[00:00:08.29] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.10] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.05] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.20] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.20] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you for joining us.

[00:00:23.25] - Taylor
Thank you for joining us.

[00:00:25.09] - Gordon
It's been a busy week, as always. I had my juggling workshop type thing, my challenges, which I did outside IKEA at the weekend. And I've got that again tomorrow, so that will be fun. That was a very early morning for me, that was.

[00:00:42.03] - Taylor
Yeah?

[00:00:42.19] - Gordon
Yeah, I had to be up very early. Well, for an entertainer, not for normal people. Right, should we get straight into it? Any news?

[00:00:51.27] - Taylor
Not from me.

[00:00:52.18] - Gordon
Okay, let's get straight into it. Shall I go first?

[00:00:54.23] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:00:55.24] - Gordon
So today I want to talk very briefly about AI. Now, I know we've talked about AI before, but there's all sorts of things going on at the moment with AI. So the the kings of AI were ChatGPT, and as far as images went, Midjourney was the best. However, things are a-changing. So there's lots of competitors now who are doing things in a different way and are treating their models differently and responding to them in a different way. We now have chat AIs like Claude and Gemini. They're the two big ones. Can you think of any others?

[00:01:45.12] - Taylor
For... I mean, ChatGPT offer images.

[00:01:51.10] - Gordon
They do offer images with DALL-E. Yeah. And also with images, we've now got something called Flex, which has just come out. And this is doing some great images. But it's really nice that you don't have a company that is right on the top, like Google for search engines, and no-one can get close to them. There seems to be enough knowledge and experience in the situation, in the area; expertise, I think is probably the right word, where other companies can bring out their models and jump over the top of what's already gone before, which is really interesting. Now, we use an AI chatbot on our website. So on thisweekwith.co.uk, in the bottom right-hand corner, you'll see a "how can we help you." And we've recently changed that, during this week in fact, from ChatGPT 3.5, which is one of the older ones, And we've now moved it to Claude. I think it's Claude Sonnet. I don't know a great deal about Claude, but I tested it because you can do a 3.5 and a Claude, and you can type in the same prompt and see how it responds. And Claude was giving much better results. So we've moved over to Claude. So if you haven't already tried Claude or you haven't tried our chatbot, we have trained our chatbot with everything we've ever said on all of our podcasts. So because we've got that, one of the reasons that we did the transcripts originally is so that we would have everything we said in written form and we could then teach a chatbot what we've said and have it have access to all that information so that you can then ask specific questions. So for example, you can go onto the chatbot and you can say, "Tell me about selling photography." And it will look back over the last few episodes that we've been talking about this, and it will come back with a few paragraphs of information that we were trying and were talking about as far as that goes. And it's great in the fact that you can find information really quickly and easily. Now, we also have a search facility on the website, and that also looks at the transcripts to find relevant information. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't summarise it. It'll give you the information, tell you what episode it was, but it won't summarise it like the chatbot does. So I've been really impressed with Claude over the last couple of days that I've been looking at it. So have a look, see what you think. There are other chatbots, there are other AIs available, and I suspect they will be leapfrogging each other again. ChatGPT with OpenAI is one of the big ones, and I suspect that they're not going to like being second place to others. So they're going to try and jump ahead at some point soon. But it's a very exciting place to be at the moment. Are you using AI for anything other than chatbots at the moment?

[00:05:16.16] - Taylor
I use it to give me ideas and just having a soundboard basically to run ideas past, generate new ideas. So one of the things in BNI is we have a theme every other week at our meeting. And it makes the meeting different. It just changes it up a bit. And I basically asked ChatGPT to give me a list of ideas that we could use at a meeting. So one of them that it gave was, 'if your business was a movie, what movie would it be and why?'

[00:05:55.23] - Gordon
Okay, and what was yours?

[00:05:57.14] - Taylor
Mine was Back to the Future.

