Putting Meaning Back Into Marketing
Everyone in an organization is (hopefully) aware that marketing is essential to a company’s success. However, when asked to define what the marketing team does and how it impacts business, answers tend to come up short.
Responses such as “social media, graphic design, advertising, emails and brochures,” are going to be most common – but chances are, if someone isn’t on the marketing team or doesn’t deal directly with the department, there’s probably some mystery to what’s being done there.
What Do Other Departments Think Marketing Does?
In fact, a recent survey revealed that only 13% of non-marketing employees think marketing drives business strategy, with 53% saying marketers are responsible for advertising and promotion and 43% saying its brand management. Marketing was noted as the least important department within the organization. As marketers, we know this simply isn’t true.
While all departments have their individual functions, without marketing, a company would be an anonymous entity operating with a limited customer base. The purpose of marketing is to bring in more customers, encourage and cultivate growth and discover how to better serve customers.
To do that effectively, marketers must make the rest of the organization aware of their jobs, their importance and their function in conjunction with each separate department.
Marketers have undoubtedly mastered their field and are constantly evolving it to be more insightful and efficient. Now it’s time to put the same amount of energy into informing the company about what marketing does well – and how they can collaborate as a team to increase the role the department plays in driving strategic change.
Data Analysis and Insight
One of the most crucial shifts in marketing has been the advent of data analysis to gain customer insight. It is also one of the lesser-known activities of marketers – with only 18% of non-marketers identifying it as a marketing function.
Within a business, 48% of data analytics are used to gain a better understanding of the customer. Much of that usage falls to the marketing department, who then becomes responsible for collecting and mining the data for better insights into how customers are responding to the company’s offering and what they are looking for from the industry.
Non-marketers are aware that customer insight is critical to achieving competitive advantage, but what they don’t realize is that the marketing department is the one that puts it in action.
Analytics help improve the overall view of a company’s performance and are used to develop content and strategies that resonate with customers to generate leads and increase revenue.
For 58% of CMOs, analytics are important for SEO and email marketing research. Another vital area that benefits from data is customer segmentation, with 49% of CMOs citing this as a key marketing function. Knowing which customers are relevant to which areas of the business can make a huge difference in reaching them effectively.
If a company wants to know what their customers are feeling, thinking and saying about their products and services, marketing analytics serve as the direct line between an organization and its customers. Marketers need to bring this to the forefront of their responsibilities to prove to the company that the department is invaluable to overarching success.
Marketing the Marketing Department
To say it’s only the fault of the non-marketers for not knowing why marketing is essential is a false sentiment. It is a shared failure between marketers and their colleagues alike.
Just as a company shares customer-facing mistakes, they should also own up to their internal ones. Members of the company are only familiar with website copy, email marketing and social media because these are the most visible aspect of marketing.
Likewise, marketing is probably only familiar with R&D’s end product because it’s what they interact with most. With this logic in mind, marketing must do more to share their ways of working, their successes and their failures with the rest of the company. That takes increased dedication to internal communications.
It’s acceptable to be narrowly focused on customer-facing material, but it shouldn’t be the sole focus of marketing. Outlets like intranets, forums and internal newsletters help spread the word about all on goings of an organization. Even better than those options, marketers should be participating in presentations or discussions.
To improve internal communication, marketing needs to start small, think creatively and lead the organization with innovation and approachable subject matter. Instead of presenting those important analytics in detail, simply give the bullet points and summarize the resulting benefits.
Once you’ve gained the attention of the company, you can tailor the communications to their interests and avoid useless weekly reports by taking a step back and looking at the big picture scale.
Driving Strategic Change
Once you’ve acquired the attention of the other departments and have effectively communicated the results created by the marketing team, you can drive strategic change.
Strategy is very much a collaborative process that takes into account all the diverse aspects of a company’s performance and needs.
Marketing is positioned to have the most influential effect on the strategy. Armed with insight about customers gained from data analysis and a general understanding of the other departments, marketing can inform the strategy to be grounded by analytics, customer demands and operational efficiencies.
Marketing holds the cards for both analytical insight and creative power. Approaching strategy with these two ways of thinking can lead an organization to more innovative and effective solutions for serving customers and increasing the bottom line.
It’s also a strong way to make decisions and help other departments develop their own strategic plans. But to leverage that power, marketing must establish themselves as a go-to entity and a critical piece of organizational change.
Marketers excel at making the unknown not only known, but also popular. They must start thinking of themselves as a product that needs launching across the company.
Using the foundation of data and insight, strengthening internal communications and playing an active role in developing company strategy, marketers can deliver lasting results and become the most well known group within the company.
Customer service, sales, finance and R&D will no longer wonder what’s behind the graphics and catchy copy. They’ll understand that marketing is in the game to help the company achieve its fullest potential.
One-click software Test Drives by Orbitera, now on GCP
Since joining the Google Cloud team in August, we’ve been hard at work bringing Orbitera to Google Cloud Platform customers and partners. Today, we’re excited to announce that Orbitera supports Test Drives that run on GCP and we’ve completed a successful Test Drive beta that includes software providers like Barracuda, DivvyCloud, Looker, and Vormetric. Thanks to the support of our partners and great team we continue to provide immediate value to customers looking to experience third-party solutions on GCP.
Orbitera Test Drives are fully functioning and interactive software demonstrations offered on the cloud. This is a popular way for businesses to try software before buying it — no software license, credit card or even cloud account required.
At Orbitera we make it easier for businesses to try, buy, deploy and manage complex software in the cloud. One-click Test Drives empower businesses to try software before buying it, and comprehensive consumption billing management gives corporate IT unprecedented visibility and control.
Here’s what some leading software providers had to say about their Orbitera Test Drives on GCP:
Looker is a Data Platform that makes it easy for everyone to find, explore and understand the data that drives their business.
“First impressions are very important, and that’s why we chose Orbitera Test Drives to increase lead-to-deal conversions. Trying a fully-functional instance of Looker’s Analytics Platform with just a few clicks and no procurement or deployment hassle is a great introduction to Looker.”
– Keenan Rice, VP, Alliances at Looker
Vormetric’s comprehensive high performance data security platform protects data wherever it resides with transparent encryption, powerful access controls, and centralized key management.
“Comprehensive solutions like ours can be a challenge for prospective customers to get up and running in a test environment, making it hard for them to really get to know the product and its capabilities. With an Orbitera Test Drive on GCP, customers can get a fully functional environment in minutes, and that makes for a very favorable first impression and gives our sales team a real head start on closing the deal.”
– CJ Radford, VP, Cloud at Vormetric
DivvyCloud’s BotFactory is a simple point-and-click tool for users to configure, build and deploy bots that automate cloud management tasks.
“We’ve worked with some of the leading cloud adopters in the world to solve common cloud problems through automation of policies. We’re very excited to bring this solution to the broader market through our bot system in BotFactory. This Test Drive will show customers how they can connect a cloud account to BotFactory and find and fix these cloud problems in a matter of minutes.”
– Jeremy Snyder, VP of Business Development at DivvyCloud, creators of BotFactory
Test drive Orbitera today
See how easy it is to try full-stack software with Orbitera — take a Test Drive for yourself. Try Looker and BotFactory by DivvyCloud, and come back soon for more Test Drives by leading software providers.
Google Cloud Partners: for a limited time, we’re running a promotion to let you create, operate, and run a Test Drive of your software on GCP at no cost for up to one year. Follow this link to sign up.
