If you’re asking this question, you’re already ahead of most product leaders. You recognize the problem. But here’s what many miss: conversion is a symptom, not the root cause of the problem.

SaaS churn often happens before users ever consider paying.

It’s common for users to hit friction points you didn’t know existed. They encounter gates that make no sense in context. They drop off at moments when just a bit more clarity could have kept them engaged.

The good news? You can fix this. But not by guessing. Not by copying what Dropbox or Notion does. And usually not by adding more features.

What you need is a systematic audit of your free or anonymous user experience. One that reveals exactly where users hit walls, why they bounce, and what you can do to keep them engaged long enough to see value.

This article walks through a five-step framework that SaaS product and growth leaders can use to audit their free experience and reduce churn. It’s the same approach we use with clients, adapted so you can run it internally. Fair warning: this takes work. But if you’re serious about improving SaaS user retention, it’s worth every hour.

Why your free experience impacts your retention rate

Before we get into the framework, let’s be clear about what we mean by “free experience.”

This includes any interaction where users engage with your product without paying. That could be a free trial, a freemium tier, anonymous tool usage, or limited feature access. It’s the first impression, the test drive, the “try before you buy” phase.

And it matters more than you think.

Most SaaS companies obsess over free-to-paid conversion rates. But conversion is a lagging indicator. By the time a user decides not to convert, the damage is already done. They disengaged days or weeks ago. They just didn’t tell you.

The real opportunity sits upstream. If you can identify and remove friction in the free experience, you don’t just improve conversion rates. You improve activation rates, engagement, time-to-value, and long-term retention. You build a user base that actually wants to pay because they’ve already seen the value.

Here’s how to find those friction points.

Step 1: Review your data for drop-off points

Start with what’s already happening in your product. Before you talk to anyone or look at competitors, you need to know exactly where users are getting stuck.

Dig into your product analytics. You’re looking for three things:

Activation drop-offs: Where do users abandon the onboarding flow? Which steps have the highest exit rates? If 60% of users drop off when asked to invite teammates, that’s a signal.

Feature engagement patterns: Which features do free users actually use? Which ones do they try once and never touch again? Are there features you’ve gated that users don’t even attempt to access?

Time-to-value analysis: How long does it take users to complete their first valuable action? And what percentage of users never get there? If your median time-to-value is three days, but 70% of users churn within 48 hours, you have a problem.

Set up a dashboard that tracks these metrics by cohort. New signups this week versus last month. Users from different acquisition channels. Free trial versus freemium. The patterns that emerge will guide your optimization priorities.

Layer on session recordings and heatmaps to see exactly what’s happening at key drop-off points. Numbers tell you where the problem is. Qualitative data tells you why.

Watch 20-30 sessions of users who churned in their first week. What did they try to do? Where did they get stuck? What confusion or frustration is evident in their behavior?

This isn’t just a data review. It’s detective work. You’re building a picture of where your free experience breaks down.

Step 2: Talk to users (both active and churned)

Now that you’ve identified drop-off points in your analytics, it’s time to understand the human story behind those numbers. Conduct 10-15 interviews, split between two groups:

Active free users (people still using your product but haven’t upgraded): Why are they still here? What value are they getting? What would make them pay? What’s holding them back?

Churned users (people who tried your product and left): What were they trying to accomplish? Where did they get stuck? What made them give up? What would have kept them engaged?

Keep these conversations short (15-20 minutes) and focused. You’re not selling. You’re learning.

Sample questions for active free users:

• What problem were you trying to solve when you first signed up?
• Walk me through how you use [product] today.
• What features do you wish you had access to?
• What would need to change for you to consider upgrading?
• If we removed [specific free feature], would you still use the product?

Sample questions for churned users:

• What were you hoping to accomplish with [product]?
• Where did you get stuck?
• Was there a specific moment when you decided it wasn’t for you?
• Did you consider other tools? What made you choose them instead?

Record these conversations (with permission) and transcribe them. The exact language users employ to describe their experience reveals friction points you’d never spot in analytics alone.

Pay special attention when users mention alternatives they considered or are currently using. This context becomes critical in the next step.

Step 3: Map what your users are being offered in the market

You now understand what’s happening in your product and why users make the decisions they do. The next question is: what are they comparing you against?

Your users don’t evaluate your free experience in a vacuum. They’re weighing it against every other tool they’ve tried, every competitor they’re considering, and every product they wish yours worked more like.

This step isn’t about copying competitors. It’s about understanding the full landscape of options your users are navigating.

Create a comprehensive inventory of how other products in your space (and adjacent to it) handle their free experiences. Document what your users are seeing elsewhere.

Here’s what to capture in a Figma or Notion file.

Set up a page with one row per product. For each one, document:

• What features are available without registration
• What requires an email address but remains free
• Where the hard paywalls sit
• How they communicate limits (countdown timers, credit displays, etc.)
• Placement and messaging of upgrade prompts
• Onboarding flows and activation sequences

Don’t limit yourself to direct competitors. Look at the tools your users mentioned in interviews. If they’re comparing your productivity tool to Notion, your design tool to Figma, or your automation platform to Zapier, study how those products handle free users.

Pro tip: Screenshot everything. Your database should include visual documentation of every monetization touchpoint, limit notification, and upgrade CTA. These screenshots become invaluable references when you’re making decisions about your own experience.

This exercise typically takes 8-12 hours for a thorough analysis of five to seven products. You’ll surface approaches you hadn’t considered and identify industry patterns that users have come to expect.

The goal here is context. When a user hits a limit in your product, they’re mentally comparing that experience to how Dropbox handles storage limits, how Canva displays upgrade options, or how Grammarly shows premium features. Understanding those reference points helps you design a free experience that meets or exceeds market expectations.

Step 4: Run a verb scoring exercise

With data, user insights, and market context in hand, it’s time to systematically evaluate your own product’s free experience. This is where verb scoring comes in.

Verb scoring evaluates the discrete actions users can take in your product and assigns each one a “score” based on the level of friction required. The six verb scores are:

• Anonymous – Users can take this action without providing any information
• Limited Anonymous Use – Users can take this action without registration, but only a limited number of times
• Free with Registration – Users must register (email + basic info), but can take this action unlimited times for free
• Limited Registered Use – Registered users can take this action, but with caps or restrictions
• Trial with Payment – Users must provide payment information to access this action (even if they’re not charged immediately)
• Gated – Only paying customers can take this action

List every meaningful action users can take in your product. Not features, but actions. “Create a document” is a verb. “Edit collaboratively” is a verb. “Export to PDF” is a verb. “Share via link” is a verb.

Then score each one. Where does it fall on the spectrum from Anonymous to Gated?

This exercise reveals your actual monetization strategy, not the one you think you have. You’ll often find that verbs are gated inconsistently, or that you’re giving away too much (or too little) at critical moments.

For a detailed walkthrough of verb scoring, including decision trees and examples, see our guide on verb scoring for product strategy.

Create a verb scoring matrix that maps all your verbs against these six scores. This becomes your baseline. It shows exactly where friction exists in your free experience, allowing you to compare it directly to what you documented in Step 3.

Step 5: Connect the dots between data, users, market context, and verb scoring

This is where the audit comes together. You now have four layers of insight:

1. Quantitative and qualitative data: Where users drop off and what they’re doing (or not doing)
2. User feedback: Why they drop off and what they’re thinking
3. Market context: What alternatives they’re comparing you against
4. Verb scoring matrix: Where friction exists in your own product

Lay them side by side. Look for patterns.

Here’s what you’re hunting for:

Friction without reason

Look out for verb scores that create unnecessary barriers relative to market norms. For example, if your data shows 40% of users bounce before registering, user interviews reveal confusion about what your product does, and your market analysis shows that competitors allow anonymous exploration, you’re likely losing users before they experience value. Your verb scoring can reveal that you’re gating too early.

Value leaks

Check for free features that users love but don’t move them toward conversion. If your most-used free features have no connection to paid capabilities, and users in interviews can’t articulate why they’d upgrade, you’re building a user base that will never pay. Your verb scoring might show you’re giving away too many “Free with Registration” verbs without strategic “Limited Registered Use” prompts.

Invisible gates

Paywalls that users hit without understanding why. Your data shows sudden drop-offs at specific upgrade prompts. User interviews reveal confusion about value or poor timing. Market analysis shows competitors explain premium benefits more clearly. Your verb scoring identifies which verbs are gated, but not whether those gates make sense to users.

Poorly timed friction

Limits or gates that appear before users have experienced enough value. Data shows high bounce rates at the first upgrade prompt. User interviews reveal frustration: “I hadn’t even figured out the basics yet.” Market analysis shows that similar tools delay friction until after activation. Your verb scoring might reveal that you’re using “Limited Anonymous Use” or “Trial with Payment” too early in the journey.

Market misalignment

Patterns where your verb scoring differs significantly from market norms, and your churn data supports that this matters. For instance, if every competitor allows free PDF exports but you gate this behind payment, your churned user interviews will likely mention this as a dealbreaker.

Create a prioritized list of friction points based on:

• Impact (how many users are affected, based on your data?)
• Confidence (do your user interviews confirm this is a problem?)
• Effort (how hard is this to fix?)
• Market expectation (is this friction standard, or are you an outlier?)

This becomes your retention optimization roadmap.

Why this framework works

This five-step audit framework delivers three specific outcomes that improve SaaS user retention:

Get a clear path to higher retention rates: No more guessing. You’ll have a prioritized list of friction points ranked by impact and effort. Fix the top three and you’ll see measurable improvement in activation, engagement, and conversion.

Make data-driven decisions: Create a culture of user-centered decisions rather than those based on the highest-paid person’s opinion, historical choices, or a gut feeling. When you combine quantitative data, qualitative research, market context, and systematic verb scoring, arguments become easy to settle.

Prevent feature flop: Validate changes before implementation. You’ll know which gates to remove, which features to add to your free tier, and which upgrade prompts to reposition, all before you waste valuable development resources.

Teams that run this audit consistently report two things: first, they’re surprised by what they find. Assumptions they’d held for months or years turn out to be wrong. Second, the fixes are often simpler than expected. Sometimes all it takes is moving an upgrade prompt, clarifying messaging, or ungating a single feature.

Running this audit takes time (and that’s the point)

Let’s be honest: this framework requires a meaningful investment. Between data analysis, user interviews, market research, and verb scoring, you’re looking at 40-60 hours of work.

That’s assuming you have the right tools, know how to set up proper analytics, can recruit and interview users effectively, and have experience interpreting qualitative data.

For many SaaS teams, that’s exactly the problem. You know you need to audit your free experience. You know churn is killing growth. But your product team is building features, your growth team is running acquisition campaigns, and nobody has the bandwidth or expertise to run a proper retention audit.

That’s where The Good’s Digital Experience Optimization Program comes in.

We’ve run this exact process dozens of times for SaaS companies between product-market fit and scale. Companies like yours with $1M-$30M ARR and pressure to accelerate growth while battling churn.

Our team conducts the full audit, including data review, user research, market analysis, and verb scoring, and delivers a prioritized roadmap of friction points with specific recommendations. Then we help you implement, test, and optimize the changes.

The result? Clients typically see measurable improvements in activation and retention within 60-90 days. More importantly, they build an optimization discipline that compounds over time.

Want to see where your free experience is bleeding users? Schedule an introductory call to discuss how we can help you reduce churn and improve SaaS user retention.

FREE RESOURCE

---

How Top AI Tools Turn Free Users Into Paying Customers

The post Why Are Free Users Churning? A Growth Leader’s 5-Step Guide To Auditing The Free User Experience appeared first on The Good.

According to McKinsey research, nearly 40% of consumers switch retailers to get better deals.

The challenge is no different from the classic showrooming problem that has plagued retailers for over a decade. Your customers discover your products, compare, and then disappear to buy from wholesalers, retailers, or resellers offering lower prices.

Because they can’t compete on price and leadership won’t budge on enforcing a MAP policy, many teams will simply throw their hands up and concede that 40% of price-sensitive shoppers will buy elsewhere.

Before you do that, I want to share an alternative POV. After working with hundreds of ecommerce brands to increase conversions, there are some tried and true strategies that will deliver in spite of MAP restrictions.

It starts with reframing the situation. Customer acquisition isn’t the problem. Customer preference is.

Instead of trying to win the price war, it’s time to focus on better customer experiences and compete in areas that can’t be replicated by the competition.

Solution 1: Make the experience worth the premium

The insight: 72% of consumers expect personalized experiences. Resellers can’t always deliver them.

While you can buy Glossier products at retailers like Ulta and Target, Glossier’s direct channels offer something those retailers can’t: a personalized skincare quiz that analyzes your skin type and concerns to curate 3-5 products specifically for your needs.

Their website shows personalized product recommendations based on your quiz results and browsing behavior, creating a tailored experience that feels custom-made.

This is the idea of selling the experience of being your customer and making it a seamless, one-of-a-kind experience to shop with you.

What this looks like in practice:

• Real-time AI personalization throughout the shopping experience
• Immersive product discovery via recommendations
• Clear articulation of your brand values and differentiators relevant to each unique user
• Brand storytelling that makes the purchase decision emotional instead of transactional

Solution 2: Create exclusivity that other sellers can’t touch

The insight: Exclusive SKUs and premium products can command 20-30% higher profit margins. While your resellers can sell your products, they can’t sell your brand or your relationship with customers.

Nike didn’t always beat resellers by matching prices. They created SNKRS app exclusives and limited colorways that resellers literally cannot obtain, contributing significantly to digital revenue and spiking DTC sales during the pandemic.

The strategy works because exclusivity creates urgency, and urgency often trumps price sensitivity.

What exclusive access looks like:

• Brand-only colorways and limited editions
• Early access windows 24-48 hours before reseller inventory
• Extended size runs available only through your channels
• Bundle combinations that resellers can’t replicate

Solution 3: Build loyalty programs that compete with discounting

The insight: Experience-based loyalty programs can make the shopping experience delightful without lowering prices.

84% of customers say they’re more likely to engage with a brand that offers a loyalty program, which is a game-changer for ecommerce companies without MAP policies.

For example, members of Sephora’s Beauty Insider program generate 80% of its total sales. While the program doesn’t guarantee products at the lowest price, it does offer exclusive access, personalized services, and community benefits that competitors cannot provide.

Loyalty programs that work:

• Tier-based structures with exclusive access benefits
• Community elements that create network effects
• Experiential rewards that resellers can’t match
• Personalized services that add genuine value

Solution 4: Optimize every conversion touchpoint

The insight: When you can’t compete on price, every visitor becomes precious. Optimizing the digital experience can offset price disadvantages.

Munchkin faced this exact challenge competing with retailers like Target and Walmart, where their products were sold. Working with The Good, they discovered that 70% of their traffic was mobile, but frustrated users were bouncing due to annoying pop-ups and poor navigation.

As David Embree from Munchkin put it, “If you’re paying to invite someone to your store, you don’t want them to walk in and immediately turn around to go somewhere else.”

By removing invasive popups, optimizing mobile navigation, and improving product findability, Munchkin decreased its bounce rate significantly and saw a lift in site-wide KPIs within six months.

What a powerful optimization strategy looks like:

• Comprehensive audit of user behavior and analytics data to identify conversion barriers
• Prioritized solutions that turn barriers into opportunities
• A/B testing and other experimentation methods to validate site improvements
• Device-specific optimization to customize the experience
• Navigation improvements to help users find specific products instead of browsing aimlessly
• Streamlined purchase paths that eliminate every source of friction
• Sophisticated abandoned cart recovery that addresses objections and provides additional value

Solution 5: Leverage tech to offer innovative shopping experiences

The insight: While resellers focus on price optimization, you can invest in technological advances that create immediate competitive advantages.

Warby Parker’s AR try-on experience through their site and mobile app allows customers to virtually test frames from home. The company’s annual report mentions that try-on features contribute to customer satisfaction, which is known to increase conversion rates.

Advanced technology requires significant investment that discount-focused resellers can’t justify for all the product types in their store. But it creates customer experiences that justify premium pricing and drive conversion improvements.

What technology differentiation looks like:

• AR try-on experiences
• Real-time personalization that updates offers based on customer activity
• Predictive analytics that anticipate customer needs/interests
• Social commerce

Solution 6: Lean on your brand story and values to connect with customers

The insight: Your resellers are selling your product, but they can’t sell your story.

Olipop transformed the crowded soda market by crafting a compelling narrative around gut health and nostalgia.

While Amazon can stock their prebiotic sodas, they can’t replicate the brand’s authentic story about making childhood favorites functional for adult wellness.

This storytelling creates emotional connections that justify premium pricing. Customers pay $2.50 for an Olipop versus $1 for a Coke because they’re buying into a healthier lifestyle narrative. They also have a subscription program that makes it easy for customers to restock every month.

Weaving the brand story into everything, from blog articles to stats on quality, helps customers build a direct relationship with your brand.

Content strategies that differentiate:

• Educational content that positions you as the industry expert
• User-generated content that creates social proof and community engagement
• Brand storytelling using elements like quality tiles to connect with customer values

Solution 7: Try product bundling to create value

The insight: Retailers may have lower prices on individual products, but you can create bundles to provide unreplicable value.

Harry’s grooming bundles products to make it easier for customers to find what they need for a smooth shave. Terms like “complete suite” and “essentials” create the perception of necessity while offering genuine convenience.

Smart product bundling makes price comparison impossible because customers can’t find identical packages elsewhere. The strategy works because bundles provide genuine convenience and a perception of value.

What strategic bundling looks like:

• Product combinations with complementary items, services, or accessories
• Value-added services like installation, setup assistance, or training included
• Exclusive package deals available only through your channel

Solution 8: Create unbeatable service experiences

The insight: Exceptional customer service can become a primary differentiator when price competition is off the table.

REI’s legendary approach exemplifies this strategy through its unmatched 100% satisfaction guarantee and return policy. Members can return any REI product at any time for any reason, with no questions asked, even if they’ve used it for years.

The policy extends beyond just returns to include their expert gear consultation services, where knowledgeable staff help customers choose the right equipment for their specific outdoor adventures, and their extensive educational programs, including classes on everything from rock climbing to bike maintenance.

Superior service creates defensible advantages because it requires investment in people and processes that discount-focused resellers can’t justify. The key is making the service itself a reason to choose you.

