaime Smith about using a book to increase your funnel conversions and profits.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How free-plus-shipping offers are a great way to attract new customers.
– Why you want to give customers a chance to spend money on the front end of your funnel.
– How immediate delivery should be one of the things that you offer.
– Why you want to have 2 or 3 different offers for customers to choose from.
– How covering international shipping costs up front is key for a successful funnel.
Connect with Jaime:
Links Mentioned:
cfprotools.com
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter
@cfprotools
Instagram
@cfprotools
Facebook
facebook.com/cfprotools
Rob Kosberg:
Hey, welcome everybody. It’s Rob here with another episode of our Publish. Promote. Profit. Podcast. We’ve been focused quite a bit recently on BookFunnels, and I have the man today that, at least from a technical standpoint, has been behind a lot of really successful BookFunnels. Jamie Smith is the founder of CF Pro Tools. It’s a SaaS-based software that allows you to quickly and easily add missing features to your ClickFunnels pages. Now, there are other funnel builders, but as most of you know, I’ve been a beta. I started as a beta user of ClickFunnels way back in the early days and swear by it.
So, with users like Russell Brunson, Dean Graziosi, Tony Robbins, Frank Kern, just to name a few, CF Pro Tools is the number one resource when you want to increase your funnel conversions, cart value, funnel profits, et cetera. There’s 70 different tools/add-ons to choose from, so I think what we’ll be speaking about with Jamie today and his 15 years of experience in the online marketing space is going to be really helpful. So Jamie, thanks so much and welcome to the podcast.
Jamie Smith:
Thank you. Glad to be here. Yeah, it’s awesome.
Rob Kosberg:
As you know, I’m doing a book on BookFunnels and so we’re in Inner Circle together, which is cool, and so thank you so much for responding to that. Maybe give us a little bit of the background first, not so much of CF Pro Tools, which is kind of a cool story in itself, but of the tools that have been used with BookFunnels, because I know that it really kind of originated with you and Russell working on his BookFunnels. So talk about out that just a little, if you could.
Jamie Smith:
I think the very first person that reached out to me that was looking for some help with a BookFunnel specifically was Dean Graziosi. And then Russell adopted some of the stuff I did for Dean, and he is like, “Oh, well, Hey, we should totally do that.” I said, “Hey, I’ve got a book funnel and I’m charging, it’s a free plus shipping model and I’m charging, $9.95 for shipping, but international customers that’s costing me $20 to send them the book.”
“So, I can’t even break even on those customers. Is there anything that we can do that allows me to change how much I charge somebody based on what country that we’re shipping it to.” Or really is versus a domestic, it’s a US based order versus it’s an international, it’s going some other country. And I said, “Absolutely.” So that was one of the first things that I build out specifically for BookFunnels and it’s been used on all kinds of free plus shipping funnels or even just regular physical product funnels where you want to have a shipping charge to it.
So, we built that out initially for Dean and then I added it into CF Pro Tools, add-ons libraries, and it’s just called the international shipping add-on and you can just go in and say, “Hey, here’s my core product and when anybody buys this and they’re from the US, or they’re from a domestic country, you define what countries zones are. Then this is the other product to add, and if they’re pick another country, then this is the other product ad.” And that allows you to charge $9.95 for domestic or $19.95 for international. It really allows people to make sure to cover those costs depending on where the customer’s located.
So, that was kind of the launch into the kind of free plus shipping offers. And then yeah, continued work with Russell, especially on this newest iterations of all of the BookFunnels and figuring out how can we increase that average cart value so that we can pay more to acquire customers. And so do things like being able to add multiple will bump offers to the same order form and really make the bump offers stand out a little bit compared to the norm. We get a lot of people that are used to, especially in Russell’s world, most of his customers are used to seeing funnels because he’s promoting funnels all the time. And so it just like anything else, you get blind to the things that you know are okay, that’s a bump offer because it’s got the yellow box with the border around it.
It looks like everybody else’s bump offer. So we talked about, okay, well how can we make that different? How can we make it stand out? And versus just, okay, I can change the color. I can remove the border or whatever we made his so it’s actually got an image of the product. It’s got a paragraph about the product and it’s got a button then to add or remove. And it just, it doesn’t look like a normal bump. So it attracts more eyeballs and gets more people to pay attention and actually add those things to their cards. So, yeah, just that’s been kind of thing is that I’ve always focused on is, how can I… What are the things that people can add that are going to improve their conversion rate as well as improve their average card value?