What SaaS Marketers Can Learn About Pricing From Menu Engineers
The food industry is a $5.32 trillion dollar business. The alluring profitability of the food business along with increasing competition has inspired a new discipline: menu engineering. As the name suggests, it is a deliberate construction of menus to generate greater profits per customer.
When asked about the rise of menu engineering, value perception expert and author of Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value William Poundstone explains that it is driven by our mental instinct to look for shortcuts: “Almost anyone in the marketplace today has too much information and not enough time to decide.”
And menu engineers – masters of misdirection, as Poundstone calls them – offer just the right kind of shortcuts our brains crave for. For SaaS marketers who rack their brains trying to figure out a way to increase customer lifetime value (LTV), there is a lot to be borrowed from menu engineering to increase SaaS profitability.
And the best part? You don’t need to tweak your product to achieve a breakthrough in your revenue. Treat your pricing page like a menu, and optimize for profitability like a pro.
Shoot For the Stars
Before you roll up your sleeves to revamp your pricing page, do the homework and segment your products by sales volume and profitability first.
Is your most pricey product the one you should sell the most? Not necessarily. According prominent menu engineer Gregg Rapp, two criteria decide the importance of a dish: profit and popularity. Profit is calculated by subtracting cost from price, while popularity is indicated by numbers of the items sold.
Once you’ve mapped out the profit and popularity of all your products, categorize them into what the menu engineering industry calls the matrix of “plow horses, stars, dogs and puzzles”.
Stars are the most popular and profitable, while dogs are the least popular and least profitable ones. Plow-horses are popular but low in profit (salad and soups, for instance), and puzzles are highly profitable items that need investigation on why they aren’t more popular.
Image Source – Recreated with Visme
Obviously, we should first of all shoot for the stars: highlight the star items on your menu, at the same time unleash the star power in your “puzzles” and “plow-horses”.
Engineered For Success
When it comes down the designing the menu that brings in roaring sales, below are some strategies menu engineers have used that SaaS marketers can learn from.
Reduce “pain of paying” by removing dollar signs in prices
Research done at Cornell University (Dr. Kimes et al.) found that customers spent significantly more when prices were displayed in numerals without dollar signs. The sight of dollar sign reminds consumers that they’re spending money, says restaurant consultant Aaron Allen, so they started getting rid of it and using numbers only.
In addition to using dollar signs and even spelling out the word “dollar”, other common mistakes by restaurateurs include putting dotted leader lines between the food item and price, and grouping prices in a column.
Bad example of using dotted leader lines, leading diners to go up and down the menu without a clear direction (Image Source)
These practices draw diners’ attention away from the food and focus on the price, according to Rapp. One solution is “nested pricing”, where the price (in numerals without dollar sign of course) comes right after the description.
Example of nested price (Image Source)
What SaaS marketers can learn from this is to reduce the pain of paying by making the dollar sign less noticeable. Considering the international distribution of most SaaS companies nowadays, it’s probably a good practice to use currency code (such as USD) instead of dollar sign symbol.
Example of subdued dollar sign: Contentful did a great job at minimizing dollar symbol in their pricing.
In the example above, Contentful did a great job at highlighting values for user by minimizing the perception of cost – the grey color and small font size made the dollar sign almost imperceptible. While it’s not yet a common practice for SaaS products to remove dollar signs, as the competition gets tougher, we can expect to see more and more SaaS companies start doing this as a way to win over consumer preference.
Amplify value by using large numbers
Using price ending in numeral 9 is a common practice in retail. Poundstone dissected 8 studies between 1987 to 2004 and concluded that number 9 is the “magic number” that trumps rounded numbers: an average of 24% sales increase was reported by using charm prices ($49, $79, $1.49 etc).
In this study by MIT and University of Chicago, researchers examined the impact of prices ending in 9 on retail sales. The same standard women’s clothing was displayed at price $34, $39 and $44. As you could have guessed, the $39 sold the most, even though $34 is cheaper.
Example of SaaS pricing ending in 9
There are many investigations among academics and marketers why these “just under” prices work better yet no conclusion has been drawn. It is speculated that large numbers like 9 communicate value for consumer and better quality. That explains why the MIT study found that prices ending in 9 are less effective when there is a “SALE” sign next to it.
While using 9 in prices still works, Rapp recommends ending with .95 instead of .99, as price ending in 95 may seem “friendlier” to customers.
Use visual cues to highlight the most profitable items
Colorful texts, highlighted boxes, fancy fonts and designs are all gimmicks menu engineers use to direct diners’ attention to the most desirable items. Research has shown that users tend not to recall more than one or two highlighted items. Choose what you want to highlight carefully, or your users won’t remember anything at all.
Example of menu engineers using box to highlight items (Image Source)
White space is also critically important when it comes to building visual cues. A clustered web page with dense information makes it very hard to read. White space, otherwise known as “negative space”, is the empty space between elements. Research has shown that use of white space can increase comprehension by almost 20%. Space your content generously, and users will find your page easier to read.
Box uses a highlighted box and wide spaces between content to highlight items.
Use of color is another effective tactic. According to Eiseman’s research in 2000, color “accelerates learning, retention and recall by 55% to 78%”. Use of color also “moves people to action up to 80%”.
Does color influence purchase decisions? Absolutely. ChartMogul analyzed 40 SaaS pricing pages of companies who have done a LOT of conversion rate optimization, and found out that most used CTA button color is green, followed by blue.
Most used CTA button colors
There is no hard and fast rule about which color converts the best. It depends on various factors: the color scheme of your sales page, your product branding, etc. The best practice is to narrow down the colors you want to test for CRO, and run A/B tests to decide on the best one.
In this example Wistia is using individual colors for each pricing tier to help distinguish between the three options.
Use descriptive language in pricing plans
According to Rapp, a mouth-watering description is another effective strategy to make the food item instantly more desirable. A controlled study done by University of Illinois compared using basic labels such as “chocolate pudding” with descriptive ones such as “Grandma’s homemade chocolate pudding”.
The association of flavorful (Grandma) and sweet (chocolate) and smooth (pudding) not only influenced research subjects’ purchase (27% increase in sales), but also their post-purchase satisfaction.
Example of a descriptive menu. (Image Source)
For SaaS marketers, being technically competent is not enough to stand out from competition. Tell a story in your product description – emotional benefits, product origins, customer successes – anything that takes your target buyers on an emotional journey.
Zendesk does a great job on their product page: they make it all about what the product can support – you, the customer – to be the hero that you needed to be. The feeling of empowerment comes with a compelling statement like “Everything is possible”.
Example of Zendesk’s emotive product description page.
SaaS marketing thought leader Lincoln Murphy has said, “every pricing plan you offer should have a story behind it.”
It’s never about features and technologies; what you are selling is a desired outcome and pricing should match the value that comes with achieving said outcome.
Understand your target users’ eye movement patterns and cater to it
Scan path by William Doefler in the 1970s is one of the earliest and most cited studies about eye movement patterns. It suggests that menu readers’ eyes zigzag across the page like below.
Image Source
What Doerfler concluded was that the upper-right corner is the “sweet spot” of a two-panel menu where most profitable dish should be displayed.
However, recently studies done by SF State University (with a more advanced retinal eye scanner) challenged the validity of menu sweet spot. Their research suggests that readers scan a two-panel menu like a book: from left to right and then down the pages.
Although no “sweet spot” was found in this study, they did discover that readers gave least attention to restaurant information section and salad lists, which they dubbed as “sour spot”.
