In this episode, I sat down with Greg Merrilees, the founder and director of Studio 1 Design, a leading web design and branding agency. In this episode, you’ll learn:
💻 The Power of Conversion-Focused Design: Greg explains the shift from traditional brochure websites to marketing-driven designs that guide visitors based on their intent.
💻 Key Elements of a High-Converting Website: Greg and I discuss why it’s important to cater to cold, warm, and hot visitors by offering lead magnets, clear pathways, and personalized messaging.
💻 Website Audit Insights: Greg highlights common website mistakes and shares practical solutions to improve clarity, user experience, and conversions.
💻 The Role of AI in Website Design: Greg talks about how AI tools can enhance website efficiency, streamline processes, and help identify unique selling propositions.
💻 Pop-Ups, Auto-Play Videos, and More: We dive into the best practices for pop-ups and why autoplay videos can hurt your conversion rates.
💻 Real-Life Case Studies: Greg shares some of his favorite success stories, including how Evan Marc Katz tripled his opt-in rates with just a simple website tweak.
Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, Greg's insights will give you the tools you need to create a high-performing, conversion-driven website.
RESOURCES
If you would like to discover how to convert more of your website's visitors into hot leads and sales, take the quiz that Greg create especially for our listeners -> Studio1Design.com/jen
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
[00:00:01.950] - Gary Vaynerchuk Hey, guys. It's Gary Vaynerchuk. You're listening to the Front Row, entrepreneur podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:00:10.300] - Jen Lehner Our guest today is a true front row entrepreneur. He is the founder and director of Studio1Design.com, a world-leading website design and branding agency based in Australia, with 28 people who are passionate about designing really, really great-looking websites that convert cold visitors into hot leads and sales for their clients. Welcome to the show, Greg Merrilees.
[00:00:36.990] - Greg Merrilees Thank you so much, Jen, for having me. It's so awesome to be here. I've been listening to your podcast, and I think it's great.
Read more...
[00:00:42.820] - Jen Lehner Thank you so much. I'm so flattered. Well, years ago, you and I had a Zoom call, or it could have even been Blab, or Google Plus, or one of those ancient platforms because it was so long ago. But you came to my attention again when I interviewed Joe Fier of the Hustle and Flow podcast. I flipped out. I was doing research, as one does before the podcast episode, and I took a look at his website, and I immediately e-mailed him, and I was like, Who did your website? It is off the chart, gorgeous, really, really unique. He said, of course, he mentioned that you did it. I was like, right then and there, I knew I had to have you on the show, so I could ask you all about your website philosophies and your thoughts on website conversions and what you think are the must haves and what you think might be a waste of time. Sure. So sound good?
[00:01:40.300] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, I'd love to dive into that. Thank you.
[00:01:42.860] - Jen Lehner Okay, awesome. Well, my guess is that 99% of the people listening right now want their websites to do a lot of the heavy lifting for them in their business. And by heavy lifting, I mean, they're personal brands or they're service providers or they have online businesses and they want their websites to basically turn website visitors into customers. Is that what you would define as a conversion-focused website?
[00:02:13.190] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, 100%. Basically, you've gone to the old days of just having a brochure website. Nobody really has that anymore. If they do, they should be updating it. But basically, a website has a purpose. It is a very important marketing asset in your business today. It's generally either the first place where people will discover you, or if they do discover you, they will go to your website to check you out. The problem is, though, there's a lot of competitors in every niche. If you think about any authority, like your website, Jen, beautiful. You've invested in good design and good video and photography, and all those things make you look like an authority. When you look at any authority in their niche, they have a pro-level design, pro-level copywriting as well, which is That's something we can talk about. But yeah, it's really important to also think about the intent of the visitor and give them a pathway that's right for them. There's various ways we can do that based on their intent. If they're cold, warm, or hot, we have different funnels we can unpack as well. But yeah, essentially your website is an asset and it should be designed as a marketing machine instead of just a brochure website.
[00:03:24.210] - Jen Lehner When you say brochure website, you're talking about the website that basically has the picture of you and then a paragraph about you and a link to all your socials and maybe your phone number. That's what you mean, right?
[00:03:40.890] - Greg Merrilees A brochure website is really when it's all about you, like you just mentioned, but it's your products, your service, you're talking about how good your offer is or whatever it is, products, services, without thinking about what's in it for them, the audience member. It's really just flipping it from being all about you to all about how you can help them.
[00:03:59.850] - Jen Lehner Can you speak to that for a second? An example of what that looks like or sounds like?