What service excellence looks like:

• Pre-sale consultation and personalized product selection guidance
• Extended warranties and satisfaction guarantees that competitors can’t match
• Omnichannel service consistency across online, phone, chat, and in-store
• Post-purchase support that turns customers into advocates

Understanding customer psychology and your unique users

Research shows that price is rarely the only factor in purchase decisions, even for price-sensitive customers. So, understanding the foundations of customer psychology and what matters is crucial when competing beyond price.

Some of the foundational elements of customer psychology are true no matter what you offer:

• Trust and Credibility: Customers often pay premium prices for retailers they trust. Build credibility through professional website design, clear policies, security certifications, and transparent business practices.
• Convenience and Time Savings: Many customers value convenience more than small price differences. Streamlined shopping experiences, fast shipping, and easy returns can justify MAP pricing.
• Risk Reduction: Customers often choose established retailers to reduce purchase risk. Comprehensive return policies, warranties, and a reputation for reliability can overcome price objections.

But there are other user behaviors that will be unique to your customers. Doing the research to understand what they want and need is the best way to deliver experiences that can compete when your company doesn’t have minimum advertised price policies in place.

Compete on value, not on price

MAP policy restrictions don’t have to be conversion killers. They can be conversion redirectors that allow you to compete differently.

While the wholesalers, retailers, and resellers race to the bottom on price, you can build sustainable differentiation through superior customer experience, expert service, and strategic value creation.

The ecommerce teams that thrive under MAP constraints understand a fundamental truth: customers don’t always buy from the cheapest option. They buy from the option that provides the most value. Your job is to ensure that option is always yours.

Ready to transform your MAP constraints into competitive advantages? The strategies outlined here require systematic implementation and continuous optimization. At The Good, we specialize in helping ecommerce brands optimize their conversion strategies when traditional price competition isn’t an option.

Let’s talk and see if there could be a good fit.

The post Why “We Can’t Compete Without MAP” Is the Wrong Problem to Solve appeared first on The Good.

Yet lots of companies treat their existing users as endpoints instead of starting points. They focus on acquiring new customers rather than leveraging the growth potential already sitting in their user base.

There are plenty of strategies to maximize your existing user base, including leveraging the power of growth loops and positive network effects as covered in other articles, but today I want to touch on how strategic feature creation that drives collaboration is an underrated revenue opportunity.

Why account expansion through collaboration can beat traditional sales tactics

The traditional approach to account expansion relies on sales teams identifying upgrade opportunities and convincing decision-makers at a company of the value. However, a new group of buyers is not accounted for in this model.

“Citizen SaaS buyers” now influence 40% of all company SaaS spending. These aren’t IT decision-makers; they’re everyday users who either A) find tools so valuable that they eventually buy them for their teams or B) see how much more effective it would be if more team members used them, so they advocate for upgrades.

These users typically start as single-seat or individual account holders, and instead of a traditional path to account expansion, their user journey finds upgrade paths via team or collaborative features. This style of collaboration-focused expansion makes upgrading feel like an extension of getting work done. It focuses on what naturally happens when users find real value.

How does it work in action?

This model of account expansion creates self-reinforcing cycles where user actions naturally drive more user actions. Unlike traditional sales funnels that end with a purchase, growth loops turn a user interaction into a potential expansion opportunity.

Here’s how a collaboration-driven growth loop works:

• User finds value → Individual user discovers your product solves a real problem
• User enhances value through collaboration → To maximize the solution, they need to involve teammates
• Collaboration creates shared investment → Team builds workflows, templates, and shared resources
• Shared investment increases dependency → Team becomes reliant on collaborative workflows
• Dependency drives expansion → Team needs more features, seats, or capabilities
• Expansion enables bigger problems → Larger teams tackle more complex challenges
• Bigger problems require more collaboration → Loop repeats at a larger scale

This isn’t just theory. We’ve seen this pattern drive expansion in everything from design tools to project management platforms. The key is designing features that naturally create more collaboration opportunities. Eventually, revenue grows through authentic value creation rather than time-intensive upselling.

Understanding the types of collaboration and team features

Before diving into strategy, it’s helpful to understand the different types of collaboration features that SaaS companies use to turn individual users into team advocates. These features work best when they feel like natural extensions of your core product value rather than bolted-on additions.

Sharing and access features

These are the foundations of most collaboration strategies. Users can share specific content, projects, or workspaces with colleagues. Examples include shared documents, project folders, dashboard links, or design files. The key is making sharing feel essential to getting work done rather than optional.

Notion has clear shared workspaces, allowing groups of individual users or “teams” to share documents, templates, and files.

Invitations

Direct invitation systems let users add colleagues to their accounts or workspaces. This includes features like “Add team member,” workspace invitations, or role-based access controls. The most effective invitation systems make it obvious why adding someone will improve the work for everyone involved.

Google Meet offers pre-meeting invite capabilities and makes it simple to add new attendees to a meeting with multiple invitation calls-to-action, and even provides suggestions of individuals you can add.

Real-time collaboration

Features that let multiple people work on the same thing simultaneously. This includes co-editing documents, collaborative whiteboards, shared design files, or synchronized data entry. Real-time collaboration often creates the strongest expansion pull because it makes individual work feel incomplete.

Figma is a masterclass in real-time collaboration, with shared files, “jam sessions” or timed working sessions, and even name tags on cursors to see where collaborators are in the file.

Communication and feedback tools

Built-in ways for team members to communicate about shared work. This includes comment threads, @mentions, approval workflows, or status updates. These features keep conversations contextual to the work, making your product the natural hub for project communication.

Airtable offers commenting, tagging, and assignment features throughout the tool, allowing teams to notify each other and host conversations in relevant project spaces.

Permission and role management

Systems that let users control who can see or edit what. This includes viewer/editor roles, department-level access, guest permissions, or approval hierarchies. Good permission systems make it safe and easy to include external stakeholders in workflows.

TLDV clearly outlines the sharing permissions on videos with levels of access, including “my team,” “my organization,” and individual users. There are also general access links if you want to share beyond account holders.

Workflow and process sharing

Features that let users create templates, processes, or automated workflows that others can use. This includes shared templates, workflow automation, or standardized processes. When teams build shared workflows, they create a collective investment in your platform.

Canva has brand kits, controls, and templates that can be shared amongst your team to help standardize and speed up your design workflows.

Social and activity features

Elements that show what team members are working on and create visibility into collaborative work. This includes activity feeds, presence indicators, or team dashboards. These features help teams stay coordinated while showcasing the value of collaborative work.

Slack offers great visibility into who is online with the green or transparent status dot next to users in the sidebar, giving easy indicators of who is available for active collaboration.

7 tactics for building collaboration features that drive account expansion and keep users around

The good news is you don’t have to pick just one type of collaboration feature. You can combine multiple types to create comprehensive collaborative experiences that make teamwork feel natural and essential. Here are some essential tactics to help you do just that.

1. Make sharing more valuable than working alone

The biggest barrier to collaboration isn’t technical, it’s behavioral. Users default to working alone unless collaboration is obviously easier and more valuable than individual work.

Design your product so that collaborative features provide immediate, obvious benefits that individual work can’t match. Don’t just make collaboration possible; make it essential for getting the best results.

For example, Figma revolutionized design by making real-time collaboration the default experience. Instead of designers working in isolation and then sharing static files, Figma made the design process inherently collaborative. Stakeholders could see work in progress, provide feedback in context, and feel involved in the creative process. This didn’t just improve design quality; it naturally expanded usage to include project managers, developers, and executives who previously only saw final designs.

2. Build features that create shared investment

When users invest time in building collaborative structures, they create switching costs that extend beyond individual preferences. The more a team builds together, the harder it becomes to leave your platform.

Provide tools that enable users to create shared resources, templates, and workflows that become more valuable as more people contribute to them. Make it easy to start collaborative structures and painful to abandon them.

A good example is Notion’s template system, which creates significant shared investment. When a team builds a comprehensive project management template with custom properties, linked databases, and automated workflows, they’re not just organizing their current work; they’re creating a system that becomes more valuable as more team members contribute to it. Removing team members from the workspace breaks the system, creating a natural resistance to downsizing.

3. Make collaboration visible and desirable

When users see colleagues accessing information, participating in decisions, or benefiting from workflows they can’t access, they naturally want to be included. Visibility drives demand for inclusion.

Make collaboration visible and valuable. Show users what they’re missing when they’re not part of collaborative workflows. Create transparency around who’s involved in what work, and make it easy to request access or suggest inclusion.

One example is Slack’s channel system, which creates visibility that drives expansion. When important decisions happen in channels users can’t access, they naturally request to be added. When they see colleagues sharing resources, celebrating wins, or coordinating work in channels they can observe but not participate in, they want to create their own channels for their work. This visibility drives organic expansion as users advocate for broader team adoption.

4. Include stakeholders who don’t use your product daily

Most SaaS tools start with individual users and try to expand outward. A better approach is to identify who needs to be involved for your primary users to be successful, and then build features that naturally include those stakeholders.

Map out who needs to be involved for your users to achieve their goals. Design features that make it easy to include those stakeholders in workflows, even if they’re not primary users of your product.

Miro understood that successful brainstorming sessions require diverse perspectives. Instead of building a tool just for facilitators, they created features that make it easy to include participants who might never use Miro independently. Guest access, simple sharing links, and intuitive contribution tools mean that workshop participants don’t need to be Miro experts to add value. This naturally expands usage to include executives, clients, and cross-functional team members who become advocates for broader adoption.

5. Recognize when users need help and suggest collaboration

The most effective collaboration features activate automatically when users hit natural collaboration points in their workflow. Instead of requiring users to remember to invite colleagues, smart systems recognize when teamwork would be valuable and make it easy to initiate.

Identify the moments in your user workflows where collaboration would be most valuable. Build features that recognize these moments and proactively suggest or facilitate collaboration.

Canva’s team features activate when users create designs that would benefit from collaboration. When a user creates a brand template, the platform suggests inviting brand managers. When they start a campaign design, it recommends involving marketing team members. When they build a presentation, they offer to share it with stakeholders for feedback. These suggestions feel helpful rather than pushy because they activate at moments when collaboration genuinely improves outcomes.

6. Support different work styles and schedules

Not all collaboration happens in real time. Some of the most powerful collaborative features work across time zones, schedules, and work styles. Asynchronous collaboration features often drive more expansion because they’re less dependent on coordinating schedules.

Build collaboration features that work when team members aren’t online simultaneously. Focus on features that let people contribute when it’s convenient for them while maintaining context for others.

Loom’s video messaging creates asynchronous collaboration opportunities that naturally expand usage. When someone creates a video explanation of a complex process, they often need to share it with multiple stakeholders who weren’t part of the original conversation. The video becomes a shared resource that multiple team members reference, comment on, and build upon. This creates natural expansion as teams recognize the value of asynchronous video communication for knowledge sharing.

7. Use access control as an expansion tool

Most SaaS companies think about permissions as security features. The smartest ones also use permissions as expansion features. Well-designed permission systems create natural opportunities for users to expand access as their needs grow.

Design permission systems that make it easy to grant appropriate access to new stakeholders without overwhelming them or compromising security. Use permission requests as expansion opportunities rather than barriers.

For example, Dropbox’s permission system creates natural expansion opportunities. When users want to share folders with specific access levels, they’re guided through options that often result in upgrading accounts to accommodate more users or storage. The permission system protects files and creates moments where users recognize the value of bringing more people into their workflows.

Ready to organically drive account expansion?

Collaboration-driven account expansion isn’t just about adding team features to your product. It’s about understanding how work really gets done and building features that make collaboration feel natural, valuable, and necessary.

The SaaS companies that master this approach turn every user into a potential growth engine. They create products so collaborative that teams can’t imagine working any other way. When collaboration becomes essential to how work gets done, account expansion becomes inevitable.

At The Good, we’ve helped SaaS companies identify and build collaboration features that drive meaningful account expansion. Our Digital Experience Optimization Program takes a systematic approach to understanding user behavior, designing collaborative experiences, and optimizing for sustainable growth.

Ready to transform your users into your most effective growth engine? Let’s explore how collaboration-driven expansion can accelerate your growth.

The post How to Drive Account Expansion with Collaborator & Team Features That Stick appeared first on The Good.

Product leaders have seen firsthand how testing changes with real users before full implementation can minimize risk and maximize ROI. Booking.com, Netflix, and Amazon have made experiment-led growth central to their success by running thousands of experiments annually to optimize UX.

But, teams that don’t have the time, resources, or traffic of the industry leaders might find it difficult to take on the practice effectively.

In this article, we’re sharing how SaaS companies between product-market fit and scale can cut down on test cycle time to make adoption of experiment-led growth practices more accessible.

What is test cycle time?

In optimization, test cycle time is the full length of time taken to complete an experiment. It includes all phases, from ideation to planning, through execution, and analysis. It’s an important metric for measuring the efficiency of testing programs and identifying bottlenecks in the experimentation workflow.

How slow test cycles are holding you back

Slow testing cycles aren’t just annoying, they can create real problems for your business and, as we mentioned, hold you back from the benefits of experiment-led growth.

We’ve seen firsthand with clients how test cycle delays can mean months between identifying an issue and implementing a solution. That’s simply too long in today’s market.

Here are a few of the high costs you might be paying for a slow test cycle:

• Market opportunities slip away while waiting for test results
• Competitors gain ground during your lengthy testing phases
• Development resources get tied up in prolonged testing initiatives
• Customer frustration builds as issues remain unfixed
• Decision fatigue sets in as teams debate what to test next

Significantly reduce test cycle time with these tips

So, what should you do about it? We reached into our tool chest and pulled together the strategies that have worked for our clients and trusted partners to reduce test cycle time.

1. Supplement A/B tests with rapid tests and qualitative research

A/B testing has its place in product optimization, but there are plenty of ways it fails.

Regulatory challenges, low traffic, time constraints, and other issues make A/B testing an at times untenable solution for validating changes to their website or app.

In some companies, by the time a test idea passes through all the bureaucratic loopholes and oversight at an organization, it’s no longer lean enough to justify testing. Without an alternative testing method, teams are left without any data at all. In these instances, A/B testing is just too clunky to make sense.

But, there is a great alternative solution that can provide insights when A/B testing isn’t an option. Using targeted qualitative methods like rapid testing helps overcome the challenges mentioned and builds confidence in changes within days instead of weeks.

Software Director of Product Marketing Gabrielle Nouhra, who leverages The Good for research and experimentation support, says this about rapid testing:

“The speed at which we obtain actionable findings has been impressive. We are receiving rapid results within weeks and taking immediate action based on the findings.”

How it works:

• Recruit users from your target segment
• Choose the right rapid testing method and conduct tests on specific features or flows
• Analyze patterns immediately rather than waiting for statistical significance
• Implement clear findings quickly while planning more extensive testing only where truly needed

In addition to the efficiency of rapid testing and its ability to overcome regulatory challenges, it also has the cool added benefits of adding some qualitative feedback and the voice of the consumer to your work.

For more on rapid testing and how it differs from A/B testing, check out this deep dive.

2. Run parallel tests

Rather than testing one hypothesis at a time, well-thought-out testing programs can run multiple tests simultaneously across different parts of the product experience.

This can be done with both A/B tests and rapid tests.

The most important consideration for running concurrent tests is to differentiate. Our director of UX and Strategy, Natalie Thomas, says:

“It’s important to look at behavior goals to assess why your metrics improved after a series of tests. So if you’re running too many similar tests at once, it will be difficult to pinpoint and assess exactly which test led to the positive result.”

To make sure parallel testing is done correctly, there are a few tips that can help:

• Create a testing roadmap that covers independent areas of your product
• Build small, cross-functional testing teams assigned to each area
• Use a centralized dashboard to track all ongoing tests
• Establish clear handoff processes so development teams can implement findings quickly

When done well, parallel testing can double or triple your insight velocity without requiring additional resources.

3. Prioritize high-impact tests

Not all tests require the same level of rigor. Smart SaaS companies create prioritization systems that allow critical tests to move faster and, at minimum, reduce test cycle time for the most important experiments.

To create a proverbial fast lane for high-impact tests, there are tons of prioritization frameworks you can pull inspiration from (PIE, ICE, etc.). At The Good, we use the ADVS’R framework, incorporating binary evaluations and stoplight scoring. We like that it encourages strategic thinking and accounts for both business value and user experience/needs in the prioritization schema.

While this is our preferred method, there is no “one size fits all” prioritization method. Regardless of the framework you choose, there are a few important steps to making sure you work on the most important hypotheses first.

• Develop clear criteria for what qualifies as “high impact”
• Create simplified approval processes for these tests
• Allocate dedicated resources to fast-track implementation
• Accept slightly higher uncertainty in exchange for speed, where appropriate

Kalah Arsenault, Autodesk’s Marketing Optimization Lead, implemented a custom prioritization calculator that allowed her team to rank test priority on business impact, level of effort, and urgency. The result was 2x the testing volume.

“We were able to double the amount of tests our team took on within one year. So, from this compared to last year, we doubled the volume of testing with a new operating and prioritization model.”

4. Adopt elements of modular testing

Another more technical way to reduce test cycle time is to adopt modular testing.

Traditional design or content tests start from scratch each time. Modular approaches reuse components, dramatically reducing setup time and saving on potential design and development costs.

To get through the testing cycle more efficiently with a modular approach, here are a few tips:

• Create pre-built design templates for common test scenarios (onboarding, checkout, feature adoption)
• If working on qualitative research, standardize recruitment criteria and screening questions for your ICP, and tweak based on the hypothesis and context of each specific test
• Once you get results, leverage analysis frameworks that speed up insight generation
• Implement consistent plug-and-play reporting formats that make decision-making faster

5. Leverage AI as a research assistant

AI can be a great tool to support you in quicker testing analysis and to point you to the research you should be taking a closer look at.

Tools can analyze user session recordings, heatmaps, and customer feedback at scale, identifying patterns that may inspire the A/B or rapid tests you’d like to run to validate changes.