Rapp still looks to the upper right hand side as the prime real estate of the menu. What today’s data-driven SaaS marketers should take away from these studies is not the conclusion, but rather the mindset: study where the “sweet spot” and “sour spot” of your sales page is, and place items strategically.
Heat map and click tracking tools (Crazy Egg and Hotjar are good options) can provide you with insights such as which areas of your page is most clicked on, how much do they scroll, mouse movement etc. This data will empower you to make optimization decisions.
Leverage the “Decoy Effect” for your desired outcome
According to industry experts, the most expensive item on the menu is mostly used as decoy. It works when you place it next to a less costly item you actually want to sell. The effect of it is that customers will perceive the less expensive one as higher value.
“You probably won’t buy it,” says Gregg Rapp in an NBC Today Show interview: “what will happen is that you will find something else a little bit cheaper, and it will look reasonable.”
In the interview, he used a menu that displayed a $20 asparagus right beneath a shockingly pricey $1,000 Lobster Frittata. The $20 asparagus dish became a very good deal compared to the lobster, even though it’s overpriced for its own sake.
The common practice in SaaS pricing is the 3-tiered high/low/middle pricing table, with the intent to prompting buyers to choose the middle one. But what could be a more intelligent strategy is to insert a fourth “decoy” plan, such as what Crazy Egg did below. By using a expensive “Pro” plan that costs almost twice as much as the most desired “Plus” plan – highlighted in blue box – it makes the “Plus” plan appear as much better value for your bucks.
Example of price decoy in CrazyEgg’s pricing page.
Another success in decoy pricing is Shopify. Back in 2013, their pricing had 4 tiers: Lite, Basic, Pro and Unlimited. Earlier this year, they made a drastic move to their pricing plans: got rid of starter plan (Lite) and dramatically increase highest tier price (from $179 to $299).
Example of price decoy in Shopify’s pricing page.
Now the price difference between their 2nd and 3rd tier is 67%, which makes the value add in the 3rd tier very attractive, and at the same time retaining a robust mid tier user base (small businesses).
Get your point across – fast
When consumers open a menu, they are immediately overloaded with information. This can trigger analysis paralysis. A well-designed menu takes the guestimation work off of the customer: the less time a consumer has to spend on understanding the choices and deciding to buy, the better the outcome.
Our subconscious brain habitually searches for shortcuts. It’s a survival instinct. So instead of reading word for word, most people end up scanning menus. Gallup organization has reported that most consumers spend less than two minutes scanning a menu, and studies by Panitz have shown that 60-70% of sales come from fewer than 18-24 menu items.
Similarly, limit the number of items on your product page. It helps your target buyers when there is less to choose from. Also, rather than listing out every bit of information about your product, only highlight the important bits that will help your customers differentiate value.
Mailchimp does a great job at eliminating unnecessary information. They got rid of long lists of product feature descriptions like most SaaS companies do, and simply used a one-paragraph description in each plan. It is simple, straightforward, and takes seconds to digest.
Use visual hierarchy in your pricing page to let the most critical information stand out. Research tells us that visual clutter delayed information processing. Group information into different levels. Arrange design elements in clear visual order. This will help your target buyers organize information and make a purchase decision faster.
Conclusion
Cutthroat competition in the food industry has inspired innovative ways to optimize revenue. When we look at the novel ways menu engineers are using consumer psychology insights to reshape the dining experience, SaaS companies pale in comparison.
As consumer SaaS market gets more and more competitive, we hope to see an uptake in adopting innovative pricing strategies such as the ones discussed here.
Is your company struggling with finding the right pricing strategy? Have any of the techniques here worked for your product? Share your thoughts and comments below.
About the Author: Lucia Wang is currently leading Growth Marketing at Visme, a drag-and-drop design tool for everyone. Previously she led growth marketing at Call Levels, an Appster award-winning FinTech app. Prior to her career in tech, she has worked in marketing and communications role at big corporations and media agencies. As a marketer, she is fascinated by persuasion science and consumer behavior.
How BlackDog Advertising engages Statue of Liberty visitors with Chrome
Editor’s note: Today we hear from John W. Penney, creative director and CEO of Miami-based BlackDog Advertising. Read how the company used Chrome devices to build engaging signage for Evelyn Hill, a vendor on New York City’s Liberty Island.
The Statue of Liberty towers 300 feet above Liberty Island, where visitors can admire its grandeur and explore the history leading to its construction. While most people know some of the statue’s history, few know Evelyn Hill, the family-owned business that has been selling food, refreshments and souvenirs beneath the Statue of Liberty for three generations. We took on the challenge of transforming Evelyn Hill’s gift shop and restaurant, the Crown Cafe, into a visitor destination, and driving traffic to thestatueofliberty.com.
Evelyn Hill wanted to replicate a photo contest my company, Blackdog Advertising, had created for Dry Tortugas, a remote national park off the Florida coast. This time, we’d be creating a live photo feed so visitors could see images as they were uploaded. My company had a great experience using Chrome devices before, so we decided to use Chrome digital signage devices because they are easy to deploy, cost effective and make content management a breeze.
The photo contest has driven incredible engagement — both in person and online. Over 21,700 photo votes have been cast so far, and thestatueofliberty.com saw a 270 percent traffic spike as a result. Evelyn Hill is considering ways to expand the photo contest to other locations on the island because of the success we’ve seen so far.
To drive high engagement, we created live-updating digital signs to draw visitors into the Crown Cafe and engage them in the photo contest. Monitors are powered by Google Chromebits that are remotely operated using Chrome Device Management, so the cafe can easily display contest results. Meanwhile, visitors can use the #PictureLiberty hashtag to share their photos on the Statue of Liberty website and encourage their friends to vote for their submission.
The flexibility of Chrome lets us optimize signage solutions. With Chrome Device Management we were able to easily install WooBox, which collected contest photos from social media, on all of our managed devices (in this case, Chromebits). We don’t want to deliver cookie-cutter solutions to our customers, and Chrome enables us to build solutions that stand out from the crowd.
Using Chrome also helped keep the campaign cost effective. Since Chrome Sign Builder is free to use and the photo content is user-generated, hardware was the only cost. Each of Liberty Island’s four units cost just $109, including access to Chrome Device Management, which allowed us to easily install apps on the Chromebits. Achieving this low cost would have been impossible with any other digital signage solution.
Visitors remember their time on Liberty Island for the rest of their lives, and Evelyn Hill is part of that experience. Chrome helps make that experience better. The #PictureLiberty contest and others like it will ensure the Crown Cafe remains a visitor destination for decades to come.
6 Steps to Save a Project That's Gone Off the Rails
No matter how much careful planning goes into a project, disaster can still strike when you least expect it. And when it does, it’s important for project managers to know how to minimize the damage and keep the team moving forward.
Sometimes, the signs are obvious: deadlines are being missed, your communication channels aren’t keeping everyone on the same page, and team members are confused about the scope of their individual responsibilities.
Other times, the signs a project is headed for trouble are more difficult to spot. Maybe team morale is a little lower than usual, or the project’s output doesn’t exactly meet your agency’s quality standards.
If your latest project seems like it’s spinning out of control, we’re here to help. We’ve outlined a basic project recovery plan to stop the bleeding and steer your team back on track. It won’t necessarily fix everything, but it’s a good place to start.
How to Save a Project That’s Gone Off the Rails
1) Acknowledge that things aren’t going so great.
It might seem painfully simple, but admitting there’s a problem with the project’s current trajectory is the first (and often most difficult) step to getting things back on course.