[00:04:04.870] - Greg Merrilees Absolutely. There's a really good book, Building a Story Brand, which a lot of people know, by Donald Miller. What he says in that book is, be the guide, not the hero. When you think about the copy on your website, even if it's a personal brand website, you still want to be seen as somebody that's helpful, somebody that the messaging on your website is all about how you can help them because they only care about what's in it for them. They don't care about you initially. If you think the wording on your website, you can do a test. If you're writing a lot of I, me, we, verse you, your, et cetera, if you count more I's and we's than you's and yours, then the website's more about you and your offer rather than how you can help them. You need a little bit of eyes and wheeze, but you also need to make sure it's more about them. That's one little test you can do. But if you think about when somebody is on your website and they only care about what's in it for them, you want to let them know how they will benefit from your offer, how you can help them, and why they should choose you over your competitors.
[00:05:08.720] - Greg Merrilees There's another book, Robert Chaldini's Book Influence, which there's a lot of principles in that we put into every website. We can unpack that if you want. But one of them is the scarcity principle. Now, a lot of people think that's just about a limited time offer or a limited amount of seats, et cetera, a limited supply. But what he really means is, what can somebody get from you that's unique that they can't get from your competitors. When you think about the wording on your website, if you can address that, it's quite hard to find out what is unique about you because you might be selling something that is almost like a commodity that everybody else has. But if you interview your best customers, you'll find, or if you read somebody's thousand testimonials or whatever, you'll find the uniqueness amongst that. You can use AI tools to research these things to pull out that uniqueness. But you want to let people know what is unique about your offer and how they'll benefit from it.
[00:06:01.390] - Jen Lehner Yeah, and I'm not familiar with the book Influence. You said it was, right?
[00:06:04.830] - Greg Merrilees Yeah.
[00:06:05.390] - Jen Lehner But I am very familiar with Donald Miller's book, and I love it. One thing that he talks about that I love is, so what you just mentioned, that unique thing that makes you stand out. Donald Miller has that in the top third, and it's like a sentence, and it's very clear, and it's stripped away and it's stripped down as it can possibly be. So best peanuts in Georgia. I don't know where that came from, but I don't know anybody who's selling peanuts. But I mean, super simple with a very simple, clear, big, fat button call to action?
[00:06:47.050] - Greg Merrilees Yes.
[00:06:48.520] - Jen Lehner I'm no website guru, but I work with clients who need help with marketing and stuff. Just having a basic familiarity with those concepts, sometimes I will say, Well, First of all, read the book. Secondly, you want to think about this, having a very clear, concise thing about your unique thing at the top. Then one, think about what is the number one call to action that you want to put on this button. But that is so much harder than it sounds. It really is. I send them on their way, but I don't do it for them because I have a hard enough time figuring that out on my own website. How do you pick? What is the one button if you believe that, maybe you don't.
[00:07:33.390] - Greg Merrilees Yeah. Look, to a degree, it depends. If you're just talking about a homepage, it just needs to be a really clear and concise because clarity is everything on a website. A lot of people write, copy themselves, and it's usually they're too close to it, so they just use tech jargon or they try to be fancy with a little tagline that they might see Nike has or whatever. Just do it, or whatever. You know what I mean? But they're just being too clever. If you think about trying to be clever versus having clarity, clarity wins all the time. But it can be quite a process. That's why, obviously, you can use tools like ChatGPT or Claude or one of those other AI LLMs to do market research. But realistically, I believe you should be hiring a professional copywriter that will really dive deep into understanding you, your uniqueness, your business, your offer, your audience, their pain points, how you solve their problem. There will be a uniqueness in that, but it does take a little bit of research and diving deep. Yeah.
[00:08:32.090] - Jen Lehner I feel like as we grow, too, as business owners, entrepreneurs, the people who own the websites, we're not static individuals. My website, I think, still says I have three kids at home.
[00:08:49.260] - Jen Lehner Also, our philosophy's changed. I think sometimes it can be for marketers, what is it, the Carpenter's Son has no shoes? We're talking about all this stuff. What I'm trying to say, listeners, is please don't go look at my website. Let's talk about, how do you know when you're auditing someone's website, what jumps out at you is like, Oh, this is another one of those big stinkers that everybody makes or a lot of people make on their website. What are the must not do's?
[00:09:26.290] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, there are quite a few. And by the way, your website is not terrible. I just want to reiterate the fact that with a homepage, sure, you want to get across what's unique about you and what they can't get anywhere else. But then think about it as a gateway because you don't know the intent. You want to show people your offers. It might be your offers, and it might be a lead magnet, it might be a product, it might be your book or whatever the case is. You might have a bunch of various offers. All you really need to do with the homepage is clearly articulate what it is that you offer, back it up with social proof, and then have various options for them to get to whatever's right for their intent. For instance, we like to cater to cold, warm, and hot traffic. If you think about your homepage, it's fine as is. You've got the top nav, which is relatively clear as well. Then you have individual pages. There's a bunch of different URLs, which is probably a bit of a disconnect and probably a nightmare to manage. But there's probably a reason for that as well because you paid off for a membership platform, et cetera.
