Dun, dun, dun…it’s the piece that easily triggers frustration and can keep your perfectly positioned offer from ever achieving true lift off. 

That’s right, in this episode of Compel & Convert, we’re talking about tech.

Your “tech stack” is online business lingo for the group of software tools you’ll use to take someone through your sales funnel and deliver your digital product.  

And while this can be a complex bit of the puzzle to configure, my goal is that once you’ve listened to this episode, we’ll have knocked out tech intimidation so you can move forward with getting your tech set up with confidence and for success.

In this episode, you’ll learn: 

• The core four functions you need your tech stack to be able to deliver 
• The one tool that is non-negotiable for every business owner to have, and it’s the one you need to have set-up asap
• Considerations to make when choosing which software platforms are going to be the best fit for you, your business, and your needs 
• My top tech tools and platforms recommendations plus my number one go-to recommendation for keeping all your tech under one platform for ultimate simplicity and ease

Resources and Tools mentioned in this episode: 

• My number one recommendation for an all-in-one solution for email, sales page builder, checkout pages and product/membership hosting – FG Funnels (affiliate link)*
• Email service providers – Flodesk (affiliate link), ConvertKit (affiliate link), and FG Mail (inside of FG Funnels)
• Recommended Sales Page Builder – FG Funnels (affiliate link) or via your website 
• Checkout/Cart Tool Solutions – Thrivecart and SamCart 
• Product Hosting Platforms – Teachery (affiliate link) and MemberVault 
• Third party tech connection and automation tools – Zapier and IFTTT (If This Then That)

*In this episode, I mention that if you sign up for a plan with FG Funnels using my affiliate link, I will provide a complimentary funnel audit (this audit can be of your overall funnel plan and messaging points prior to building it, or it can be an audit of your already built funnel and will include an overview of the funnel flow and key messaging throughout. To redeem this offer (a $250 value), click here to send me a message via my contact page and we’ll get your audit coordinated!

Read the Transcript for Season 1, Episode 8 –  Building an Ideal Tech Stack for Your Funnel

Well, hey there, podcast listener. So happy to have you here with me for episode eight of season one. We’re getting to the end here. Last few episodes kind of wrapping up this whole process of building out a funnel for either a digital product or mainly digital product. That’s really what we’ve been focusing on throughout this whole season.

But I mean, you can build a funnel around anything and everything like we’ve already talked about. But today I want to talk about and stick with me here because this is the not fun part. This is the part that will trip you up if you let it. But it doesn’t have to. I think the reason it trips most people up is because it feels like a lot and it can be a lot.

But I’m going to give you some solutions that hopefully make it a little bit more bearable. And I’m talking about the tech. So like, raise your hand, obviously, like, not if you’re driving, but raise your hand if you have said, I’m not a techie person or I’m not good with tech, something about putting yourself down around the fact that tech is hard, you’re not alone. I consider myself a techy person, and there are still things that around tech that I go, this is too hard. I can’t do this.

And I’m just going to give you a little bit of perspective here. As someone who has a three and a half year old who I’m not quite sure where he picked this up. Maybe it’s just a natural thing we as humans do, or maybe he’s just more inclined to do it. But sometimes he will say, I can’t do it, and he wants me to come and immediately help him. And I’m very much the type of parent where I’m like, no, let’s give it a good try first before I swoop in and help you.

And he will get impatient and say, I can’t do it. And oftentimes, if I can keep him calm enough and kind of guide through step by step, break the steps down of whatever it is he’s trying to do, whether it’s like climbing something at the playground or putting a thing of Legos together. This happened just the other day. So this is why this example is at the top of my mind. We were playing with his dinosaur toys and he couldn’t get the top of a tree onto the tree trunk, these two pieces that fit together.

And he’s going, I can’t do it. And I’m like, well, I know you can do it because one, you have the capability to do it. You do it with other things. And also, I’ve seen you do it before. So you’ve done hard things before.