Whether you’re dealing with a big problem or some smaller difficulties, the earlier you acknowledge them, the better. If you leave those seemingly less urgent issues to fester, they could cause major project disruptions down the line. Be vigilant for signs of potential catastrophe.
Avoid playing the blame game. Gather your team for an emergency meeting to discuss exactly what’s going wrong and assess the damage. As the project manager, it might mean an ego hit to call out a project’s shortcomings, but it’s a necessary blow to get things back on the right path.
2) Reevaluate the project’s core objectives.
The best way to get things rolling again is to bring your team’s attention back to the project’s original purpose and primary goals. When things get chaotic, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, and people can get bogged down in the stressful details. The purpose can get lost in the frantic shuffle.
As the project manager, it’s your job to keep an eye on the ultimate goal — especially when the project isn’t headed in the right direction. At the kickoff meeting, you likely went over the project’s targets and milestones with your team — but it might be time for a refresher.
When you meet with your team, don’t just rehash everything from the initial kickoff meeting — make sure you take the time to identify where things have fallen off course. Are there any particular areas of your project plan that now seem unattainable? Any areas that require some careful reevaluation? Maybe something you thought would be a small component is actually demanding a lot more attention.
At this point, you can’t be afraid to be flexible.
It can seem absolutely terrifying to pull a 180-degree pivot midway through an important project, but sometimes it’s the only way to salvage things. Think about it this way: You know more about the project now than you did at the outset. At this point, you know what doesn’t work, which makes you better equipped to formulate a better — more realistic and informed — approach.
3) Audit your team’s communication channels.
If your project isn’t going as planned, there’s a good chance that poor communication deserves a significant chunk of the blame. It’s pretty simple: For your project to succeed, you need to have a communication infrastructure that allows team members to stay on the same page, even when they’re working on different areas of the project.
Take the time to examine your current communication process and look for any gaps or weak spots. What channels is your team currently using to communicate? How are you sharing information about individual team members’ work? Is there a central place where team members can track the project’s overall progress? How often are you checking in as a group?
One of the easiest ways to keep your team connected is investing in a project management tool. There are a ton of tools available at various price points, making it a great option for agencies of all sizes.
If onboarding your entire team onto a new piece of software midway through a project sounds like it might overcomplicate things, make the best of your existing tools and channels. Create a single place (such as a shared document) where team members can report on their progress and keep track of how the project is doing overall. Establish regular times to meet in person and discuss what’s working, and what isn’t.
4) Schedule one-on-one meetings with team members.
Group meetings are a great way to share information and confirm everyone is focused on working towards the same goals, but individual, one-on-one meetings are still necessary to ensure the project is headed in the right direction.
If you haven’t already been doing so since the outset of the project, set up weekly one-on-one meetings with each of your team members. Regular one-on-ones give your team the chance to discuss how they’re feeling, how their work is going, and what they need from you to be successful.
These meetings also give you the opportunity to get a feel for where the project currently stands and address any concerns directly and discreetly. If a project isn’t going well because a few people seem to be slacking in their contributions, this is your opening to dig into why, and help them start pulling their weight again.
5) Address stakeholder concerns.
When a project starts going south, it’s your responsibility to keep your client (and any other relevant stakeholders) in the loop. Transparency and honesty are key here. If you attempt to hide the project’s issues, things will only get worse down the road.
Acknowledge any mistakes that might have occurred, and own up to them — don’t try to pass the blame or throw around excuses, because they won’t be received well. Instead, explain the issues straightforwardly and share your action plan for getting everything back on track.
The most important thing to emphasize here is that you fully understand the situation and you’re in control of it. It’s much better to inform your client something will be a little late and explain why, rather than keep them in the dark and have them get frustrated when the deadline is missed.
6) Learn from it.
It’s important to fully recognize what exactly went wrong so you can do your best to prevent it from happening again in the future.
After the project is over, you should orchestrate a project post-mortem with your team. Send out a simple questionnaire before the meeting to give team members the opportunity to reflect and share insights they might not feel comfortable sharing in front of the whole group. This is a great chance for people to dig into both the project’s weak points and successes (however small).
The post-mortem meeting itself should ultimately be a frank but civil discussion of the project from start to finish. Try to acknowledge even seemingly small points of frustration, and plan on putting processes in place to avoid issues in the future.
Remember: This meeting isn’t the time to put anyone on the spot, point fingers, or assign blame. It’s ultimately a chance to unpack the project’s trajectory and make your team is stronger for next time.
Booking fitness classes just got a whole lot easier
After a holiday season full of delightful indulging, millions of people make an optimistic New Year’s resolution to stay fit or lose the extra pounds they put on from those festive parties and family get-togethers. To help, starting today we’re piloting a new way to easily book fitness and wellness classes. Reserve with Google will be available in Los Angeles, New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, to make keeping up with your resolutions easier than ever.
To book a fitness class, visit the Reserve with Google site on desktop or mobile web. There you can search for fitness studios near you, get great recommendations for fun new classes, or book a spot in the session you already know and love.
Over the coming days, you’ll be able to do this right from Google Maps and Google Search, as well.
Reserve with Google is possible through deep partnerships with top scheduling providers you may already use, including MINDBODY, Full Slate, Front Desk, Appointy — and we’ll be adding more, like zingFit, MyTime, and Genbook soon.
So pull out your yoga mat, dust off your running shoes, and fill up that water bottle. Reserve with Google will help make completing your New Year’s resolution as easy as click, click, booked.
A Year of Content Marketing in Review: The 15 Top-Shared Posts of 2016 by @JuliaEMcCoy
A look back at the content that “made it” in content marketing, with tens of thousands of shares, is the perfect recipe for inspiration as we end 2016.
The post A Year of Content Marketing in Review: The 15 Top-Shared Posts of 2016 by @JuliaEMcCoy appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
How to Write the Perfect Marketing Email [Free Ebook]
From the subject line to the closing, there’s a science to writing the perfect email.
Include too many pictures, and your clickthrough rate may decrease. Write too much text, and your message may overwhelm your reader — especially considering 48% of emails are opened on a smartphone.
In our ebook, How to Write the Perfect Email, we’ll walk you through the 14 key steps to optimize your marketing emails for opens, clicks, subscribers, and more. We’ll cover how to:
Prioritize the goals of your emails
Nail the tone of your email to build trust with your audience
Time your sends to make sure your email is actually read
Segment your emails by lifecycle stage, content engagement, and more
Choose an impactful call-to-action
With each email send, marketers make countless decisions that influence whether your message gets opened, tossed, skimmed, or clicked. Don’t send your next blast without the latest optimization tips and industry data.
Check out our email optimization guide and learn how proper email optimization can boost your content downloads, convert more prospects, and increase your ROI.
Grain Valley School District’s new approach to 21st-century education
Editor’s note: As part of the ExploreEDU event series, schools are working with Google for Education Premier Partners to throw open their doors and invite neighboring educators to learn first-hand from their own experiences using Google tools to innovate and improve. To see if there is an event near you, visit the ExploreEDU site. For those who can’t join in person, we’ll also share the schools’ experiences here. Today’s guest author is Nicholas Gooch, Director of Technology, from Grain Valley School District. The school is hosting an event on Dec. 15-16 with Best Buy.
It’s daunting to realize that many of us are preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist and a world we can’t quite imagine. At Grain Valley School District, we’ve designed our schools to prepare students for the future workplace. We’ve created our curriculum to emphasize communication and creativity. We’ve done away with the traditional 100-point grading system to instead focus on helping students master their subjects. We’ve even started the process of redesigning our high school campus to create dedicated spaces for group and individual learning.
