How to Persuade SaaS Customers When They Hate All Your Pricing Options

Your pricing options suck.

At least that's what some of your consumers think.

They like your products. But the pricing packages aren't meeting their expectations.

Customers may enjoy one feature, but it isn't included in a specific package. Or maybe they admire the pricing but prefer different benefits.

“Pricing is a moving target and found should view it as an ongoing product discovery process. Pricing should be re-evaluated regularly,” says Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist at Redpoint Ventures.

So, what do you do when customers like your product but not your pricing? Check out the four strategies below.

1. Determine Your Most Valuable Benefits

Experts believe “30% of the thousands of pricing decisions companies make every year fail to deliver the best price.” Business managers don't always match the right price to the right services.

What your team deems valuable isn't important. You want to know what buyers love about your products.

That's where data can help. Gather data to identify which benefits your customers enjoy the most.

Monitor customer feedback, product usage, and user behavior. Discover which benefits make your product worth buying.

Once you find the desired benefits, talk about them from the customer's perspective. Speak their language.

Peep Laja, the founder of ConversionXL, writes:

“Your value proposition needs to be in the language of the customer. It should join the conversation that is already going on in the customer's mind. In order to do that you need to know the language your customers use to describe your offering and how they benefit from it.”

Here's an example from Intercom. The team highlights product features in simple, short sentences. It communicates what the platform can do and how it's beneficial to the customer.

Sell consumers on what they like most. Continue to emphasize your SaaS product solutions.

2. Educate Consumers About Undesirable Features

Research shows that “75% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions.”

Content gives your consumers the opportunity to learn about your products. And the information can be easily shared with a team of decision-makers.

Brigg Patten, a business and tech writer, says, “Educating your customer is a vital part of the sales process for any business, and is important in relationship building. Customers have more confidence that your solution is the best for their particular needs when you take the time to ensure they are well-educated.”

Therefore, when customers dislike certain pricing options due to product features, it's time to educate them about the possibilities.

Show consumers how particular features can benefit their businesses. Give them real-life examples that their team can relate to.

For instance, if your SaaS sells subscription billing software, demonstrate why multiple payment methods matter. Produce content showing how their customers want options to pay by credit card, ACH, and PayPal.

When educating your customers, decide how you will convey the message. The medium is just as important as the message itself.

Collect data on which method your consumers prefer. You can send a simple email survey asking for their preferences.

Content formats range from eBooks to webinars to blog posts. Select the one that works for a majority of your users. Your team also may consider doing more than one option.

Below is an example from Asana. Did you know you could create editorial calendars on the platform? The team shows you how through on-demand guides.

Some customers don't dislike your features. They just don't see the benefits. Educate your consumers.

3. Seriously Go Above & Beyond Expectations

Humans love routine. Some drink coffee at the same time each day. Sit at the same desk. And even watch the same TV shows every week.

It becomes a habit. Those patterns mold us to not expect anything new. It's not that we don't want to experience something different. We just don't look for it.

To shake your customers out of the SaaS buying routine, go beyond their expectations. Give customers something extra for choosing a specific pricing option.

“People like bonuses. They help build positive emotions around your brand. They make customers feel happy and appreciated. As a result, the customers will strongly connect these positive emotions to your brand and the chances are you won't be forgotten,” writes Damian Winkowski, former new business developer at PayLane.

For instance, if all your competitors are offering extra storage space for new customers, then provide your buyers with extra storage space and one-month of unlimited access to a customer success manager.

It's all about doing things differently to grab your audience's attention. Customers aren't excited by the same-old sales tactics. They desire a little extra in order for you to secure their business.

SignupLab, a sales CRM and customer success dashboard, rewards people who found them on Product Hunt. They offer interested buyers a 30% discount on their first subscription period.

So, if any consumers really liked their product but hated the pricing options, this discount may convince them to at least give SignupLab a chance.

Add a bonus benefit to your pricing packages. It will give your consumers another reason to choose you over the competition.

4. Emphasize Value With Social Proof

Psychology plays an integral role in sales.

Analysts have found that people buy based on emotions. Consumers purchase because their sad, happy, or even upset.

Moreover, purchases may involve not only internal perceptions but also external pressures. This means we buy items due to our environment.

