Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for SaaS companies. It allows you to understand various metrics, beyond just the typical number of orders, conversion, revenue, and similar. You would want to focus on metrics beyond simple sales and revenue numbers in Google Analytics because other metrics give you the opportunity to seek out revenue growth opportunities. …
Finding good marketing advice online can be a tricky task. There is a lot of advice out there, making it hard to decide which advice is quality and which isn’t worth your time. To help you on your quest to find good online marketing advice, we’ve decided to share 7 marketers to follow who will help you grow your business. …
Seeing your pages convert at a high rate is always exciting. There’s an unusual thrill in seeing your work appear to pay off. But, what if you your high converting pages are actually hurting your business? It’s a potentially odd question, but it’s worth considering if all of those “10 ways to make high converting landing pages” blog posts are actually during your business more harm over time than good. …
Whether you’re a small local store, a tech startup, or a freelancer, lead generation is how you grow your business. There are a wide variety of ways to grow leads, so how do you decide which tactics to use? …
In this post, we are going to work through a way to think about funnel optimization that could potentially produce some impressive growth numbers. We’ll call this the lead generation funnel concept, and it’s a fantastic way to scheme up methods of growing a SaaS company. …
There are a lot of components and considerations that go into making great lead generation landing pages. While adding LeadBoxer is a great start, you’ll also need to come up with tactics to make your website visitors convert from visitor to sales prospect. You will need to think about your website copy, colors, design, and more. …
When you launch a new website, you typically try to dream up ways for how to get more website traffic. This is because you probably built your website to share an idea or grow your business. The more people that end up on your website, the more people will learn about what you’d want to share. …
If you’ve just installed WordPress to begin creating yourself a new business website, you’re naturally going to want to find the best WordPress plugins and agency WordPress themes to make your site as effective as possible. For a business website, you’ll likely want to have your ultimate goal to be to collect sales leads that increase your revenue. However, to get that sales lead, you’ll need to figure out how to engage users and make them interact with your website and brand as much as possible. …
If you’re creating social media posts for your company, you’re naturally going to want to know which image sizes will make your posts look best. This is because the better that your images look, the more clicks and engagement your content will get. …
Many agencies use WordPress to build their websites. This is because the blogging platform makes it easy to showcase services, a portfolio, create a blog, and more. With WordPress being such a popular website building tool, it’s no wonder that agencies go on the hunt for the best agency WordPress themes. …
When you run a business or are simply on the marketing team of a company, you’re always looking for ways to be more innovative and discover new opportunities. After reading Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore, you will gain new ideas for how to accomplish both of those tasks. It’s a great book filled with marketing lessons that can quickly be applied to just about any business. …
Lead generation is an art. Gathering up high-quality sales leads takes skill and intense planning. When you implement the best lead generation ideas with smart planning you will drive big business results. …
According to Ascend2, 82% of companies now use email marketing. That is quite an impressive number, and probably a lot higher than you would have guessed if you were asked, “What percentage of companies do you think use email marketing?” …
The most important thing that a startup can do to accelerate success is to increase the rate at which the company is able to generate leads. Lead generation is key to success because sales leads are how you grow your revenue. If you don’t have any leads, your company simply can’t grow. …
It’s becoming harder and harder for startups to gain traction in cost efficient ways. This is because the competitive landscape for capturing attention is becoming overly saturated with idea after idea. It’s easy to get somebody look at your brand, but the real challenge lies in getting them to interact and remember you brand. …
You can be very successful with Google Adwords. It can be the perfect way to drive an immense amount of qualified traffic to your website, which has the impact to immediately boost sales and revenue. …
Marketing Goals are effective because goals are for learning. Learning intensifies when there is a goal because goals make you focus on your efforts. Additionally, goals make it so that you can leverage the powerful psychological benefit of goal setting to hack your own brain. A goal should not be thought of as make-or-break demand, but rather a hypothesis:
If [variable], then [result], because [rationale].
For example, if our marketing goals were to “get 100 new free trial users per month,” the hypothesis would read something like this:
If we create 15 high quality blog posts each month, we will generate 100 new free trial users per month, because I think we can generate 2,000 new leads and maintain a 5% new lead to free trial conversion rate.