You can do them again. So we had to take deep breaths, really remind ourselves to be patient, both of us, and break down the steps one by one. How do we tackle this? To get to our final solution. So that’s what I’m going to do for you today.

I’m going to walk you through all the tech pieces. I want you to try to not get too overwhelmed as I dive into it all because I’m going to give you the solution that I feel helps condense a lot of these things to make it a lot easier. But you still need to know all of their individual parts. So let’s dive in now. Well, before we dive in, let me backtrack.

Back in episode two, I talked about the five key components that you need with the sales funnel. It included, like your lead page where people opt in, they get on your email list includes your sales page, check out page, thank you page, all these things that you need in your funnel with all of those key components. So if you haven’t listened to episode two, go back and give that a listen. 

You will need a tool, a tech tool to support you in bringing that piece of the funnel to life. Now, I highly encourage you to try to utilize tools that are best suited to that specific role, as well as finding tools that are a more comprehensive solution and are built to be a comprehensive solution.

So this will make more sense as I dive into each thing. All right, first thing you need. And this is a bottom like baseline business tool that you need, not just for funnels. Anybody needs this. You need an email service provider.

So your email service provider is the tech solution that hosts your email list, allows you to send out newsletters, campaigns, sequences. You need some kind of email service provider. There are literally hundreds of email service providers out there. I’ll give you a few that I’ve used that I like. Now, ConvertKit is one that’s very popular.

Personally, I’m starting to not fall in love with ConvertKit as much anymore. They’ve made some moves as a business in the last year or two. That to me, I think their tool has become a little more clunky. However, it’s still pretty easy to use and it serves a good purpose. It allows you to host a landing page that then leads to your email list.

You can create automated email sequence, funnels, all those type of things inside of Convert kit. So even though it’s not like my go to favorite option anymore, it’s still a really solid option, especially if you are starting a new branch as a digital business owner or digital product builder. And maybe you want to keep a separate email list from your Brick and Mortar. Now let me add that as a small caveat. If you are a spa owner, yoga studio owner, wellness studio owner, you have a Brick and Mortar type of location.

If you are planning to offer some sort of digital product or online business component that is separate, like, let’s say you want to get into education and consulting, you want to get into being a course provider. You want to create training courses, whatever it is that you’re wanting to the ebooks or workshops you’re wanting to provide. If they are in essence a secondary brand and business, you do not want to commingle your email list with Brick and Mortar. That’s not to say that you may not end up marketing to your email list that you’ve built for your Brick and Mortar. Maybe you’re creating.

I’m just going to say I’m going to go with my standby example here. I’ve used it in the past episodes. Let’s say you’re a Gua Sha expert. You want to create an online course, but you don’t want it to detract from your  Brick and Mortar. You don’t want to confuse people.

So you’re creating your presence as a Gua Sha expert separately from your Brick and Mortar. That’s not to say you can’t market whatever digital products you’re creating as a Gua Sha expert or the tools that you’ll be selling, say via your new brand to your email list for your Brick and Mortar. 

But you will still want to keep those email lists separate because you are hoping to expand into a market that is not in your immediate vicinity. So keep in mind, like where you’re building your real estate, so to speak, and you want to keep that real estate separate. So you might be using something like Vagaro or Mind Body or there’s one I think called Mint or something like that.

You might be using your booking software as an email software as well. For your Brick and Mortar, I would recommend having an email service provider that caters specifically to online style businesses. And that’s where ConvertKit is a great one. Clavio is a great option that is a little bit more geared towards ecommerce, and you will see that they really speak to the ecommerce type of customer on their sales pages. So ConvertKit really speaks to the digital product creator.

And Clavia really speaks to the e commerce the ecommerce shop builder, but they still work really well. Omniscient is another great one for both e commerce sellers and digital products sellers. And I’m trying to think of one other. I like Flow Desk a lot. Flow Desk is a little bit more on the simple side.