This is helpful information for your sales team. You can show customers how other clients are benefitting from particular pricing packages.

Social proof makes pricing options irrelevant for some buyers. Because if they see top brands using your services, consumers will feel the need to be part of the pack no matter the circumstances.

So, offer social proof to your customers. Let them hear stories from your most successful clients.

“We tend to imagine ourselves in other people's shoes when we read or hear a story. This is why stories are so persuasive and often more trustworthy than statistics or general trends. Individual examples stick with us because we can relate to them,” states Ed Hallen, co-founder of Klaviyo.

To build trust, SumoMe includes their client logos on its pricing page. These images solidify that many satisfied customers look beyond pricing packages.

Studies also reveal that “70% of consumers say they look at product reviews before making a purchase.” Plus, product reviews are 12x more trusted than product descriptions.

Solicit honest feedback from your customers. And then post those comments on your website. Those reviews will persuade prospective buyers and display your brand's transparency.

Consumers aren't completely pleased with your pricing options. Use social proof to convert them.

Upgrade Your Pricing Options

Customers want your product. But your pricing options aren't meeting their expectations.

Offer the most valuable benefits in your product packages. Educate customers about features they don't initially like. And boost your product's worth by adding verifiable social proof.

Persuade your customers. Upgrade your pricing options.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

The Little-Known Segmentation Issue that's Directly Affecting Your Brand's Relevance

For marketers, the quest for branding that matters to consumers has always been about how to achieve deeper relevance. The more relevant a brand is in a customer's life, the more they'll begin to look for ways to integrate it into their lifestyle.

Of course, many point to segmentation as the easiest and fastest way to achieve that kind of relevance.

But what if you could go even further?

According to a cross-site study by Optimove, going beyond simple segmentation – down to pure granularity, causes a distinctive and measurable campaign uplift. Optimove measured this by presenting different offers to smaller groups of consumers who had similar attributes. They found by going more and more granular, they were able to generate greater and greater lift within their respective campaigns.

Luck's Got Nothing to Do With It

LuckyFish, a developer of casino games powered by social networking, created over 100 player personas as part of their relevance campaign

In one such campaign for a set of casino games built on the power of social networking, they were able to segment to over 100 individual player personas. Imagine having that kind of deep detail about your customers or players. As a result, they were able to send the right messages to the right players at the right time, through the customers' preferred channels.

So what were the results? A 65% increase in conversion rates, a 15% increase in the number of paying players and a 40% increase in the volume of player payments to name a few. As part of the larger study, they looked at this kind of granularity with over 30 million customers across 2,000 campaigns – measuring the uplift of the average campaign in groups of all sizes.

The smaller the segment, the higher the value per customer

The results speak for themselves. The smaller the group, the higher the lift. In this case, the smallest-sized group saw an average increase of $3.2 per customer. When you start sending segmented campaigns to targeted groups of 100,000 customer or more, the monetary uplift drops to a measly $0.1.

Many Small Campaigns Perform Better than One Concentrated One

Another note of the study is that, overall, many small campaigns targeted to a group of customers has a much greater effect on revenues than the all-too-common strategy of throwing an ad at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

Hyper-focused segmentation yields even greater results

Now the question then becomes, “why don't more campaigns do this?” and that's because there's some risk involved. As with every strategy, there are exceptions to the rules and things to watch out for – namely, volatility.

Because these groups are so small and hyper-focused, there can be a lot of different outcomes for one message no matter what you're testing. You can account for much of these differences by chalking it up to a small sample size. The revenues and customer relationship building obtained as a result are far too lucrative to not test granularity in your own campaigns.

How Do You Like Your Coffee?

What customers say they want, and what they really want, are two completely different things

In his famous TED talk on the powers of segmentation, Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the customer preference of coffee. If you asked most people what kind of coffee they like, they'll tell you “a dark, rich, hearty roast”. But if you give them that type of coffee, they'd likely rate it as a 60 on a scale from 0-100.

Now, break down that population into their precise coffee preferences and make coffee for them according to their actual tastes – the score would go up to 78/100. Gladwell notes, “the difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is the difference between coffee that makes you wince and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.”

Is the end result here implying that we shouldn't trust our customers? Not at all! But it does mean that we shouldn't hesitate to find out what they really want from our product – and not just rely on what we think they want.