If this was a goal of ours at LeadBoxer, and we were to hit this example goal, that would be great. We would now know that we would need to make more blog posts because writing blog posts is a great use of our time. However, if we don’t hit the goal, we still have a brilliant starting place to learn and iterate on our strategy from. When things don’t work out, we should be asking questions like: Are blog posts the wrong format (variable)? Did we overestimate how many leads we would get (result)? Or was the problem with our ability to convert those leads into free trials (rationale)? When your company is in the stage of trying to figure its business out, the information you learn from accomplishing and failing at goes is immensely valuable.
Why Do Goals Often Not Succeed?
Goals typically go wrong when they aren’t clear enough. When a goal isn’t defined well (or is even too defined), it becomes impossible to succeed. And setting goals that are clearly impossible (or highly unlikely to succeed) are dangerous for a company because they set teams up for failure.
Setting Too Many Goals
Setting too many goals is also very dangerous for a company. Too many goals lead to what is referred to as “false hope syndrome.” This will mean goal after goal is missed, and this will destroy both motivation and focus of the team building a company.
Setting Marketing Goals That Are Impossible
Company leaders often set marketing goals that are clearly impossible to reach. This is one of the most dangerous things that a company leader can do because it’s demoralizing. A great leader creates a team of high-achievers. If these team of high-achieves is forced to chase impossible goals, it can be devastating. Leaders need to be focused on building a culture of success; so creating smaller goals that are actually attainable is a key ingredient for building a business. Steering clear of vanity metrics is incredibly important. Defining success and failure from metrics that don’t matter will lead to failure. Vanity metrics are metrics that don’t truly explain the health of a company. For example, the number of free trials doesn’t really matter for a company. Free trial numbers just say people are signing up, but don’t signify if real traction is being built. Vanity metrics are things like free trials, registered users, downloads, and pageviews. These numbers don’t typically correlate to the metrics that really matter. Metrics that actually matter include: active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenue and profits. The real data that matters are the numbers that help you understand if there’s repeat usage of your product and if you’re able to retain users.
How to Create and Use Goals Like a Growth Hacker
The best way to avoid common goal mistakes is to remember that goals are not definitive make-or-break numbers, but wonderful learning opportunities. Here’s how goal setting should work:
Form hypothesis
Select KPI
Set goal
Execute
Track progress
Talk about what happened and iterate
This structure helps guide a company away from “set-in-stone” goals. It helps make goals more enjoyable, realistic, and beneficial for a company. It’s how you set a company up for success.
Social media can be one of the most authentic ways to connect with qualified sales leads. Once you figure out how to generate leads using social media, you can work with these new leads to generate more sales for your business. …
Since lead generation is a process in the making, we get a lot of questions about timing. The longer you wait, the more details we could know about your lead. While you could take your time to gather more information on leads, you could be losing your client to a competitor at the same time. Because of that, one of the most important steps is to follow up on leads. …
One of, if not the most common, WordPress plugins that people seek are WordPress form plugins. People frequently seek form plugins because most websites are made with the goal of increasing business growth or spreading of ideas. When it becomes easier to contact the website owner or business owner, it becomes easier to meet and talk with people who can accelerate your success. …
One of the most common and most difficult questions that a SaaS company with a free trial asks itself is “how long should a SaaS free trial be?” This question is asked by every SaaS product because every one of these companies has the same goal: getting users to have that moment where everything clicks and they realize why they need the product. Every SaaS product needs to figure out how long it takes to get free trial users hooked, so that they convert into paid customers. …
The term lead enrichment is important to know when you’re trying to understand lead generation. When you know the definition of lead enrichment, you have a much more firm grasp on a core concept of sales and lead generation.
What is lead enrichment?
Lead enrichment is when you add actionable intelligence to your sales leads. This means that instead of just seeing an email address, for example, you have a way to add phone number, company details, and more to a lead.
Why is lead enrichment important?
Lead enrichment makes sales easier because when you have more information on a potential customer it becomes easier to know what influences their buying decisions.
This information can be thought of as sales intelligence. When you have enriched leads, you can make smart choices as to how to approach and interact a lead. When you can have a more personable interaction with a lead, you close more deals.
