When sitting down to write a new post, I ran through a plethora of ideas. We’ve been focusing a lot on CES 2017 recently, so I needed to get us back into the swing of our typical marketing and startup sales related posts. I ended up thinking about user on-boarding and the mistakes that a lot of startups make when creating their on-boarding flow. I then thought about what mistake is most commonly seen during user on-boarding experiences: giving product tours. …
The single most important metric that a SaaS company can track is customer acquisition costs (known as CAC). If you aren’t calculating CAC right, or worse, not even calculating it, it’s absolutely vital that you take time to understand this. If you’re acquiring customers at a drastically unsustainable cost, your business is bound to fail. …
It’s extremely hard to make LinkedIn ads that actually work. Targeting can be confusing and LinkedIn ads are typically much more expensive than other platforms. Because there is a decent amount of risk in starting LinkedIn advertising, you may decide not to dabble in experimenting with it at all. …
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. …
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’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. …
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.
Visitor or customer touchpoints are any way to collect information in order to qualify a lead. This pertains to sales and marketing cycles where some contact is needed to close or further a deal, for example in the B2B or personalised B2C sectors.
What are customer touchpoints?
In creating a Best Practice guide, we came across extensive literature on the subject, which we are summarising here. To begin with, there is currently a lengthy Wikipedia article running at 20 pages without references, and over 16,000 words. Let’s unpack that.
Goal: the point here is to understand that there are numerous points at which (potential) clients come into contact with brands (products & services). This is the buying / decision-making process, also called customer journey, and can refer to both B2C and B2B scenarios.
For purposes of lead generation, we are concerned with contact points through which decisions to purchase or not purchase are made.
Specific to identifying and nurturing leads, we recommend creating touchpoints that can be measured. In other words, touch points that involve some sort of interaction. Ideally, a touch-point will result in another piece of the puzzle being revealed, meaning that you learn something about your lead, and get a step further in the qualification process.
Definition: a ’visitor touchpoint’ refers to any way to collect information in order to qualify a lead.
Using touchpoints in practice – examples for lead generation
Q: So what does this all mean in the context of nurturing leads?
A: It means an opportunity for companies to structure their information-gathering techniques.
Historically, lead generation technologies created techniques such as contact forms, demo calls, and product surveys for interacting with visitors. This has not changed. What has changed are the interaction points. This technology has been formalised into what is currently called Marketing Automation – which bundles all steps across the spectrum.
List of example touchpoints
Blog
Trial sign-up
Purchase
Demo/ video
Webinar
PDF brochures / downloads
Implementation / configuration/ enrichment
Customisation process
Feedback/ data analysis
Automated report generation
Email newsletters
Contact form
Login event
(Social media) logins – meaning ‘login with Facebook’ or ‘login with LinkedIn’
Downloads
Social media sites and feeds
For SaaS products, the website itself is the main touchpoint
Useful definitions from Wikipedia article on Touchpoints
“A touchpoint can be defined as any way a consumer can interact with a business, whether it be person-to-person, through a website, an app or any form of communication… Touchpoints allow prospective customers to become knowledgeable on the brand and the benefits offered and allow them to make a decision to whether they will buy the product or service.”
“Touch points are the first association that a customer has with a product or service offered by a company or individual and are the contact points between a customer and said provider of services. The touch point offers a link between the customer and the service, acting as a go between of what the customers wants and what the service provider is offering, providing a central service in the communication between customer and supplier. The touch point is the first interaction that a customer has with a company and that interaction is considered as the starting point of a customer journey.”
“The customer journey/experience is the full involvement that a customer has with a particular brand, starting at the first connection between customer and service, and ending with the purchasing of a product or service and the advocacy of said product or service to others.”
“Touch points provide the basis and foundations for information gathering techniques used by customers.”
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. …
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.” …
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. …
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. …
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. …
Offering sales prospects free trials is often a very valuable marketing tool. It gives potential customers the opportunity to try your product, with their own data or experiment with how they would ultimately end up working with it.
Getting users to signup for a free trial is the easy part, making them actually use your product during the trial period is the really hard part. If the person in the free trial isn’t using your product during the trial period, there is no way that you can expect them to actually convert into a paid customer when the trial finishes. …
Slack has managed to become the fastest growing B2B startup. Ever. It’s a pretty amazing story and it almost feels like it found success by accident. However, success was anything but an accident and Slack grew by obsessively listening to customers, quickly testing, constantly iterating, and always putting their learning to use. …
When you’re looking up articles on growth hacking, most reading that you’re going to find will be on how to grow a B2C startup and not a B2B company. While these articles about B2C will often have small nuggets of useful information in them, you’re going to still benefit most from blog posts that offer strictly B2B growth tips.
Every brand needs a personality. Do you know why it’s important for a brand to have a personality? If you don’t know (or would like to refine) your brand persona, we have listed out the steps that you should take to form a powerful persona that compliments your mission, product, and website perfectly. …
Inbound marketing refers to marketing methods that attract visitors, rather than a marketer having to go out and earn the attention of a sales prospect. Instead of your company waving its arms in the air and saying “look at me!” you are instead producing compelling content that draws customers to your website. …
Blog posts, ebooks, email drip campaigns, and similar marketing activities will replace traditional advertising.
It’s a bold statement, but it’s hard to deny that there is currently a massive surge in interest in content marketing from all types of brands underway.
With this surge in interest in content marketing happening, a more tactical approach is now required to turn readers into email subscribers, social followers, repeat readers, and then eventually customers.
There is a very simple reason why content marketing will replace traditional advertising: it works really well. …