Getting Started with Granular Segmentation

So now that you know the potential of granular segmentation, how do you do it?

The first step is to look at your existing campaign channels – are you running PPC ads? Doing social media marketing?  Blog posts? Landing pages? All of the above? Good. Make a note of where your best traffic is coming from right now - and even if it's all of those places, that's perfectly fine.

Next, imagine your prospect has just saw your campaign ad. Map out all the possible ways your prospects can interact with it. For instance, they could:

• View


• Click


• Share


• Call


• Add to Favorites/Bookmarks


• Link


• Download


• Comment


• Buy


• Rate


• Review

Now, sort these according to the type of campaign channel. For example, people using social media are more likely to share, view and click, while people on a landing page are more likely to download, click, add to favorites, or even call for more information.

Once you're sorted, it's time to organize these labels so that your analytics (and the people behind them) can make sense of it all. UTM identifiers are great for this purpose. Here's how to set those up in Kissmetrics.  You can use event tracking to see who clicked on buttons on your landing pages or social media campaigns, for instance.  Some of these steps, like calling or adding to bookmarks, need to be handled manually (some stats programs will tell you if someone accessed your page via a bookmark), but the goal here is to see who's interacting with your pages and how.

If you want to segment your ad campaign, you can build custom audiences in Google Adwords in a few simple steps, including segmenting them by conversions, transactions, time of day, device used and more. Although these are all technical “granularizations” and the ones I mentioned above are more qualitative, having this kind of precision in defining and better understanding your audience is vital to giving them what they truly want, and making them deliriously happy.

Getting to Deliriously Happy

Our goal as marketers is to get customers on the deliriously happy end of the spectrum. Granularity may seem like an awful lot of segmentation just to reach a handful of people. But being able to chunk the process down again and again means you're reaching those people with the kind of relevance that broader campaigns simply can't match – and that's where you'll come out ahead. If you've ever hoped a customer might think “it's like they KNOW me!” – granular segmentation is your answer.

Remember that by segmenting campaigns with this kind of laser-focused attention, you're not only increasing conversions but building relationships with your customers using the kind of personalization they crave. It's a win-win for everyone.

Now It's Your Turn

Do you micro-segment your customers and your offers to them? What have your results been like so far? Do you find that customers are more receptive to offers, or is it just too much effort for lackluster and volatile results? We want to know what you think, so share your thoughts in the comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

The Lazy Marketer's Guide to Customer Acquisition

There are a billion emails sent every day by MailChimp alone.

There are over two million blog posts published each day.

Average page length has become a staggering ~2000 words, which based on average writing times, can easily take up to four hours (or half a workday) for a single post.

The sheer volume of marketing activities is rising to a nearly unsustainable point.

Not to mention, your calendar's already full. Strapped and spread thin.

Today, doing more just isn't possible.

But being better is.

Here's how a seemingly lazy approach to the demands of marketers everywhere can help you double down on quality to excel.

Start by Doing the Right Things, Not Doing Things Right

A few years ago, digital agency Seer put together an excellent research Guide to Pinterest.

Towards the bottom, after all the fun tips, tactics and hacks for marketers to use, comes the analytics section.

One of the striking things you'll see when staring at their work long enough (beyond those impossible-to-see images where you have to cross your eyes to make the foreground picture separate from the background) is a symbiotic relationship.

The more engagement (as in repins, clicks and likes) something gets, the more impressions (reach) it gets too.

This finding, while seemingly basic and obvious at first, appears on other social platforms as well.

Analyzing your top performing content updates on Facebook for example will show the same correlation between the posts with highest Engagement, also have the highest Reach.

When you look at how these individual posts stack up over time, you'll again see that when Engagement (measured by Reactions, Comments and Shares) spikes, so does Reach.

This is no accident of course. Social algorithms are specifically designed to reward engagement as a quality signal. More 'Likes' on your funny cat meme tells EdgeRank that other people are enjoying what you're doing, and more should be able to view it too.

Those individual interactions act similar to how quality backlinks act as votes for pages to rank higher in search engines too.

A literal Quality Score used in AdWords dictates what you effectively pay. Which means a higher Quality Score, enables lower CPCs. Which in turn should lower your Cost per Conversion. And raise your ROI.