However, I think they have a very unique platform in the sense that they’re very design focused. So if visuals are a really big piece of your brand that you want to play into, like really beautiful imagery and your more visual minded person, Flow Desk might be a good option to check out as well. 

And with all of those email service providers, you have the ability to create landing pages, get people onto your email list. You have the ability to create embedded, opt in forms, pop up forms, all these things that can get people onto your list. Okay, so that’s the first tool you need.

The second tool you need is something to host your sales pages or your webinar pages, whatever main pages you’re using to sell your product. Now this is where you could use an extra tool if you want to. Or you could use your existing website. 

If you say have a website made with Squarespace, you can host a sales page on Squarespace and then connect all of your call to action buttons to the next tool that I’m going to cover on our list. But nothing says that you need an individual sales page tool.

As long as you have the ability to create some sort of a page where you can insert the information, you can design it in the style of a sales page. I find that pretty much all website builders these days do have the ability to create a sales page in one way, shape or form. 

If you are wanting to keep things as lean as possible. Squarespace is a great website host to be able to build out sales pages on Show. It is another great website platform, not as popularly used as square space, but actually this is what my website is hosted on and I love Show.

It it’s a little more of a learning curve than Squarespace, but it’s a different type of learning curve. So you could use your website. But there’s also sales page building tools and these typically also are called funnel building tools. And I’m going to hold on my recommendation there because I want to give you kind of my number one top recommendation at the end. So kind of put a pin in that and let’s move on to the next piece.

The next piece is a payment processor. So you need some sort of way to collect payments from your customers, right? So just like how you would use Vagaro as a booking software or My Body as a booking software. And maybe you even use those platforms to sell some of your retail products in your Brick and Mortar store. You need something that is going to allow you to collect payment online.

So this could be Square Spaces ecommerce solution. You would just need to have that level of the plan. You could also sign up for a cart what’s called like a cart builder or a payment processor software. So Thrive Cart is a really great one. Thrive Cart also allows you to build some sales pages, however not totally in love with their sales pages.

And this kind of goes into what I mentioned at the beginning, which is you want to find tools that are either fully robust and really are meant to handle kind of everything and that is their sole focus, like a funnel building platform that encompasses all these things or when you’re kind of piecing together different tools. 

Even though Thrive Cart can do sales pages, if I had a Squarespace website and I was using Thrive Cart as my cart payment processor tool, I would still opt to build my sales page on Squarespace versus the simple sales pages they have through Thrive card, because I know that I can create a better designed sales page via Square space. Does that make sense? Hopefully it does. All that to say, just because a tool does do something doesn’t mean that that is the best tool to do it with.

And that’s because even with the name like Thrive Cart, you know that their main focus of their software is providing cart checkout pages, not sales pages. So you want to have some way to collect payment that can be through a tool like Thrive. Cart. Sam Cart is another one, and I love Thrivecart. I’ve had Thrivecart in the past and great software.

Then there’s also simple PayPal checkout pages. Don’t recommend doing that solely because PayPal gets a little iffy with people declining charges. And PayPal is notorious for siding with the buyer. So you could be someone who’s selling digital products. Someone knew darn well and good what they were buying.

But then in their PayPal portal they decide to say, oh, this was a fraudulent charge, and then as the creator, you kind of get screwed. So I don’t love PayPal for that way. However, having a PayPal option is really powerful and it does help with your conversion. So I prefer to use some sort of a payment gateway that is not exclusively PayPal, but something that includes PayPal. So Shopify also has PayPal options, and their Cart processor is one of the most well known out there.

And of course that’s built into more of an e commerce solution. But you can absolutely sell digital products via a Shopify site. I will also mention that a lot of times your product hosting site, which I’ll get to in a minute, I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. That’s kind of the next piece. Well, let’s just go ahead and get into it.

So the next thing that you need in terms of your tech stack is your product hosting platform. So whatever platform is going to actually deliver the product for you, that is going to be your hosting platform. Now, depending on what type of product you are selling, this will also go into what tech you’re going to use. So for instance, with Shopify, you have the ability to run payments. You can do credit card PayPal after pay, where you can actually split up payments into payment plans.