Some practical applications of AI-assisted analysis include:

• Automatically categorizing user feedback into actionable themes
• Identifying anomalies in user behavior that warrant immediate attention
• Generating preliminary insights that researchers can validate quickly
• Transforming qualitative data into quantifiable metrics

Companies using AI-assisted analysis can move from question to answer much faster by quickly identifying common trends in data or research that require further investigation by an expert researcher and/or feedback from real users.

Speeding up your test cycle means better products and faster growth

There is a big caveat to keep in mind with all of this: there are tradeoffs when you prioritize speed.

A faster testing cycle means more room for errors and statistically insignificant results. While precautions can be taken, there are pros and cons to whatever approach you choose.

For some organizations, a slow testing cycle that reaches statistical significance is worth it for a high-risk change. This may mean they’re fine with a custom, one-test-at-a-time approach.

Also, speeding up test cycles takes a certain level of expertise and nuance. You can’t just ask users what they prefer and call it a validated improvement.

To make these changes well, it takes some training, but it’s worth the investment.

SaaS companies that successfully implement these approaches can see benefits like:

• Accelerated product improvement cycles
• Higher customer satisfaction and retention
• More efficient use of development resources
• Competitive advantage through faster innovation
• Improved team morale as they see results from their work more quickly

If you aren’t sure how to get started, let’s talk. We can help you accelerate your product improvement cycle without sacrificing the quality of insights.

The post How To Cut Test Cycle Time In Half Without Losing Out On User Insights appeared first on The Good.

Product managers (PMs) play a crucial role in defining product vision and strategy, but to truly create products that resonate with users, they must understand UX fundamentals.

We’ve seen this time and time again with our SaaS clients. When PMs incorporate UX principles into their decision-making, they ensure their products are not only functional but also intuitive, engaging, and aligned with user needs.

If you aren’t upskilled yet, don’t worry. In this article, we’re diving into the fundamentals every product manager should know.

What is UX?

The term user experience, or UX for short, describes the overall experience of using a product (e.g., website, digital application, etc.). It covers all aspects of a user’s interactions, including perception.

The key components of UX are, intuitively, elements that impact a user’s experience with a product. This includes:

• Interactions: The various ways that users directly and indirectly interact with a product or service.
• Perceptions: The subjective experiences a user has with a product or service, including their emotions and personal beliefs.
• Context: How and where users interact with the product or services. The general environment impacting the experience.
• Usability: The practical elements of an experience like accessibility and task completion.

Why do product managers need to know UX fundamentals?

As a product manager, understanding UX fundamentals is crucial for creating products that are both functional and delightful for users. This is true whether or not you have an internal UX team.

Knowing UX fundamentals enables you to be a better collaborator. Even if you have specialists on your side, knowing the fundamentals of UX allows you to converse, collaborate, and incorporate the user into all product decision-making.

If you’re working on upskilling your PM role to include UX fundamentals, good for you. You’re doing the work that will not only deliver better business outcomes but will also make the internet a better place.

Here are some key UX principles and practices that every product manager should know.

UX research

The core pillar of UX that can’t be ignored is: always start with research.

UX research is fundamental to successful product development and optimization. It uncovers how your customers interact with your site and the journeys they take to purchase.

Beginning to understand the experience means digging into data and leaning on UX research methods to discover how users feel when they’re on your site. Here are a few important ones to keep in mind.

Discovery research

Discovery research helps you understand use cases and user needs. It can ground you in what problems to solve and what is going on in the market.

Example: Desk research is a type of discovery research that collects material or data from public sources like reports.

Generative research

Generative methods are great for understanding what’s happening on a website and forming hypotheses about what would work better. It helps you ideate problems that need to be solved and what product interventions could support users.

Example: Interviews, surveys, and market research are all forms of generative research.

Generative research is great for ideation, but in order to move forward with confidence that your solutions will actually work, you need evaluative research.

Evaluative research

Evaluative research helps you understand task completion, satisfaction, and whether users are able to accomplish core tasks within your app.

Example: Task completion analysis and user testing are evaluative research methods that offer insight into how your experience is working.

Evaluative research also helps you test treatments against the current experience, understand if core user needs are met, and if the solution will generate positive outcomes for the business.

Example: A/B testing is a form of evaluative research that delivers validation on changes.

Competitive analysis and journey mapping

Competitive analysis and journey mapping help you understand if your app delivers on value promises better or worse than other solutions. Map out the customer experience for your product and that of competitors to uncover where you excel and where you might fall short.

These are the fundamentals. You can learn more about the UX research process here, but by understanding these pillars, you’re already on your way to a more effective product.

User-centered design

Along with UX research, another core fundamental of UX is user-centered design.

User-centered design is the iterative process of putting users at the center of the entire product design and development process. It leans on empathy and a core understanding of user needs to create experiences that align business goals with user needs.

Visual design

Before we dive into the tools used to keep design user-centered, it’s important for PMs to understand the principles of visual design in general.

Visual design is a combination of both graphic design and user experience (UX) design that uses aspects of the site, such as brand identity, internal consistency, and visually communicated goals, to provide a unified, cohesive experience to its users.

A strong visual design doesn’t detract from the site’s content, usability, or conversion potential. Instead, it enhances these functions by creating an engaging and trustworthy experience for users.

You can explore the principles (with examples) in this visual design deep dive.

Now, with visual design in mind, how do teams make sure beautiful visuals actually keep the user as the priority? User-centered design leverages tools like wireframes and prototypes to get user feedback throughout the design process.

Wireframing

A wireframe is an illustration of an application or website page. It is a simple (often greyscale) visualization. Wireframes outline components of the page (like text, images, navigation, etc) in a hierarchical format. They are an early blueprint that UX designers can then validate against user needs and business goals before committing to a final design.

Designers create wireframes to visualize and evaluate core flow and features. Those basic designs are then leveraged in user testing, and put in front of real or look-alike users for feedback.

Prototyping

Prototyping is an essential part of the UX design process and can unlock your team’s ability to validate ideas before you send them to development.

In literal terms, a prototype is a first or early model of a proposed design passed to the development team before being coded onto the website. For product teams, prototypes are early samples of a product intentionally designed for testing. It is a quick way to get something to evaluate with users.

They can range from simple pen and paper sketches to highly interactive mockups in tools such as Figma. With prototypes, you can get user feedback on pages or app elements, which can be used to iterate your way to a better digital experience for your users.

To illustrate the idea, you may use a prototype when redesigning your website’s landing page. You may sketch ideas out in a wireframe and get either internal or external feedback before layering on your brand design and sending it to development for implementation.

Inclusive design

The last fundamental of user-centered design that is important to understand is inclusivity.

Not all users are the same, and therefore, it’s crucial to design a product that is functional and helpful regardless of the user’s personal circumstances.

Inclusive design is about providing an equitable experience for everyone. The goal is to never sacrifice the experience of one community of users for another. The implementation of an inclusive feature should address the needs of a minoritized community without negatively impacting mainstream users.

User-centered design is for all your users, so don’t ignore a subset that may need special accommodations or features.

Usability

Usability is a measure of how well a user can achieve specific goals within a product. It is the product’s ability to deliver an experience that a user can efficiently and easily navigate.

Another UX fundamental, usability includes elements like learnability, error prevention and recovery, memorability, and efficiency.

Learnability

This considers how easily a new user can understand and start using a system effectively. A highly learnable interface has clear cues, intuitive navigation, and minimal need for instructions or prior experience.

Error Prevention and Recovery

Error prevention and recovery is a system’s ability to minimize user mistakes and help them recover quickly if they occur. This includes designing intuitive workflows, providing clear error messages, offering undo options, and preventing irreversible actions.

Memorability

Understand how easily users can remember how to use a system after a period of inactivity. A memorable interface reduces the need for relearning and allows users to quickly regain proficiency when they return.

Efficiency

Efficiency in this context refers to how quickly and easily users can complete tasks once they are familiar with the system. High efficiency means fewer steps, minimal friction, and optimized workflows that reduce time and effort.

Iterative testing and feedback

PMs should consider the importance of iterative testing and feedback as one of the fundamentals of UX.

Similar to UX research, this incorporates forms of evaluative research like rapid testing and A/B testing to validate ideas but also includes simpler elements like feedback loops. Setting up systems with sales and customer success that send you user feedback. When you make changes, send those back to the user or teams to make sure they accomplish what they set out to.

An ethos of UX is never let timing hold you back from staying user-centered. The best product launches consider UX even on tight timelines. If you feel the need to launch quickly, you should at least perform what Emma Leyden, human-centered product leader, calls a “gut check.”

“Your ‘gut check’ can be done in low-effort ways. It won’t give you the most confident answer, but something as simple as showing a design to like friends and family before you launch can teach you a lot.”

As a good rule of thumb, Emma encourages having some kind of user research scheduled every week, even if it’s as simple as letting someone see or use the prototype of a product and voicing their thoughts aloud. You can learn a lot about the usability of a product with this kind of approach.

For more sophisticated companies, a best practice is to conduct regular UX audits on your product to encourage iterative improvement. Another good strategy is to create theme-based roadmaps that center around the user experience.

UX metrics of success

UX success metrics vary based on the goals of your company and your product. To get your footing on what kind of metrics are used for UX success, consider this framework.

Google, a UX leader, created a simple methodology to track progress toward goals that aren’t directly related to business outcomes. Called the HEART framework, it measures the quality of the user experience via five metrics:

• Happiness: Measures of user attitudes, often collected via survey. For example:
  • Satisfaction
  • Perceived ease of use
  • Net-promoter score
• Engagement: Level of user involvement. For example:
  • Number of visits per user per week
  • Number of photos uploaded per user per day
  • Number of shares
• Adoption: Gaining new users of a product or feature. For example:
  • Upgrades to the latest version
  • New subscriptions created
  • Purchases made by new users
• Retention: The rate at which existing users are returning. For example:
  • Number of active users remaining present over time
  • Renewal rate or churn rate
  • Repeat purchases
• Task Success: Efficiency, effectiveness, and error rate. For example:
  • Search result success
  • Time to upload a photo
  • Profile creation complete

You can apply HEART to a specific feature or the entire product and help to identify goals, signals, and metrics for each of the five categories.

The HEART framework is a good starting point for keeping teams on track to deliver better user-centered products.

The goal is to integrate user-centered metrics into the decision-making process across the organization.

How PMs and UX teams can work together for better products

Now that you know the fundamentals of UX, as a PM, you are set up to successfully do your job more effectively and with the user in mind.

By embracing UX principles, product managers can ensure their products are not only functional but also delightful and effective. Integrating user-centered design, research, and continuous testing into product development leads to better outcomes for both users and businesses.

For product managers with internal UX teams, you can collaborate by doing things like:

• Hold a kickoff meeting with both PMs and UX designers to outline objectives, assumptions, etc.
• Conduct joint research sessions (e.g., customer interviews).
• Develop shared documentation outlining key findings.
• Regularly review prototypes together based on feedback loops.

If you don’t have the internal resources for UX research and design, you can hire an unbiased perspective and receive actionable recommendations. Get in touch with The Good if you’re ready to get started.

The post The UX Fundamentals That Every Product Manager Needs To Know appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Not all online businesses need the same amount of traffic. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how consideration, target market, and budget impact traffic for both startups and industry leaders.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• What a traffic moat is, and why established brands want to create them.
• What startups should focus on when it comes to generating traffic.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Castbox
• Castro
• Overcast
• Pocket Casts
• Stitcher
• Subscribe via RSS

Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Hey, Ryan, I assume that our listeners are aware, but not all businesses online need the same traffic. So surprise, surprise. So much depends on consideration, target market budgets.

All right. So. If you’re selling a 35 watch band, your conversion paths are pretty likely to be short, but if you’re selling a 25,000 B2B server, or maybe even a SAS product of all things, we haven’t talked a lot about here, but I have a feeling we will do more. You most likely have some complicated paths to conversion.

And I think, you know, we really have not spent a whole lot of time tackling these issues. And I think there’s potentially a more unique [00:01:00] traffic source and pattern there that that we should discuss.

Ryan Garrow: I agree. And I think it seems logical that when you’re looking to drive traffic in a High consideration industry with high dollar value deals or lots of margin in those product sales.

It really still does, when you boil it all down, come a lot of times down to just budget, which in turn comes down to, were you already successful before you started spending money? or where you’re at now. Like it’s difficult unless you have an investor with really deep pockets willing to blow a bunch of money on the internet to hopefully win to be able to compete sometimes when you’ve got a large incumbent brand there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: I just got the call this morning actually with a company that’s launching into a B2B space. They’re only going to have a couple thousand dollars of budget and they’re competing against It’s the web stronts and the Grangers of the world with essentially the same products in their little small slice of the industry there.

I mean, I, I painted a pretty bleak picture for them. I was like, it’s going to be tough. Your competition is already spending six, [00:02:00] seven figures a month on Google capturing demand. You’re going to be priced out of the ad auctions in just a thousand dollars. It’s like. You know, a pea shooter against a tank to a degree.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Why even bother in those cases?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And I tell them most of the time, don’t, I was like, you can pay me and you know, I’d have no problem taking money, but you’re not going to be happy. So there’s probably better places to spend your money. You know, startups in these spaces have to get somewhat creative for their traffic and lead flow while larger businesses or industry leaders really have to focus on creating traffic moats around what they’re doing.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. So. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that term traffic moat before what what do you mean by that because I don’t even know how an industry leader would create one. What is that? What are we talking about here ?

Ryan Garrow: Before today? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. But I was sitting down creating notes.

I was like, how do you explain some of these strategies I would talk about? I’m like, I think of it as like, okay, you’ve got this castle, you know, And you’re, Oh, you’ve got, you can build a moat around it and it helps protect you. And we talk in business around, you know, how do you build moats or, you know, be in blue oceans and keep out the bloody [00:03:00] waters.

If you consider your traffic, your advantage on as a B2B large sales product or a SAS product, then you want to protect that. You don’t want to just make it easy to, to steal that traffic from you. That’s what I think you’re trying to accomplish in a perfect world. And you’re always going to have people trying to take it from you because they’re going to see your size.

They can estimate your profit. You know, we know a lot of what SAS margin products look like. You can see their traffic and do backup math and calculations and be like, Hey, I want some of that profit. To start creating this mode, you got to think through your search funnel and then at each layer, figure out kind of how you’re going to protect yourself.

What’s going to keep the startups from coming in? I usually start with Google Bing and say, okay, you’re capturing demand. And if it was me, I would almost do the opposite of what a lot of e com brands get advised to do. But I would say increase your bids, increase your CPA goals, meaning like be willing to pay more for a CPA than maybe what you can actually capture.

Okay. If you can get a CPA of, let’s say 80 on Google and Bing, [00:04:00] and I can handle 120, 130, I might go up there anyway. Just because it’s going to make it that much more difficult for a startup with less money than me to compete and I’m playing the long game.

Jon MacDonald: Well, it’s almost like that story you were just talking about, right?

In the sense that somebody new who’s entering that marketplace can’t possibly compete spending a couple grand when their competitors are spending tens of thousands.

Ryan Garrow: Google many times will set a minimum CPC in a lot of industries to help give you that moat to a degree. But like I might be bidding a hundred even though I know I can handle.

I can take it for 50 or do really well there just because I’m competitive and I want to win. And I want a monopoly if I can get it, but I want to keep them out. And I want to focus really hyper focus on quality score because that’s the area that small competitors can jump into these auctions and beat you.

You know, if you’ve got a very large Google ads account, that’s not getting a lot of attention in many areas, you may have three to five out of 10 scores. Meaning that if I’m a small competitor, I’m going to get hyper focused on that. I can get a [00:05:00] 10 out of 10 and outbid you for less money. You might be bidding 100, but I might be able to get that same click for only 30 because I’ve got a much better quality score.

Large brands can’t take their foot off the gas and allow for those creaks to come in. So you really do have to pay attention to those details. If I’m advising an aggressive business, you know, somebody like myself. I might say you need to find a way to get a second entity in that auction That you own and control not something that you you don’t break any rules by doing it, by the way It’s just you have to be very clean about it.

Jon MacDonald: Okay,

Ryan Garrow: you can’t have the same credit card on there You can’t have the same billing address You need to make sure google sees that second entity bidding in that auction as a Second entity as a competitor to you, even though the ladies may be flowing up to you at the end of the day So some of them might be that you create a best of list We had a client that did this in a much simpler industry He was selling t shirts based undershirts and he created this huge ecosystem where he became a like a t shirt guy And was like doing all of these reviews of undershirts funny [00:06:00] enough, he won every best of list.

He’s like, Oh, that’s got the best quality. It’s got the highest thread count. It’s all these things.

Jon MacDonald: This is the old mattress play. All the online mattress brands done this for years.

Ryan Garrow: Yes. And it, I think it gets overlooked in its simplicity. Like you’re just going to create this entity that you like, but it can bid because it’s Collecting review. And you might even set up, realistically, you might set up affiliates, affiliate links to your competitors.

Jon MacDonald: Why not make something off of it?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. You send them traffic, you might as well at least make some money off it. Yeah. And so, but you’re gonna win most of the awards on there. So that could be one way to do it.

Sometimes you will acquire or create a reseller of your product so that you know, if you’re selling this piece of sass and this. Ryan’s, you know, store is going to be one of the resellers of that. I can own that. There’s nothing against that rule. It’s a separate business. Maybe my wife owns that and she’s the reseller on there, but it’s my, I’m controlling the budget goes in and the reseller gets some of the revenue share just like a normal one would.

And then sometimes in the B2B like online sales, you would buy [00:07:00] it. You can buy a competitor and

Jon MacDonald: Oh, that’s a good idea.

Ryan Garrow: control it that way. One of our clients, and we pulled this from Fossil Watches. Where I don’t know, 10 years ago, they, they owned the watch market in the U S I mean, they owned like the top 10 brands.

They made all the watches. They had a fossil. They had watch station. They had all of, I mean, they could, they basically came to us during certain periods of the year and said, we want to own watches, wallets, and belts for men. I’m like, well, what do you, what do you mean own it? We don’t want to see any competitors anywhere in the auction on text ads or shopping.

You have all of our properties. Go make that happen. Like, okay. So if you weren’t organic top three on any of those during holiday, you were not getting traffic for those. It was going to be painful competing with our team on that space. So it’s, it’s thinking big,

Jon MacDonald: interesting,

Ryan Garrow: but really focusing on some of those details within the space. Okay.