The principle of leverage is clearly seen in this example, where you can quickly (like in a few days) take popular keyphrases from one Ad Group with notoriously low quality scores…

… spin them off into their own dedicated Ad Groups with brand spanking new ads and landing pages to match, and watch how the new results eclipse the previous ones.

This AdWords example (like the social ones before it) are similar because they all share something in common.

Specifically, an economic principle founded over a century ago.

In the late 1800s, an Italian economist was tending garden when a sudden realization occurred to him.

The yield from his peapods resembled other distribution ratios he was recently studying, including distribution of income and land in his home of Italy.

His Cours d'économie politique paper was published at the University of Lausanne in 1896, going on to inspire what would become known as the Pareto Principle.

The infamous 80/20 principle may have become skewed in recent years (to more like 99/1% in some cases), but the basic theory still holds.

And when applied to digital marketing, it's clear that certain activities can give you outsized returns.

Drucker said, “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things”.

That means prior to focusing on ways to improve efficiency and scale, start with making sure you're doing the activities (whether we're talking the type of social posts, quality backlinks, or AdWords fundamentals) that will provide leverage; generating the most significant returns with the least amount of effort.

Automate to Increase Results While Reducing Costs

86% of people flat out ignore banner ads on most websites.

While the number of people using ad blockers (which eliminates all browser ads altogether) has skyrocketed in the last few years, shooting up to almost 200 million in the last year.

Some companies, like Apple, are trying to bake ad-blocking features into their software from the get-go to help consumers deal with the onslaught of clutter.

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But why?

Why are so many intent on not just turning a blind eye, but going out of their way to make sure they never see another ad?

We could sit here and throw around some statistics about how consumers have never seen more ads in their lifetime than today. And they'd all be true.

But here's the other reason.

It's because these ads suck.

Not technically. The creative might be great. They ticked all the boxes. They're hitting all the popular ad networks. They're following the checklist of good ad campaigns over the last few years (or longer).

The problem is that in many cases, these ads are completely irrelevant to the people seeing them.

In other words, they're being efficient but not effective. And unsurprisingly, these ads inevitably fall on deaf ears.

Again, the solution isn't more ads, but better ones. Through personalization and automation.

Using automated ad platforms that personalize each message not only shaves off some time typically required for creating so many different creative campaigns, but also boost results over the standard junk people are clamoring to avoid.

A perfect, simple example includes Facebook Dynamic Product ads, which works similarly to other popular retargeting or remarketing methods. They target people on their network who recently viewed individual products on your site, with well-timed ads being pulled from a database or product catalog.

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It's seamless, targeted, and timed to perfection. And the results speak for themselves.

The party line straight from Facebook boasts that The Honest Company saw a “34% increase in click through rates and a 38% reduction in cost per purchase” from these ads.

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Beyond ads, email is another popular channel whose performance continues to decline.

The reason should be obvious now. Too. Many. Damn. Emails.

MailChimp by themselves sends a billion every single day. Which isn't necessarily the hard part according to an excellent Wired piece. The hard part is making sure those emails get delivered successfully.

Email service providers like Gmail have begun using sophisticated methods such as machine learning to either redirect your basic email blasts to a separate Promotions inbox (where they go to die a lonely unread death), or quickly flag them as spam (and again, don't allow them to get through to the people you've intended to receive them).

More emails only compounds this problem. Again you need better ones. Specifically the kind only available through automation.

The Aberdeen Group reports that personalized emails improve click through rates 14% and conversion rates 10%. Jupiter Research says more relevant emails results in 18x more revenue.

Not to mention, Gartner says companies using marketing automation can also see a 15% cost savings on creative production.

These, it seems, are good stats. By fairly reputable sources evidently.

Automating key events, whether that's customer onboarding or client follow up or checkout cart abandonment, is a simple way to get more done with less.

The automated relevancy and timing increases results. While the use of automation helps cut down on required staff or complicated manual methods that barely scratch the surface of potential tools like HubSpot might deliver.

Strategically Add Labor to a Well Oiled Machine

There's a lot of debate around the performance yield of A players vs. B players.

The exact definitions are muddied but the picture is clear: most organizations can't carry deadweight (no matter which letter grade we're talking).

Good people, while absolutely necessary and critical to the success of any organization, are (a) hard to come by and (b) expensive.