[00:10:31.780] - Greg Merrilees But the point is, on some of those landing pages for your VIPs and all the various things that you offer, you've got decent copy on there. To me, it's extremely important. You don't need all that stuff on your homepage. But when it comes to the individual landing pages for your offers, that's where it really counts. What we'll do if we ordered a website, sure, we're going to think about it from a conversion perspective, but we also think about how it will rank on It's Google, essentially. Forget Bing, so minor, but Google. Therefore, it's a bit of a mix between having enough content on the page so that Google can read it and understand what you're all about, versus just having the right amount of information to give clarity and to send people on a path that's right for them. But I would say on the individual landing pages, that's where you need more information. If we do order the website, we're going to think about the traffic, think about their intent, do Do you have a funnel for a cold visitor, a lead magnet of some sort to warm them up, something that you're going to offer extreme value for in return for an email address?
[00:11:39.850] - Greg Merrilees Then what are the steps off the back of that to help build trust in your brand? It's going to be different for every business type because some businesses, it might take five years before a lead becomes a client. They may have listened to your podcast, and then a few years later, they say, I found you on your podcast three years ago or whatever, and now I'm a client. The point is, you just want to lead with value. You want to warm people up, but you also want to make it easy for people that are ready to buy. Having your product pages, having your pricing, things like that, just giving them an easy pathway to pay your money, essentially. You don't want to have to be doing a whole bunch of unnecessary calls or back and forth or emails, et cetera, if you can just give them a clear pathway to buy from you. So think about what their intent is, have a pathway for cold and hot visitors.
[00:12:29.980] - Jen Lehner Oh, okay. I want to talk about this for a second. I went to traffic and conversion this past whenever it was, and Ryan Deiss got on the stage and he led with this thought. He said, Forget the funnel. Not to say that the funnels are dead, because of course they're not. We're going to have a funnel, we're going to have a sequence, all of that. But he said, qualify immediately. Ask your qualifying questions immediately, because some people don't need to be warmed up. They need your service now, they want it now, let them buy now, and go ahead and figure out who those people are. I love it. I've been chewing on this for maybe it's almost a year. I don't know when it was, but I don't know exactly how I would do that. But are you thinking about that? Are you doing that with some of your clients on your clients' pages? Can you give us a case study or an example?
[00:13:28.170] - Greg Merrilees Absolutely, yes. With a coach, for instance, if we don't know their intent, what we do want to do is, similar to what Ryan Diess said, you want to ask them some questions. What we all generally do is have a call to action on the homepage. Might be insert benefit to find out If you need help with X, whatever you do. There might be a sentence before it, and then a call to action relates to that sentence. But what you're trying to do is get them to answer some questions. They click a button, it'll be a pop up that'll ask a series of questions. You can use Typeform or these other tools, but you can also just code it directly onto your website, especially if you're using tools like Elementor. But the point is, more importantly, you want to ask some questions that are going to make them feel like you understand their situation. For instance, I'm just thinking about one case study. He's a love coach. He helps smart, successful women find love, find marriage and things like that. Is that Evan? Yes, exactly.
[00:14:25.110] - Jen Lehner I was in a program with Evan. We were in a mastermind together.
[00:14:28.420] - Greg Merrilees There you go. Okay, Very cool. I'll just go to his website so I can see the exact word and so I can let your listeners know what that is. But basically, it's just a simple button. It says, take the quiz to find love now. Then the first question, which best describes you? I've never I'm married or I'm divorced, separated or widowed. They select one of those options. This is their situation. Then next thing, we're talking about their problem. I don't know if you know the book Spin Selling by Neil Rackham, but it's an acronym, S-P-I-N. situation, problem, implication, need. This is what we're trying to get across.
[00:15:04.880] - Jen Lehner What was the I, implication?
[00:15:06.560] - Greg Merrilees Implication, yeah. What it means is... I'll just unpack a little bit. People want to know when they land on your website that you understand the situation they're in, this all comes from good copy and good design, and that you understand the problems that they face and the implications if they don't address the cause of the problem or if they don't try to solve it. N is the need, which is your solution to that problem, your unique solution. When you think about Donald Miller's building a story brand, it's the same framework, but it's told in a different way. It's more a story, SP7 framework. But what he's trying to say there is you are the guide, and then you're sending people They get a choice. They can either go this path where nothing will change if they just keep doing the same mistakes or they choose the wrong solution, or you go this path and here's how we can uniquely help you. It's just a similar outcome, but different framework. Basically, Evan asked, which best describes your current relationship situation? I'm taking a much-needed break. I'm dating but can't blah, blah, blah. I'm in a relationship, but I'm not completely happy.
[00:16:10.920] - Greg Merrilees Basically, you're just selecting all of these one, two, or three options. Then what is your age? It's got an age bracket. Then how important is it for you to solve this problem today? Then the last question, and all these things are just letting people feel like, Oh, wow, this guy is I need to have a solution that's specifically to my situation and my problem right now. He says, The last question, what do you need right now? I'm looking for love and want to work with Evan ASAP. I'm looking for free dating and relationship advice. Back to Ryan Diess, what we're trying to do here is for people that are ready to buy, we're going to give them a direct path. But people that aren't ready to buy, don't waste their time or yours by sending them to a free call. Just give them some free stuff. Based on what they selected previously, if they press the free thing, then they're going to get an eBook that's relevant to what they selected previously. It's quite smart. He said that this tripled his opt-in rates, having this little choose-up. Oh, wow.