Jon MacDonald: So I think everyone right now knows that you’re super competitive. So this doesn’t surprise me, but I love that tactic. You know, it’s [00:08:00] taking something that is legit, Google lets you do it and using it towards your advantage. And I love the buying a small competitor up to be able to do that. I think that’s a great idea.

Okay. So I get that you can create this mode around demand capture and properties like Google and Bing, but so many SAS or software as a service clients that we work with at the good have massive amounts of traffic coming from sources like affiliates or LinkedIn is huge now. How do you put a moat around those?

Ryan Garrow: Well, of course, it’s usually, it’s usually not as simple as controlling Google and Bing because that’s a very direct spend a dollar, get this relationship. But again, I think as long as you’re thinking within the details and minutia of those areas of the traffic, I think you can find ways to really Corner the market and keep small competitors out, even big competitors sometimes depending, but like, for example, affiliates are big in the SAS space.

Many of the tech players in my space have affiliate programs and they’re, they’re nice, but they’re almost table stakes for playing. Like if you don’t have an affiliate program or a partner [00:09:00] program that pays me a rev share, it’s like, yeah, are you, are you even trying to a degree? If I were to create a moat in affiliates for a big SAS company, Or a large player in the B2B space.

I would want to create tiers that, you know, a small competitor just can’t play it. And so aggressive pricing is one thing. So if standard in your industry is 15 to 20 percent of the SAS revenue to a partner, go 30%, I mean, make it uncomfortable for a small company without much money to be like, how would we pay 30 percent or more?

If you’re smaller, oftentimes you have to overshoot the incumbent. to take that partner away. Aggressive pricing can be one thing. It doesn’t have to be an all the time thing, right? You could just be like, I know this guy over there or girl over there is starting to start up a competitor of mine. I’m going to make sure they don’t get off the ground.

Small competitors usually lack a few things, money, time, and clients. And so if they don’t have all of those that you have an abundance of, or at least more than they do, as an affiliate, you want to provide those things to your partners or your affiliates that you know your small competitors can’t do.

You’ve [00:10:00] got the clients they don’t, you can provide leads. For your partners, find a way to engage your clients. Find some needs that your partners that are sending you business will like, I mean, everybody in the partner space loves reciprocal lead flow.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s a key, right? It’s gotta be reciprocal, but 30 percent is intriguing.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. I mean, so I have some competitors that will just do it for Revshare and that’s fine. You know, there’s many agency owners that will take, you know, 15, 20 grand a month in rev share from partners. That’s great because that’s going right to the owner’s bottom line or affording employees that maybe you’re trying to build up when you’re as big as LP 10, 15, 20 grand.

It really doesn’t. It’s not bad. We’re not going to turn it down. Don’t get me. Don’t hear me to say that.

Jon MacDonald: Shop in the bucket. I get it. Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: It’s a drop in the bucket for us. But so it’s when you can give leads that keeps me from saying, Hey, all things being equal and you’re giving me leads, guess who’s going to stay the predominant partner for us.

You know, there may, if you’ve got more cash, you could provide cash for a certain tiers that you hit. You know, we’re working with a partner right now to try to do some of that for some of our employees. Like, Hey, we’re going to do a set of incentive trip for some of the [00:11:00] lead flow that they’re going to be getting.

Well, that’s unique enough that a small competitor to them is not gonna be able to come to me and be like. Yeah, we’d like to, you know, give your employee a 100 gift card. Cute, not gonna turn it down, but at the day, they’re probably not gonna pay attention because they have this big cruise trip coming up with this partner.

Inviting them to events with your client. So if you’re already doing some events with your clients, where they’re just gonna be in the same spot. Invite a partner that you like, that you want to keep from going to a smaller competitor. Just getting them in the room with your clients is going to be valuable to them.

Again, if you’re inviting me to just meet with your clients because you’re there and you’re saying that Ryan’s valuable and logical position does good stuff.

Jon MacDonald: I mean, I feel like that’s the only time we see each other face to face anymore since COVID is like those events, right? Come see our clients. That’s an interesting one too.

Ryan Garrow: LinkedIn is tough because I feel like it’s been evolving a lot and it seems to be, it’s a pretty even playing field. Anybody can post anything they want. There’s no restrictions to being able to post a piece of content there. You don’t have to pay to play there. And so it is fairly [00:12:00] flat, democratic, even playing field space.

Most bigger businesses though will have a content team to help. And I think that’s the resource that becomes more valuable is if you have a solid content team regularly posting. The key is engaging thought leadership pieces. And this is going to take some work because there’s a lot of garbage on LinkedIn.

Like it’s just I don’t want to see another case study. I I don’t I just don’t care great You have a business you’ve probably done something good and you can spin the numbers most case studies when I get in them It’s even some of our partners I’ll go into the case and be like don’t you want to put this in front of your clients?

I’m, like no your case study is garbage because you one partner in particular talk about How they increase conversion rates. I can increase conversion rates. Like we talked about, like, not, and it wasn’t you, it wasn’t Jon, by the way, but it was like, I could just cut off your non brand traffic and conversion rate goes up.

So how can you tell me that making this little change just magically increased conversion rates across 5, 000 clients? Maybe, but you’ve got to give me some real data there and your case studies are fluffy. So,

Jon MacDonald: yeah, I think, you know, LinkedIn’s becoming more like, in some ways, like Reddit, where the community will come after [00:13:00] you in a way, they’ll call you out.

If you do things like that, and it used to be that you could post whatever you wanted to LinkedIn and everybody was kumbaya. Everyone was great with it. And, you know, high fives and likes and thumbs up everywhere. And I’m noticing as a lot of folks who were on Twitter left Twitter wanted something more business minded as Twitter has gotten away from business have really come on and said, you know, like, I love this, but you got to bring value.

And if you’re not bringing value, then I’m Or you’re trying to fake bringing that value, then I’m going to call you out on it. And I think that’s fair. And I love seeing that. And I think there’s a lot of ways to make LinkedIn work for brands. But you’re right. It’s tough because anyone can post anything.

And you are at the whim of the likes and follows, if you will, that are on there. And you got to deliver value. It’s the only way to do it.

Ryan Garrow: Yep, giving me a picture of you and partners at happy hour.

Jon MacDonald: [00:14:00] Like, yeah, this isn’t Facebook.

Ryan Garrow: I mean, no, it’s like that. There’s a time and place for that. And I get it. And you want to call them out, but it becomes the easy button.

I think it’d be like, I’m going to go to face facing and I tagged you and it’s great. And yes, you need to tag partners and give them some of that. Especially if you’re a leader in the space, your team does a phenomenal job at this. I mean, there’s so many times that we come across clients, we share, they’re like, yeah, Jon is everywhere.

He’s such a big deal. And I’m like, he is. Yes. But I also know that he’s got a great team behind him, you know, pushing that out there. Like it doesn’t just happen by accident. There’s a lot of intentionality with what your team does and how you’re repurposing content. You write books. To give yourself more things to talk about and do so.

I think Jon MacDonald is a great person to go if you’re trying to think about LinkedIn. And he does it from, yes, he’s a leader, but he does it with a very small team. So you can adopt Jon’s strategy as the market leader. But also maybe think about it too, as an incumbent, like you just have to be very intentional. So LinkedIn is somewhat challenging as the market leader because of that.

Announcer: You’re [00:15:00] listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of the The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers.

And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon MacDonald: I think it is, and I think too many people lean on the business instead of the individual, but LinkedIn. nobody follows businesses. They follow people on LinkedIn. And so you can’t just post from your company account and ask your team to like it. Not going to do anything. You really have to engage and be part of the community.

Similar to Reddit, as I mentioned, where you have to be part of the community. You can’t just pop in and promote yourself. Doesn’t work.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, [00:16:00] I wouldn’t even go to those stories I have there with I was trying to solve some Amazon problems. I went in there and I could see people doing I’m like, Oh, this is Stay away from that part of Reddit.

Yeah. But yeah, another example to look at too is Barb Brewis from No Commerce. I think he does a great job of being really authentic on LinkedIn. Yeah. Historically, he’s really built up a good following, and so you can duplicate what he’s doing. And No Commerce, I would argue, is one of the, one of the market leaders in the post purchase survey space.

Yeah. So they’re trying to keep their selves insulated, and so the whole team has to be going. Like, if you don’t have, I’ll say this, if you’re a large entity, In the B2B, SaaS space, and you don’t have a LinkedIn strategy for your organization, I think you have a problem.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Because it’s not like your business needs to post. Again, like you said, nobody cares. But your C level VPs, directors all have something that they are strategically posting about. And you have to be willing, I think as a big company, to let your people become elevated. There’s a lot of leadership, I think, to get worried like, Oh, if they get too big for me, they’re going to demand more [00:17:00] pay, or they’re going to get recruited.

I’m like, well, anybody can recruit anybody on LinkedIn. I know who the best people in e com are across the board. It’s not a question. If you want to hire the best here, here, here. I know who it is. It’s, it’s more about, are you going to create some value and encourage them to be part of your company is how you should be thinking, not like afraid of them getting picked off because they’re being helped in their LinkedIn strategy.

Jon MacDonald: You have to understand that you’re going to be helping people with their personal brands and that’s okay. You want that. And yeah, they take that when they, when they move on. Hey, at the same time, I think that obviously we do it. So I think it can be fairly, really valuable. And any other points for like a large brand wanting to create a moat around their traffic? You mentioned a few large names earlier, but

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I would say events can be a great moat for trackers. If you’re in the SaaS or B2B space, you’re probably involved in events, or there are industry events that you probably need to be at if you’re not. That is a great source of traffic and lead flow and you need to create a mode around that.

I don’t think it needs to be a booth at every event because I think a lot of times that’s [00:18:00] a waste of space. The expo, we rarely do, and I can’t say logical position is perfect at this, but we rarely have a booth because that’s not often where the money’s made. Sometimes you have to have a booth and that’s fine, but even just making sure your logos on the event guide.

So you have some branding and awareness and you have a person there that is willing to go out and meet people. So when I’m going to events. I find that the the companies that are most successful have the right person at the right event. I often don’t like multiple people at events if I’m the same company. Just a personal preference of mine.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: Because I find that they, you’ll have maybe one person that’s good at events and they put somebody else to tag along. They end up latching on and not covering double the space. They cover maybe less space than one person would alone. And so one person that really understands how to just network. And I’ll say this. If I go into an event not knowing if it’s going to be good, it’s already failed.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Like your event is made the two weeks to a month before you even show up. Where you’ve got meetings already [00:19:00] booked. You’ve got partners already engaged. You’ve got events outside of it that you’re attending.

Like we have a person or he loves conferences. Like he, it is hands down. He loves it more than anybody else on the planet. And he wants to meet every single person. He’s phenomenal at these, but he, he doesn’t plan yet. He like, it’s like two days before he’s like, Ooh, I got to get to a happier on Tuesday because I don’t have one yet.

And then what am I doing after happy hour? So he’ll do it. But he does it in much more condensed than I would prefer, but he, after every event, so that’s one of the people I will go to an event with because he’s fully autonomous, but I, and he stays out later, like my bedtime, usually in an event about nine o’clock and I’m done. You’ll take the early morning coffee.

Yeah. He handles the 9am to 4am or 9pm to 4am shift and it’s great, but we leave an event and Everybody knows it’s amazing if you’re going to do an event, you don’t necessarily need to do all of you know what he does and stays up late, but he has an impact. And so if you’re going to be in an industry leader and keep those away, you need to have some of that.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And I think, you know, you have to have the right personality for that, right? If [00:20:00] you’re just a by nature and introvert. And don’t really like those things, then don’t, don’t go because you have to engage.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, don’t force yourself into that.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. You’ve got to be willing to sit down at a bar with a beer and talk to somebody you’ve never heard or, you know, even a glass of water.

You don’t know them. You’re going to meet them and they may be a prospect. They may not, doesn’t matter. And the final point, I think for large brands. is going to be you need to have great relationships with the other top companies in an industry. And so if you have the, like the top three companies in an industry solving problems together for the same group of clients, you’ve essentially created an unbreakable cartel scenario.

Like always one of my goals, you know, there’s like, I want to be able to have a cartel or I kind of friend, lead it up to a syndicate. Now you get the best of the best. And once you get them together and then they’re solving problems for these clients, those clients are not going to leave, right? A group that’s working really well together to help them grow.

And so when you have the scale to be able to pick up the phone or email The other really large company helping them and say hey, we’d like to help [00:21:00] solve this problem with you And we’re going to we have the resources just to give you and not ask for anything in return We just want to make sure this client’s taken care of that goes a long way And that’s going to come back and create this circular system of referrals Which will keep going around and around and it makes it very challenging for You know, a competitor, small competitor to try to jump into that flywheel because it just won’t be an entry point.

Jon MacDonald: Well, I’m glad I’m part of your cartel. Excuse me, syndicate. How would you suggest the startup do just that though? I think the vast majority of brands are chasing the market leader, right? So if you’re not part of that market leader cartel, how do you make that happen? What do you, what do you think you need to do?

Ryan Garrow: It’s obviously tough as you would see, like the reason the big companies are big is because they’ve done some things right. And so you’re trying to undo something that’s been done very well. And so I think against the grain, probably I would tell a smaller brand to think small, not as in you don’t want to take down a big competitor of lofty goals for your business. But you need to get very specific and targeted.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: And I have this [00:22:00] conversation regularly with partners trying to partner with me at logical position saying, you know, we want to partner with you. I’m like, okay, great. Yeah. Everybody wants to, cause we have a lot of clients and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can’t come to me and say, well, we can’t, we built this tech to do all of these things that probably take place.

Or of 10 of your partners. I’m like, well, you’re not going to replace 10 of my partners. You have 50 clients I can’t afford to do that. Number one, you might be the best and i’ll need to pay attention to that And help you along the way if you are the actual best in certain niches, but be hyper specific around what problem you solve for my clients that I can go to them with My account teams and say hey i’ve got this partner That’s going to solve a very specific problem that is not probably being solved as well by other partners More specific is more better because you can always expand on that.

But if you’re telling me you can solve all my problems I’m just not going to listen, it’s not going to help. And another thing I would do is if you’re a small business at startup, you’ve got some clients that are probably pretty passionate about you, they’ve taken the gamble on you and they like your tech, [00:23:00] usually you’ve started that because of relationships, double down on those, follow those customers to their events.

Doesn’t really matter what event it is, you want to be by their side. Number one, you’re playing defense to keep in front of them and build a relationship, keep the competitors out, but you also want to see who else is there and what’s the potential. You know, a great example was early on in my partnership career.

I followed one of our clients to outdoor retailer, which is a, that’s an amazing event. I love it. Everybody listening should try to get to outdoor retailer because it’s just super cool.

Jon MacDonald: The kegs come out at like two, it ends up being a party.

Ryan Garrow: and there’s all the coolest stuff coming out next season is there.

Like you can see all the new shoes, all the new stuff going on trucks. You see, you know, vehicles that haven’t come out yet because they’re outfitting them for products. Just do it. It’s super cool. And it’s in Denver, usually, which I like, I think they started moving it around, but it’s just a cool spot.

When I went there with this client, number one, we had a ton of fun. We rented an Airbnb with. They’re they’re team and I stayed with them. I kept them and deep in the relationship, but I also leveraged that relationship to open up new doors and outdoor retail. So I was just [00:24:00] walking the floor saying, Hey, how you doing?

What are you doing for marketing? What’s going here? I saw, you know, opportunities for clients or new companies come on board, but also I was like, Hey, you service the same companies I’m trying to talk to, and we don’t compete. I’m going to partner with you. Yeah. So I created some great partnerships there and I wasn’t supposed to be there.

So they don’t allow agencies in Dow to a retailer unless you, you might be able to, if you spent a disgusting amount of money at the time though, they were like specifically. No agencies.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And so the hack for us was we would go every year and speak there and we would have a client speak with us. And that was always the hack to get into those conferences because if we can have a client get us a badge and a speaking slot and then we would do it with them and we would basically turn it into a case study and they would talk about their experience and we would provide value. Right. Of how to do something and how it turned out for this brand out there. Retailer love that.

Ryan Garrow: Oh, yeah.

Jon MacDonald: [00:25:00] They always loved it.

Ryan Garrow: And it’s unique enough because your competitors weren’t thinking like that because there was, there was a wall around that event saying it’s really difficult for an agency to get in.

So don’t try. I was like, well, I’m not going to, I usually don’t take no for an answer. So I’m like, what can I do? And great. So think through things like that, where it is a walled garden, keeping in mind. You out on purpose along with your competitors, no matter how big they are, then figure out what can I do?

Sometimes it’s just, Hey, I’ve got clients there. I’m going to have, find some, look at the list of sponsors and be like, Hey, I see you’re going to be there. I’d love to throw an event for you and some of your clients. I’ll cover the costs and we’re just going to do. A happy hour across the street. Yeah, you know, I did that at, it used to be called IRCE.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, yeah.

Ryan Garrow: It used to be good. Now it’s garbage. I don’t even know what it’s called now, but it’s, I don’t even, don’t even waste the time going at this point. And IRCE, if you’re listening or whatever you’re called now, you can call me and we can talk through it. But it’s not great. But then it was, and I said, I had Brent Baum, Ross, the CEO of Listrack.

I had one or two people from Google on stage. And I just opened up a [00:26:00] bar across the street from McCormick Place over there in Chicago and just said, Hey, invite some of your friends and come on in. I literally whoever who cares that I had some budget spend. It wasn’t a ton, but it was great. Met some phenomenal companies, but I had to think outside the box of how to get companies outside of the event that I couldn’t pay for because I was small at the time.

I couldn’t make it happen. Love that. And I think you need to think through partnerships. You know, big competitors can really do more in partnerships. Then you can, if you’re small, but partnerships becomes a way that you can level the playing field. If you focus more on the relationship piece. I think a lot of large brands that I see in the SAS space gets large enough that the partner team isn’t maybe necessarily as important as some of the other things in the organization.

And so it doesn’t get the attention and therefore they don’t attract the top talent into the partner space. Not always, but many times. And so their partnerships in that ecosystem become more of just an affiliate relationship essentially, where you get a, you’re a number and you get a newsletter and commission payouts.