Rob Kosberg:
Let’s talk through the specifics there. So, just for our listeners, the whole idea of a free plus shipping BookFunnel as I’ve been discussing is that it would self-liquidate the ad expense. It’s called a self-liquidating offer. The idea is if it costs you $60 to acquire that book buyer, then ideally you want the average book buyer to spend $60 in the BookFunnel itself, which is not always easy to do. In fact, it’s quite difficult to do, especially if your initial offer is only $7 and 95 cents. So you mention one thing, the bump, you mentioned of course, the idea of the domestic versus foreign shipping. So talk me through what other options there are and talk me through even some specifics, like what have you seen as far as conversion rate increase or average cart value increase based on some of these changes?
Jamie Smith:
One of the things that I’ve seen that is effective on really all funnels, but specifically on pre-plus shipping offer funnels that works well and one example I can think of is with Dean Graziosi. He has a journal pack that he has and he offers a journal in five different colors. So the offer on the front end is okay, you can get one journal and we’re going to send it to you for free just to cover the cost of the shipping. Or if you want to buy a bundle of all five colors of the journal, then that’s like $35 and we’ll ship that out to you. And what that allows him to do is now give the customer a choice on the front end of spending more money.
And what we do to make that more attractive is we just put what we call the best seller highlight around that product. So normally click bundles, you get radio buttons for choosing product one or product two, and it’s pretty plain and it’s just the name of the product. With this it puts a box around the product you want to highlight with the yellow background and a black boarder around it. So it kind of pops off the page. It’s got a little shadow behind it-
Rob Kosberg:
Like a best value kind of thing.
Jamie Smith:
Exactly. Yeah. So it just kind of stands out, lets you put a little headline above it that I recommend always going with something like most popular or best choice. So that kind of social proof that, hey, this is what everybody else is getting, so that’s what I should get to. And so that allows first off they come in because it’s a free plus shipping and you attracted them with the free, but then they get the choice to spend more money and they can see that, oh, other people are buying the that’s a higher value. And so instead of just spending the $9.95 to cover shipping costs, now they can spend 40 bucks on just the initial offer before they even get to the bumps.
So, that works really well and we’ve seen that bestseller highlight work in other funnels as well, especially TradedWell, uses it quite a bit for his physical product funnels where we’re going to offer them to buy one of something for free plus shipping or they can buy two or three or five or 10 and then highlight say the five pack option is the most popular and it gets more people to take that. I’ve had multiple people report to me that just by adding just that one add-on where they’re highlighting a higher value product that they’ve doubled their average cart value by just highlighting which product they want people to pick.
I tend to think from a psychology perspective, it just makes people take that extra second to look for the best value and when they’re doing that, they’re already trying to figure out how can I spend my money in the right way. So yeah, that one is really effective. It’s when you think about your offer a little bit and how you can tweak it to support that, but it works well.
Rob Kosberg:
Before you go on to the next one. Talk to me a little bit about CF Pro Tools. If someone hasn’t used CF Pro Tools and they’re interested in maybe using it, do you have examples of how these various tools are used? Do you help the people? Talk me through what they can find when they go to CF Pro tools, because unless they’re listening to this podcast and learning about BookFunnels, they’re going to be like, “I don’t know what to do.” Right. So-
Jamie Smith:
Absolutely, yeah.
Rob Kosberg:
I imagine you have tools within it for that.
Jamie Smith:
So when you come, you can just go to cfprotools.com and click, then get started button put in your email in, that’ll let you create a free account that’s got a limited set of add-ons available. Or from there you can pick a plan for the what we call the VIP club subscription and there’s 70 different add-ons you can choose from there. Each one of them come with demos of here’s what it does and here’s how to set it up and use it. But I think probably the most valuable thing is when you get into the C Pro Tool software on the dashboard, there’s a training and resources section.
And in there I’ve got two separate videos that’s total about five hours of training that walk through every step of Russell’s traffic secrets funnel. And what we did to set it up to be the most successful that we can. So every add-on that we used is outlined in those training videos. So if you really wanted to do, if you wanted to kind of model the expert, if you want to funnel hack Russell, that’s really kind of the best way to get started. Just go in, watch those, I’ll tell you exactly what add-ons we used to make it, do the things that Russell does and then you can kind of model that quickly and easily.
Rob Kosberg:
So, let’s move on. So we got the choosing the product that’s even before the bump, which is very, very cool. Talk to me about anything special with bumps and then go from there.
Jamie Smith:
Yeah. I think the key with the bumps at a minimum, there’s a few different ways to go, but at a minimum, allowing somebody to choose more than one is a good thing. And we’ve seen that be very successful with Russell’s funnels. Initially it was just, okay, it’s an offer and a bump and that was it. You can buy the physical product; the physical book and we’ll ship that to you. Oh and Hey, if you’d like the audio book, check the box and we’ll add it to your order and you’ll get it right away. That I think works well. Anytime you can offer an immediate delivery as a bunk offer, because most people that are buying books are trying to solve a problem and they’re in that pain right now and you’re going to ship them a book, but they might not get it for two weeks.