And Shopify can then deliver files or deliver things like that. I’m thinking more along the lines of if you have ebooks that you’re selling, Shopify can be a good one. If you are selling like an online course or a membership, you want to look into a product hosting platform that is built specifically for that style of product. So if you are looking to do like ebooks and digital courses and a workshop, go with something that’s going to give you a greater range than just Shopify. Okay?

Because Shopify is really meant for more physical product e commerce type of selling versus digital product selling. So that’s my caveat there. However, a lot of these product hosting platforms include payment processors and payment pages that you can use. So places like Member Vault great for memberships, which a lot of times the names of these tech companies will give you a clue as to what it is that they do best. So Member Vault is great for memberships.

They also are great for digital courses as well. I love Teacher. Teacher is a bit of a smaller platform, not as widely known, but the two people who create and own and operate Tea Tree, they are fantastic people. I just really trust them and love their platform. That’s a great one for people who are not looking for a super robust solution and want an easy to navigate platform to sell their digital products, then trying to think of some other ones there’s Kajabi.

I don’t totally love Kajabi. This is where you need to when you’re testing out tools for your tech stack. Almost all of these softwares have like two week trial periods. I highly encourage you to go in and sign up for a number of free trials so that you can actually see what these platforms look like on the back end. To me, I find Kajabi very confusing.

I prefer another platform that is oftentimes compared to Kajabi is called Thinkific. I much prefer Thinkific or Member Vault compared to Kajabi, but Kajabi is an industry leader. You’ll hear about it a lot and it’s because they were one of the first bigger software platforms and they have a lot more like PR behind them. I just personally find their platform hard for my brain to wrap around. I find other platforms to be easier, but that’s just me.

This is where you need to go in and you need to do your own research in terms of what is going to be the best solution for you. Okay, now here’s where I’m already feeling the overwhelmed. I’m feeling the overwhelmed just talking through all these things. So I’m trying to put myself in your shoes here because I actually know all this tech very well and it is still a lot for me to sift through. So let me just review those four things real quick.

You need that email service provider software. Everybody needs this. This is going to give you the ability to host your email list and have opt in and landing pages and opt in forms throughout your site. You need something to host your sales pages and your webinar pages. This can be your website does not necessarily need to be an outside tool.

You need a payment processor. Again, could be included in your website plan if you’re on a site like Square Space that has an ecommerce type of option to it. But oftentimes you will need something else that acts as a payment processor that you can connect your stripe to oftentimes. This can be found in the fourth tech piece of your stack, the product Hosting platform. So one question you might be asking yourself is, well, if I have a product hosting platform that offers a payment processor, why would I want to have one that’s separate?

Certain platforms do lend themselves to having nicer design that is more conversion focused. So for instance, you may say to yourself, OK, I looked in the Member Vault. I really like the way it looks. It makes sense to me. I think it looks really good.

Their payment pages aren’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re also not super optimized. Thrive Cart has definitely got more conversion friendly checkout page designs. I couldn’t tell you why. It’s almost like you can’t have the best of everything, although you can stick around until the end when I give you my number one solution. But it is hard to find everything all in one.

Okay, so that’s why you might want separate tools for all these things. It just depends on your preference. You also have to think about how lean do you want to run your business? How much overhead do you want? The more tools and subscriptions you sign up for, the more overhead you have.

So when you can combine some of these tools together, the easier it is. Also that eliminates the potential addition that you might need, which is an automation or tech connector. So the more tools that you have in play in your tech stack to make your funnel work, the more you have to piece those tools together to get them to talk to each other. Okay, so let me run you through.

I’ll run you through an example of when I ran my business in a little bit of a duck taped fashion, which it wasn’t bad. It worked. It was a lot more complicated than it probably needed to be. But this also felt like the best way forward that I had at the time. Now that has changed with my go to tool.