How to enrich your leads better?
A tool like LeadBoxer makes lead enrichment much easier because it has the ability to automatically work with all website forms, give you more information about your web-traffic, and capture lead information on your website.
Tools, such as LeadBoxer, help enrich leads by giving you a lead score, information about the company from a LinkedIn profile, and an understanding of what pages a lead is browsing the most. A great lead enrichment solution will include information such as lead’s career history, how the person is interacting with your product or website, and much more.
The type of lead enrichment tool that we have described above will ideally do the following to the form lengths on your website:
This will make your potential clients more eager to subscribe and fill in your forms without sacrificing important information as everything else will be captured with our cutting-edge technology.
If you want to jump-start your lead enrichment, we suggest creating a free LeadBoxer account. Click here to create an account.
If you offer a B2B SaaS product, marketing can be quite difficult. B2B SaaS products are often difficult to integrate or the majority of the people on your website may not be the decisions makers at companies. …
In the online marketing and sales world, the idea of a referral program is commonly talked about. In the standard referral program, a person is incentivized to invite a user to join a product. If the person who was invited joins, the original user earns something as a reward. …
User onboarding is extremely important because it is the first impression that you make on a user.
A quote from American actor Will Rogers perfectly sums up why the first impression is so important: “You will never get a second chance to make a first impression.” …
One of the reasons why Slack likely grew so fast is because it has proven to be a fantastic way for companies to make communication and workflows much more smooth. …
The best marketers are data-driven. This means that they use customer and website data to make smart decisions that accelerate the growth of a company. Smarter decisions are made because, by using data and analytics, you can get a much better understanding of your customers and what they want to do with your product. …
The best software as a service (SaaS) companies set up conversion funnels.
A conversion funnel allows a company to efficiently and effectively track how and if people are converting into customers. Beyond just customer tracking, companies can use conversion funnels to understand if website visitors are performing important tasks that help facilitate long-term and lasting customer to company relationships.
After reading this post, you will have a great understanding of what an acquisition funnel is. You will also likely be able to take what you’ve learned from this post and, using Kissmetrics, identify items that are hindering your growth.
Let’s look at how to use Kissmetrics for your SaaS company.
What Is an Acquisition Funnel?
For a SaaS company, an acquisition funnel is a way to get a great view as to how a website is performing. It allows key business stakeholders to understand what is working and what isn’t.
An acquisition funnel often looks like something along the lines of:
1. User visited the website
This is the top of the funnel. This is simply the number of people who came and visited your website.
2. Signed up for a free trial
If your company is like most SaaS companies, you offer a free trial. This step is where a person who has visited your website signs up for a free trial. It’s the next step in your funnel because you want your website visitors to sign up for a free trial.
3. Person used product
This is the next step in the acquisition funnel. This is a very important step because it is when people take the time to use your product. When a person actually uses your product, it becomes A LOT likelier that he or she will ultimately pay for your product, since a user not using a product means there’s no chance of them converting.
5. User turns into a paying customer
This is the final step of our example user acquisition funnel. It’s the most vital part of your funnel and everything leads to this: a free trial user turns into a paying customer.
An example of this funnel in Kissmetrics looks something like this:
How To Analyze Your Acquisition Funnel
1. Look for a bottleneck
When you first begin doing funnel analysis, you want to identify a bottleneck. This means that you want to find what is blocking your users from doing actions that benefit your business.
Let’s analyze the example funnel above.
By looking at the example funnel above, we can quickly see that:
A decent amount of people visited the website, giving us a reasonable sample size.
At 15%, the website does a great job converting visitors into free trial signups. (Most SaaS companies see 1-10% at this step.)
Once people signed up, we can see that a very healthy number of people actually started using the product. There’s obviously some room to improve this number, but it isn’t a detrimental bottleneck.
As we move to the last step in the conversion funnel, we notice what our primary bottleneck is: turning users into paying customers. Now that we know that getting people to convert to paid is a major pain point in the growth of the company, we know that we need to figure out why people don’t feel the need to pay for the product.
2. Figure out why the bottleneck exists
Now that we have identified that there is a major bottleneck in getting people to convert into a paid user portion of our funnel, we need to figure out why people don’t want to pay.
