If you run a subscription business, cancellations are part of the package. You need to focus on retention to win, but cancellations / churn happen no matter what.
You should minimize cancellations by improving your service and/or getting the right kind of people in the door. Not by making it harder to cancel.
Retention is the key to building a great business.
When your core product experience brings your users back time and time again, you gain some incredible advantages. You spend less on acquisition, learn from your users faster, and start building a community through word of mouth and referrals.
If you can’t retain your users, you’re going to spend more on acquisition while not growing as quickly. You’ll spread distaste for your product, not delight. Soon, you’ll find that there are no more users out there to churn through.
A common mistake ecommerce store owners make is accepting the sale as the end-goal. It is easy for brands to think in such a transactional way; looking beyond each purchase can prove challenging.
A 2014 survey by Econsultancy revealed, “Just 42% of companies are able to measure customer lifetime value.” Though the remaining 58% understand the importance of customer loyalty and retention, they may find it difficult to execute and analyze customer happiness and conversion campaigns.
For a business to thrive, it must provide customers with long-term value that translates into repeat purchases and, thus, increases the customer’s lifetime value to the company.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra
Digital marketing moves at a fast pace. One year something works, and the next year it is obsolete.
Similarly, conversion optimization moves quickly. Sure, there are some core skills that seem foundational and everlasting, but year to year there are also some new skills that crop up.
What are the skills someone should invest in learning if they want to be a top 1% optimization expert in 5 years? What should they learn today?
What are the industry and technology trends that are fueling the need for these skills?
Here’s a common phrase that perhaps you’re familiar with: “Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.”
As an optimizer, you’re in the business of arguing. You’re constantly arguing with your visitors about whether they should leave their email or not, buy something or not.
Improving your argument, even just a little bit, can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. That’s where rhetoric and persuasion come in.
As conversion optimization continues to mature and become adopted by more organizations, it’s always interesting to get an a/b testing tutorial from people in your network to see how they’re approaching growth and optimization. Especially, for me, in the tech startup space, as these companies often live and die by data, and tend to build their organizations around experimentation.
LawnStarter is one such company, so we sat down with their CTO, Jonas Weigert, to learn how they experiment across their product and communication and how they deal with optimization as a company.
What if you found out you are, at best, only optimizing your site for 81% of the people who might possibly visit it?
Whether you’ve spent years perfecting your site’s usability or are just getting started, you’d want to know about that other 19%, right? That 19% represents millions and millions of people with disabilities who can’t access or engage with sites in the traditional way.
That’s where web accessibility comes in, opening you up to conversion opportunities you didn’t even know you were missing out on.
Session replays are a common conversion research technique. And they can provide a lot of value.
Still, the process is amorphous. I haven’t seen a structured way to approach session recordings other than just sitting down to watch a bunch of them and inferring your qualitative findings, somehow lopping them into the rest of your research stack.
But what if there were a better way?
Discoverability and findability are two important terms that optimizers should be familiar with.
Discoverability is when you find the perfect book, even though you were not necessarily looking for it. Findability is when you find the exact book you were looking for, even if all you knew about it was the author’s last name.
eCommerce product filtering, when done right, can solve both issues.
Math.
It’s cold. It’s undeniable. It’s absolute. It’s infallible.
Or is it?
As CROs we tend to boil the world of human behavior, intent, and action into neat rows in a spreadsheet. We weave our assumptions together with formulas in order to break down complex interactions into absolute spreadsheet cells valued by the number of the digits they contain.
It’s math. We can’t be wrong!
But we are wrong. We’re wrong a lot. Our entire existence is built around being wrong.