But if you have somebody that’s really good in partnerships and building relationships where they come into your [00:27:00] organization with existing relationships, that can do a lot to move the needle because I will often do more for a partner that is just a good person and have a good relationship, even if I could make more money from a payout or something from a larger partner in their space.

I think you just have to get a little more creative in that space. And then I would say when you’re looking at the search, you are going to look at marketing online. And I think you have to play a spot in that to a degree. But if your budget is such a small magnitude, it’s hyper focused. And so you might only attack a small sliver of the market.

And, you know, if you have a tenth of a percent of the market right now, getting to two and three percent would be huge anyway. Yeah. Very targeted landing pages. And think through the entire search funnel, because you don’t have the shotgun blast to hit everything in the funnel. Across all search terms and so you need to think kind of that ClickFunnel, like if they need to see this piece of content on LinkedIn, then how do I get them in?

A first party list of remarketing, so I can say, then I get them on, you [00:28:00] know, meta and then I can get them on the display network around Google and then I can get a YouTube video in front of them. You can be big to a very small group of people with the, with the budget, but doesn’t even have to be big.

Yeah. You just have to be highly intentional and that’s where you’re thinking small. Like if I’m going to create a POS system for aftermarket auto, that’s a massive mark. You cannot spend enough money at SEMA to have an impact for that as you launch. And so what you need to do is say, I’m going to be aftermarket for this particular subset of products.

Maybe it’s going to be chrome wheels for cars between the sixties and seventies. And those are one really good at, and I will know the product better than any other partner trying to service them. So when I get in front of them or get on a phone call, they know that There will be nobody that knows the products I’m trying to sell better than them and you land and expand from that say, okay, I’m the best at this.

Now I’m going to add on the ancillary products that maybe they have or spend this other retailer that’s trying to sell those. Similar enough things will look at them and say, Oh, you [00:29:00] do work with them. I know them and you’re doing really well. Great. Let’s try that as well.

Jon MacDonald: I love it. It all comes down to face time, right? Being willing to have that conversation, meet up with them in person and share the love, right?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Well, and just making sure that you’re not, you know, once people are getting insight, like you’re taking advantage of, you know, like Jon’s team and making sure the conversions are good because it’s, you offline around, The SAS product, the conversion doesn’t happen on the site necessarily, like getting somebody to sign up for free.

I do that all the time. I have so many emails with free Adobe. Don’t tell Adobe, Jon. I know you’re looking at Adobe things that I had to edit a PDF. So I’m like, God, I got to get another email address because I just need to edit this one thing.

Jon MacDonald: Stop killing our conversion right over there.

Ryan Garrow: But it’s, it’s after the fact. So you guys make sure you’re, you are thinking through that full funnel, not just. Oh, we got a free trial. Therefore, we’re done now.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah hundred percent.

Ryan Garrow: Don’t ignore that.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. Well, this has been enlightening to talk about more traffic for larger brands and how that complicates things and how to build that moat of the traffic moat, thinking about all the other ways you can, you can make [00:30:00] this work. So I appreciate your time today.

Ryan Garrow: No, thank you, Jon. Maybe I’ll have to trademark that traffic mode thing.

Jon MacDonald: Love it. Have at it.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 125): Larger the Brand, More Complicated the Traffic appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Creating a well-designed SaaS website requires a strategic approach. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss the key fundamentals of creating a SaaS marketing website that not only attracts and engages users but also converts them into customers.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• Why identifying your target audience’s needs, behaviors, and pain points comes first.
• How to deliver a seamless experience that connects with your customers, answers their questions, and shows them how to take the next step.
• The importance of regularly testing and validating your website with your audience.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Castbox
• Castro
• Overcast
• Pocket Casts
• Stitcher
• Subscribe via RSS

Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan Garrow: Jon, you without much of an argument or debate, do know quite a bit more about sales. SaaS products than I do. Your team has done phenomenally well at helping SaaS companies scale over the last few years. A ton about ecomm, we know that, but SaaS is a, it’s a unique area for me because I don’t lean into it nearly as much as I should probably, especially hearing some of the things you talked about leading into this podcast recording, you have some great insights on what you need to be doing from a SaaS company when you’re building the website. And there isn’t necessarily, and maybe you’ll correct me through this podcast, but it’s not as simple as Oh, there’s like a Shopify for SaaS. You just put it up and then it automatically converts at this range.

And it’s yeah, you’re done now. You just collect money and it’s awesome. There probably needs to be, maybe we need to go [00:01:00] on another tangent and solve for that and create a Shopify for SaaS because when you’re going B2B, I feel like there’s a really high expectation of what you’re going to get on the marketing site.

There’s so many ways to do it wrong because you can go so many different directions and you’re applying probably to a vast spectrum of clients on that first marketing page, not knowing what you’re going to hit. So you’ve got a lot of data here. So I’m excited to hear about this. You’re going to talk to us about how to, I assume, remove some friction on these sites and make it super simple SaaS product. Is that right?

Jon MacDonald: That’s right. Yeah, I think begin and maintain as well.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay. And so when you’re setting up your SaaS website, you’ve outlined in the notes here, 11 fundamentals for a marketing website that you want to cover today. And there’s different pieces of SaaS, right? There’s the front end marketing site, and then there’s the actual product that you can optimize as well.

So we’re focusing on Marketing, which I like, but it’s how you’re acquiring customers. Customer acquisition websites, essentially.

Jon MacDonald: [00:02:00] Exactly. Yeah. This is for the marketing website. Let’s just say pre conversion to becoming a trialist or a paid user of your SaaS tool.

Ryan Garrow: Okay. So there’s 11 things we need to be paying attention to when we’re looking at the design on these that are going to make sure that we don’t do something dumb and create a bunch of friction. We don’t need to.

Jon MacDonald: There you go. Before we jump in, I just want to be clear about one quick thing, and that’s that. You called it out, right? The SaaS digital journey does not always begin or end with your website. For instance, your user’s journey might start when they read a recommendation on another site.

And in SaaS, there’s several of these, right? You got G2, you’ve got all of these other top whatever sites that are out there for apps, right? You got Product Hunt, you got all these. Great resources for small, especially small and medium businesses that are looking to purchase a new tool, right? And solve a pain point that they have.

Usually, it starts with them doing some research. Okay? And then it [00:03:00] ends when they have a conversation with enterprise, with a salesperson, or with them converting into that trial user.

Ryan Garrow: Okay. It’s obviously imperative to have a seamless experience that connects with the customers. Answers questions and then basically tells them how to take the next step because it’s, we’re multi step.

It’s, I joked about click funnels. It’s all about click funnels to a degree. It’s you’re just moving people down a process and it’s not where to. And you

Jon MacDonald: mentioned earlier that there’s not like a Shopify for SaaS brands, and I would say that there’s several tools out there that are trying to do that.

So there are tools that can help you now for the front end marketing side, right? Not necessarily for the app itself, although AI is coming a long way. And maybe that’s a whole nother show about how you can, as a single person, tell AI what you want and have it generate the entire app for you now. The code may or may not be usable, but it’s there, right?

It’s the one thing to debate, but I think, creating that well designed SaaS website does require a strategic approach. And that’s the thing [00:04:00] that I want to break down and talk about of these fundamentals, because it’s important to focus on these several key fundamentals. There’s not just one, there’s actually 11 that we’ll talk about quickly today.

If you’re listening to this, 11 sounds like a lot. I promise you we’ll move through them pretty quickly, but they’re all important and things that we’ve seen come up time and time again. And these all enhance that user engagement and customer satisfaction. What we’re aiming to do with these fundamentals is to help you to create a SaaS website that not only attracts and engages users, but also will convert them into customers.

Ryan Garrow: I like it. Okay. Look, let’s dive in then. I want to start getting through this list. Yeah, sure. I’m going to learn some cool things here. Okay. So step one where do you start in this journey? Like I’m based on your car conversations, I guess I could hypothesize, but

Jon MacDonald: yeah, the first one is starting by understanding your user.

So you begin by identifying your target audiences, needs, behaviors, and pain points. These are all things that would be key to good product design [00:05:00] anyways. If you have a great product design team, getting them involved in the marketing side can be helpful here. But this understanding also guides the design and the content strategy of your site and really helps you to ensure that your website serves your users well.

Ryan Garrow: What happens if you’re not necessarily sure about who your user is going to be? Do you have to have multiple instances you test at the same time for that or do you have to pick one and go?

Jon MacDonald: Normally, if you have product market fit, But you should have a good understanding of who your consumer is going to be.

Where in ecomm, that could be much wider. In SaaS, you typically have somebody who’s approaching with a very specific problem that you’re solving for them. So you’re able to talk to that problem. That’s where I think, it varies from e com, but also it is something that is actually helpful because that’s really going to be able to guide talking to consumers because you’ll be able to find the right people.

And guide actually writing [00:06:00] content for them, where you’re going to be able to address that specific pain point at each step.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay, that is much simpler, actually, because you go into e com thinking you know where you’re going to be, and then all of a sudden you’re like, Oh, we, these people found us and liked us even more.

Jon MacDonald: Honestly, that may happen SaaS, and it does quite often. You think about Slack is a great example of this. Slack did not start out as a company that made a chat, right? SaaS, I believe that Slack was a gaming company at one point, and they had built this tool to have internal conversations.

And then that became the thing that everybody wanted and was like, this, we have something here. This is pretty cool. We should sell this. And so that’s how they ended up down the line. There are now a billion dollar companies sold to Salesforce.

Ryan Garrow: Taking lots of my money every month. Okay. So we know who our user is.

And you mentioned the content, so I guess we’re informing our content creation on the site to make it, to put it there, right? But is there more about the content we need?

Jon MacDonald: [00:07:00] Yeah. So the second thing is keeping that content compelling. Because it’s very easy if you feel like you know the audience to not make it compelling.

Make it as engaging as it could be. You really want to make sure your content is engaging. And it, that really, I keep saying that word because it’s crucial. It is crucial for capturing and retaining interest, right? You really want somebody to be reading down the page and say, yes, that’s me. Yes. I have that problem.

Yes. Great. This sounds like the solution for me. And as they continue down that journey, so using clear, concise, and persuasive language here, that’s going to speak directly to that audience’s needs and highlight the benefits of how you solve that for them. So you can do things like using imagery. People love actual product shots, not just illustrations, right?

They love videos. Anytime you do a video walkthrough or click snippets of things being used, it really helps visitors to learn. about the product.

Ryan Garrow: Don’t just give me a marketing video on the marketing page. I think [00:08:00] that’s where people will often confuse Oh, I’ve used your video that we used to run an ad one time.

We should put that on there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. No, you definitely, it goes back to the same thing as ecommerce. I say all the time that marketing’s won once somebody’s gotten to your site. Time to actually help them solve their pain or need.

Ryan Garrow: And number three is use directional guidance to help users find what they need.

Thanks again. And directing them down the page further or to contact forms?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Directional guidance is this kind of umbrella term that really encompasses anything that puts the user on a path to help them find what they want. That can be navigation, calls to action, strategic use of white space, right?

Nothing at all could be helpful. I think, you start, working in that direction. on how you’re going to guide people along that journey and help them find the necessary information and tools that’s important for them. It’s a very kind of umbrella term, but it really is something that needs to be considered.

Where are you telling these people to go next? Where are you influencing [00:09:00] their journey on your site?

Ryan Garrow: That helps quite a bit there. Your next point might be one of my most frustrating in the business B2B world. As I search for apps and things that help my business, but it’s a seamless customer experience.

The website on the desktop complements what I’m seeing on the, on my mobile device. Cause I often am jumping devices throughout days, weeks, even, and not everybody does this very

Jon MacDonald: well. No, but I think, the key here is to have a smooth user experience that optimizes the website’s performance.

You can make it responsive, but. Ensuring usability across all devices, as you mentioned, you really just need to fix anything that’s broken or introduces friction into that experience and consider each step what devices they might be on all the way from that initial conversion and beyond. How many times have you have fired up an asset, a SaaS app and tried to use it on your iPhone in a mobile browser, and it just doesn’t even work, right?

You’re just like, Oh, what am I doing here? I can’t, [00:10:00] it’s way too big, and it’s not responsive. There are tools that are just meant to be used on desktop, and I understand that, but not delivering a seamless user experience across all devices is a huge issue for a lot of SaaS brands, and you really want to make sure that’s touched on your marketing site.

You’re setting the tone for the rest of what it’s going to be like. And if your marketing site doesn’t work across different platforms, then people sure aren’t going to think that your app is either.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, there was even just, I think, I forget which one it was. It was a competitor to DocuSign. But I had to execute something on a mobile device, and it was the worst.

I actually stopped and had to wait till later in the day to get back to my computer because it was like, I just, I couldn’t get the fields to work. It was embarrassingly bad. I’m sorry to hear that. I can’t blast them, but I hope it wasn’t Panda Doc. DocuSign does a great job at that. Yeah,

Jon MacDonald: DocuSign does a great one.

That’s one of the benefits of pretty much owning the realtor and real estate, because those folks are setting those things up on [00:11:00] the go all the time. If you’ve ever had to sign a real estate contract, 99 percent chance it came from DocuSign. There’s a lot of them out there now, and they’re all competing on very similar functionality.

So if you don’t have a seamless journey, you might as well just stop.

Ryan Garrow: If that ever happened again, I’d be like no, I’ll send you a docu sign. Let’s do it this way.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, exactly. Download the document, resend it to them.

Ryan Garrow: Yes. All right. Number five is design with product verbs in mind. This is not something I would have thought of.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, we actually have a whole article about product verbs up on the good. com. Just go search verbs or whatever you feel comfortable with on the good. But the reality here is that you really want to focus on action oriented language that emphasizes the core functionalities of your product. Okay. So that’s why it’s called verbs, product verbs, because you’re really trying to convey actions that users can take, such as create, manage, track, analyze, right?

These are all things that make the [00:12:00] benefits of the product clear to the end users.

Ryan Garrow: And I would imagine this is not one where you’re going to be like, Oh, let’s think of some cool synonyms to maybe sound different. This is just keep it simple, stupid almost. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: You don’t want to get cute with this by any means.

But you definitely want to communicate in a manner that is going to help people understand what it’s like. You hear this all the time about resumes. If you’ve ever read a resume filled with these type of verbs, it feels like that person’s way more qualified, right? They’re like, I curated, I influenced, I managed, I did these things, right?

Where if you just say I was part of a team. That doesn’t sound as good. If you say, I led the team, or I did, had some action with the team. I was an integral part of the team. You really want to influence with the verbs. And it’s the same thing here. You’re trying to sell your product through.

You really want people to understand how it’s going to benefit them.

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert a podcast focused on ecommerce growth. Your [00:13:00] hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers.

And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan Garrow: Oh man, this one is probably, I mentioned the non seamless experience. But being clear about pricing and plans, Oh man, maybe I’m young enough. I don’t like it. Maybe I’m too old. I just don’t like, I don’t know. There’s something in there that I do not want to talk to sales. What does it cost? Okay, great.

Does it make sense? Let me make that determination, but don’t force me to talk to somebody before you tell me how much things cost.

Jon MacDonald: Ryan is a hundred percent of get off my lawn guy.

Transparency [00:14:00] and pricing and subscription plans builds trust, okay? So that’s what you’re talking about. Like you say, Hey, I want to know what I’m getting into, right? You want to aid that decision making process. And that is what’s key here, clearly presenting all the options available. Including the features and costs and then helping consumers choose the plan that best fits them.

All of that can be done without a salesperson. And in fact, so many SaaS brands try to integrate salespeople, they think that’s the route they need to go. When in reality, they’re probably any gains they have by. inserting a person who’s really just there to convince often, unfortunately, they lose by people who just give up and go to a competitor who makes it real easy in that research phase to understand what they’re getting into.

Ryan Garrow: I feel like if you need a sales people or sales person to get it across, your product probably isn’t developed well enough. So that’s just the way my perception is. When I’m looking at it, if you can’t tell me how much it costs, you have to get somebody [00:15:00] on the phone to sell me because it’s not good enough on its own.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And that’s how I personally approach it.

Jon MacDonald: There are benefits from the SaaS perspective, right? Of saying, Hey, I’m going to have a salesperson on my team and really what they’re doing is not there to sell and convince. They’re there to understand what are the common questions? What are the key pain points?

Why are people calling? What did they think our app does? When I give them a demo, where do they go? Oh, I like that. Or, Ooh, that’s a problem. Or I, does it also do X, Y, and Z? That’s very similar to what customer service role plays at Ecom. And I say consistently. Get customer service involved and optimizing your e com website.

It’s the same thing here. If you have salespeople, they should be contributing content back to the site. And ideally, as a SaaS brand, a salesperson gets on the call, and they should just be confirming. If you’ve done the right job, that person should just be saying, yeah, so you need this customization.

We can work out a [00:16:00] custom plan for you. Or saying, yeah, our feature does that you do you want a demo? Let me give you the demo answering questions you have. That’s great. But they shouldn’t be there to do cold calls and outbound calls and then say, I got to convince you of X, Y, and Z. They should be more of a consultative sale at that point.

Ryan Garrow: Love it. Okay. I knew this one was coming because it’s Jon MacDonald, but we’re going to test and validate with our audiences.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Are you surprised this is more than halfway down the list? I would say regularly test your website with real users. I, we could probably almost skip this because it’s a broken record with me.

A/B testing, user surveys, analytics, validate your design choices to ensure they’re meeting that user expectations and produce a user friendly design before you do anything. And I’ll just say here, I understand if you need an agency to help you with this. Might we might know somebody

Ryan Garrow: a little hint there. Jon. There you go. It’s not the first thing [00:17:00] you do though it’s are these kind of in order of a process you would have somebody go through like this is Generally best after you’ve been already clear about your pricing and plans and before we get to the next step

Jon MacDonald: I would say You know, you can pick and choose from this list.

They’re not in any specific order, but I do think that they are in the order of, I would say, to me, anyways, importance. You’re going to start with one and work your way down to the bottom of the list because they start building off of each other, right? You can’t really test and validate until you have some idea of who your audience is, right?

So you have to have that understanding first, right?

Ryan Garrow: Once you have some traffic, you’re testing and validating. Getting some feedback and then you’re going to use that feedback, I assume. And you’re going to iterate on your website design and feed that loop back almost. So like the seven and eight points probably are almost circular constantly.