We see technology as critical to helping students master the skills they’ll need in the 21st-century workplace. We began integrating technology into everyday learning by launching G Suite for Education at our high school, two middle schools and four elementary schools during the 2014-15 school year. Last year our high school became the first of our schools to go 1:1 with Chromebooks. Each of our 1,250 high school students has access to a Chromebook that they can use in class and at home. With the help of technology and the support of our innovative teaching staff, here are a few ways we changed how we educate to better prepare students for the future:
Fostering teacher leadership and innovation
To empower our teachers to push the envelope and take more risks with technology in the classroom, we created Breakthrough Learning cohorts. The cohorts are made up of elementary and secondary teachers who applied for the program. One day each month, these teachers work with our instructional technology coaches to learn the best practices for integrating technology into their curriculum. These sessions go beyond typical “how-to” sessions and instead focus on helping teachers make learning, assessment, and digital citizenship a seamless component of the classroom. Not only does the program develop this capacity in our own teachers, it allows them to do the same for their fellow teachers.
High school students using TV screens to collaborate on shared assignment.
Emphasizing subject-mastery over grades
In 2006, school and district leadership reexamined the 100-point grading system. They decided to try a new approach — helping students achieve subject mastery rather than measuring them on a graded scale. Standards-based grading and feedback practices have been fully integrated at the high school since the 2013-2014 school year. Today, we personalize each student’s learning program. Google Classroom has also helped us emphasize the learning process rather than a final grade. Teachers can easily give feedback on an assignment, even before a student has turned it in.
Building for collaboration
The new architecture for our high school is designed to make it easier for students to study together outside of class. We’re creating communal spaces with whiteboard walls and TV screens. Students can use these TV screens to visualize projects they’re working on together — for instance, a presentation they’ve made in Google Slides. We’re also providing WiFi access and ample charging stations for laptops and mobile devices across the campus. Over the next few years we hope to introduce similar changes to other schools in the district.
We’re excited to be hosting an ExploreEDU event on December 15-16. If you’re in the area, join us to hear more about how we redesigned our approach to teaching and learning for the 21st century, supported by technology and an openness to change.
7 Laws of Sales Funnel Physics Every SaaS Business Needs to Know
Back in college, I visited to this run-down pizzeria shop called Sammi’s.
Their logo had a picture of a pyramid on it. No one understood what that had to do with pizza.
I pitched Sammi repeatedly on my startup’s text message coupon product at the time. He never bought.
But I’ll never forget the time I saw him hand a $200 check to some kid selling an ad from a local magazine like it was nothing.
Two-hundred bucks looks like a lot of money when you’re a nineteen-year-old college kid. And especially when all your customers are on a free trial.
What caused Sammi to buy a print ad but not what I was offering?
The education you need to become an effective marketer is just a lot of little experiences like that.
Those experiences are like “flicks” to your forehead.
They are the market saying, “Pay attention!” as it tries to teach you something.
In the years since that time at Sammi’s, I’ve started and launched a SaaS business. Today I run a growing subscription-based service business. So far, my team and I have created hundreds of sales funnels for startups and small businesses. I also had the opportunity to lead a Mastermind group for entrepreneurs starting SaaS companies.
From this wide mix of experiences, I’ve been able to observe several success patterns. These success patterns are relevant to every business marketing itself online—but especially SaaS companies.
I’m telling you this, because what I’m about to share with you is not just theory.
This is about people. It’s about the people who are stuck in your sales funnel. It’s about the people who haven’t heard about your product yet. And it’s about the people who are your competitors.
While people may not always behave in a predictable manner, they are influenced by the Laws of Sales Funnel Physics.
Let’s jump in.
Note: At 6,300 words, I don’t expect you will read this all in one sitting. So I created a free PDF of this resource that you can refer to again and again when it’s time to redesign your site.
Law of Visibility
Law of Big Changes
Law of Repetition
Law of Clarity
Law of Proof
Law of Friction
Law of Alignment
First Law of Sales Funnel Physics: Law of Visibility
What is it?
Imagine two different scenarios.
Scenario A—Relaxing on the beach on a hot summer day with no sunscreen.
Scenario B—Relaxing on the beach on a hot summer day when your doctor shows up to tell you you’re at risk of getting skin cancer.
In scenario B, you’re going to react right away. You’re on the beach without sunscreen, and the doctor has given you urgent information on why you should wear sunblock.
If putting on sunscreen became your “conversion goal” after the need was recognized, B outperforms A, because the offer is right in your face.
That’s why the first law of Funnel Physics is the Law of Visibility. In other words, people will convert on offers that are highly visible and noticeable to them.
If they don’t see it, they won’t convert.
So it all comes down to something being seen.
Now, how can we apply this to your marketing funnel?
Example:
Andrew Warner and his team at Mixergy rolled out a new site design a little while ago.
One thing that stood out to me was the prominent call-to-action button in the top right corner.
It’s visible on every page of the website.
This is an excellent example of the Law of Visibility in action. By featuring a highly visible call to action (CTA) for your core offer across your website, conversions are almost guaranteed to increase.
In fact, we did the same thing on our website:
We wanted more people across our website to see and learn about our productized service. You can see below how this change had a sustained impact on how many people viewed our homepage.
But this is just one example.
How to Apply it to Your Marketing Funnel
Let’s brainstorm for a second.
Where can you put in place a simple change like this on your website to cause more traffic to flow deeper into your funnel?
Think in terms of “global” or structural changes that will be seen across many pages on your website.
Here a few ideas off-hand:
Navigational changes like the example above
Redesign or add a CTA to your footer
Install an exit pop-up
Promote a lead magnet in the sidebar of your blog, as well as at the end of every blog post
Run a new campaign using Kissmetrics Engage that targets only visitors with a specific offer
Those would be the top ones to implement, especially if your SaaS business is trying to grow via content marketing.
The Bottom Line
Offers—free or paid—that aren’t seen, don’t convert. So shine some light on them!
Second Law of Sales Funnel Physics: Law of Big Changes
What is it?
Imagine you’re an engineer building a cross-country railroad.
But there’s a problem: a stretch of mountains lies in-between the train’s start and end points.
You have two options: you can lay the track so it snakes around the mountainside, or you can use explosives and heavy drills to create a tunnel that goes straight through.
Which do you choose?
Consider that the universe is (mostly) rational. By this, I mean there is cause and effect.
Nothing happens unless something causes it.
If you want to cause growth in how your sales funnel converts, you have to make a significant change to your sales funnel—the copy, the structure, the design.
Whatever big result you are looking to produce, be prepared for the change to be significant from the customer’s standpoint.
That last part is important, because you are trying to influence your target customer, and changes that seem significant to you may not be that different from their point of view.
Sometimes the difference is hard to understand.
In the mountain scenario, the decision becomes easier if we view it as a customer optimization problem.
We could ask – what does a passenger on the train line want?
Do they care about seeing the beautiful snow-capped mountain scenery while on their cross-country journey?
Do they care more about getting to their destination faster?
There is a big difference between drilling a tunnel and snaking around the mountain. But if you know your customers value a shorter trip, the tunnel would be the better choice.
If they care more about speed, then the answer to the problem is to drill a tunnel through the mountain.
Lucky for you, you’re laying down code on your website, not train tracks.
Example:
Demo Consultation vs. Instant Video Demo
This is a good one, especially if closing the sale means getting on a phone call.