Beyond the difficulties in hiring them, their compensation (deservedly so) typically follows that same 80/20 (or 99/1) relationship examined earlier.

What exactly makes A players, A players, is tough to define. But they're essentially alchemists; possessing this rare combination of incredible vision, creative ingenuity and the raw intensity to get a lot of valuable shit done when there's no map or rulebook to follow.

They blaze their own trail and figure things out on the fly that usually turn out correct.

The ambition is to have a team full of these A players. The reality is that yours probably won't.

And that's OK.

The key is to find people who can potentially become A players one day, and help them get there by giving them a clear process to follow.

Franchising sounds like entrepreneurial purgatory for most. However formal processes result in more revenue and innovative companies are still systematic.

So after toiling away for long enough, E-mything your business to work the system is the best approach to create a business built to sell.

Because typically hiring young, relatively inexperienced, or overseas people is the antithesis of quality. The reason this approach typically fails is because they're thrown in the deep end, expected to figure things out when they lack the context of experience.

For example, many companies hire external writers to help share the workload. But problems quickly happen when you expect them to immediately understand your style, tone, and subject matter.

MailChimp created an entire website devoted to helping writers overcome that challenge.

Even a simple outline of the categories, messaging examples and specific personas each should target is a huge head start over what most people have.

The great news is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel either. You just need to cobble together and amplify based on your preferences.

Start with Unbounce's step-by-step campaign guide.

Download Headline Hacks and use their ready-made headline templates to create a spreadsheet for writers so they don't have to reinvent the wheel each time.

'Franchising' as E-Myth refers to it allows you to document how you want things to look, and employ more, (relatively) inexpensive labor to scale your productivity and results. When done correctly, you can even have people tackle technical subjects even with a complete lack of experience.

For example:

Canonicalization typically refers to duplicate content issues, which can impact SEO by splitting authority across several different domains (instead of consolidating it into a single URL to maximize that page's potential value).

Simply reading that last sentence probably made your brain hurt. Besides being a mind-numbingly boring topic, fixing canonicalization errors can get slightly technical if you have to edit HTML directly.

Processing these potential scenarios gives ambitious, diligent people – despite a lack of skill or experience – the ability to help 'punch above their weight class'. Mindfully adding these people can help you scale results significantly faster.

Conclusion

Marketing output has never been higher.

There's never been more people, publishing, creating, producing and distributing more things.

It's evolving at a breakneck pace; one that's becoming increasingly unsustainable for most who're already overwhelmed and stretched thin.

One counter intuitive solution to do less, but do it better.

Start by focusing on making sure that you're doing the right things, and not just ticking boxes off your to-do list.

Once you're going down the right path, use automation to help increase the yield or results you'll see from your efforts.

And when ready, then (and only then) add additional labor on top of an already defined process to scale productivity.

About the Author: Brad Smith is a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences. Brad's blog also features more marketing thoughts, opinions and the occasional insight.

Why Your High Conversion Rate Might Backfire (And How to Avoid It)

The numbers on your graphs are up and to the right.

Conversion rates at or above industry averages.

But…

Revenue's flat. Stagnating or declining even.

The problem is that those seemingly high conversion rates are a red herring. The sheer quantity of free trials or new leads looks enticing, seducing you with the promise of big numbers getting even bigger.

But in reality, the alluring illusion is sabotaging your results.

Here's why.

Why Removing Friction isn't Always a Good Idea

As an inexperienced marketing consultant years ago, I wanted to impress a new client by going above-and-beyond our agreed upon SEO scope; throwing in some badly needed landing page updates to skyrocket AdWords conversions.

It wouldn't be that difficult. Page content was wordy and jargony. The number of form fields overwhelming.

Not to mention, we could improve the design, run a few quick iterative A/B tests, and start squeezing out more juice in no time.

Basic stuff. Common conversion rate optimization knowledge.

And yet they said no. Polite, but firm.

Why?

This business had a consultative sales process. The consumers were educated, and it was a big-ticket item that wasn't taken lightly. Their customers researched and needed a thorough education in most cases. And they had to want to purchase. Badly.

Otherwise the sale, even if it went through, wouldn't be profitable or end well for either party.