If you’re really trying to grow your SaaS product.

Jon MacDonald: And that’s really why they’re lower on this list because they’re going to continually. cycle through making sure [00:18:00] that you’re validating and testing, but then you’re iterating on your website design. So you’re putting that test and validation back into your site and, every website, including SaaS, should evolve based on user feedback.

There’s always technological advancements, there’s changing market trends. The reality here is, Just continually update and refine, right? Same thing you might do with ecommerce, but I think you have a lot more leeway with SaaS to do this because you’re not stuck to having to find a template that works across hundreds of SKUs.

You’re really trying to hammer home one key solving point that you have. That’s really something that’s going to enhance that user experience and stay ahead of the competitors.

Ryan Garrow: Now, one thing this doesn’t mention in your notes is landing squeeze pages on your website, you should have lots of them.

Jon MacDonald: It’s not here.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, it’s not here.

Jon MacDonald: And I think that’s a great point. Almost what’s not on these lists as much as what is, right? I think that having a hundred [00:19:00] different landing pages is a sign that you still don’t have great product market fit. Now, if you have a handful that are around specific pain points and you know you can solve a couple of pain points or maybe there’s a couple of industries like we talked about DocuSign and Realtors or maybe DocuSign and legal like lawyer teams or, there’s a whole bunch of different ways you could use a tool like that at that point, you can have a landing page for each of those that talks to the specific page.

angle on that same pain point for them, right? You got to get documents signed in an efficient manner. What does that look like for them? It’s different. I guarantee you a lawyer, not guarantee, but I will say high likelihood your legal team is not sending a docu sign from their phone. Just probably not.

But a realtor on the road, ready to get that offer in a hundred percent, probably doing that. They would approach that a little differently.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I like that. Okay, that leads right into your ninth point, ensuring mobile optimization.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So with an increasing number of users accessing websites on [00:20:00] mobile, you need to make sure it’s optimized for mobile.

I almost feel like I shouldn’t have to say this one, but unfortunately we do. And for as much as people have pushed it in ecommerce, SaaS is still behind on this. They really are. They often aren’t using responsive design. The loading times are slower because they just expect you’re on a corporate network or that, you’re okay with it being a little slower.

And in a lot of cases, consumers are, so that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to optimize, especially for smaller screens, right? You want that smooth experience across all devices.

Ryan Garrow: And Google’s ranking those first time from an SEO standpoint. Yeah. So if you’re going to compete, you got to go to that Google site and see what Google thinks of it. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: That’s a great idea.

Ryan Garrow: Mobile first. Not desktop. Love it. Even if that’s what your users will do.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And you can understand too. There are plenty of SaaS tools that are really desktop first and I get that. I wouldn’t want to be doing QuickBooks on my phone. I just wouldn’t. There are some functions of QuickBooks that I would want to do, but I [00:21:00] would not want to be maintaining a P& L and running reports and doing that type of stuff on my phone.

But, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t functionalities that I would want on my phone. And it doesn’t mean I’m not going to do research about the tool itself on the marketing website on my phone. That is something that is very likely. Regardless of whether or not your app is Desktop first or mobile first, you should be making sure your website is mobile first.

Ryan Garrow: Your next point, 10, I would say is probably an area that SaaS is ahead of a lot of the ecomm potentially, but it’s focusing on accessibility and those with certain abilities or lack of ability to read and engage with your site. ecommerce has struggled at scale for sure to label their images and.

Jon MacDonald: Which is interesting to me. I often wonder why ecomm struggles with this as much as they do. And I think that you’re seeing over the past five or six years, a lot of those lawsuits from lawyers who do nothing but chase down these e com sites. [00:22:00] And, I think that’s because they’ve already, those same lawyers have already run their way through every SaaS site.

And so they made their way to ecomm next. Because SaaS has all the money in the world to, to pay them off, right? And settle. But ecomm typically doesn’t. So they knew the margins were thin there. They’re not gonna, go after where the margins are thin. It’s just not as big of a return. I think they’ve worked through most of SaaS now.

SaaS is really good about accessibility. But I think, number 10 on this list is focus on accessibility. You have to design your website to be accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. It’s just, you need to do it. You’re leaving out. A large segment of the population. If you’re not doing that, all texts for images you mentioned, that’s great.

Keyboard navigation is huge color contrast. If you even go to HubSpot’s blog, now HubSpot’s blog. I’ll let you do a high contrast mode and they have a on every single page, they have a toggle. It’s like high [00:23:00] contrast or not. It really is something that you can tell if HubSpot’s doing it. It has really worked its way into SaaS.

If you’re not focusing on this and haven’t came this far, you’re behind

Ryan Garrow: for sure. So focus on that accessibility. And then final point, number 11 is leveraging social proof, which in e comm comes naturally you gotta have that, but

Jon MacDonald: Exactly. It does come naturally, and you see there’s so many tools out there asking for reviews.

There’s really only one that I ever hear about from B2B, and that’s G2. It’s the only one that ever emails me and says, Hey, leave a review for this product. And you’re just like, Okay, I don’t know. But here’s the reality is that if you incorporate customer testimonials, case studies, even reviews build credibility and trust.

You’re going to be ahead of the game. You can’t forget to do that. And I promise you, just putting a star rating, et cetera, is not going to get the job done. Same thing that you have on e com. You really need to make sure that you are showcasing world [00:24:00] success stories here. And you really want to make sure positive feedback is from existing users.

You’ll see a lot that will have influencers in SaaS world. That’s happening more and more now, and not just in e com.

Ryan Garrow: There’s more money. Yeah,

Jon MacDonald: yeah.

Ryan Garrow: You can pay those influencers more.

Jon MacDonald: This is where the whole cottage industry now of LinkedIn influencers, right? They’re all going on there and getting paid quite a bit by B2B companies to, to influence around their products.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. No, I agree. I think it’s definitely valuable there. We’ve gotten through 11 and the punchline feels that designing a SaaS website is about more than just making it look pretty. Yeah. And have high contrasting covers.

Jon MacDonald: A hundred percent, right? How did you know that was coming? Because the reality is it’s very similar to what I’ve talked about with e comm and I think the play here is a lot more similar than not.

The fundamentals don’t change. Your visual appeal of your website, it’s important, but it’s important to remember that websites are made to be used, and that goes for e com or [00:25:00] SaaS. SaaS website design is about creating a user experience that clicks with your target audience. See what I did there.

But there’s this wireframe in design should be validated with real feedback before you launch anything and test it with your ideal audience before you start building. Why waste the money? Your development team has better things to do inside the app. I promise you that’s where they want to focus.

And if you validate everything, you say, Hey this has already been proven out. We’ve already refined and iterated. Now I just need you to build this version. I promise you the relationship with your development team. Between marketing and development is going to be that much better and I hear this all the time from product design and product development folks.

If you are a product manager design development, you often have a rift between you and internal implementation teams, the technical teams that are actually building something because They are getting pulled in so many different directions and marketing is [00:26:00] unfortunately not usually a priority for them.

They’re solving bugs, looking to retain customers, add new functionality. So you really need to be able to speak to them appropriately.

Ryan Garrow: I love it. That was helpful for sure. I think we’re all going to be doing a lot more SaaS marketing and growing of those brands in the near future. I’m excited for it.

Jon MacDonald: It is where it’s headed for sure, especially as I mentioned earlier with AI being able to build SaaS apps. You’re going to see a lot of these. Small creator sites popping up the time and again, so

Ryan Garrow: Excited. Thanks, Jon. I appreciate the insights.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, thanks for hanging with me today through my head cold.

Appreciate it.

Ryan Garrow: Anytime.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 124): The Fundamentals of SaaS Marketing Website Design appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

2024 was the year social ads made a serious comeback, and the focus on social selling will continue into 2025. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how YouTube is poised to impact the marketing stack in 2025.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. Why YouTube’s roster of influencers and the YouTube Shopping program are attracting media spend.
2. The four unique ways YouTube can track attribution.
3. How brands should get started with YouTube in 2025.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Castbox
• Castro
• Overcast
• Pocket Casts
• Stitcher
• Subscribe via RSS

Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Ryan, clients are starting to plan for 2025. We’re seeing it across our client base. I’m sure you guys are as well. 24 seemed like a big focus in social selling. TikTok shop is something I continuously hear about now. And I know there’s others that kind of have blown up for selling online this past year.

A lot of that’s been happening for a handful of years, but it really seemed to take off this year. So I know you want to talk about this. I’d love to get your thoughts on it. So it seemed like a good topic for today. What do you think?

Ryan Garrow: I agree. It’s, I have mixed feelings on TikTok. I’m not on there because I’m, I just don’t have time.

I’m maybe too old to get new tricks going. All of our clients, it does feel like everybody had to have some insights or [00:01:00] questions around TikTok. Do I do it now? When do I do it? I have to be involved. What does it look like? Then on the other side, I hear a lot of people burned out from TikTok shop and influencers doing nothing but peddling products and pushing it.

TikTok may have gone too far. They’re really in tight with Amazon. And there’s a lot of stuff on there from trying to sell products and which is fine. Influencers have to make some money, but we saw a big decrease in social ads through the pandemic because of the Apple iOS issues in 21 and changing tracking for all of us.

Which was painful for somebody that’s been doing the same thing for a long time. For me, it feels there’s even ancillary data around that, but social ads really did make a comeback in 24 meta stock price alone would be proof that social ads are doing fairly well. It’s gone bonkers.

And so I think that everybody here’s aware of social, I don’t have to talk about, why you need to be involved in social ads or Just a presence on social media. What I think is missing [00:02:00] is a good discussion around that other social platform out there called YouTube.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, the other, huh? I would have said the main one was the first.

Not the first, but it is a big dog for sure.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Google had their little foray into what’s called, what was it? Google plus, or that they tried to have, what did they call that? Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: Was a mess. Yeah, that

Ryan Garrow: was, I was one of the, I had one of the first ones and I thought it was going to be great.

And then they, it was terrible. But historically YouTube is not really fit into the Bucket of social marketing. I’ll say that it wasn’t necessarily social. People have comments on it, but it’s not like there’s a lot of two way interaction. At least that I see, it’s like you’re posting to be seen, but not get feedback really.

Or yeah, it’s not like LinkedIn

Jon MacDonald: where it’s a conversation every post.

Ryan Garrow: There’s a conversation or I follow my friends on YouTube so I can remember people from high school or my family. Wait, that used to be

Jon MacDonald: Facebook. Wasn’t that what Facebook was for?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And so it’s [00:03:00] now it’s I don’t know what Facebook’s for now.

My mom’s on it and there’s a lot of politics essentially, which is why I don’t get on there anymore. Yep. Yep. But YouTube wasn’t really doing that. It was like you would go there, I think, to be entertained or follow somebody who created content that you liked. And so I think Tik TOK had an impact on that to a degree, but there weren’t people going there to maybe get influenced to purchase.

It was, my dad uses YouTube a lot to fix stuff and I do as well. If I need to solve a problem in my house, cause I’m not a fix it person. I’m like, I don’t know. How do I change? Every time, man, this is funny. I just did this last week. My wife’s expedition. She’s the back windshield wiper needs to be replaced.

I’m like, okay, great. I think I’ll figure out and get the wiper. And I’m like, I get back in the truck. I’m like, I gotta, you gotta Google the same video. I think every single time. Replace the windshield wiper on the back of the expedition. That’s what I use YouTube for having worked with Google for 15 years now.

I’ve seen them try so many different ways of selling my clients on. They need to get on spending on YouTube. Like it’s [00:04:00] every year. It seems to be like, this is the year, Gerald, you’ve got YouTube. They’re missing out and for 15 years, they’ve not spent on YouTube and they’ve not missed out with a few exceptions like our team does really good stuff on YouTube.

We’ve won awards two years in a row for our work on YouTube, so there is some really good things happening there, but it just hasn’t felt like it got critical mass to really be like everybody needs to be on YouTube and everybody’s knows it and they’re asking us questions about it and just saying, Hey, what do I need to do?

How do I scale YouTube? I think 25 is going to be that year. I just

Jon MacDonald: so this is the year Google got to you

Ryan Garrow: if I’m making a prediction now in 24. Yeah, this is the year that I’m going to listen to Google. And I’m going to be like, Yes, we are doing it is we are going to get people spending on YouTube because it’s going to have an impact.

Jon MacDonald: Okay, so you’re saying that my teams are going to actually be looking at landing pages this next year, and we’re going to have to optimize them for YouTube traffic. That’s what I’m hearing.

Ryan Garrow: I’ll say this. I’m not going to stand on a battleship and say [00:05:00] the battles one and everything. YouTube is success.

But what I am saying is I finally believe YouTube has a compelling reason to be looked at much deeper. And I’m betting some of my own time and money on the fact that it’s going to work. It’s rare that I would do that with a Google property that I haven’t seen a lot of traction at scale. There’s, Blenjet did some amazing things with our team and grew their brand really well there.

There have been wins, but I think it’s going to be a lot of wins in 2025.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. I’ve always looked at YouTube as the second largest search engine. So under that kind of line of thinking, it would make a lot of sense to be there. So why is this time different? What’s different for you?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. So I think that I agree, second largest search engine, if you looked at it that way, which is always how they put set it, but it’s like Google has, you What 95 percent of the search volume in the US and being has 30 percent so like beating being wasn’t exactly this great amazing thing, but YouTube as a search [00:06:00] engine is interesting because yes, I search YouTube, but I’m searching for a video to explain something or to entertain me, not like I’m going to say what’s the best.

Headphones. Maybe there is a YouTube video, but that’s going to happen on Google. And then they’re going to drive me to YouTube to watch a video if I don’t want to read it. And for my personality, I like reading rather than watching or listening because I can do it quicker

Jon MacDonald: but unless you’re changing a wiper.

Ryan Garrow: Unless I’m changing a wiper, then I already know I’ve got to have somebody show me how to do it or even change you. It’s always cars for me cause I’m not a car guy. I enjoy cars, but I don’t work on them. And so even changing the battery in my remote, I’m like, I forget how to change it again.

And I’ve got to figure out how to get into it.

Jon MacDonald: I had to do that for my Audi remote. And I will tell you, it was a pain in the butt to get the battery out. And I’m glad I had a video show me how let’s do that. I would have broke the key 100 percent

Ryan Garrow: me too. Like every time and I’m like, at some point, I probably should be like, it’s worth 300 for a new remote.

We’re going to trash it. The battery’s dead. It’s not worth it. Historically on YouTube. [00:07:00] We’ve really had one way to measure. And that was through a brand list study. And if you can only get that if you spent seven grand a month or more. And so most of the scale on YouTube was large brands that could say, Hey, you, Google’s going to do this cool study for us.

And we’re going to be able to use that and say it worked and obviously not perfect, but functional, but it’s also. Like going to the IRS and saying, Hey, did I do my taxes? They’re like how much did you pay us? Oh, you paid us enough. Therefore you did it. And so it’s always been a struggle when it comes to YouTube, because you had to do it outside of what we normally looked at as a source of truth, where I can’t just go To analytics and see what it is now meta has a different side of that where there’s been They are able to tell us whatever they want And it’s always different than google analytics or what we’ve seen in the past as our social truth for some reason As advertisers, we’re always like that’s all right Okay So I think they broke the that glass ceiling to a degree for youtube to say It’s okay if we’re showing numbers that are different as long as it’s true We’re seeing the growth.

It can’t be like [00:08:00] meta is saying they drove a million dollars in sales last month when the site only did 20, 000. Okay that’s obviously not working.

Jon MacDonald: I think I hear about that all the time. And as marketers, we have a hundred percent been conditioned, if you will, to the fact that data is never going to be the same across platforms and you’ve got to have that single source of truth.

And I think that’s why we’re just okay with. Like each platform being wrong because you don’t know which one’s right. So you just assume, you know what? They’re all biased and they’re all wrong. We will find what that, what go in the corner and do your numbers. I’ll do what I need to do and we’ll just work with it.

That’s pretty much the attitude, unfortunately.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And the problem YouTube had in that world is it’s being run in a Google ads account with like next to a campaign where you’re trusting. That data in Google ads and Google analytics matching up and Oh, I get it. Yep. Here’s what they’re saying then you’ve got this YouTube campaign.

That’s like what the heck is this? It doesn’t not even close to matching up or making sense based on what we’re looking at from a Shopping or text [00:09:00] ad standpoint because the intense a little different on those and so lots of issues from tracking My wife even brought this up to me. She’s think about YouTube like our kids have our YouTube login like yeah You Why not?

She’s I have yet to give our 11 year old my Instagram login. Oh good point when it’s on Instagram or meta, they know exactly whose eyeballs they’re looking at. Yeah. When it comes to YouTube, we have YouTube TV. We have YouTube like for video game solving problems. Like my son needs to figure out how to build something on Minecraft.

Guess where he goes? I can’t answer the questions. I’m like, I don’t know. I’ll just YouTube that and figure out somebody else has done it. Change is coming, which I’m excited about. They’re bringing in shopping feeds, which is exciting because it’s putting it more into the flow of okay TikTok has shopping feeds.

Meta has shopping feeds. Everybody has shopping feeds of YouTube. Hasn’t really leaned as much into the shopping feed and now they’ve got some cool stuff coming up with that. And so I think that we’re really going to start seeing the e com brands lean in a lot more because of it’s going to feel and work a lot more similarly to [00:10:00] what they’re used to on meta and tick tock.

Jon MacDonald: Are you saying that Google had to come up with its own YouTube specific tracking?

Ryan Garrow: Pretty much Google’s realized that I think in 24 that. All right we can’t beat them, join them, let’s understand how we get meta advertisers because that’s the same place they want to play in from a social standpoint

Jon MacDonald: okay

Ryan Garrow: see YouTube in the same way.

So if so, we’ve got to learn how to track it the same, but also in Google’s, we got to be different because we’ve got to somehow be able to show we’re better and get that. So YouTube now has four different things, I say for tracking, which. Again, makes it somewhat complex, but we’re getting a lot of really cool points that tell a story.

I say you’ve got to use multiple different data points and our team’s going to talk about, you’re going to need to have some to help measure the impact and say, Hey, when we do this, what else happens and using all four of these things together, it should create a much cooler picture than just saying.