The example below is from a case study where a consulting company A/B tested a “Free 5-Min Demo Video” offer in place of an offer to schedule a demo consultation.
The results were powerful.
By changing the offer to a demo video instead of a scheduled demo, the conversion rate went from 1.7% to 15.3%—a 9X increase. The offer of the free demo won in a landslide.
Although nothing on the page changed except the text describing the offer, this mattered a lot from the customer’s perspective.
Why? Most people aren’t enthusiastic about scheduling a demo or a consultation because it requires them to (1) wait, (2) coordinate their schedule, and (3) commit a fixed amount of time.
The “free 5 min demo” offer converts much better, because customers can watch it right away without a phone call.
Side note: We recently tested this same idea of a free demo offer on our pricing page vs. scheduling a consultation. The data is still coming in, but lead conversions are up significantly.
This example illustrates that structural changes are most important when you are thinking about “big changes.” Structural changes include a difference in the number of steps or the offer itself.
This is different from merely changing design or copy, because it represents a more significant change to the customer’s experience in your funnel.
As a result, the change is more drastic and so are the results.
Freemium vs. Free Trial
When I started my first SaaS business, we offered a free trial.
Later, we removed it and went from generating weekly sign-ups to zero (bad move, duh).
A better example here is MailChimp. After building a profitable business with 100,000 users, they went freemium in 2009 offering free email marketing accounts to 500 subscribers.
One year later, they reported a revenue increase of over 150%.
How to Apply it to Your Marketing Funnel
If you’re not converting or you see a big bottleneck in your online sales funnel, start with a BIG change.
Go big or go home! If you’re only seeing a “trickle” of people moving from one step to the next, the issue is probably bigger than simply, “Oh, let’s test a different headline,” or “Oh, let’s change the button color to yellow.”
The Bottom Line
The results may be positive or negative. The important thing here is that you won’t really know which version is more effective unless the spread is statistically significant.
When creating an A/B test or a sequence test to improve your conversion rate, go for big changes. Little changes (usually, but not always) yield a proportionally smaller result.
So blow a hole in the mountain.
Challenge your assumptions.
And take a walk in your customer’s shoes.
Big changes mean big growth for your bottom line.
Third Law of Sales Funnel Physics: Law of Repetition
What is it?</h3
You’ve probably heard some guru say that people don’t remember a brand name until the 7th time they’ve heard it.
This is not that.
The Law of Repetition says that following up multiple times (via email automations, retargeting ads, or call-to-action buttons on your website) will cause more conversions within your funnel.
Yes, you could say that this law is saying, “beat your prospect over the head with your offer enough times, and you’ll get more sales.”
That’s true, and it’s why spammers use this technique.
But I am not advocating for that. Rather, I am giving you this universal pattern with the hope that you will use it responsibly.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Examples:
The Law of Repetition is about repeated messaging and consistent follow-up.
This happens when you are presented with multiple lead magnets asking for your email address.
For instance, Clay Collins and co. over at Leadpages have repeatedly pointed out that each of their blog pages have multiple offers and CTAs. This, in turn, has helped them quickly build an email list of 200,000+ email subscribers.
I applied and refined this technique on my company’s website in 2014 and later wrote about the results in a guest post on Leadpages. I gave the method a name—“The Every Page Rule.”
The Law is always in effect when you implement email follow-up sequences or retargeting ads.
In 2013, I tried my hand at launching an info product. The email sequence I wrote was “OK” so I rewrote it and kept iterating.
The final sequence was aggressive with the follow-up, but the truth is that it worked. People bought the course at a very consistent rate.
Noah Kagan later reminded me of this principle when he published some research from people using his SumoMe tool to help people build their email lists faster.
The research showed that people were more likely to opt-in if they were repeatedly shown the pop-up on a website until they signed up.
Again, not saying that’s the best way to do it. In fact, I would say being too aggressive makes you look not cool.
Want another example? Look at the Kissmetrics funnel. If you sign-up for a free trial or opt-in to one of their lead magnets and request a demo, you are instantly entered into a follow-up sequence where an Account Manager will contact you to schedule a demo.
And here’s one more from a little-known multi-billion dollar company called Amazon.
Ever heard of Prime?
Prime is a premium subscription that gives Amazon customers perks like free 2-day shipping and access to streaming movies.
The Amazon website is covered with call-to-action buttons for Prime, and 54 million customers have opted into this service as a result.
How to Apply it to Your Marketing Funnel
If you’re a SaaS business, you can apply the Law of Repetition in a variety of ways to your own sales funnel.
Here are the best ideas, in order of priority:
On-site CTAs that are clear and relevant to the stage of the funnel the prospect is in.
Follow up with potential customers using email automation to get them on the phone, get their feedback, or nudge them toward signing up.
Show an ad or link in your blog’s sidebar or navigation, along with an exit pop-up, to promote your lead magnet and grow your email list.
Get more return traffic with retargeting ads. Make sure to segment visitors based on where they are in your funnel. For instance, you may want to treat people who reached your checkout page differently from those who signed up for your free 5-day e-course.
Finally, you can get more advanced using a combination of tactics (Think: Amazon + Smart Funnels). For instance, after a customer checks out, you can upsell him/her on the benefits of the next-level pricing package. Similarly, when he/she comes back to the website later on, he/she will see CTAs on the blog nudging him/her and offering benefits for upgrading. This can also be done over a course of weeks or months via automated email follow-up to anyone who has purchased.
The Bottom Line
Repetition yields higher conversion rates and can also increase the value of an average customer to your business.
Don’t let leads forget about you and your services—constantly remind them of what you offer and how it can benefit them.
Just be sure not to overdo it, or you risk hurting your brand.
Fourth Law of Sales Funnel Physics: Law of Clarity
What is it?
“Better to be clear than clever.”
When I was a little kid, I’d go to the doctor at least once a year for my checkup.
I remember the waiting rooms were always gray and super boring.
So I’d pick up one of the outdated magazines they had laying around and flip through it.
I found most of the ads weird and frustrating, because I couldn’t tell what they were trying to sell.
Did they want to make money, or just confuse people? It was unclear to me.
Turns out, I was on to something.
Fast forward years later to the first time I heard the expression, “Better to be clear than clever” from Dane Maxwell, a serial entrepreneur, while he was being interviewed by Andrew Warner from Mixergy.com.
This expression highlights the biggest reason why most sites don’t convert well in the first place: people don’t buy what they don’t understand.
Many people make the mistake of focusing on creating a catchy headline, instead of focusing first on customers’ understanding by creating effective copy for their sales funnel.
Consider a few examples.
Examples:
The following case study documented on Visual Website Optimizer’s blog illustrates how clear copy converts.
Movexa is a supplement product with a direct response website funnel. In other words, they are looking to make sales directly to people visiting their site.
In an A/B test where they clarified what the product was by adding the word “supplement” in the headline, sales increased by nearly 90%!
Here’s another example from a company selling personal training subscriptions.
As cited by Unbounce, the company A/B tested a clearer “boring” and uncreative headline against the original.
The result? 38.46% more training memberships were sold.
Michael Aagaard, the author of the case study reflected after the fact:
“I have yet to see a creative headline beat a clear headline in an A/B test.”
Clarity over cleverness, indeed.
Further, research has consistently confirmed that website users prefer copy that is “simple and direct.” Here are a few key nuggets from the research conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group:
“Users often leave web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer.”