But I’ll tell you what I did in the past. So in the past I used ConvertKit as my email service provider. I used their landing pages to get people onto my list like freebie sign ups and opt in forms on my website and my blog posts and pop ups, things like that. Then from Convert kit, I was able to create automated email nurture sequences. And when I was launching a product, I would simply link to my sales page.

I would use my Squarespace website as my sales page host. So I had a digital product built out the sales page on Square Space, which I was already paying for. So as of at this point in the funnel, I’ve got ConvertKit, which I needed to have anyways to be able to build my email list. And then I had Squarespace, my website host, also a tool that I needed anyways. Then came in the piece of the payment processor I had my product hosting platform.

I used Teachery. I still use Teachery for some things. I didn’t love their payment pages for the reasons I just mentioned. They just weren’t super optimized, not as conversion friendly as other payment processors I had seen. They also didn’t offer a PayPal option.

I wanted that option. So I went ahead and got Thrive Cart. So the way I connected all these things was if you signed up for my Opt-in page, you then got an automated sequence that would take you to a sales page on my website. And all the call to action/buy now buttons on my sales page led to my Thrive Cart Checkout page. Now, from my Thrive Cart Checkout page, I needed the ability to get people into my digital course, which was hosted on Teacher.

And this is where I had to duct tape the two tools together because Thrive Cart and Tea Tree are two different tools that do not naturally talk to each other. So I had to use a third party tool called Zapier to connect the two. 

And essentially what Zapier does is it says anytime that someone signs up for this product via Thrive Cart, they get added to this product via Teachery. So you’re adding in another tool that just helps connect your two different tools. It’s a good thing Zapier exists because it gives you lots of options, but it’s also just like one more layer to the pie.

You know, the trifle. I always think of that Friends episode if you’re a Friends fan, where like, Rachel gets the two recipes confused and builds like half of a dessert trifle and then half of a Shepherd’s pie. And it’s the most disgusting trifle ever. But example aside, it just creates a lot of layers that then can get a little bit more complicated than they need to be. Okay, that is kind of the full rundown of the most essential type of tech stack that you need to make a funnel work.

Now, here’s where I’m going to kind of like, let’s put all that overwhelm and all of that head spinning to the side if your head feels like it’s going to explode. Here’s the solution. A funnel building platform. Funnel building platforms take care of all of these elements for you. They allow you to build an opt in pages that build your email list.

They allow you to build out sales and funnel pages webinar pages. They also host your payment checkout forms. And they also some of them. Not all of them do it well. We’ll also host your product.

Now, if you’re trying to simplify as much as possible, but you still have this product hosting platform you really prefer because it’s so hard to find an all in one tool, you will often find that using a funnel building platform and then a product hosting platform are the two tools that make sense for you. But if you’re in the name of the game of simplicity and keeping everything under one roof, I prefer FG Funnels. FG standing for Funnel Gorgeous. Funnel Gorgeous. I know.

I’ve mentioned them in past episodes. I’m a certified master marketer through their certification program. I cannot recommend them highly enough. FG Funnels is their software, and it was born out of a need for a more ethical and well built funnel building platform out there. Because the market leader of funnel building platforms and softwares is Click Funnels.

I have used Click Funnels in the past for clients, and I also used it for myself briefly because I feel like it’s important to try out a lot of these different tools. That way I can give sound recommendations. Click Funnels is fine.

Personally, I don’t love the ethics of the company as a whole. I don’t like the ethics of the founder as a whole, and for those reasons, I just prefer to stay away from ClickFunnels. I also find that their tech is now very outdated. They have not stayed on top of their coding, and it has made for a very clunky type of software compared to a lot of the other software that are on the market. So enter FG Funnels.

Fg Funnels is, I want to say, about a year and a half old, maybe almost two years. I signed up as one of their original founding members, and I have not really recommended this tool for the first nine months that I’ve been using it because I really wanted to make sure I understood this tool because it is a very robust tool and because it’s a more robust tool, it’s also a bit more expensive. So I want to say it is now $119 per month. But here’s the kicker to that. Although $119 per month is definitely a steeper cost compared to, say, like other funnel building platforms might be 97 a month or even 67 a month.