The smartest thing that you can do here is speaking with the individuals who didn’t convert.
According to Kissmetrics, these are some of the best questions to consider:
Is there a particular feature that users are having a hard time with?
What is the difference between the people who are paying for your product and the people who aren’t?
What are the people who converted saying differently than those who didn’t convert? Take time to really understand the differences between these two groups of people.
Once these questions have been considered, you have taken a great step towards effectively using your funnel data to make smart business growth decisions.
3. Further analyze your funnel with segmenting by property
Segmenting by properties is a great way to learn about the characteristics of different types of users. This is because properties allow us to understand people in groups.
Luckily, Kissmetrics makes segmenting by property extremely easy.
Using the example above again, we’ll look at how to segment people by campaign name. This type of property is triggered using a UTM parameter. A campaign with a UTM tag would have a link that looks similar to the following:
The example campaign is “ExampleName.” This is something we know since the URL says “utm_campaign=ExampleName.”
Knowing that our campaign name is titled “ExampleName” we can view the people who came into our funnel from that campaign. This will give us a snapshot of how the campaign is bringing us traffic and customers.
We have now segmented the campaign name property on the funnel report:
You can see above that all of the traffic came from five different sources.
By looking at each campaign, we can see how each source performs throughout our entire acquisition funnel.
Using this data and having a somewhat granular view of how each of your campaigns impacts your business means that you can make great business decisions. You now have a very clear picture as to what is working for you and what isn’t. You know where to stop focusing your efforts and where to increase your focus.
While segmenting by the property is undoubtedly insanely valuable, we can continue and look at data even closer with Kissmetrics.
4. Taking a closer look at your acquisition funnel
We’ve looked at data from a pretty high level, but we can look at it closer to get an even better understanding of what makes people convert into paying customers.
Often SaaS companies want to do things such as track how many people take important steps during the signup process. By this, we mean having a flow like:
Viewed signup page. This step of the funnel would be triggered when an individual visits the signup page.
Entered business type. Once a person signed up, they entered the type of business they work with when prompted.
Entered phone number. When prompted, the person entered their phone number.
Entered a password. After entering a business type and phone number, users entered a password.
Enters the website URL. At this step, users enter their website URL.
In this example, we looked at a variety of steps that aren’t optional, and are simply form fields. Users aren’t being taken to new pages in these steps but are simply being prompted to fill out different form fields.
Here is how the above funnel would look:
In this funnel, you can see that most people successfully complete actions until the moment that they are asked for their phone number. Once people hit this form field they start to drop off.
This type of granularity can be very valuable since it helps you get a closer look at where individuals are having problems completing tasks that are important.
5. See how healthy your acquisition really is
The funnel tool in Kissmetrics is a seriously phenomenal resource. It is a great resource because it’s perhaps the simplest way to understand how healthy your customer acquisition efforts really are.
You will be able to find roadblocks and bottlenecks in your acquisition and make it so that fewer visitors drop out of the flow.
You can make smart decisions, especially when you set up micro funnels, that allow you to determine what parts of your acquisition funnel need the most improvement.
Using funnel reports in Kissmetrics, you have no excuse not to find ways to efficiently grow your business.
Making a great checkout page is important for increasing revenue.
Checkout page design is something that we’ve been spending time studying here at LeadBoxer, and we thought that we should share some of the best checkout pages we found in our research. …
Marketing and sales automation is important because it helps streamline and remove tedious tasks from your life. In this article we will discuss some of our favourite Zapier automations. …
Having a good product is pointless if you don’t give people the right tools to understand your product. If people don’t understand your product, they are never going to use it and become purchasers.
You have bad user onboarding if you experience the following:
Users quickly vanish after signing up.
Low conversion rate to paid accounts.
High churn rate (people aren’t renewing their paid accounts).
All of the effort that you’re putting towards building a company are effectively going down the drain if you have awful onboarding. Your product doesn’t matter if nobody is willing to use it and everything that you’re doing is a waste of time if you can’t get people to pay for your product and retain the people who are paying for your products.
Do you know your customers?
A person who signs up for your product did so because he or she believed in the promise that you explained in your marketing materials. Your marketing materials explained something that sounded great to the user, but are people finding that your product actually meets the promise once they join?