In other words, it literally doesn't matter what color the CTA button would have been in the grand scheme of things. And as a newbie, I lacked that context.

In fact, persisting with some landing page optimization tactics that are so common today, like throwing up an exit intent pop up to artificially boost lead conversion rates, would probably only do more harm than good in the long run – turning off would-be customers to get a few extra conversions fooled by impulse.

We're taught to remove friction to increase conversions. And that's true. It does. You can swiftly raise conversions 11% by removing a few form fields. Making it easier to convert, quicker, usually resulting in better numbers.

But in this case, they were right. I was wrong. (First time that's happened, I swear.)

Because many times when you use misguided tactics to increase conversion rates, you're effectively lowering the lead quality that's getting through.

When MORE Conversions LOWER Quality

Software company Moz learned this lesson first hand when analyzing who their most profitable customers were.

They looked at the number of free to paid trial conversions, taking into account how the number of website visits correlated with loyalty metrics like churn.

The findings, recounted by founder Rand Fishkin in this Whiteboard Friday, were surprising.

For example, Moz customers that converted on only the first or second website visit “tend to leave early and often”. The customer loyalty is low, with reportedly “very high churn and low retention”.

Contrast that with their best customers. The ones who're most loyal, sticking around longer to drive up that Lifetime Value of a Customer. The average is 8 website visits prior to signing up for their free trial.

And even if they visit 14-20 more times, “that loyalty keeps increasing”.

Coincidentally, similar results were just shared in another recent Moz post. This time, Wordstream founder Larry Kim shared several CRO truth bombs to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the best strategies for increasing site conversions.

As you can imagine, the results weren't what you'd expect.

They analyzed over 100,000 global companies, finding that most typically small results from A/B tests “don't persist”, typically fizzling out over time for various reasons.

We've already seen this evidence.

But the big news was the fact that a “CRO increase in quantity typically lowers quality”.

He went on to share data from a customer that shows as landing page conversions increased, the quality of Marketing Qualified Leads (you know, the peeps who're most likely gonna give you some loot) declined.

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This isn't an isolated event either.

It happens in other channels where short-term, aggressive tactics used to increase a leading indicator, only upsetting the delicate balance of each system, resulting in sacrificing long-term gains.

Take precipitously declining email results. As subscriber recency sets in, open rates gradually decline.

Who cares, right? As open rates have been notoriously unreliable for almost a decade.

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Well, it turns out, most clients and bosses do – that's who.

So to overcome, you jack up volume. Even going so far as to resend the same campaigns to people who might have not opened the initial one.

But then, unsubscribes grow. People hate too many emails, with quantity or volume being amongst the primary complaint.

So let's put it all out there.

Why do we obsess over tactical conversion rates? When the data shows, it can jeopardize the real goal (revenue)?

Here's one thought, with a few ideas for ways to overcome.

3 Ways to Increase Bottom-Line Results (And Not Just Artificially Boost Conversion Rates).

Most clients and bosses have no idea what data-driven marketers do on a daily basis.

They get in, in theory. But they don't understand it, in detail.

There's a ton of nuance behind what drives what. And without a deeper understanding of how it all works, they lack the perspective. If you lack perspective, you gravitate towards surface level, easy to understand evidence.

Like Open Rates. Or Conversion Rates. Without taking into account the context of those numbers.

That's not a knock. It's the reality of specialization. That's why you drop a car off with the mechanic and let them figure out why that funny sound happens each time you start your car.

Sometimes, doing things to increase conversion rates can backfire by ultimately decreasing real sales.

The better question, is how you should increase revenue from conversions without dangerously over-optimizing one thing at the expense of the bigger picture?

1. Value Prop Sucks? So Will Conversions

'Product' is one of the key, foundational elements of marketing. Has been for decades.

And that's because Promotion and Distribution, or the stuff commonly called 'marketing' today, is heavily dependent on it.

A poor product makes Promotion incredibly difficult. Like rolling a boulder uphill.

A good product virtually sells itself. Like a boulder gathering momentum on a descent. Journalists jump at the chance to write about it. The rabid public quenches their starvation for this new widget in their life.

The value proposition is the way you communicate the most valuable aspect of your Product to a specific audience. Like a translation in their language to match their worldview.