[00:05:59.02] - Gordon
Of course. And why?

[00:06:01.25] - Taylor
Because it's very innovative and it's merging the old and the new.

[00:06:09.21] - Gordon
Okay.

[00:06:09.06] - Taylor
So yeah.

[00:06:10.21] - Gordon
I like that. Yeah, that's very good. So yes, if you haven't looked at other chat, that's not right, other AI platforms, then you should have a look. I mean, this week we had the Google Pixel 9, which was announced, and they are coming with Gemini, which is Google's AI. And I know that MetaQuest... Sorry, Meta have their own AI. It might be Claude, I'm not entirely sure. Things move at such a pace, honestly. With AI, things change on a daily basis. So just trying to keep up with it is really difficult. But that's all I really wanted to say. So the takeaway from this is, make sure if you're in a situation where you're using a certain technology that is getting better all the time, just check to make sure you're still using the best one. I think we've spoken about that, that particular takeaway in the past, but it's true with online software and tools that we use as well. So just keep an eye to the ground, an eye to the ground? That doesn't make sense, an ear to the ground. And listen for any advancements in tools that you use. What would you like to talk about today?

[00:07:33.13] - Taylor
So I want to talk about how you frame questions, how you frame emails to your clients. So, something that I saw in The Admin Bar this week was, it was either this week or last week, was Kyle's way of asking for feedback to clients. Now, I think I've spoken about this before, where he records a video and others record videos that they send to their clients. It's a bit of a walkthrough of the design that you've created. You go through the design and you explain your reasoning behind all of the decisions you've made. When you are a designer and you are creating it, you're always making the conscious decisions based on experience, based on how people perceive and how just the industry works. And these are common knowledge to us. However, people that are not in the industry or don't have those skills, they don't know that. And so sometimes the decisions you make look strange or weird because the clients just don't understand why that was made. And what I found is by sending, I've been doing this for probably about a year or so now. By sending an email with a video, it negates all of the feedback that is very unhelpful. So things like, can you make this bigger? Can you change this colour? Because they're not really helpful feedback because they don't improve the user experience or they don't help with the end goal of converting the customer or whatever. And something that he touched upon was how you frame the email. So a lot of people will just say, "Here's the feedback... Here's the design. Please give me your feedback." Now, he changed it to, "Here's the design. Please let me know and give me your approval." So he's not asking for feedback. He's basically asking for approval on the design.

[00:09:50.29] - Gordon
Yeah, because if you ask for feedback, people feel like they need to come back to you with something and they may just make something up just so that they can give you feedback.

[00:10:00.02] - Taylor
Yeah, pretty much exactly that. It removes the need for them to feel like they have to give something back. And we're the experts in this industry, and your clients will be the experts in their industry. And so when you go to the doctors, you don't ask, they don't ask you for your opinion. It's this is the advice and this is the suggestion. They will ask for your approval and say, "are you okay to go through with this procedure?" or whatever. But they don't ask and say, "what do you think? Do you think this is the best decision in terms of the route that you're going or how you're going about it?" And by just changing the phrasing, you not only remove the guilt that the client has to come back with some sort of feedback, whether they want to or not they feel like they have to. But you're also asserting that you're the expert in this situation. And it got me thinking about how other places we can do that in our business, how we can make sure that we're showing that we're the expert and showing that you're the expert in your industry while still making sure that the customer feels seen, feels like they've been heard, making sure that in the videos that you're making, if they've made a specific comment that you explain, if you haven't included it, why you've not included it. So I had a similar one this week where a client wanted to have the words 'About Us.' They wanted to have the words 'Telephone and Online Counselling.' And there just wasn't enough room. I didn't really want to put the word 'About Us.' I thought 'About' was fine, but there just wasn't enough room for the second one. And so when I sent the updated design and feedback, I basically said, "Look, I can't fit the text in the space. There just physically isn't any space. And if we were to do that, then you'd have to wrap the text onto another line, or you'd have to remove the menu and hide it at a higher breakpoint, which just makes it even harder for the users to use the website." And when you explain it in that, they go, "Oh, okay, that's why he didn't include it." Not "Oh, he was just ignoring me." And yeah, it's again, just another reason why you're showing and explaining your reasons behind things.

