Why SamCart is Worth its Weight in GOLD (& How We’re Using It to Upsell...)
Listen on the go by downloading the audio of today’s video here.
- After explaining yesterday why he’s quitting Leadpages, Matt goes into detail about why AutoGrow now recommends SamCart.
- Other renowned marketers like Frank Kern have also used SamCart features to grow their respective businesses.
Hi everyone, this is Matt Ackerson, the founder of AutoGrow.co. Welcome to another edition of Matt Hacks, where in 10 minutes or less, I give you one tip to be more awesome at marketing and accelerate your creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
In this video, we’re going to talk about our new favorite tool, SamCart. I'll also tell you why we recommend it and why it is worth its weight in gold.
Our Experience with SamCart
We've been aware of SamCart for a little while now. We've seen other marketers who, on their webinars, will direct people to a checkout page that is hosted on SamCart, but we’ve never really thought much of it.
Frank Kern talked about how he uses checkout pages and recommended these in the past. I said to him, "Why on earth do you need a checkout page? A whole application that costs a new monthly fee for a checkout page."
I mean, why not just have a custom coded application or use an embedded Wufoo form which links up to your Stripe account and PayPal account? That's what we were doing for a while, and then we had another checkout page that was custom-coded and it looked pretty good and people bought from it.
But you know what? We started to look into it. One reason is related to a video that we made last week where we talked about how listening to customer and visitor feedback helped to grow our sales last year by 71%.
We fixed typos on our page and made other changes, because one of the pieces of feedback we received at the end of 2017 going into this year was, "Can I pay with PayPal?" That was one piece of feedback. I thought, "If one, two, three people are asking about PayPal over a period of time, how many other people would like to pay with PayPal, but simply can't or don't?"
The thing that finally motivated us, as you might have seen from our video on Monday on why we no longer recommend Leadpages, is that Leadpages came out with this feature where it allowed you to click on a call-to-action button or link with one click, and it would show a pop-up box where you could put in your billing information and buy something.
However, as you may remember from that video if you saw it, these are half-baked and very, very limited, like other features Leadpages has been rolling out lately. It only integrates with Stripe and it doesn't allow you to do payment plans or subscriptions. You also can’t do easy one-click upsells.
When we did try to do an upsell, we would redirect people to a thank-you page and say, "By the way, here's a special offer. Click here to learn more." People wouldn't take it. The conversion rate was something like 2% or 3% at best. These were coming from people who had just bought something, who had just entered in their billing information.
That was pretty bad, and we reasoned that a big part of it was people would have to enter in their billing information again after they had just put away their wallets. That whole action of just having to get out your wallet...maybe if they had used PayPal it would be easier, because at least you could just click, click, click and go through checkout by signing into your PayPal account.
So we took action and came across SamCart. Initially, we weren’t sure if it was worth the price, but then they came out with a trial. It was a limited time trial for 60 days, so we said, "Great. I'll give it a shot now for two months, and if it pays for itself then I'll be more than happy to pay the monthly fee for it." So we signed up for it and fell in love with this tool. Let me show you why.
The Benefits of SamCart
So first off, SamCart allows you to create these simple checkout pages. They also have a ton of templates to choose from. Initially, we thought it was kind of clunky, since there's limited ability to kind of put things where we want them to go.
With time, it actually worked out pretty well and we’re glad they kept it pretty simple and didn't give too many design choices, as we also explained in a video earlier this week.
Now, we were concerned because they didn't have a two-step opt-in or two-step click, where you click on a button and instantly a checkout form would appear on the page, like Leadpages. SamCart came up with a solution for that based on the feedback that we gave them.
So not only was it easy to create a checkout page for our swipe file, which is one of our tripwires, but SamCart made it super easy to integrate with PayPal. Now the people who had given that feedback could check out more easily.
Even today, half of all our orders are coming through PayPal, and I suspect that's just because it's easier. People just have to log into their PayPal account versus finding their wallet and typing in their credit card number.
The second thing that SamCart allows us to do is make a very special offer to some people who check out when they get the swipe file we're testing. So not everyone gets it, but they can access a one-dollar, one-week trial of our Six-Figure Funnel training. After that one week trial, there's a one-time payment they make and they are charged if they don't cancel.
What makes this really great is that unlike the issue with Leadpages that we talked about, people do not have to enter their billing information twice, because this is coming immediately after they click the button and confirm they want to start the trial.
The next thing that I want to show you is that you can create upsells and downsells with SamCart that are dynamic based on how your customers respond and whether they take an offer.
For example, if someone rejects the one dollar one-week trial for our free training, we could have a downsell to that. Maybe it’s another tripwire for seven dollars, or we could even present an offer before that. We could also cross-sell something at a similar price point, maybe a complementary product to the swipe file, for example.
Then if they reject that, we can upsell or downsell them on the one dollar one-week trial. We can do this up to 10 times. You can see here how SamCart allows you to do it with up to five different offers.
The final thing to mention is, SamCart didn't initially allow customers to click and see the checkout form directly on the page. We gave SamCart feedback about this because originally it said the feature was "powered by SamCart" and it just wasn't such a seamless experience.
Their customer support has been stellar; they respond very quickly during normal business hours and they took our feedback so seriously, they actually customized the feature based on what we were telling them, namely that the checkout button was too limited and that it promoted SamCart on it. We’re very happy and excited to test that out now.
So those are all the reasons why we recommend SamCart.
We recommend them if you sell any kind of products online where you want to have a seamless checkout experience with multiple payment options, and the ability to do upsells, downsells and cross-sells to maximize the customer lifetime value. There are also checkout pages that you can embed directly on your landing pages where you can click a button and see the pop-up to check out right there on the page.
That's it for today's video. In the next Matt Hacks video, I'm going to show you how to send targeted messages to each of your newsletter subscribers that are personalized to where they're at in your sales funnel.
If you like this video, go check out SamCart and remember to like, subscribe, share and show it some love. Remember that SamCart is well worth its weight in gold (which is an Austin Powers reference). Until next time, my name is Matt Ack in the Matt hat, delivering your daily dose of Matt Hacks. See you next time. Keep hustling and stay focused.