Or some of these other tools have like, you know, it’s $29 a month for ConvertKit, and then you can host your sales page on Squarespace, which just cost you your normal hosting fee. Thrive. Cart is a one time payment. All these other things, right, 119 a month, which I believe is the current rate for FG Funnels is steeper. However, you could in essence, host your entire website on FG Funnels.

And if not your entire website, all of your funnels, all of your payment processing pages, all of your products can be hosted through FG Funnels. It is a truly all encompassing, full scale solution. And that is very rare to find it is rare to find a platform that claims they can do it all and actually can do it all very well. 

And I will say that now, after using FG Funnels for about a year now, I want to say, and I’ve only been talking about it for a few months, but they are truly a great company, constantly innovating keeping on top of their product, introducing new things that customers need and want and solving issues because it is a newer platform. And I just find that the ethics of the company and the values of the leaders of the company trickle down into what type of product it is.

So I don’t want this to become a big pitch Fest for FG Funnels. But I do want to make it clear as to why I recommend that as my go to funnel tech stack builder because it allows you to have the simplest tech stack possible that actually works. And when I say actually works, not only does the tech side of it work, but it is truly built for conversions. 

The style of the builder and the style of the checkout pages, the design elements that you get are very optimized for conversion. And I have had nothing but great results with FG Funnels, both for my own stuff and for clients. So I just find that it is, I think, one of the best products on the market currently and will only continue to get better because it’s a new company and it’s only going to continue to grow. 

And actually, at the time of this recording, I am currently doing the Virtual Marketers Heart conference, which is the conference hosted by these two women who own this company. Oh, by the way, did I mention that it’s women owned? Yeah, it’s women owned. And they are awesome, super hard to find tech companies that are women owned in the online business space.

And I don’t know, I really like supporting that element of business. So if you have questions about FG Funnels, let me know. Shoot me an Instagram message. I’d be happy to talk you through anything you might want to know, but they honestly have so many great resources readily available on their site. I’m going to include my affiliate link in the show notes and then the blog post of this episode.

If you sign up through my affiliate link, I will do a free funnel review for you, which if you are in the place where you have a sales page ready or you have an opt in page that you want looked at, if you sign up for FG Funnels through my affiliate link and you get your sales page or your opt in page funnel set up through FG Funnels, I will give you a free funnel audit where I will look at your copy and your design and provide you a screen share video with any updates that I think will help your conversion factor. 

So that is a little incentive for you to go check it out. But I would not say that unless I truly recommended this product and I love it, I will never sign up for another funnel builder. So that is my go to recommendation. But like I already mentioned throughout the rest of the episode, there are a lot of different solutions out there.

It’s about finding the one that works best for you and for your goals and what you’re looking to build long term and that’s kind of the last little note I want to end this episode on before your head actually implodes because I don’t want that to happen I don’t want you to get scared away by the tech the tech is figureoutable I promise you and if you really have that hard of a time there are people who can help you. I can help you there’s so many people out there on the internet who specialize in funnel building. 

If you actually go to hireamarketer.com that’s the directory of all the master marketers you will find my profile on there but you can also go to studioclary.com but in any case there is help for you out there but I promise you you are way more capable than you may think if you think you’re someone who is not techy right this is a necessary part of the funnel building process.

And I just want you to know that don’t let this piece be the thing that keeps you from getting your idea out there because I have seen and I’ve done it myself too many people with a great idea or a product that’s even made and it’s sitting on their Google drive and they have not built the funnel yet because the actual process of the tech of building it out feels overwhelming it does not have to be that way so listen to this episode again.

If you need a breakdown break out a pen and pencil or read through the transcript and if you need extra help reach out you can do this and I am excited to see what you create. 

Alright I will catch you in the next episode where we’re going to be talking about launching!