[00:17:12.430] - Jen Lehner That's amazing.
[00:17:14.140] - Greg Merrilees Exactly. That's amazing.
[00:17:15.950] - Jen Lehner Yeah, that just reminded me of... I did do a qualifying thing with we have a really successful PDF that we run Facebook ads to. When I say successful, I mean, I get like a dollar leads. However, the problem is The title of the PDF is like, 160 Things You Can Outsource to a Virtual Assistant. The problem is that I would say 50% of the people that have been downloading this are virtual assistants. 100% not my client at all. I don't even need to be giving them a freebie. I don't need to be clogging up my convert kit with these people who are just going to cost me money. However, I figured out a way that I monetize that. What I I do is I send them to a client of mine who trains people how to be successful VAs. We have an affiliate situation set up. I'm not saying I'm making a ton of money off of this, but at least it's not completely wasted I've helped them because I'm sending them to a great resource. So, I forgot about that.
[00:18:21.640] - Greg Merrilees Yeah.
[00:18:22.240] - Jen Lehner Yeah, but we could do that right from the beginning on the website with a quiz or even with just some radio buttons, maybe, or are those a thing of the past. I don't even know what I'm talking about.
[00:18:31.400] - Greg Merrilees It can be a radio button for a choice. But yeah, I mean, look, these days you can pretty much custom design anything and it's quite easy to have a half-competent developer build it. Or you could use, like I said, a tight form to a third-party tool. But yeah, There's so many different ways you can segment people, essentially. But yeah, it's really meeting them where they're at, and then you just send them on a pathway that's right for them. I know another SEO expert has a similar thing. He has people that just want to learn from him. He wrote 1,000 pages on SEO.
[00:19:04.880] - Jen Lehner Wow. Did you read that book? I won't tell him. No.
[00:19:08.010] - Greg Merrilees He presents on stage all the time, and he hands it out, and people just hire him because they sound not- Who wrote it? Stefan Spencer.
[00:19:15.230] - Jen Lehner Okay, wow.
[00:19:16.090] - Greg Merrilees He co-authored it, but yeah, he's a very… I think there's three authors. But yeah, the point is, what we do on his website is he has a lot of people that just want to learn from him. But also his end goal is to have clients pay him thousands of dollars month for his services or for his agency services or his coaching, et cetera. We have a series of questions that's going to pretty much filter out the people that just want to learn from him, and he won't send them to book a call with him because they would be a waste of time. There's various ways you can filter out people, and it's just by asking a series of questions, similar to Ryan Diess's approach.
[00:19:52.400] - Jen Lehner Okay. All right. Now I have just a couple of random things floating around in my head that I would like to ask you about. What do you, Greg Marrilees, the website expert, do when you land on a website and you either accept all the cookies or do you mess around with it to actually... Because I don't even know. I'm like, I just accept all the cookies from all the places all the time. Do you do that, too?
[00:20:15.470] - Greg Merrilees I do the same, but then I do clear my cookies. If I get sick of seeing the same ads, I'll just clean my cookies once a month or something like that.
[00:20:22.820] - Jen Lehner Because I guess that's not going away anytime soon. We have to have that ugly thing on our website or we get in trouble with GDPR and all of that, right?
[00:20:31.120] - Greg Merrilees Exactly. You can get in trouble with so much more these days. If your website's not ADA compliant, for people that are visually impaired, there's a lot of things that you need to do to make sure people can navigate just with your keyboard, with their keyboard, I should say. A lot of people are getting sued because their website's not ADA compliant. Even smaller businesses these days, so you have to be quite careful.
[00:20:53.610] - Jen Lehner Have you had any clients get sued?
[00:20:55.650] - Greg Merrilees Yes, I have. Yes. We're not one of our clients.
[00:20:59.630] - Jen Lehner Does that mean everything needs to be like we need to have an audio version of everything? Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:05.730] - Greg Merrilees Look, it's the people that are visually impaired, they will have an audio tool that they'll use as a plugin across their browser so they can apply it to on your website. You don't need to put those extra things on your website, but you just need to make sure. Even little things like font size, some people may be able to see, but not that well. Also, the other thing is you might have a target audience that's over 40 and they may I have difficult reading small fonts, right? Like me. Yeah, me too. Just think about your audience and be as helpful as possible with font size and the contrast as well of your font. Make sure it's dark on light background, high contrast, as opposed to just mid-color on a dark background. That's the worst thing you could do. But yeah, there's a lot of little things like that that will help it be more usable.