And so, if you can give them an option to immediately receive the information and solve their problem today, instead of waiting two weeks, that’s an attractive author. So we always like to go with that, but then you can add additional bumps as well. Maybe it’s another package, another course, another high value product that you have sitting on the shelf that you could deliver to somebody with minimal effort, but to them it has a really high perceived value. And it’s only available when you’re buying it along with this other package. So, we generally like to see, going from a, say a $9.95 for the core offer free plus shipping and then a $27 to $37 bump for usually an audio book or an audio plus the PDF and then go into either a $47 or a $97 additional bump that may be an additional course that you know is going to augment and help them solve that problem faster or be other problem that they have.
Rob Kosberg:
And that’s a check box?
Jamie Smith:
It’s just a check. Yep.
Rob Kosberg:
I hadn’t even seen that. So, it’s basically a larger bump box on that first page that offers multiple bumps.
Jamie Smith:
Yeah. You put multiple boxes basically that, however many offers you want to make. I definitely don’t want to go too crazy with it and put “n” different bumps, but two to three is what I would normally recommend. More than the one tends to increase value, get too much, it tends to throw people off, but yeah, you just, with click funnels, you get the option to add one bump to the page and then they don’t really support the feature beyond that. With CF Pro Tools, I’ve just set it up so that you can add as many bumps as you want to your order form. You just insert a new bump element for every one of your bumps and then you tag that element in the ClickFunnels editor to say, it’s this product ID when they check the box that I want to add and this product ID and they check this box.
So, it lets you add as many as you want. And then along that you can, there’s a couple different ways to do that. There’s one add-on that’s just called the multiple bumps add-on. Super simple. It’s your normal yellow background, black boarder bump boxes and you can add multiple to your page. The one we’ve done with Russell is a combination of a few add-ons, but we call it the ad-remove product. So instead of being actual bump element, it’s just a button on the page that when you click it adds that product to your order. And when you click a button, then it replaces the button with one to remove the product. If somebody wants to get rid of it, then they click remove and it just swaps those things out.
And you can put as many of those on many pages you want as well, and you just attach it to a bump product. You say, when they click this button, it adds this product. When they click remove it, removes that product and do that as many times as you want. So we use that with Russell’s funnels and it’s been great to give people that option, but then you’re in complete control of the design. So it’s not the traditional yellow box with a black board. So.
Rob Kosberg:
Those two are unique and I can immediately see how both the choosing your product and offering multiple bumps would absolutely raise average cart value. So what about your upsells then. Upsells, an upsell is an upsell or are there some interesting things that you can do with CF Pro Tools there?
Jamie Smith:
Yeah. There’s definitely some interesting things you can do there. Before I forget, the other thing that I would recommend, if your offer works well for it, for on the bump is there’s another option that we call the bump quantity, which puts a dropdown into the bump itself to say, “Okay, I want to buy this thing.” And when they check the box, it says, “Oh, how many would you like?” And for each one they add, it increases the price. And so, if you’re doing things like t-shirts or something it’s just great to be able to say, “Oh yeah, I’d like that. Oh, I can pick five of them. Sure. I’ll pick five.” So that’s another good thing to look at for bumps too. Anytime you can allow somebody to spend more money, it’s a good thing and make it simple for them to do. That’s a good thing.
And as far as the upsells, one of the things that obviously Russell does a great job of teaching upsells and what it should be. How do you solve the next problem they’re going to have and all that. But one thing that we’ve done, that’s kind of makes it unique with his products, is we really want people to buy the audio book versions of all of the books. And so that’s one of the bump offers, is you can say, “Oh, hey, I’ve got two other books and you can buy.” Get the.com secrets book plus traffic secrets, plus expert secrets on the bump itself on the order form. But if somebody that doesn’t choose that we’d still like them to have the option to do it on the next upsell page, because the upsell after the initial book is, “Hey, do you want to buy the box set of the books?”
I’ve got my box set with two additional, three additional books for Russell. And if you want to buy that, then click here. Oh, by the way. And we call them, we call it the OTO bump. There’s actually two additional bumps on the OTO page as well. So it’s not just buying one product it’s oh, I want to add this, the audio book pack. I didn’t buy it the first time, but okay. I see it again. And what we do is we’ve got an add-on that allows the OTO page to know, did somebody buy the bump on the front end? And if they did don’t show them this off offer, because they already got it, but if they didn’t buy it, then show them this offer. And if they didn’t buy it or if they did buy it, then show them this other offer instead.
