The Growth Newsletter

Decrease user churn by better managing expectations.

Insights from Michael Erickson Facchin of AdBadger.

When your app isn’t as polished or feature-rich as its competitors, users may become disappointed and churn.

Here’s what AdBadger did to reduce churn by 30% in one month:

They now show a warning box when people click “sign up” that explains that the app is still in early-adopter mode. They transparently say that they do some things way better than the competition, and that you’ll love how do it, but that features X, Y, Z are not yet available. Then they close with, “If you’re an early adopter and love what we’re doing, sign up.”
While this reduced the amount of people who signed up for a free trial, it significantly increased their ideal, high-retention customers.
Remember, people respond to authenticity — especially when everyone else is exaggerating in their marketing copy.

How do I stay out of email spam folders?

Insights from Mike Arsenault of Rejoiner.

Your reputation as a sender is critical. Most marketers overlook this, and their poor sending reputation causes emails to go to spam.

Here’s how to improve your sender reputation:

Maximize positive signal: How often do recipients forward or reply to your emails? A history of this positive engagement signals to Gmail and others that you’re likely a trustworthy sender who isn't sending spam. Pro tip: Sprinkle questions into your emails asking people to respond with feedback. That helps increase your positive response signal.
Minimize negative signal: When your emails hard bounce, are reported as spam, or are deleted without being read, that can send negative signal to Gmail and others. The ideal “complaint” rate is under .02% — or 1 complaint for every 5000 emails. Monitor this with your email marketing platform. If your complaints are high, redesign your email opt-in flow to make it crystal clear that people are signing up for email marketing, and don’t over-email them or send them low-quality garbage. EOLYWTBE: Email others like you want to be emailed. (I just made that up.)
The health of your sending infrastructure: Are the IPs your emails are being sent from viewed favorably by ISPs? If at any point in the past your IPs were penalized for spam, it can hurt your current reputation as a sender. Your email platform should monitor this for you.

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How do I create explainer ads on a budget?

Insights from Sam Shepler of Testimonial Hero and Julian D’Angelo of ROSS Intel.

Start by making your explainer video DIY-style using a tool like Animoto. It may not look as polished as you’d prefer, but it looks good enough. This gives you an opportunity to rapidly nail your product messaging before investing in professional videos.
Once you’ve tested and finalized your messaging, you can have one of these companies inexpensively create a professional video: Explainify, Verstiuk, and Studiotale.
Or, you could record a voiceover for a screenshare walkthrough of your product. For B2B SaaS, this often outperforms every other video ad.

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How can I increase quality user signups?

Insights from Julian Shapiro (@julian) of Demand Curve. P.S. If you pay for Demand Curve's training this week, it's 15% off.

There’s a myth that you need to drive visitors to your primary call to action as quickly as possible — often in the hero of your landing page.

CTA’s are critical, yes, but they shouldn’t be given so much weight that visitors click them before understanding what you do and why they should care.

For example, here’s how a visitor’s journey too often looks on a site: A visitor lands on your page, they click your giant button in your hero section that says “sign up” or “see the product” then they land on the next page — BUT they don’t yet feel compelled to actually take the next action. Because they don't fully understand yet why you're awesome. So they just bounce.
So, rethink landing pages like this: If your landing pages are in fact written well, you should want people to read them. Because a visitor armed with knowledge of your value props is one who is going to convert much better down funnel. They're in the right frame of mind.
Specifically, I’ve seen better checkout conversion rates from doing two things: (1) Removing the hero CTA, and putting it in a sticky navbar instead (2) After the second or third section of a page, I sprinkle a CTA after every section. And I end with a big CTA.

Consider A/B testing this to find out if it improves things for you.