User onboarding is when you make your marketing promise come to life. To make your promise come to life, you need to creatively introduce people to your features while remaining intensely focused on your customer.
To become intensely focused on your customer, you should be creating a brilliant strategy that embraces of notions of a buyer personas and the jobs-to-be-done theory.
The idea behind buyer personas and the jobs-to-be-done theory are:
A buyer persona makes it easier to understand who is signing up for your product or service.
The jobs-to-be-done theory makes it easier to understand why people are signing up for your product or service.
If you have a strong understanding of who and why people are using your product or service, you will be able to achieve far greater success.
The two ways different ways to onboard new users.
In this post, we are going to focus on two ways to best onboard new users. The tactics that we are going to discuss are using persona’s to onboard users and also using the jobs-to-be-done theory. Ideally, you won’t just pick one of these theories. But rather, you’ll be able to strategically combine both theories to create a powerful user onboarding machine.
Onboarding customers using a persona.
Because onboarding is a key part of marketing, it’s important to bring the idea of a buyer persona into the onboarding mix.
This is important to do because it makes it so that your customer is the center of the onboarding experience.
For example, Canva relies heavily on persona onboarding to make a memorable initial user experience. They rely heavily on personas by showing three options for new users to pick from. The three options ask if the new user is using Canva for education purposes, for work, or for personal use. Whichever option the new user picks dictates the onboarding flow that he or she will go down.
If a user selects that they are using Canva for personal projects, he or she will sample projects for items like birthday cards. If a personal says they are using Canva for business, they will see more professionally-inspired projects to start from. …
Getting people to join your SaaS product free trial is great, but it doesn’t matter how many people are joining a free trial if none of them are converting to paid users. …
If you’re new to online marketing, you may often see the term landing page floating around. With this term commonly used, under the assumption that everybody knows what it means, it’s easy to get confused.
In this post, we are going to answer your question “what is a landing page?” so that you can become an even better digital marketer.
Facebook’s annual conference, F8, is just around the corner.
The conference, which takes place at Fort Mason, San Francisco on April 12 and 13, is guaranteed to be an exciting event for developers, marketers, publishers, and really any Facebook user. …
One of the primary goals of content marketing is to get more backlinks. Backlinks do more than just boost your search engine ranking, but they also allow you to subtly boost your brand authority by leveraging the audience of other people or companies. …
Landing pages are a core asset of every great online business, since every great business needs to entice sales prospects to convert into actual sales.
Since landing pages can be such an integral part of the sales funnel, we thought it would be important to share with our readers how to build high converting landing pages. …
The phrase “cold calling is dead” has been getting said more frequently recently. People have been saying this more frequently because, often, people just assume that cold calling comes off as overly salesy, unprofessional, and likely a waste of time. …
In the digital marketing world, the terms paid media, owned media, and earned media have been becoming increasingly popular. Do you know the differences between paid, owned, and earned media are? Or, do you perhaps not know what any of the terms mean? …
There is a ton of information available out there about search engine optimization (SEO). Because there is so much information available, it is easy to stumble on misinformation that will steer you in the wrong direction. …
When your sales team loves their job, they are going to thrive. You want to create a work environment that puts a huge smile on your team members faces, because they know that the time they are spending as a member of your team is potentially the highlight of their professional journey. A happy sales team is an efficient sales team. We did some research into how to keep your employees satisfied.
Here is what we learned:
1. Think about happiness often
If you frequently think about the happiness of your team, you’re likely going to be coming up with ways to continue improving happiness level.
However, it’s important that you don’t obsess over the pursuit of happiness. According to a study by Yale psychologist June Gruber, there can actually be a dark side to happiness. Meaning, that when you fail to meet increased expectations for happiness, you can actually become unhappy. The study explained: “the pursuit of happiness may lead to maladaptive outcomes because it sets people up for disappointment.”
This study is a great reminder that you should remember to think about happiness often, but don’t obsess over it.
2. Consider what type of team you want to build
You need to think about the type of team that you want to build and build your culture of happiness and motivation around that.
Below are some popular types of teams:
The Open Team: This type of team is willing to try out new experiences and take risks. An open team is often more willing to make decisions that are bigger risks but have greater potential upside.