[00:21:59.360] - Jen Lehner I was on a A strategy call the other day with my group, and one of my students shared with us a really horrifying thing that happened to her on her website. She had shared an image. I think she might have even shared it on social media in the fashion that one does share, like you repost or whatever. I mean, attribution was not taken away from the original share or even the creator. I think it said this person took this picture or whatever. I can't remember the name of this company, but man, the way that they're set up is like, you can't win because they fine you. It's not enough for you to take down whatever image. They find you anyway. For this one little image, she just had to pay like $300 or $400. But there are people that are getting chased down by this private company and being forced to pay $5, $10,000. Have you had any of your clients approach?
[00:22:57.400] - Greg Merrilees Absolutely, yes. We had a T-shirt design website, which is how we started in business. But yeah, and we had the same issue. We accidentally used an image in our blog post, and we had lawyers hunt us down, and they didn't stop. But we just ignored them and they went away. So you can't just do that.
[00:23:13.630] - Jen Lehner Okay. Well, there's one method.
[00:23:14.730] - Greg Merrilees That's their business model. They just hunt every website and they just put down this power of the law. I don't know. To me, you don't have to pay them, personally. You can get it.
[00:23:27.810] - Jen Lehner All right. Well, that's actually comforting and good to hear.
[00:23:30.000] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, just take it down.
[00:23:32.010] - Jen Lehner Yeah. Pop-ups or no pop-ups?
[00:23:34.300] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, great question. So pop-ups are generally annoying if when you first land on somebody's website, there's a pop-up. It's like, Well, get out of my face. I don't even know what you offer.
[00:23:45.080] - Jen Lehner All right. Right.
[00:23:47.040] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, so it's super annoying. However, they kept quite effective if they're triggered by one of three methods. So one, the time on the website or web page. So it might be after three minutes, you're going to have a pop-up. It depends what's in the pop-up. It needs to be something of value, usually a lead magnet of some sort, something free in return for an email. That's one trigger. The other trigger would be how far they've scrolled on the page. If it's a longish page, and let's say it's a landing page for one of your offers and they haven't taken action, they've gone past, they read the call to action, the price, and whatever, and they're reading FAQs, and then they're just sitting there for a while, then you can just literally, by the time they get to the bottom of the page, if they haven't taken action, then offer something that's relevant to that offer, but it's like a free version. It needs to be relevant and helpful, essentially. Then the third one will be an exit intent. If people go to leave your website and they haven't taken action, then have triggered by them, hovering over the top couple of pixels, have the pop-up pop-up then.
[00:24:49.320] - Greg Merrilees It's just one last chance to try and get their email. Now, those things do work that you will build your email list by doing that, but just don't ruin brand integrity by having them pop up too early. That's That's the only issue.
[00:25:01.850] - Jen Lehner Okay. Videos autoplay or no?
[00:25:05.200] - Greg Merrilees Definitely not. So proven conversion killer. They're up there with image sliders, with crazy parallax effects where as you're scrolling, things move around everywhere. It's just so confusing. The thing that's most important on a website, more so than the design, is the copyright. If you have a moving background, like an image slide or a moving video, it's too distracting. It will slow down the website as well, which affects your SEO and makes it annoying for people. There's lots of reasons to never use auto play background. But have video. Video is great, but just not auto play.
[00:25:41.960] - Jen Lehner I love that case study that you shared about Evan and how he tripled his leads. It was his leads, right? Tripled his opt-ins. His opt-ins, yeah. Do you have any other little goody? I love stories like that, where you made a little tweak or you did something and then they saw huge results. Can you share one or two of those with us? Not to put you on the spot.
[00:26:01.500] - Greg Merrilees No, that's okay. A lot of the time, it's more about the strategy involved. Also, we do full redesign. Before we do a full redesign, we need to really understand the business we do dive deep, and it's a big process for that. But it's really just, I would say, normally people not have in some lead magnet that then has a next step. Just offering something on the thank you page can be a huge Which conversion boosted for your next thing. Usually people just have download free offer, free thing, whatever. They go to thank you page, thanks for downloading it, check your email in a line of text. But if you have a face-to-camera video, they're in the habit of saying yes. If you offer something else on the page and in the video, clearly describe what that next offer is and let them know what the benefits of that offer are. Might be a free call after that, whatever it is. Just depends what your funnel and offer is. But the point is, if you do that, then you're far more likely to get people to take that next step. For us, we just have, say, it might be a quiz, et cetera, and then we'll take people to a webinar, an evergreen webinar.
[00:27:11.610] - Greg Merrilees They can either watch it then or later. It's up to them. But we do get people that watch that, and then we do get people that fill out, get a quote form after that, basically. That's a case study from us. It's worked for us, but it also works for our clients.