It's central to the MarketingExperiments' conversion sequence heuristic, combining the four critical elements of Appeal, Exclusivity, Credibility and Clarity to explain why someone needs your thing.

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And it's one of the driving forces behind which offers are the most appealing.

The conversion game changer – the ingredient most responsible for Unicorn status success – isn't changing button color but having “massively differentiated offers”.

Spend the bulk of your efforts here, focusing on how value prop changes (not page design changes) influence conversions, to get a more meaningful increase in sales.

2. (Sometimes) More Friction is Better

The source or medium that delivers people to your website can tell you a lot about which customers need more friction and which need less.

Many times it tells you their 'state of awareness'.

For example, people clicking on an AdWords link after typing in exactly what they're looking for understand they have some need, but not brand awareness at this point. So they're relatively cold, unfamiliar with who you are and why you're credible or unique.

That's OK for a simple, low-priced product or commodity purchase. That's not OK for a high-touch product or intangible service.

Sending these visitors to a short-form landing page sans navigation would tank results. Similar to the Moz example earlier, they need a chance to look around. To browse. To become familiar.

Additional methods such as retargeting and marketing automation can be brought into play in order to build up the necessary trust, knowledge and level of confidence in order to keep this customer around for awhile.

Now contrast that to people who've been on the receiving end of emails, social messages, and retargeting ads for a few weeks. They have had a chance to develop familiarity through retargeting ads, and trust through interacting with your other available offers.

In this case, a direct, no-BS approach that's concise might work best. In this case, the less friction, the better (generally speaking).

3. Optimize for Revenue & Sales, Not Just Conversions

In most cases, conversion tracking is technically set up properly.

A company has a rough idea of how many leads came in last month, and roughly which channels (or campaigns) drove them.

(This is bound to get a little more challenging with Google recently getting rid of converted clicks.)

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The problem is that outside of simple product sales, only a fraction of your leads are going to become actual customers.

Companies understand this in theory, yet still continue to make critical marketing and advertising decisions (like budget allocation) based on leads (and not customers) generated.

For example, let's say Campaign A delivers 10 leads to Campaign B's 3. At first blush, it gets priority (and money).

But how many of those leads become actual customers? What are the deal sizes or average transaction values for each? And how do those total revenue numbers for each campaign now stack up?

However factoring in the number of sales each campaign generates, not to mention total revenue, could conflict and tell a completely different story.

It also means you need a way to link actual customers (like John Smith) with revenue amounts ($5,000) against the channel or medium which delivered them (AdWords Campaign A) and the spend it took ($400).

If you're not using an all-in-one CRM or marketing automation tool, try a simple free solution like LeadIn.

While you'll have to do some manual data entry (boo!) to line up form conversions with what you're seeing from other campaigns, it will help you begin to bridge the gap to discovering which marketing activities are resulting in the best ROI (yay!).

You have no business making any significant changes to a landing page until all of these other issues have been thoroughly reviewed first.

But when that happens, you can use something like the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report to see how changes might impact specific parts of your funnel. For example, you can see what impact a headline test might have (if any) on purchases.

Kissmetrics uses this on a few different steps in the funnel. For example:

1. Initial Customer Sign Up


2. Received Data (Customer successfully installed the JavaScript.)


3. Received Custom Data (Customer set up custom events.)

Now for all the of the tests they run, they can go beyond just the initial surface level data (i.e. Initial Customer Sign Up) and go as far down as the third step (Received Custom Data) to get the most accurate data possible.

When you have this level of granularity into your funnel, you can easily spot when one variant or test results in increased Initial Sign Ups but loses in Received Custom Data (which happens often). In those cases, you can comfortably stick with the original because you're not getting fooled by the lure of big vanity metrics.

Conclusion

It's tempting to wanna make big numbers go up.

Especially when it's something tactical and easy to understand like a page's conversion rate.

But that rate doesn't exist by itself.

Making it go up is easy. But doing so without sacrificing quality is hard.

If possible, start first by improving your offer, strategically adding friction or education, and setting up full funnel tracking to help you increase conversion (and revenue).

Making these changes with a deeper understanding that conversion rate increases will cascade down to lead quality will help make sure you're not sacrificing results in the process.

About the Author: Brad Smith is a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences. Brad's blog also features more marketing thoughts, opinions and the occasional insight.