The Extroverted Team: This type of team is based around the idea of creating a culture where team members draw energy from each other. This is a highly social and thoughtful type of team.
The Agreeable Team: This team type is often more compassionate, which means there’s a lot of agreeing happening between team members. This means that this type of team is likely to be less willing to take risks and will make decisions on the safer side.
Once you have a clear idea of the type of team you want to build, it will become a lot easier to build a happy team. It will become easier to build a happy team when you know what type of team you want to build because a clear team vision will allow you to build a cohesive relationship between all team members. The more cohesive and rallied behind a unified vision that a team is, the happy everybody will be.
3. Be an actionable leader
If you’re a leader, you shouldn’t just be leading. You should also be doing too.
A great leader leads by example, so leaders that just sit back and direct often make team members feel belittled or disconnected from the leader. A strong leader knows what he or she needs to be doing because people will follow a leader based on the quality of his or her actions, rather than the leader simply declaring, “I am the leader!”
When there is a strong leader who is leading by example, a team will be happier. And a happy team means more motivation to drive sales forward and here sales enablement can help you.
4. Give employees both freedom and responsibility
Empower your employees to make decisions. When employees, not just leadership, are involved with decision making they instantly feel happier.
In Dennis Bakke’s book, The Decision Maker, he shares an interaction between an employee in HR, named Angela, and the CEO of her company:
“You’ve got the responsibility, but you’ve also got the freedom. Think through these questions. Figure out what you think will work best. Do whatever you need to. If you want to connect with other people who are thinking about this, get advice from other businesses, you let me know. Whatever research you need to do, we’ll make it happen. And then come to me with your decisions about how to handle human resources going forward.”
“So you can sign off on them?” Angela challenged.
Tom shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “So I understand what’s happening in the business.”
This is a simple interaction, but it helps remind us that when employees have the ability to make meaningful choices, they’re going to ultimately be much happier and willing to contribute to the company.
5. Establish team values
Every good team has strong values.
Emphasizing values to team members will help define the path at which ideas come to life; shaping how the team operates and moves a business forward.
To make your sales team as happy as possible, pick out the simple values that matter the most to your organization. Think about factors such as positivity, creativity, and other cultural values that you know will help enhance the growth of your company.
If you’ve done a good job hiring, your team will quickly be able to rally around your team values.
The ability to rally around a shared set of values will make a team more cohesive and a cohesive team will be happiest working together (which means the success of the team will propel further, faster!).
6. Hire the right people
Hiring the right people is easier said than done. But, if you’re not doing a good job hiring, you’re likely building an unhappy team that won’t work well together.
In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins compares the hiring (and firing) process to putting people on a bus:
“If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”
This quote is a great reminder as to how important it is to build the right team, by hiring the right people.
To hire the right people that allow you to build a happy sales team, you should have a very disciplined hiring process. If there’s any doubt in your mind over a person you’re considering hiring, they probably aren’t a good fit. On the reverse side, if you hire somebody and quickly determine they are a bad fit, it’s smart that you let this person go quickly. It’s smart to let this person go because when you keep people around who aren’t a good culture fit, it can be detrimental to the company and destroy any shot you have at making a team that works together effectively and is happy.
Do you have a happy sales team?
Before looking at ways that you can improve the happiness of your sales team, you should step back and think about if they’re already happy. If your team is happy, think about why they are happy and maintain that; rather than trying to push the level of happiness forward even more.
If you have determined some items that you think make your sales team happy, we’d love to hear them. Let us know what’s making your team so happy in the comments.
Most companies and marketers are very focused on using social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. We think that there is one platform, which is often forgotten, which deserves more attention. That platform is SlideShare. …
If you’re having a hard time collecting qualified leads for you business, you’ll gain a lot of valuable lessons from this article. We are going to explain exactly how to easily generate more leads, using high quality content. …
Lead generation is an amazingly complex topic, which means that there are a vast variety of books on the topic. Great lead generation ultimately comes down to having a highly optimized sales funnel and way of nurturing leads into sales. Optimizing both of these items can often come down to micro-improvements that really add up; marginal gains in lead generation can drive massive results over time. …