So, it just allows us to kind of tailor that OTO page based on what they purchased on the front end and then to offer them additional features on an OTO. So it’s not… Again, they have the option to spend not $87 or up to $300 just on that first OTO.
Rob Kosberg:
Now I’m going to be interviewing Russell in a couple of weeks about the latest and stuff that he’s doing. I know he is writing another book, which is very interesting as well. Do you have any idea what his average cart value is? Based on-
Jamie Smith:
It’s been a minute since I’ve looked at that and I’d hate to even speculate at this point. I know we saw a significant increase when we switched from his kind of first version books and funnels to adding in the things like we did with the having the multiple bumps and then having the bump offers on the OTO pages. I think we saw, we probably, I think we, I want to say we saw about a 50% increase in the average cart value by making those changes. So yeah, definitely makes it much easier to acquire more customers when you can spend 50% more on your ads and still break even so.
Rob Kosberg:
What else? What else am I missing? We have these funnel elements, we’re going to use this recording and a lot of the information for our kind of funnel tools section of my book. And so what else am I missing? And that could be helpful to increase average order value, conversion rate, all of that.
Jamie Smith:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I definitely think the big ones are, like I said, the international shipping, being able to cover that cost on the upfront is probably the best place to start. And I think the majority of people that are operating any sort of physical product funnel will want to do that. If they’re going to accept international orders. We have the option if you don’t want to accept international orders, you can actually use another add-on that says, “Hey, I want to preset United States as my country and they can’t choose anything else.” So they know right away that, “Oh, this is only valid for US orders.” So you can kind of limit things that way.
But being able to cover that cost has been a key. I’ve had numerous people reach out to me like “This is killing me. I’m paying twice as much to ship it internationally and I just can’t cover the cost.” So, that’s the big one. Yeah, the bumps and then I think the keys are coming up with those well-crafted offers on the back end. OTOs always are the way to increase your profits. And that’s just boils down to the pure psychology of the funnel itself. I’d love to say it’s magic tools that make those better, but it’s really all about the author.
Rob Kosberg:
They help though. Those tools help, man.
Jamie Smith:
Oh, they do. Yeah, they do. And I’m still amazed when people reach out sometimes and say, “Oh man, I just added this one thing. And it, I got a 50% increase in my conversion rate.” And it’s the simple stuff that makes all the difference. Being able to add multiple bumps and being able to add bump offers to your OTOs is also a great way to go.
It’s just, it’s for the customer. It’s super, so they’re just clicking a button and then you click a big buy button and when they’re finished, like okay I… You’re getting this one thing and you click the big buy button, but you want to add this and this? Oh yeah. They click a button a couple times and they click buy and then it just adds it all at the same time. And then looking at ways to… The other things that we do that can help to increase kind of the front end, but also the long term, because I’m a big fan of recurring revenue. It’s always beneficial. So anytime you can offer somebody a subscription, it’s great. And sometimes you don’t want to charge them the full amount up front, but you might want to collect a little bit or do a $1 trial because you, hey, I at least want to ping the card and make sure it’s balanced.
And so, I’ve got a group of add-ons that you can use with either on the order form to do what we call a paid trial where, hey might be a $97 a month subscription, but you get your first month for just a dollar. So it actually, as far as ClickFunnels is concerned, it adds two products to the order. A one-time charge for the $1 and then a trial subscription for the $97 a month. So to the customer, it’s just one transaction, but to the ClickFunnels it’s two different products.
You can do that same thing on OTOs as well and group them together. And I’ve seen that be really effective with some physical product funnels to add recurring revenue. TradedWell uses this, Perry Belcher used this quite a bit and in some of his survival. He’s got some survival clubs and stuff like that where it’s like, “Oh, hey, we want to send you this thing. It’s $7 for this. And then it’s just going to enroll for this $27 a month, recurring revenue subscription.” And it works great. But it allows you to cover that cost for sending the free gift or at least ping the card to make sure you have this customer’s valid and this is going to continue to go. And so yeah, those sorts of things work really well.
Rob Kosberg:
Awesome. Great. Jamie, thanks. Thanks for all the stuff you shared. Obviously they can go to cfprotools.com. Anywhere else, any other links that we’d like to send them or just cfprotools.com is the place to go.
Jamie Smith:
That’s the one, that’s the place to go and get started and get there and see the quick demo video on the page and I talk about some of Russell’s funnels and Dean’s and Tony on there. So get to see some examples and use those if nothing else is… Something to model.
Rob Kosberg:
Thank you so much for sharing. Really appreciate it. It was good stuff. And I use CF Pro Tools as well, so I’m going to go and talk to my tech guy and see what other ways we can use it. So very cool.
Jamie Smith:
There you go. Awesome. Thanks so much, Rob. I really appreciate it.