[00:12:36.03] - Gordon
That's very good. I really like the idea of asking for someone's approval, not for their feedback, which is what you were saying there. I had an I've got an email this week about the seven-word email that you should send out to people and will make huge conversions for you. Do you want to know what those seven words were?

[00:13:00.12] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:13:01.17] - Gordon
Hi, are... I'm going to make sure I get it right. Might be eight words, in fact. "Hi, are you still interested in product?" That's it. Seven words. Don't add to it by saying, "if so, blah, blah, blah." All you're doing is someone has shown interest in a product that you sell. They might have made an enquiry with you. They might have put something into their basket, but not checked out. There's really good software that does that. Fluent CRM has just got that feature, which is great. So you can basically go back and just say, "Hi, are you still interested in product." Now, obviously, if your product has more than one word, it's going to be more than seven words. But by doing that, they're either going to ignore it, in which case, chances are they're not interested, or they're going to reply to you and they're going to tell you why they haven't actually made the decision to purchase yet, at which point you are now in a situation to be able to knock down any blocks or walls that they have to give them the ability to then purchase. But by having just a very short email, you're not going to stop people reading it, because it's seven words. You're not going to stop people from just ignoring you if it's not relevant, which is fine because they'll just dump the email and you've done very little work because you've obviously automated this, right? Because we like automations. And if they do reply, they'll tell you, "yes, I'm still interested and I completely forgot to do it, blah, blah, blah." Adding to that, another email I got from a different company was somebody had gone online to make a photo book for their wife, and they found the one they wanted; they looked at it; they decided the price was fine. They then had to do all the work to create that book. So they had to find all the photos. They had to then put all these photos into an album and into 36 pages and just decide what layout they wanted. And it got really frustrating for them and they gave up. And the reason that they wanted to do it originally is because they had a discount code, which had a certain amount of time before the cut off. And they decided that it was getting late in the evening, they would finish the job tomorrow. Well, tomorrow never came. So two months later, they got an email. They realised that the code was no longer valid, and so there was no reason for them to actually spend the time to complete it, because they weren't going to get the deal that they originally wanted. So they got an email that basically said, "We notice you didn't finish your book and your code has now been deactivated because the expiry date came. We've reactivated it for the next 14 days. Please use this code to get this amount off." And that was the push that they needed to go back in, because they'd already done most of the work, finish it off, and click the buy and check out. And it's something really, really simple like that, which can push people over the edge to take action. So yeah, I really like that idea, Taylor. It's a great idea. Well done, Admin Bar people. Really good. Can people join The Admin Bar if they want to? I don't think we've ever talked about that.

[00:16:50.21] - Taylor
You can apply to it. It's a Facebook group. You can apply. You answer a couple of questions, and then Kyle basically decides if he's having a good day and if he lets you in or not, basically.

[00:17:00.04] - Gordon
Okay, so what we'll do is we'll put a link to how you apply to be part of The Admin Bar in the show notes so that you can come along and get these pearls of wisdom before we give them to you on here. Because we do. Every now and then, there's a few that just creep on. So if you're watching, Kyle, thanks for the inspiration. Anything else you want to say?

[00:17:24.08] - Taylor
Don't think so.

[00:17:24.29] - Gordon
That's it for me as well. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we can be found on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.

[00:17:32.02] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:17:37.04] - Gordon
And we quite often put the episodes as links on Facebook in our Facebook group as well. You can find links to that on our website. And we're on all of the major podcast platforms, so you can listen to us as well. Please join us again next week at 1pm on a Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:17:58.24] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:18:29.26] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:18:29.29] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes