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MAKE THE INVITE TO SHARE AN INTEGRATED PART OF THE USER’S EXPERIENCE, NOT AN ADD-ON
“Your friend Morgan gave you $25 off your first trip on Airbnb, the best way to travel. Be sure to say thanks!”
the rate at which you get new users to your aha moment.
study hard data about their behavior and then query them on the basis of observations you’ve made in order to focus your experimentation efforts most efficiently on changes that will have the greatest potential impact.
browsing patterns indicate that they’re about to leave a page or screen (companies like Bounce Exchange, Qualaroo, Qualtrics,
“What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you from completing your order?” We’ve found this “one thing” question elicits a high number of responses, and ones that are very eye-opening.
map all of the steps that get users to the aha moment; create a funnel report that profiles the conversion rates for each of the steps and segments users by the channel through which they arrive; and conduct surveys and interviews both of users who progressed through each step where you’re seeing high drop-offs, and those who left at that point to understand the causes of drop-off.
DESIRE – FRICTION = CONVERSION RATE
new user experience (NUX).
NUX must accomplish three fundamental things: communicate relevance, show the value of the product, and provide a clear call to action. Bryan Eisenberg, who is widely considered the godfather of conversion optimization, refers to these three factors as the conversion trinity.
Kissmetrics, a data analytics company, found when they tested using “Sign Up with Your Google Account” as the one and only call to action on their home page. There was no option to enter an email address and password; it was connect with your Google account or nothing. And seemingly overnight, cofounder Neil Patel reported, their sign-ups increased a stunning 59.4 percent.
At Inman, when Morgan’s team experimented with removing their single sign-on, they saw conversions increase 24.8 percent. It turns out that one size does not fit all when it comes to growth hacks.
THE POWER OF POSITIVE FRICTION One of the great ironies of improving activation is that not all friction is bad. Dumping people with no context or clue right into your product as fast as possible is not always optimal; sometimes you want to put some positive friction in their way.
Asking customers about their interests or about the problems they are seeking solutions for immediately creates a form of commitment, as they must invest a little time in responding, while at the same time they have forged a deeper personal connection with you and your product.
He suggests focusing on three main aspects of any gamification effort: meaningful rewards, creating surprise and delight by varying how rewards are earned and presented, and providing some element of instant gratification.
retention is generally the deciding factor in achieving strong profitability,
research shows that users who get more value from a product during the initial period of use are more likely to stick around longer term.
Once new users have crossed the threshold of initial retention, they move into the medium retention phase, a period when the interest in a product’s novelty often fades.
midterm phase is to make using a product a habit;
long-term retention.
key here is to keep refreshing the customer’s perception of the product as must-have.
Your churn rate is essentially the inverse of your retention rate; so, for example, Costco’s 91 percent membership retention rate is also a 9 percent annual churn rate.
A data analyst can put together these reports relatively easily, assuming that your user database has been set up to allow for separating out users by the right set of variables.
programs, such as Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, or Amplitude.
prolonging of the activation experience. Refining the new user experience and getting users to experience the product’s core value as quickly as possible
BRAND AMBASSADOR PROGRAMS
RECOGNITION OF ACHIEVEMENTS All customers appreciate recognition
CUSTOMIZATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP
“one-to-many” marketing mindset, to one of delivering fully customized, one-to-one experiences.
wider behavior on the Web, which is readily obtainable from data providers such as Demandbase.
This customization is enhanced by data from a company called Boomtrain, which uses machine learning tied to personalization to continually optimize the newsletter’s relevance,
Open source software such as the Machine Learning Library (or MLlib for short), offered by Apache Spark,
Communicating to customers that some new features or product offerings are just around the corner, and telling them how they’ll benefit, can be a powerful inducement for them to stick with you.
LONG-TERM RETENTION
introducing a steady stream of new features over a long period of time.
The ideal scenario is one in which you are leading them on a continuous journey of discovery. So another important element of long-term retention is figuring out how to move your users along a learning curve. This developmental process—called ongoing onboarding—is similar to how you would learn any subject, such as an instrument or language or technical skill: by starting with small, simple objectives and then building on your mastery incrementally over time.
Winning back users who’ve abandoned a product is called resurrection in growth circles.
Getting to the bottom of this can be done quite simply by interviewing people who canceled or no longer use your product about why they left.
HACKING MONETIZATION
When it comes to monetization, analysis starts by returning to the basic mapping of the entire customer journey,
systematically present ideas for new product or feature offerings to customers through surveys, and then experiment with those products or features before going wide with them.
conduct surveys and customer research to find the optimal pricing range to start experimenting within.
four questions in the following order: At what price point does [your product] become too expensive that you’d never consider purchasing it? At what price point does [your product] start to become expensive, but you’d still consider purchasing it? At what price point does [your product] start to become a really good deal? At what price point does [your product] start to become too cheap that you’d question the quality of it?9
Too many companies set a price and then treat it as if it’s set in stone, when in reality the team should be continually experimenting with it just as they do with other elements of the business.
One of these is pricing relativity, which is the principle that people’s perceptions of prices are influenced by the prices of other options they are offered. In his seminal book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely describes an experiment that revealed just how much consumers’ decisions about the price they would like to pay are affected by the set of options they have to choose from.
much easier way to compare the value of each offer, and many saw that they were essentially getting the Web subscription for free—what a deal!—leading
The middle package is sometimes called a decoy package and can be a powerful way to drive customers to higher-priced products.
monetizing free users through ads, or by charging for add-on features, can be extremely lucrative.
