Microconf 2014: Six Tricks That Helped Me Triple My SaaS's Growth Rate
NOTE: These recaps are a bit more for me than you. I’ll skip over stuff, include asides that are more personal notes to me, etc. Your mileage may vary. More detailed/sanctioned recaps will be available at http://microconfrecap.com at some point. This one’s a bit more slight because there’s slides.
Speaker: Brennan Dunn
- I’m a hacker and I like growth
- I’m more of a marketer these days.
- Not using the “growth hacker” term, but might be talking about some things that are “gh-y”
- http://planscope.io, also two books, podcast, workshops
- I do this for family. Home office is the archenemies.
- Everything optimizes to less time in front of a computer.
- We’re all here to grow
- WoW: The idea is you want to level up. Just like business.
- We’re all here to make more money.
- Planscope is 2-2.5 years old.
- “How big is your team?” .25 in a good week.
The all important sales funnel
- Visitors > Trials > Activations > Paid
- Treat one, it affects all the others. Same with churn.
- Identify and tweak points of optimization.
- Reacquire drive-bys.
- Retargeting (drive interested people back to you).
- Information vs. product: Two paths, “Google, how do I raise my rates?” or “Google, I need project management software.”
- First group doesn’t really know about Planscope. The second knows and needs the product.
- One size fits all retargeting is a very bad idea.
- First group: Facebook to email course. Second group, display network.
- Retargeting is more than just converting visitors. Invite for 1-on-1 onboarding, rsvp for webinar, success stories or usage guides, product updates, reinforce lifecycle email communication
- Retargeting as push RSS (retarget blog posts to paid customers)
- Segmentation.
- Goal: Make this a product-for-one
- Are you a team or solo? Or you design or dev? How do you bill? Becomes choose-your-own-adventure onboarding. Devs get dev-based sample projects, for instance.
- People think there are core difference that mean it won’t serve their niche.
- A perfectly placed “if” condition can go a long way toward improving conversions. Technically easy to do.
- Trial scores
- Lead scoring. Started scoring all new trials. So he can determine which trials to manual outreach.
- Take a snapshot of db when a user buys. Find commonalities. If they do all the commonalities = 100% score.
- Use to power different emails for good trial/bad trial sequences.
- Then, what caused these scores to inform onboarding.
- Educate everywhere
- Your product is a very small part of customer’s business.
- Sends a manual email when a proposal closes. Responses become excellent testimonial fodder.
- Do an exit interview
- Funnel doesn’t always give big picture
- When you put credit card upfront, you require people to cancel, which means you can ask them why they’re canceling.
- This alone is one of the best features I’ve added to Planscope.
- Look for trends, features that are missing, environmental factors.
- Why weren’t you using? Find followup cancel opportunities.
- Most emotional when they cancel, best time to gather feedback.
- Increase LTV
- Why don’t you upgrade from trial now? I’ll give you this book in exchange.
- Figure out when accounts typically churn, email a few months before with a coupon discount for life. Make their account more valuable over time.
Q&A
- No one’s ever complained about privacy implications with sending email with first closed proposal.
- Constantly pausing autoresponders and send email out manual instead.
- Customer happiness scores, weighted by probability of converting? 100 score is typical conversion. Not scientific.
- How do you maintain the state of mind when working on the product so little at times? Early mornings. Have a lot of other stuff going on. No multitasking. Support is more intermittent.
- Biggest competition is Excel and email. Newsletters/ebooks make more sense to educate on the existence of a problem. Less friction than signing up for an account.