[00:27:26.380] - Jen Lehner I want to take a big highlighter pen, and we're going to highlight that because I also see that as such a wasted opportunity. I always say, never squander the thank you page. It's like you bring someone into your store. Let's say you have a little boutique on Main Street and they come in the door, then you just slam the door in their face. They come in and you just walk away and you go off to the back room. It's like they've come into your zone and now they're here and now you have one absolute opportunity. After that, we don't know if they're going to open up your download. We don't know if they're going to open up your email. But we know if they opt in, the very next thing that happens is something comes up on the page. You can grab them with some special offer that maybe has a countdown Timer on it or whatever. Yeah, that's true.
[00:28:12.110] - Greg Merrilees Absolutely. That can definitely work very well on the thank you page, a countdown Timer for a limited time offer. Just on that, if they do opt in for the PDF, for instance, or a downloadable, don't give them that on the thank you page. Just let them know in the video, it's going to be e-mailed to you in 15 minutes. Meanwhile, watch this video and blah, blah, blah.
[00:28:29.940] - Jen Lehner Yes. Now, if somebody were to interview a web designer, and I don't know why they would when they can just go to your page, because really, you do small jobs all the way up to very fancy jobs. You have something for everyone.
[00:28:47.220] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. We can do a single page. We can do branding. Yeah, whatever's needed.
[00:28:52.350] - Jen Lehner The whole thing. You have copywriters?
[00:28:54.740] - Greg Merrilees No, we work with copywriting partners, so we work very closely with them that have the methodology that we use.
[00:29:02.100] - Jen Lehner All right. You have the black book of copywriters to hook us up with the people who have the magical words. Okay, so you pretty much do it all. Again, I don't know why anybody would go anywhere else, but let's say that they did. Do you have three questions they should ask or things they should look for before they give a deposit or hand over any money?
[00:29:21.790] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, absolutely. Okay, number one, you want to have a look at their folio. You want to make sure their folio resonates with you as far as the look and feel. Two, have a look at if they with similar type of businesses that you are. If not, it doesn't mean they can't. It's more likely that they're going to get a good result. The next thing is look at all their results and case studies and things like that, because that will tell the true picture of what the Let's say if you look at a case study, a good case study will show what their situation was like before they came to you, how you helped them, what their problems were, how you actually helped them, and then what the results were. If you can read a lot of case studies and results from From a range of businesses and a range of industries, especially yours, there's a good chance that you are going to get a good result as well. Now, for us, we offer unlimited design revisions because we understand that design is subjective. Sure, we're going to use all of the right conversion elements, but at the same time, we want you to love the design.
[00:30:21.810] - Jen Lehner I didn't know that. That really set you apart because I know that in so many contracts when you work with a web designer, they're like, four revisions. That's It's stressful because you feel like it's just stressful. I think it's stressful for both parties. Both parties have to really nail it, and you only get four tries. Then what? Because I don't add a code.
[00:30:45.170] - Greg Merrilees Exactly.
[00:30:45.780] - Jen Lehner I might have a flashing light that I don't like anymore, and you're going to say, Sorry. I mean, you're not going to because you don't operate that way. But that's a very important thing to consider.
[00:30:57.010] - Greg Merrilees Yeah. Ask them, How many revisions do you get? If it's not unlimited, just dive a little deeper and just make sure you're comfortable and make sure you like them as well as a person. Make sure they're going to be approachable as well throughout the process. You want to make sure that they don't just ghost you after you pay them.
[00:31:16.880] - Jen Lehner I like to work with someone who's seasoned and has been at it a while, and you for sure are that. Speaking of, so I want to transition into this next part of the interview which is about you as an entrepreneur. Also, I want to talk a little bit about the systems that you use in your own business because we talk a lot about systems a lot. Now, you as an entrepreneur, what I am curious about is, as I mentioned in the intro, you have 28 folks that you work with. In what year did you start the website end of your business?
[00:31:52.760] - Greg Merrilees Sorry, 2012.
[00:31:56.270] - Jen Lehner Okay, so you've been at it a while. How in the world Are you managing all these people, dealing with major disruption in terms of AI and having to just be ready to just be on your toes and still drum up business and do all your marketing and all of that? How are you doing all of that and you're not burned out? Maybe you are burned out. I don't know. I'm assuming you're not, though, because you look very fresh and well.
[00:32:25.410] - Greg Merrilees Thank you. Well, I'm 53 years old, and A lot of people say I don't look that. But yeah, the point is- Not at all. You're going to love this answer because you're a coach, right? I hired a coach. We were T-shirt designers from… I've had the business since the year 2000. For the first 12 years, we designed T-shirts, and then the clothing industry shifted and the industry went vertical, which just means they cut out the middleman wholesalers and they went and directed to China themselves, basically. Our clients were the wholesalers, and so they were dropping like flies. I found podcasts, and podcasts pretty much saved my business. Basically, there were two business coaches that said their logos sucked on their podcast. I saw it as an opportunity to design them a new logo and had T-shirt design experience, so made it look really cool on a T-shirt. And then one was for Ezra Firestone from smartmarketer. Com, the other one was James Schramko. James Schramko. Yeah, exactly.