Users will often have multiple windows or tabs open and leave and come back to your site within a single session. When this happens, having clear straightforward copy helps the reader to re-establish context.
Of the first three items a user focused on, almost 80% was on text, not graphics.
Reduce use of wording that could be seen as marketese (i.e. clever copy or slogans) in order to build trust.
How to Apply it to Your Marketing Funnel
Of course, you could jump right into A/B testing.
But this wouldn’t be much better than taking a wild guess.
You’ll be more likely to see growth if the changes you make are inspired by feedback from prospective customers. You want to hear from users currently “stuck” in your funnel who are actively considering your product.
You want to hear the questions they have, ask them open-ended questions, and hear how they react to your website’s current copy.
Here are the two best ways to do that:
User feedback survey tools can be set to automatically ask visitors leaving the site a question. Survicate is a free tool that works well for this purpose. HotJar is also a very solid option with lots of additional features, which now has a free plan for basic use as well.
Order a user test where complete strangers will test your website. It’s ideal if you have people in your target market test the site, but when it comes to knowing if your website communicates clearly, feedback from strangers can provide a just as actionable insight. I recommend browsing Fivver for user testing services or check out UserInput.io (this one gives you more options for targeting).
After you have some actionable feedback (make sure you get enough so you notice patterns), it’s time to test.
If you have less than 10,000 visits per month, it could take a while to reach a high level of statistical significance for your A/B test. It might not even be worth a/b testing.
In that case, you might just want to do a sequence test (“before and after”). With this test, you can see an impact on your bottom line in as little as a month with a reasonable degree of certainty. Just make sure you are accurately tracking results before and after, while also tracking conversions that matter, like leads and sales.
For example, at Petovera we saw 25% MRR growth from June to July after we re-launched our new homepage, pricing page, and free email course.
The sales results from this test were so significant compared to other months. When considered with the fact that no other major component changed on the site, the only conclusion we can draw is that the changes caused this growth.
Note: This example highlights both the application of the Law of Clarity (we did research on our target audience’s needs and questions before rewriting the copy for greater clarity), as well as the Law of Big Changes covered above (copy completely revamped along with the design).
The Bottom Line
The words you use to communicate about your product matter more than design.
Site visitors need to trust you; providing them with a clear understanding of the product’s value and how it works is a critical lever for growth in your sales funnel.
Fifth Law of Sales Funnel Physics: Law of Proof
What is it?
People buy what other people buy. That’s because we seek to minimize the risk of potential loss by relying on what other people are saying.
We are programmed to be loss-averse creatures.
Don’t believe me?
Watch yourself the next time you are picking out a movie on Netflix or browsing for a new book on Amazon.
Personally, I won’t buy a new book without at least 250 reviews and an average rating of 4 stars or higher. Even 4 stars are “iffy.”
I use the same risk minimization when it’s time to kick back and enjoy a new movie on the weekends. Less than 4.5 stars? That’s a no-go.
Your habit for loss aversion might be slightly different. Maybe you read individual reviews.
The point is, your customers operate the same exact way when they enter your sales funnel and become interested in your product.
The Law of Proof says that people are more likely to invest time and money in that which they see as low risk and likely to give them the result they desire.
Proof (or “social proof”) can come in a wide variety of forms:
Testimonials
Reviews
Case studies
Examples of past work (e.g. from a designer’s portfolio)
Vanity stats (e.g. “over 10,000 happy customers serviced since 2010”)
Customer logos
Press logos
Networking groups
Third party accreditations (e.g. certified Google AdWords Partner)
Other than making your business look legit, social proof elements will increase conversions in your funnel.
Example:
WikiJob, a website with over 500,000 monthly visitors ran an A/B test on their homepage.
The one thing they changed? A simple testimonials section was added. Here’s what it looked like.
The result?
Here’s the response from the company owner:
[Adding the] testimonials increased sales by 34%. The testimonials we used are very ‘sober’ (compared with the overly enthusiastic ones you so often see in marketing literature). The test results were surprising. Although such increases of sales can be quite normal in split testing, I did not think that testimonials would make such a difference (and indeed put off testing them, thinking they were irrelevant). The increase in revenue was very substantial.
Social proof can make a huge impact because it influences how trustworthy people perceive your brand to be. It lowers perceived risk.
Research from Nielsen showed that 70% of people trust recommendations from people they don’t even know. That’s compared to 90% of people trusting recommendations from people they do know.
How to Apply it to Your Marketing Funnel
Test adding social proof on key landing pages.
Generally, it’s a pretty safe bet ASSUMING you have taken into account the context and the user’s intentions for that POINT in your funnel.
Here’s what I mean:
Derek Halpern documented a case where adding social proof did not grow conversions. See graphic below where the middle version won.
However, this is actually an example of the Law of Friction (discussed below) vs. The Law of Proof and NOT an argument against the effectiveness of social proof in general.
The middle example simply requires less “mental load” to understand. It could be as simple as the fact that the number “14,752” is difficult to read and the middle variation is visually more attractive because it is simpler.
Similarly, last year we A/B tested a lead box for our newsletter in the sidebar of our blog.
Here are the results:
The one without the social proof won by a large margin.
Here’s one more case study to drive home the importance of understanding context and user expectations when considering where to integrate it in your funnel.
Security seals—also a common example of social proof—build trust, right?
Well, it didn’t work as one might have expected when tested on this lead generation form.
Version B increased conversions by 12.6%. In this case it didn’t work out, because security seals are associated with online checkout. As a result, users were confused or put-off by it.
The Bottom Line
Social proof is a key point of leverage when optimizing your sales funnel.
However, you’ll need to A/B test to know for sure. If your traffic is too low for A/B testing to be a realistic option, do a sequence test after taking into account user context and intentions.
Sixth Law of Sales Funnel Physics: Law of Friction
What is it?
Since I began my career as a web-based entrepreneur at 19, I’ve done many A/B tests and been part of many research-based website design projects.
I’ve spoken with hundreds of business owners about their conversion issues since that time.
I’m always learning, but I can say from experience that this issue is one of empathizing with the end user who is on your website.
That’s what it comes down to because people on your website have goals.
Often the business owner doesn’t know the potential customer’s goals or how their website is “blocking” these customers from buying.
This is what is meant by friction. When friction is minimized—and a user’s goals are made easier to accomplish—conversions go up.
Let’s look at a few examples that support this principle.
Examples:
An online retailer was able to increase annual revenues by $300 million by changing a button.
In a now-famous case study, Expedia was able to increase profit (not sales) by $12 million by removing a single text field from their checkout form.
And Barack Obama’s re-election campaign was successful in part because of rigorous A/B testing that minimized friction and in turn grew donations by 49% and sign-ups by more than 161%.
Let’s walk through each case briefly.
Kyle Rush was on the optimization team for President Obama’s re-election campaign.
They conducted numerous tests, and in his own words, Kyle explained how much he was able to learn due to the high traffic the site received.
This made A/B testing different designs and copy ideas easier, because they only had to wait days or even hours for results.
Here’s the law of friction at work in one of their tests.
In the variation they tested on the right, the idea was, “maybe we can convert more people to make a donation if we make the donation process appear easier by breaking it into steps.”
The result was a net increase of 5% in donations. It might not sound like a lot, but over the course of a campaign and raising many millions of dollars, it is.
Jared Pool observed the Law of Friction at work for a major online retailer. He saw that 160,000 people per day were requesting a password reset on their account prior to checkout, and 75% of these people ended up not completing their purchase.