[00:11:00] Spend a million on meta and they 3 million and analytics says half a million. We’re going to meet somewhere in the middle. Two of the YouTube more things that are currently in process are in closed beta. So I can’t get into the super details on that from

Jon MacDonald: okay

Ryan Garrow: summary standpoint. They’re going to give you the geographic impact of ads and just think a way to scale blackout tests without having to do it manually.

Interesting. And it’s show ads in Seattle, but not in San Francisco and then see what happens as far as sales to the site. And then they have three different lifts that they do. Conversion lift, brand lift, search lift. And generally speaking right now, those are for larger advertisers because you need volume of conversions to really see it.

You can’t be doing, 50 conversions on the site. Okay. Go spend on YouTube and see the impact through their measurement. I think there’s going to be ways that we take a lot of those enterprise strategies in 25 and boil them down to somebody that only wants to spend or can only spend a thousand or 1500 on YouTube to be able to say, great, we’ll black out, or we’ll only run it in one market to see, what’s going [00:12:00] on.

What is that having an impact on and then we can run some of these tests individually in each account to make it work for that merchant.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. So with all this stuff, YouTube’s coming out with, you’re able to prove the ROI a little better. It sounds do some testing with the data. Do you think that’s going to pull money and budget away from meta and tick tock?

Ryan Garrow: I doubt it. I think those platforms have done a good job in 2324 of showing what they can do. And they’re probably going to get more spend this year. If anything, my guess is it’s going to pull more from television buys and display buys from large advertisers. So if you’ve got a, 2 million a month display budget, it’s probably going to make sense to lower that half a million to a million and throw that on YouTube if you haven’t been there yet.

And I think if you’re a smaller advertiser, I’ll say six figures or under a hundred thousand or less. I see. You’re probably going to be seeing YouTube as the logical flow up the funnel. Like you’re covered a lot of your Google search and shopping. [00:13:00] Now it’s going to make sense. How do we get to that next layer?

That mid funnel, that’s going to have an impact and that’s going to be some in meta, but it’s probably going to be some in YouTube as well.

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan Garrow: What I found interesting, we had this big event in Boston. It’s one of their Google office by MIT. We had some of the top YouTube talent inside of Google come and talk to us. Some of the numbers are fascinating in explaining how under invested in YouTube it is. [00:14:00] Facebook had, I want to say 130, 31 million or so advertising revenue in 23.

YouTube, I think, had 30, 32, somewhere in that space. So roughly 25 percent or just under 25 percent of Meta’s ads was YouTube and YouTube actually had just a super small fraction less time on the platform than Facebook did include Instagram and WhatsApp in there too, but it shows the Delta in investment in YouTube from an ad standpoint.

Is dramatically less as a percentage of available inventory than meta has, and so it should be cheaper and have more scale.

Jon MacDonald: Do you think that’s, to me, the way that was, I’m hearing this and correct me if I’m wrong, though, is that is Google cannibalizing their own ad spending. Cause you had mentioned like people pulling from display and maybe even search into YouTube, that would be mostly Google just moving their budget over to YouTube, which as an end user, it seems like it [00:15:00] makes sense to me because they’re rolling out the AI answers is not a lot of clicks happening on ads.

Inside Google these days, at least for me, I haven’t, I don’t remember last time I got past the AI answers because they’re actually getting pretty good. None of them have told me to eat something that’s going to make me sick or anything like that, which was like the early answers we’re doing.

I remember some of those examples, but I do think there’s good opportunity for them to move that budget. People were already spending with Google to other channels and I can’t help but wonder if that’s part of the play here.

Ryan Garrow: Google’s hoping, I’m sure, that they keep search and shopping there, and then YouTube would be the next layer up, that mid funnel that would help feed some of that down the funnel.

So it’s like when I talk to a meta advertiser yes, you should be spending some money on meta, but if you haven’t covered the searches on Google at the bottom of the funnel, you’re likely investing some money in meta to your competitors. And so make sure the [00:16:00] bottom is solid, that you know you’ve got it covered, then move up a layer.

I think too often, especially smaller CPG brands, I see this a lot, where they really just want to be like I heard this brand did really well. Like Nick Sharma had a brand that spends 2 million a month on social, so I should do that. I’m like, what? Probably, but maybe let’s take some steps to get there and build something.

Cause they don’t hear about some of that kind of nitty gritty yeah, you do have to cover it. And the best social brands really do have a solid bottom of funnel. If you search their brand on Google, you’re going to see a almost monopoly on the shopping ads. You’re going to see a well built text ad, usually taking up real estate to keep the competitors off of that space.

Cause they will be there and they should.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. Yeah. So that’s fair. You’re not going to. As a brand, you’re not going to move on from it. You might just not iterate as much or invest as heavily, but that definitely makes sense. You don’t want to give up ground. So to date, when we’re recording this episode, there’s a big boxing match coming up.

I believe that’s tonight or very soon with [00:17:00] Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, which is going to be amazing to watch. I can’t wait to see it. Yeah,

Ryan Garrow: I, me too. I’m excited. I’ve been excited about a boxing match for probably 15 years, maybe 20 years.

Jon MacDonald: we could probably do a whole episode just on this because I really only see this going one of two ways and a older gentleman is going to get the legacy knocked out of him or a young person is going to get seriously hurt. It’s going to be one of the two. Yeah. There’s this not and that’s why this is going to be entertaining. It’s not for the boxing itself. I’m not worried about the skill here. This is just a rough match, but

Ryan Garrow: no,

Jon MacDonald: I am thinking about how Jake Paul got here. And I’m thinking about how there’s been so many influencers, especially in YouTube.

And not that much on products. So I’m wondering what the play is for YouTube with products.

Ryan Garrow: It’s true. YouTube, the biggest influencers in the world are generally [00:18:00] got their start on YouTube. If we look at Mr. Beast, like the billionaire influencer started by posting YouTube videos over a decade ago.

Same thing with Jake Paul. Like it was pranks and stuff and about, getting information on YouTube and people following there, that’s where they made their money and their impact and those same influencers. I think there was a crazy stat when Tik TOK released their creator fund in, I want to say 21, 22, Mr. Beast was massive in 21, 22, just like he is now, I think in 10 months, he made something like. 14, 000 despite having yeah, almost a billion views. And then while YouTube is paying him disgusting millions of dollars from an influencer standpoint, just creating good content. YouTube has generally been way ahead of the game.

When it came to we’re going to get people to watch and be entertained and have eyeballs here. But what they haven’t necessarily done is say, how do we bring products into that? Whereas TikTok and Meta, it was really simple. Yeah, there’s a feed. And [00:19:00] so you’re going to ship this influence or a product and they’re going to talk about it on TikTok and people are going to buy. Like it was pretty stupidly simple, actually. And TikTok and Meta didn’t have to pay their influencers really. Whereas YouTube didn’t have that. So it was always like, Hey, we got to pay for this content. Looking at it almost like Netflix buying movies or having their own creative thing.

If they’re going to pay for that, it costs them money and then people pay to be there. YouTube’s advertising funneled it. And so all that to say YouTube. Adding product feeds for creators to tag products and enter more into that, what we expect to see on social now, like I, it doesn’t bug me when I’m scrolling through a feed now to see somebody talking about a product or being pitched a product. And so I think in YouTube shorts now, their competitor to reels and TikTok.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah,

Ryan Garrow: I think people are going to be just used to seeing products. And if the targeting is done right, which if you’ve got a good advertising agency, hello, come talk to me. It should drive some decent traffic and [00:20:00] conversions because it’s now set up to handle that.

Yeah. It’s cool. Cause it’s cool in beta. So there’s not a lot of details I can share publicly, but there’s ways now for brands to go in and from an affiliate standpoint, incentivize these creators to talk about you. And there’s a discovery thing in there. For both creators and brands. I think this is going to be big.

I do. And brands can bring the creators in. So if you’ve got a decent amount of creators on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you should be able to move a lot of those in to the YouTube environment. And there’s going to be some incentive for those creators to come make sure they’re creating content for YouTube.

And so we’ve got some larger brands are going to be hopefully moving their creators into the system that we’ll be able to hopefully maybe towards the end of Q1, I’ll have some really cool data to share that’ll be like, Hey, I’m Here’s the actual numbers that I talked about, at the end of 24 that are now going to be real and tangible.

Jon MacDonald: Okay. I’m convinced our listeners are convinced. How should they get started with YouTube in 25? Because that sounds to me like that’s going to change. Based on what they have been [00:21:00] doing.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I think that kind of scrap what you used to think about YouTube. I think it started Hey, if pretend it’s a brand new social platform, then you’re like, all right, everybody’s moving there.

Let’s get excited. Let’s participate. You, every brand will be different. I’ll say that you’re going to have to establish it what makes sense for your brand because it’s probably going to be different than your next door neighbor’s brand, but you have to have a YouTube channel. You have to have, that’s just base practice.

If you don’t have it already, go get your YouTube channel claimed, get it designed, right? Have a plan for creating content. It’s what I talked about in Tik Tok, I don’t know, a couple of years ago, when we saw some really good success from some of our brands, you had to have a voice on there to participate.

You couldn’t just run ads on TikTok without actually putting some of your own content out there and being a part of the community. It was, it created a feeling of inauthenticity. Like you were just weren’t, you were there just with your money, not. to participate. I don’t think that’s as important on YouTube because of how ads run and it’s because you can run pre roll on your competitor’s sites if they haven’t [00:22:00] blocked or your competitor pages if they haven’t blocked it.

I just want to have a landing page that people can research you and make sure that you’re a legitimate brand more than anything else. So you don’t have to probably regularly create content. I think it’s a benefit if you do, but just at least have a presence there controlled. That’s you. And then for most advertisers, I’m going to say, you’re probably going to create a separate Google account for YouTube.

Not all the time, but for most of you out there, separate accounts going to make sense. Cause it keeps your tracking cleaner. Cause what happens is if you have YouTube as a separate campaign and where you’re running shopping and search and all the other various things you can run in Google, you will have, we’ll call credit stealing, where they’re going to have multiple touch points.

And Google’s data driven algorithm is going to say that hit shopping there and it hit a text ad here. And then YouTube was here. So it’s going to get 10 percent of the credit. It’s going to be more difficult to see the full impact. So the similar, the way you would have your meta account is separate from Google.

They’re both claiming credit for some of the same sales. And you realize that as an [00:23:00] advertiser, look at YouTube as a social channel, be able to be comfortable with it, measuring the full impact and then deleting credit where you see fit. But you’re going to be able to see a better holistic picture of.

What is it actually doing? All of our larger advertisers have separate accounts. When you’re doing some of the cool studies with Google, it’s helpful to have a separate account. Again, when you come to shopping feeds, I get this question. So I’ll address it now that you can have two Google ads accounts targeting the same website, one with YouTube, one with all the shopping and also connected to one merchant center.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: So you got one merchant center running all of your product feeds. And you can have that going to two, two separate Google ads accounts.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. Yeah. I would have thought that wasn’t possible, but what do I know? Yeah. Interesting.

Ryan Garrow: And then I’ll say you’re going to have to go out and have a goal for it.

That makes sense. What is it? What is, what do I need YouTube to do? Look at some of the data and then make adjustments to either how you’re looking at it, if it’s not performing that way, not to say you have to justify it, but say, Hey, we expected it to do this, but in reality it’s doing. [00:24:00] This down here and maybe we just need to accept that and say hey, how is that benefiting the brand?

Let’s still continue to scale it But know that it’s accomplishing a goal slightly different than what we wanted it to be and keep testing You know, you’re gonna have the audiences can be again super creepy and awesome from a marketing standpoint like meta I would say you can’t give up on it that’s been one of the things you have to have a really hard head because It’s not gonna for most of you listening.

It’s not out of the gate going to be boom We spent 50 grand on youtube and our business grew half a million dollars that month. That was amazing Hopefully that happens but understand that it’s not and it’s going to be a commitment to making it work Just like for most of you meta wasn’t perfect out of the gate and it was a commitment to saying, okay I have to make this work, the eyeballs are there, I want to get first mover advantage over my competitors.

So we are going to make this work. Let’s keep trying, keep iterating, test the content, test the landing pages, test the algorithm, test all the things that can go into making the system work just like [00:25:00] you would if you were iterating on Meta.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. So 2025 is the year of YouTube, I’m hearing. And.

Ryan Garrow: It’s as of now,

Jon MacDonald: as of now, Ryan is convinced subject to change on what actually happens

Ryan Garrow: always

Jon MacDonald: what he finds, but I think it’s really interesting. I would not have guessed that you would have come here today and say that. So

Ryan Garrow: two months ago, I probably wouldn’t have thought that either.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I do think there is a lot of opportunities still out there and all this stuff goes in cycles. I remember years ago, they’re talking about adding clickable shoppable moments into YouTube videos with overlays, et cetera, to highlight products and be able to clip one click to a page to buy it.

And that never really came to fruition. Now they’re like, you know what, we need to do this because everyone else is doing it and it’s coming back around. But at the same time, e commerce especially has been really hurting this past year for some time now. And I think they’re all looking for this new place to shift their marketing [00:26:00] dollars to some degree that’s going to get them back to where they were.

And for no other reason, I think there’ll be some more investment in YouTube just to try something else, right? And see if they can be the first mover to take advantage of it and ride that wave. So this is really interesting. I appreciate you sharing that today.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Thanks for the time, Jon. Let me stand on my soapbox.

Jon MacDonald: All right. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 123): New Year, New Marketing appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Aligning your online experience with user expectations is crucial. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how to leverage the priming & expectation setting heuristic to increase conversions.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. what the priming & expectation setting heuristic is, and how it works.
2. how to determine if you are violating this heuristic.
3. examples of tactics that leverage this heuristic.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Castbox
• Castro
• Overcast
• Pocket Casts
• Stitcher
• Subscribe via RSS

Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Hey Ryan, have you ever felt frustrated by unexpected fees when shopping online.

Ryan Garrow: No, never. That’s weird. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: It’s a weird question, right? Look, it’s such a common experience and it so quickly turns customers away that I even recently encountered this while trying to purchase concert tickets.

I went through the long process of selecting seats, looking at all the views, doing all that stuff, got the checkout, had the countdown timer, I was all stressed out about it, finally got it done, and then I got hit with exorbitant convenience fees. It almost doubled the price, needless to say, I abandoned that purchase despite the time investment, et cetera.

And I’ll put in air quotes, [00:01:00] the convenience of having gone through that process that I was paying for. But I think this really highlighted a critical aspect of digital experiences for me, and that’s priming and expectation setting. Leave it to me to have a bad experience online and bring it to a positive psychological principles and make a

Ryan Garrow: podcast out of it

Jon MacDonald: and then make a podcast out of it. Nerd central here, but

Ryan Garrow: oh man, those expectations are the worst. Like I think almost everybody listening has done the same thing. I almost bought tickets to What was it last week? My wife wanted to go to book of mormon and it’s coming to portland I was like, oh, I got an adam metaphor.

Let me go find that click the ad got to the end and then I picked the seats and then they’re like Oh, it’s not even on sale yet. And these may or may not be the seats you get, but they’ll be as good. Or I’m like, I tried to find where the real tickets were instead of these secondary site that I accidentally, I felt embarrassed because I went to a secondary site thinking it was a real, I’m like, ah, man, some [00:02:00] expectations.

Meta did that. Is that his algorithm is really good. Because I’ve been listening to my wife talk about wanting to go to Book of Mormon. Love it. I’m assuming we’re talking today about priming and expectation settings to help drive conversions, I’m guessing.

Jon MacDonald: Yes, spot on. Look at your deduction capabilities are prime right now.

I appreciate that. Yeah, look, there’s nothing more frustrating than feeling like a company is giving you that bait and switch and user experience design. We call this poor priming and expectation setting. It’s really a violation of one of the six Heuristics of digital experience optimization. As a reminder here, heuristics of those mental shortcuts, the use to solve problems quickly and effectively, that we all take these shortcuts.

I know we’ve talked about it on the show a handful of times, but knowing that our brains are wired to take shortcuts and make these quick decisions. You can imagine how heuristics play that critical role and how customers navigate and just perceive digital experiences.

Ryan Garrow: [00:03:00] Yeah, just even saying the word heuristics, I go back to that podcast.

There’s a shortcut there that takes me there. But I’m priming an expectation setting. I understand expectation, but the priming piece, I guess you’ll have to explain that piece of heuristics and how that works here.

Jon MacDonald: The concert ticket buying story tells almost everything you need to know about that.

Because it can either set people up for success or complete failure. And it does that by clarifying how the interface will perform, indicating what actions users should take, and then managing those user expectations along that journey. So digital experiences that adhere to this may apply tactics like it.

Explicitly mentioning free shipping early in the journey or reducing cart abandonment rates or sharing estimated delivery dates to manage customer expectations, or just saying, Hey, you know what, you’re going to pay double for this ticket because we want to get rich too. Just say that up front and I probably would have been okay with your,

Ryan Garrow: I expect you to charge me 150 [00:04:00] bucks.

That’s great. So convenient. But something else stuck out just now, because you said that there were six heuristics for digital experience optimization. We only mentioned one. What are the other five? You might have told me before, but you don’t have to remind me. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: When we talked about heuristics prior, we did talk about this briefly, and I’m not expecting you to have memorized all six of these by any means.

No, that’s your job. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That’s what I’m here for. So just call me next time you forget. But look, our team is the good has identified six of these shortcuts, right? And any site Whether it’s software as a service or ecommerce should be considering each step of these in their digital experience.

All six of those include, of course, priming and expectation setting. Easy win right there. You should get an A for getting that one because that’s what we’re talking about today, right? Trust and authority. Ease, how hard is something to do, right? Benefits and unique selling points. Making sure those are clear.

Directional guidance. Helping people through that journey. Making it easy for them to [00:05:00] get to the next step. And then six is incentives, right? So given them that little push over the edge, what that might be, I think in the future, we could probably do an episode on each, but today we’ll just focus on that primary expectation setting and we can fix those damn convenience fees while we’re at it.

Ryan Garrow: I sure hope so. Hopefully all your ticket companies listen to our podcast and then let us work on your sites.