[00:33:26.450] - Jen Lehner Yeah, I love him.
[00:33:28.030] - Greg Merrilees I ended up hiring James James as my coach. And then Ezra white-labeled us to do all of his clients' e-commerce websites, and we learned a lot there. But yeah, so the point is, I hired James as my coach for the next... Up until today, right? So he taught me every Everything from how to grow a team, how to speak from stage. I spoke on Ezra's stage in San Diego. I spoke on James's stage. Congratulations. Yeah, thanks. Just the word just spread, and we still get leads from that today. But that's how we ended up designing for Sylvester Stallone through somebody that saw us in the audience that knew his marketing department. What?
[00:34:06.340] - Jen Lehner Rocky Balboa? Oh, my gosh. You could just quit everything you're doing and be like, I did it. I won. I mean, Rocky, seriously.
[00:34:16.180] - Greg Merrilees That's true. Hiring James as my business coach and learning so much from Ezra as well, Ezra also was coached by James. James, at the time, he surfs three times a day. He had 90 of people on his team, and he just works from home. I said, I want to learn how to do that. He showed me everything there was to know just one step at a time. He's very much… He'll simplify everything. Every week, we jump on a call, What's your biggest challenge? Okay, let's talk through that. Okay, here's the one thing I'm going to do each week. It's just gradually, step by step by step, grew a team, got all of our marketing out there, and just pretty much put myself out there more and gradually implemented systems. I guess that's evolved over the years and the tools that we've used have evolved. Our main system tool is ClickUp for project management. Then having the right structure of team in place, we've got a general manager. I do only work 25 hours a week, so it's pretty good. That's because I've got an amazing general manager. She was actually my executive assistant. We got drunk at a Christmas party one year.
[00:35:26.800] - Greg Merrilees She said, I want to be a general manager. She just promoted herself Which was awesome.
[00:35:30.450] - Jen Lehner I love that. I love that. That's fantastic.
[00:35:35.390] - Greg Merrilees She's been with us just since started COVID, basically. Then we use ClickUp and we use ActiveCampaign, and we have a lot of automation. Based on how people come into our world, whether it's through a referral, whether it's through, it might be a website footer link, it might be through one of our lead magnus, one of our offer pages. There's a bunch of different ways. We have automation based on just Just making sure we never lose a lead. We've got Sally, my general manager, has her own assistance as well that when this automation is triggered, we don't do automated email follow-ups for leads, but we have an EA go in to reply to the chain of the thread of emails that we've had communication with that client with, and just make sure we're always personal with our approach and our replies. But yeah, everything has a system and automation, but it's mainly through active campaign which has really good lead flow and pipelines. Then we have ClickUp for all of our project management, and we use Help Scout for our client interface. We have a VA for our design team and one for our dev team.
[00:36:45.230] - Greg Merrilees There's just a lot that goes into it.
[00:36:47.380] - Jen Lehner I'm so glad you're talking about the systems because as I told you just before we went live was that I wanted to pick your brain a little bit just because you're clearly dialed in on all your systems. For the I just would share with you that every part of the process of scheduling this podcast, even though I am the person hosting it, I felt very much like my hand was being held by Greg because you have this podcast guesting. You have this so dialed in because you're clearly, I can go and look and see that you've been on a million podcasts, and you have made sure that the interviewer has everything that they need from you. Thank you. And then some. So I was like, wow, well, we talk a lot about systems on this podcast. And so I wanted to ask you if you had a favorite little automation or just anything you might want to share with us that happens on the back-end?
[00:37:47.090] - Greg Merrilees Well, I try not to get involved too much. I don't really understand.
[00:37:51.530] - Jen Lehner Sally does all of that. Good. Well, that's the right answer, actually. That's what a front-row entrepreneur should say.
[00:37:58.160] - Greg Merrilees Got it. Yeah. Well, a lot I love the book and the podcast, COO Alliance. What's his name? Cameron Herold. Cameron Herold, yeah. He's got an amazing podcast. He pretty much says, and it's all for COOs, second in charge, what he calls them. But really, you have the CEO who's the visionary, but they shouldn't be... They're not really an implementer. You need somebody that's the yin and yang, the balance of that. That's what Sally is for me. I'm the visionary. I do all the stuff to get the business in, essentially. Then once we get the business, she does all the doing all the operations. I don't really understand the system, so I just know they work.
[00:38:38.000] - Jen Lehner I love that. That's the greatest answer. Also, you've given us so many great resources and books and podcasts, so we'll make sure I don't have all of that linked up in the show notes. So thanks for that. My audience, they're big-time readers and big-time podcast listeners. Excellent. All right. I don't know if you do this every year, but I remember one year, you did a blog post that was at the end of the year, and it was like website trends to look out for for 2022 or whatever. Do you do that every year?
[00:39:09.660] - Greg Merrilees We do. Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:39:11.340] - Jen Lehner Well, I shared it as a link in my newsletter as favorite things or something. Thank you. I got so much feedback. Everybody loved it. Since we're headed in already, I can't believe it, into 2025, what are some trends you think we should be looking out for?
[00:39:29.340] - Greg Merrilees Yeah, Absolutely. Look, I would say design trends in general, most of them are just created because designers get bored. Obviously, business want to always look like they've got the latest website, right? Not everybody. But just be careful because a lot of them will hurt conversions. We talked We had before where there's parallax effects and animation and even dark mode. A lot of websites want dark background. Well, that's actually a conversion killer as well. But just using things that are too distracting really may hurt your conversion. Just be careful. Don't have too much of that fancy stuff. A little bit is okay where it's a little bit interactive, but not too much. Just think about the user experience. I think that's important. You can experiment with color and there's a lot of vivid gradients and innovative typeface, large fonts, probably less font, less word in these days since it'll be more of a trend just because people just scan websites. They haven't really got the time to read everything. But I would say on important landing pages, you still need a lot of copy. But on most pages, you don't need as much copy as you used to have.
[00:40:32.650] - Greg Merrilees But it makes copywriting a lot harder because it has to be more concise and more clear. But I would say in general, trends that are, let's say 25 and beyond, I would say AI is definitely a trend. Now, AI tools can actually build an entire website. We've had our website ripped off up to over 20 times, I would say in the last year and a half. There's AI tools that can just grab your entire website and rebuild the whole thing exactly as is. We've seen that and we've had to send many cease and desist letters lately.
[00:41:04.140] - Jen Lehner Oh, my goodness.
[00:41:05.190] - Greg Merrilees Therefore, to beat that, try and think more about personalization. Have more brand personality in your voice and your look and feel that is unique to your business and your offer. Try not to be like everybody else. Just be more personal. Also, there are tools that can help with this. If you have a podcast and you might have 500 episodes or whatever, you can use an AI bot where people can ask a question to your bot, and Joe does this, Joe from Hustle and Flowchart podcast, where an AI bot will... He calls it AI Joe. You can ask it whatever question, and then it will give you an answer based on all of the content that he's got in his podcast. That's really helpful for the listener or for the viewer on the website. That's one thing. There's another tool called Video Ask, which is an interactive video tool where you just do some pre-recorded videos or you can use AI tools to create videos from your avatar. But the point is, people ask questions, you answer them, and you can send them in the right direction based on where they want to go, essentially. Similar to that, then we talked about on Evan, but this is a little bit deeper and you're having a video conversation with them.
[00:42:13.630] - Greg Merrilees I think that's important. But yeah, as far as, and like I said, we touched on the ADA compliant thing, I think that's important. Just really focus on usability and make sure it's easy for people to get what they want. Then I would say as well, think of your website as something that's never finished. You always want to update it and don't just get stuck on one trend and think it's the latest look and feel because it will be outdated in a year or two, and then you have to keep chasing new trends. Don't chase new trends all the time. But basically, just keep it fresh. You might just think about changing little parts of the website, but always add social proof. Every time you get new testimonials, put them on your website. Your offer has generally changed. Just update your photos, videos, and things like that as well. Just keep your website fresh in the eyes of your visitors. Don't follow trends or you'll have to change it completely every couple of years.
[00:43:09.840] - Jen Lehner Great advice. Thank you. I think we all needed those reminders. Cool. Well, listeners, if you want to audit your website yourself, Greg was kind enough to create a special link just for the listeners of the Front Row Entrepreneur podcast. I told you this man has got it together. Go to studio1design.com, and that's a design singular, not with an S, studio1design.com/jen. It's this awesome, I almost hesitate to call it a quiz. It really is more of an audit. It's not a cutesy little quiz that marketers use. It's like a legit information gathering tool. Then it's going to give you something really cool at the end. He's got other goodies on his website as well.
[00:44:00.630] - Greg Merrilees Yeah.
[00:44:01.350] - Jen Lehner Did you want to add anything to that?
[00:44:02.930] - Greg Merrilees Yes. It's going to show you 50 things across six vital areas of your website. It's just asking you a question, do you have this? Yes or no? Yes or no? At the end, you'll get a score out of 50. Most websites have a score of about 15. If you're doing better than that, then you're doing well. But it'll also show you the opportunity by all the things that you don't have that you can start implementing over time yourself. It'll just show you what's missing to help it boost its conversions.
[00:44:30.410] - Jen Lehner Love it. So generous. Thank you so much. You're welcome on this show anytime. We're going to have to have you back, at least, for sure, if not sooner next year, so we can talk about how things have changed. It'll be so interesting to see. Let's bookmark this and come back in in about a year.
[00:44:48.330] - Greg Merrilees Thank you so much, Jen. It's been a great interview, and I really enjoyed chatting with you. Thanks so much.
[00:44:53.290] - Jen Lehner Okay, take care.