The issue was people would go to check out and be confronted with a simple but supremely annoying form that asked them to register in order to check out.
As one user who tested the site for Jared said:
“I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”
The solution? They replaced the Register button with a Continue button and added a note:
“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”
The result? $15 million in new sales in the first month and +$300 million in additional sales for the first year.
Finally, the case of Expedia:
Simply by removing the “Company name” field, profit (not sales) grew by $12 million per year.
Of course the question is, why?
Well, the field simply confused users and set the wrong expectation. For instance, some thought that company name meant the name of their bank, which would cause them to put in the wrong billing address and then the payment would fail. This, in turn, killed sales.
The user interface was causing friction in this case.
Or, as Jon Correll from Conversion VooDoo put it,
“Conversion rate optimization gains are often just a function of getting your broken UI the $!@$!@ out of the way of your end user.”
How to Apply it to Your Marketing Funnel
Start by understanding where the bottlenecks are in your sales funnel.
Where are people dropping off? Look for outlier numbers.
For instance, a couple of months ago I saw that 60% of people clicked through from our homepage to our pricing page, but then only 7% made it to the checkout or consultation pages.
Numbers like this serve as a compass because they point you toward what should be worked on.
Next, as I discussed in Law of Clarity above, you want to gather lots of feedback from users.
You can have strangers test it, or you can talk directly to existing users of your site.
Both have worked in my experience. However, getting at least 10–15 people from your list of existing users will yield more accurate results.
If you’re doing it over the phone, establish rapport first, then ask open-ended questions and listen.
Maintain detailed notes as you go through this process. Look for patterns, but NEVER guide or do anything to influence the answers.
Again, you are gathering this feedback, because without this data, you will not gain a clear understanding of what is blocking sales on your site.
Once you have identified a pattern—perhaps a recurring type of complaint directly related to the bottleneck in your funnel—then you can start testing possible solutions.
Don’t expect an immediate $300 million change in your business overnight, like in the example above.
But also don’t underestimate the impact you can have with small, deliberate changes that work to address the source of friction in your funnel.
The Bottom Line
Friction is caused by design or copy that is not fully optimized to help people entering your funnel accomplish their goal. This matters whether their goal is buying from you or efficiently learning what you have to offer.
Seventh Law of Sales Funnel Physics: Law of Alignment
What is it?
Johnny rides a red bike.
He arrives at your imaginary bike store.
You try to sell Johnny a new set of tires, but he declines.
Why did Johnny not buy? Because the offer wasn’t aligned with his needs.
The difference between alignment and friction is that friction comes after alignment in the buying process.
Alignment deals with helping customers to identify the need your product can address.
Friction deals with the interactive experience of buying and how easy or difficult it is.
Alignment deals with the customer’s intentions, questions, or context (like what previous website or page the customer came from).
Get it? Got it. Good!
Examples:
Here’s an intriguing case study to demonstrate the Law of Alignment in action.
An SEO link-building company called The HOTH originally relied on a fairly straightforward homepage to generate leads for its service.
Leads were converting on the page at 1.39%.
Ok, not terrible.
So they tested the page against a minimalistic design.
The results? 13.13% or almost a 10X increase in the number of people converted to leads by creating an account.
The case study’s author explained the reason this worked:
[The] majority of visitors coming on The HOTH website were from the direct and referral category. Hence, they had some background knowledge of the company already. This was also true for the social traffic. A very large portion of their search traffic also came from branded keywords…
In other words, the context of the people arriving on the page meant that they didn’t need a lot of information about the service in order to convert. They were already aware of the company’s service, and many already had some trust built with the brand.
The simplicity of the form aligned best with what they already knew or felt about the company’s offer. They didn’t need a long landing page in order to convert.
Important note: The HOTH’s website today looks a little different, with a video at the top above the form. This pushes the form and call-to-action button further down, below the page.
I would speculate that this introduces some friction on purpose.
Why?
I would guess—from direct experience doing lead generation for similar businesses—that the friction is good, because the leads are more educated and higher quality.
After all, you have to assume that a significant percentage of the traffic that does come to that homepage isn’t 100% familiar or clear on what the company has to offer.
Here’s one more example to prove the pattern of the Law of Alignment.
A personal organization service drove search traffic to a landing page via pay-per-click ads.
Which version do you think won?
Version B would seem to have a clearer, more benefit-oriented headline and sub-headline.
But actually version A was the winner, increasing leads by 115%.
The reason is version A’s copy was written to align with the PPC ad copy that the user clicked on before arriving to the page.
The ad created an expectation of ideas in the mind of the user. So arriving on the page where the copy complemented and reflected those same ideas made them more likely to convert.
How to Apply it to Your Marketing Funnel
Traffic arrives on your website from five basic sources:
Direct (people typing in your website or clicking a link in your email)
Search
Social Media
Referral
Paid ads
The source heavily defines the context for people on your site.
One key to using the Law of Alignment in your funnel means tailoring the page that people enter into your website to the context of the traffic source.
Of course, you can take this to an extreme (i.e. if your traffic comes primarily from Google, that doesn’t mean you should redesign your site to have a similar UI and layout to Google with the hope of increasing conversions).
A more practical approach is to ask yourself:
How can we make that “on-ramp” into our funnel more inviting and anticipatory of the visitors’ needs?
What answers do visitors expect to find on each page based on what they searched for prior to arriving there?
What reassurances, if any, do they need once they are in the funnel, browsing our site, and evaluating our product?
As covered above in the Law of Clarity and Law of Friction, you have to do your research and listen with empathy to gain the biggest insights that will lead you to alignment.
The Bottom Line
The context from which a visitor comes to your site needs to be addressed; as does how you will deliver the information they need prior to making a buying decision.
Conclusion
I titled this article as “Sales Funnel Physics” because as in physics, these laws identify the universal principles behind why people do or don’t buy online, assuming there is a market need for the product.
I have not been able to find any case studies or A/B tests that do not fall under one or more of these principles:
The Law of Visibility says that offers must be seen in order for sales and conversions to occur. Sounds obvious, but it’s too often forgotten.
The Law of Big Changes says that as a general rule, testing more significant structural-, copy-, or design changes to your funnel is a best practice. This is because big changes will cause proportionally more varied results than small changes. It doesn’t have to “look” like a lot of work, as long as it is significantly different from your customer’s perspective.
The Law of Repetition is different from the Law of Visibility, because it says that the frequency of exposure to your offer has a direct impact on conversion rates. More exposure to the offer causes more conversion, though ROI diminishes after a point because people get annoyed.
The Law of Clarity says that before people become interested and decide to buy your product, they must first understand what it is.
The Law of Proof says that people care a lot about whether or not your product actually does what it claims. People are risk-averse, so they desire proof in order to minimize perceived risk before buying—in the form of testimonials, case studies, etc.
The Law of Friction says that the easier you can make the experience for an interested buyer, the more likely he/she will buy!
Finally, the Law of Alignment says that people will convert more often on offers and landing pages that better align with their context, like from which site they just came.
Have you noticed similar patterns when designing your sales funnel?
How will you apply the Laws of Sales Funnel Physics to grow your business?
Tell me about them in the comments and I’ll respond 🙂
About the Author: Matt Ackerson is the Founder of Petovera, a company that specializes in growing email lists faster with a pop-up optimization service. Business owners never have to lift a finger and you can see the results each month. Kissmetrics readers can grab an exclusive copy of the Law of Funnel Physics summary today, along with our free 5-day email course: How to Double Your Leads in 30 Days.