Jon MacDonald: We have Taylor Swift on our side, I’m told. So that’s a positive. That’s

Ryan Garrow: true. Taylor, give me a call. We got to fix this. And my daughter’s won an autograph. So if I’m, if I’ve got my site, other than a convenience fee, that’s ridiculous, how do I know I’m violating this heuristic?

Is there some easy things I can see without thinking too hard?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Before you can start to address any of these heuristics to improve that digital experience, you have to understand if. When and where users are getting stuck and to understand if your digital experience is violating this priming and expectation heuristic, a great place to start is in user research.

You probably could have guessed that one. It seems like it comes back. [00:06:00] I think I could think of a

Ryan Garrow: jar Starbucks line. I’ve got all of that, right?

Jon MacDonald: So start talking to your users or just observing their behavior. That’s a great place to start. And as you analyze that, look for patterns. So there’s patterns like rage clicking.

I know you love that name.

Ryan Garrow: Oh, this is the first time I’ve heard rage clicking from you, I think. But I know exactly what it is because I do it.

Jon MacDonald: Everyone does it, right? And usually this signifies that experience doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or even timely feedback to keep you informed.

You’re clicking on something and you’re like, why is this not working? And here it’s not a link at all, maybe. Right? Low directness is the next one. This is an interesting pattern because this can be a sign of unmet expectations, meaning your systems interactions, the navigation or the language don’t match the user’s mental models of the real world or normal site conventions.

Okay? So you want your site to be direct if you think about it that way, right?

Ryan Garrow: How do I notice low [00:07:00] directness? Like I can’t see that in rage clicks.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So this is a very one sentence summary of the entire book. Don’t make me think. Oh, so read the book. It’s this one. Yeah. The reality here is make it easy.

Be direct in what people are supposed to do. We call it low directness because the idea is if I’m looking to do something, I should be able to go right there and directly do it because I have an expectation, right? I want your phone number. Yeah, I want your phone number. I’m going to scroll down to the footer.

I’m not going to click all over your site. And if it’s not there, I’m like, Oh God, I got to click around to find this. The worst is you want a company’s address. The hack for that every time, if they don’t show it anywhere else, it’s in their privacy policy because that has to be my law.

Ryan Garrow: Or they’ve used the Shopify template and haven’t filled it in. It’s all caps in brackets address. I’m like,

Jon MacDonald: Yes. Which case their lawyer should probably call them.

Announcer: Yeah. You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on ecommerce growth. [00:08:00] Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon MacDonald: The third is price sensitivity. Okay, so you’re looking for this in that feedback. It often indicates poor priming, right? Because it’s unclear or maybe missing elements in that interface that typically guide people to inform them of what to expect next around pricing. So just tell me about that darn convenience fee up front and I’ve been primed.

But the good news is once you identified all these patterns, you’re You can address them with tactics to improve priming and expectation setting. It’s not hard. And doing this is a [00:09:00] really ethical way to improve customer sentiment and increase conversions.

Ryan Garrow: Which is what we all want. Now, I obviously am a very visual person, and so in this, can you paint me a picture or give me an example you’ve worked on where this was obvious to you or became obvious to

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I have two that come top of mind. First is with a company called eManual Online. Oh, that’s right. We share them as a client. They are the largest repair manual database online, right? Our research revealed that users were confused about how eManual Online delivers the manual. Some are digital downloads, some are physical editions. And because of this mixed delivery message throughout the entire site, customers just didn’t know what to trust when they confronted this issue on the website.

They were like do I have to wait for the mail? I’m going to get a download. I have no idea what I’m buying. And so we decided to test out highlighting the delivery methods to clarify that confusion, increase transactions, etc. Not a [00:10:00] surprise, but the clear delivery method language showed a 14 percent lift.

So definitely worth it. Now. To clarify access methods for offline downloads, this resulted in a person and a stronger purchase intent as well. So not only were people converting a higher rate, but they also went directly to purchasing as opposed to clicking around the site a lot more because they felt clear that expectation had been set.

So it’s a great example of priming and expectation setting at work. Yeah, the second is with residential furnishings company. No, you’ve probably heard of Herman Miller, Yeah. In Knoll, I think they’re now called Miller Knoll, they merged, and they also own Design Within Reach, or design not within reach, depending on your budget, your financial bracket. But I will say that Knoll has a range of uniquely crafted and handmade products that you honestly can’t find anywhere else. The care and detail that goes into each piece means a lot longer lead times. [00:11:00] Everything’s handmade and shipping and delivery just takes longer. So you don’t order something from them expect to have it tomorrow.

It can take months. So what we did is we went on the site and we wanted to prime and set that expectation. So we changed the wording from lead time. Eight weeks. Okay. So it was two months to get a product. And it said lead time, eight week consumers looking at that. Like I get what lead time means, but it’s very commercial also eight weeks.

Oh my gosh. And then we changed it to made for you ships in eight weeks. Very different. We turned a negative into a positive. We primed them with that. And we said, okay, you guys, we’re going to make this just for you. And yeah, it ships in eight weeks, but it’s made for you. That makes sense. Now, why it takes that lead time makes it think, wow, they have to just go get it from the warehouse.

It takes forever with somebody walking it to me. What’s going on here. But this change had the biggest test win of the year for them in terms of revenue. And it had the benefit of turning that challenge or really long lead time into a compelling conversion [00:12:00] booster around it being made for you or custom made.

Ryan Garrow: Transparently. It sounds like making your checkout button orange instead of blue. When you’re talking about that, those words. But is it as simple for a lot of brands to almost wordsmith some of the things on their call to action arena? Not as simple as changing a button color, but thinking through that, that seems like I could help in a lot of sites.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, without question I can. And I think the reality here is the intent behind the change. Right here. We are trying to set them up. So when they get further into checkout and they’re reminded of when this is going to ship to them that they aren’t surprised because we have clearly up front told them that it’s going to be eight weeks.

But what we did is we changed the language to prime them in a way that made it more beneficial for them, right? And set that expectation up in a positive light. So there’s a lot of psychology happening in one line here that we changed. And [00:13:00] so you can easily do something similar, I would look at all of the expectations throughout your entire site.

We mentioned the cost of no products. The reality is most of the people who are coming to know, understand that the cost is a little more. So it’s not so much about priming the price. Although when you say something is handmade for you or made for you, you expect to pay a little more. You feel like there’s more value there.

Okay. So it has that helpful effect there as well, too.

Ryan Garrow: Oh, 100%. And I think that if I could force a change to every Shopify site, it would be to leverage that, the bar above the header that you can put a message in, that almost everybody on Shopify uses it for their shipping callout. Yeah. If that was just standard, like even if you said, we charge you shipping on everything.

I’m like, okay, great. I’m here because I want to buy this. But now I know that when I get to the cart, there’s going to be a four 99 charge or whatever. Yeah. Rather than trying to figure out on the site, what am I paying for shipping? Cause I usually don’t even want to put it in the cart until I know I’m like, Oh, free shipping at 99.

Okay, great. This is a 79 product. There’s going to be something, but. I’ll probably add something to [00:14:00] get me to 99 because the shipping cost annoys me.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. That right there is a great example of priming. You’re priming people to spend more, increase our average order value, which is a big tactic that we use shipping costs for quite honestly, right?

Free shipping above a certain amount. Look at your current average order value. There’s two ways to do this. The first is look at your current average order value, and then set the shipping rate to be slightly above that. Okay. That will help increase it. I promise you. The second is to look at what your most popular product is and set free shipping just above that.

And that will mean people buy the most popular product, but they’re also going to add something else to their cart. Another way, do a bundle. Right there. We’ve talked a lot about increasing average order value. Bundling is a huge way to do this, just tax something else on, and then it adds up that price you can offer it to them.

And then even as part of that bundle, you can advertise it as free shipping.

Ryan Garrow: And even when this comes out, we’re in the midst of holiday season, but one of [00:15:00] my, favorites, but also frustrating, but it works well for me is you discount a product to just below the free shipping threshold. Like your free shipping is a 49 and this gets discounted from 60 to 45.

That’s I have to have the deal because I’m cheap. I always shop deals in my nature, but then I’m like, Oh, I’m not paying for shipping. So I’m going to spend another 5 at least. And I ended up spending 15 and I spent 60 for two things. So I essentially bundled myself, but really creative discounting like that gets me.

It’s a product that everybody wants at a discount, even if it was, you have a lot of games you can play right now with pricing with discount and free shipping thresholds and adjusting those for new file customers. So many cool things you can do there.

Jon MacDonald: We even talked about that method in terms of Amazon.

And their prime day, I think that we did a recap episode on prime day and you brought up, what is it called? The arrow garden? I think it was something of that name where it’s like a little mini garden that they had lowered their price and sold way more and then immediately raised it back up and it [00:16:00] was like, they were playing the same sales

Ryan Garrow: velocity.

Yeah, because people saw the rank was like, Oh, this is Amazon’s choice in reviews on Amazon. Don’t stay on Amazon. Say historical pricing. So it’s super easy to do there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Expectations. If you just give me the right expectations, I do most thing. Most of life is setting the right expectations.

Jon MacDonald: That’s a great way to put it. If you come into something with the right expectations to been primed on it, it’s really hard to be upset. Yeah, it’s all about aligning this experience with user expectations. So companies that nail this, though, as we’ve talked about today they see improved customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates.

It’s a win for everybody. And those that aren’t doing this, they’re just damaging their reputation. Ticketmaster has made billions off of this while also damaging their reputation to the point where Taylor Swift refuses to use them whenever possible. The key is putting yourself in the user’s shoes.

And what information do they need? What might surprise them? What’s going to confuse them? And then address those proactively. It’s all you can [00:17:00] do. And you’ll create that digital experience that feels intuitive and trustworthy. And I don’t know about you, but that’s really all you want, right? You don’t want to be left guessing.

So set those clear expectations and watch your conversion soar.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, it’s just that easy. It’s actually not complicated. So it’s easy. But also you think about you’re paying money for traffic at any time. So that company paid for your traffic to get you to the cart and then to have you leave that’s just a waste of your spend and then it makes your

Jon MacDonald: agency look bad and we didn’t do anything wrong maybe it’s a waste of the skill set that you have hired let’s put it that way

Ryan Garrow: yes a lot of waste when you need to cancel expectations right well Jon thank you for this i’m excited to hear about the next five in the heuristics lineup As we get through this process, we will

Jon MacDonald: have you memorize them. There’ll be a quiz at the end.

Ryan Garrow: I’ll fail it. I stopped taking quizzes so many years ago.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan [00:18:00] Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 122): How To Leverage Priming & Expectation Setting appeared first on The Good.

But have you thought about how you might leverage your current user base to increase product relevance and reach?

This can be a low-cost, high-impact way to improve product quality, re-engage dormant users, or get in front of some new eyeballs.

It’s hugely beneficial to both your tool and the users by creating positive network effects. The more people that use your product, the more valuable it becomes. It’s a self-propelling mechanism to drive growth.

What is a positive network effect?

A positive network effect is when the value of a SaaS tool increases as the user base grows.

Take LinkedIn, for example. It becomes more valuable for users if their peers, colleagues, and dream employers use the tool. You can make more connections, learn more from the user-generated content, hunt for more jobs, and generally get more out of the tool.

For SaaS companies, larger networks can lead to several competitive advantages, such as:

• Are more trustworthy
• Entice advertisers
• Encourage referrals and word-of-mouth
• Build more unique user-generated content that can’t be copied by competition
• Increase retention

Understanding network effects is only the first step. The real challenge lies in building strategies that activate and sustain these effects. Creating positive network effects typically starts by leveraging your current user base, so let’s explore five proven ways to mobilize your users for growth.

5 ways to mobilize your user base to drive growth

Products like Pinterest, SurveyMonkey, or LinkedIn use network effects to grow. Each new user or engagement encourages more new users or engagements.

Tools target different objectives with their efforts. Some might prioritize user acquisition, while others reinforce retention, monetization, or product quality.

The most effective SaaS companies often find a couple of different ways to leverage current users as part of their growth strategy. Here are some examples to inspire your efforts.

1. Increase reach with shareable features

One way to leverage your current users’ network is to build product features that encourage natural sharing and engagement. To maximize reach, they need to be easy to use, helpful, and solve a real problem for users.

Pinterest allows users to create shared ‘boards’ to collaborate on home decor, event planning, and more. This either re-engages current users or prompts new sign-ups by sharing their board with both current and new users.

Here’s how it works:

1. A current user returns to Pinterest, ready to explore new content.
2. The user creates a ‘board’ to collect commonly themed content in support of a goal (redecorating their home, brainstorming for a trip, planning an event).
3. The user saves, pins, or repins content to their board.
4. The user shares the board with a collaborator (decorator, travel partner, event planner, etc) either directly on Pinterest or via a messaging tool.
5. The collaborator is either re-engaged or prompted to sign up for an account to collaborate on the board.
6. If the board is public, other users can stumble upon a piece of content and pin to their own boards.

Another example is Calendly, which builds natural sharing into the user journey. They incorporate simple scheduling and the speed of using invitation links. It’s also brilliant in that you don’t need an account to add yourself to a user’s schedule.

Here’s how Calendly includes shareable features to increase reach:

1. A Calendly user sends an invitation link to book a meeting. The invitee can select a time without the usual back-and-forth emails.
2. The invitee schedules a meeting without the typical friction of the scheduling process.
3. If an invitee schedules a lot of meetings themselves, they’re likely to sign up for Calendly to streamline their own scheduling.
4. As new users share Calendly links, more people experience the simplicity, driving additional sign-ups.

2. Drive referrals with growth loops

While shareable features focus on increasing reach, growth loops create a self-reinforcing cycle of engagement and referrals.

Think of a growth loop framework like a flywheel: Once it’s moving, it picks up speed and sustains momentum. For example, a user finds your product, interacts meaningfully, and creates content or engages in a way that attracts other users who repeat this cycle.

The goal here is to maximize viral reach without high acquisition costs. For a viral loop to succeed, the incentive needs to resonate with the users and align naturally with the product.

DocuSign’s growth loop leverages the need for digital document signing. Every document sent for a signature serves as an introduction to the platform.

Here’s how it works:

1. A user uploads a document to DocuSign and sends it to recipients for signature.
2. Recipients receive an email with a link to the document. They review and sign without needing an account. This helps them experience the platform’s convenience.
3. Impressed, recipients often sign up for their own accounts to send and manage their own documents, especially if they frequently need to get things signed.
4. As new users send their own documents for signatures, they introduce even more users to the platform. Each document sent by a new user brings in additional recipients.

3. Improve product quality and engagement with user-generated content

In addition to growth loops, user-generated content can amplify engagement and improve product quality by turning users into contributors.

Content engagement relies on user-generated or brand-created content to attract and retain users. This thrives when content shared or created by users on the platform is accessible to non-users. New visitors become intrigued and decide to join or engage.

GitHub, for example, leverages network effects to improve product quality. The collaborative coding and open-source project visibility encourage the use of their tool. Developers join to contribute to existing projects and then end up hosting their own projects.

Here’s how Github’s engagement of their customer network works to improve product quality:

1. Developers upload projects or contribute to open-source repositories.
2. Other developers discover these projects and contribute code, fix bugs, or fork the project for personal use. Each interaction boosts the project’s visibility on GitHub.
3. Developers who were attracted by the collaborative environment sign up to host their own code. This contributes to the platform’s network effect.
4. These new projects become additional attractors that bring in new developers.

4. Drive acquisition with incentives

A way to incentivize current users to aid in acquiring new users is through referral programs. Build shareable moments, incentives, and visibility into the user journey. Each new user not only becomes a customer but also a potential referrer by making sharing a natural part of the user experience.

The best referral programs provide support and education to users, making sharing about the product as simple as possible.

A great example is Airtable, which credits $10 to your account automatically when you invite new users to the tool.

Here’s how it works:

1. Current users invite new users to Airtable or share your unique referral link.
2. When a new user signs up and verifies their email address, $10 is automatically credited to your account.
3. You can see the credits on your account page and apply them to your charges.
4. Users can accumulate the credits, so the incentive to invite new users continues.

5. Re-engage dormant users

Social community features and push/message notifications prompt dormant or inactive users to re-engage with your tool.

For example, Venmo builds social engagement into its payment tool and uses these features to drive engagement. Each transaction re-engages the network of contacts with ‘reminder’ functionality and social engagement features.

Here’s a breakdown of how Venmo re-engages users:

1. A user requests payment from a friend, roommate, or coworker. If they don’t pay promptly, the user can ‘remind’ their contact about the pending payment.
2. Once complete, Venmo posts this transaction to a public or semi-public feed. This visibility serves as social proof.
3. Friends see the transaction and can like or comment on the payment.

Tools can leverage multiple strategies

From shareable features to re-engagement tactics, each strategy leverages your users’ networks in unique ways. By combining them, you can unlock exponential growth.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example again:

• Referrals: New LinkedIn users are encouraged to invite their friends to the tool. This creates a positive network effect by increasing acquisition immediately with each new user.
• Re-engagement: When users join LinkedIn, they’re encouraged to connect with their contacts. Each connection re-engages current users on the platform. Users post updates, share articles, and comment on others’ posts. This drives users back to the platform frequently, increases time spent, and encourages interactions that deepen the network’s value.
• Registrations: Companies post job listings on LinkedIn and widely share the URL. There is a ‘quick apply’ function for LinkedIn users, which incentivizes applicants to sign up for their own profile.

These are just a few examples of how a tool might incorporate multiple strategies leveraging their customer’s network.

Start growing with support from your user base

Ready to start leveraging your customers’ network to increase product relevance and reach? Start by defining your goal and key metrics. Do you want to improve referral rates? User activation? New registrants?

Monitor these metrics to identify bottlenecks and opportunities to improve. If a specific action isn’t driving the desired results, you may need to adjust the user engagement structure, incentives, or experience.

Other best practices for leveraging your customer’s network to increase product relevance and reach:

• Segment customers
• Leverage social proof
• Make it easy
• Celebrate success and loyalty

Ready to amplify your SaaS growth through positive network effects? Our Digital Experience Optimization Program can help you identify and implement strategies tailored to your user base.

The post Leverage Your Customers’ Network to Increase Product Relevance and Reach appeared first on The Good.