Heuristics play a crucial role in how customers navigate and perceive digital experiences. So, we developed a framework called the Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization to theme common optimization issues and opportunities through the lens of heuristics.

Leveraging the tool keeps users at the center of analyses and, when done correctly, ensures your strategy creates journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

One of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization focuses on incentives. In this article, we’ll explore how SaaS teams can leverage the Incentives Heuristic to build better user experiences and ultimately increase referrals through a well-done SaaS referral program.

How does the Incentives Heuristic work?

The goal of the Incentives Heuristic is to find opportunities for digital experiences to motivate users to take action. For example, sharing promotional offers or guarantees to get a user to register, convert free-to-paid, or make a referral would fall under the Incentives Heuristic.

Instead of relying on discounts, which have historically been the go-to to incentivize an action, digital experiences that adhere to this heuristic typically incentivize with offers that add value for the user and don’t devalue the product, such as bonus features or upgrades.

One great way to leverage the Incentives Heuristic is to build a referral program.

The power of a SaaS referral program

Well-done SaaS referral programs leverage incentives to encourage existing users to promote your tool.

The goal is to harness word-of-mouth referrals and increase product relevance and reach.

SaaS referral programs work well because they systemize the referral process and make it easy for users to share products with their network. And with 86% of B2B buyers saying word-of-mouth is the most influential factor in making purchase decisions, it’s an incredibly important part of the sales cycle.

Referral programs are effective for SaaS companies because of the social nature of tools. Professional peers frequently share their favorite tools and discuss new options in their communities. Incentivizing these conversations makes them mutually beneficial.

It’s a win-win. Your customer receives valuable incentives and trusted recommendations while you generate an organic growth cycle and harness positive network effects.

Viral growth loops

A growth loop is a compounding referral motion that leverages existing users to grow your user base through referrals. Referrals help keep marketing expenses low and increase the potential value of every new user.

Unlike traditional funnel frameworks, growth loops turn each interaction into a chance to draw in new users. When they start spinning on their own, they lead to lower customer acquisition costs and increased loyalty.

Positive network effects

SaaS referral programs that center on user benefits and incentives create positive network effects.

A positive network effect is when the value of a SaaS tool increases as the user base grows. For many companies, this larger user base leads to increased retention, bigger advertising budgets, unique user-generated content, improved user trust, and more.

How the best SaaS referral programs incentivize users

As mentioned, a straight discount or percentage off isn’t always the right way to incentivize referrals. Here are a few ways SaaS tools creatively incentivize users AND show the value of their product.

Service upgrades

Companies can incentivize referrals by offering upgraded account status. For example, Trello rewards referrers with one month of their “Premium” level service for each signup, up to 12 months. This gives users access to a new service level with a variety of new features and member benefits.

Dropbox pioneered the dual-sided incentive model, rewarding both the referrer and the new user with additional storage space. Referrers earn 500 MB for each successful referral, while new users receive 500 MB upon signing up, creating a viral loop that significantly boosts their user base.

Premium features

Some companies offer access to specific features as part of their referral program to add value for users while showing off the capabilities of their products. Evernote uses a points system where users can redeem points to unlock premium features. This tiered reward system encourages multiple referrals and gamifies the process.

Value-based offers

Another way to incentivize users is to offer a product that aligns with your tool’s value proposition. GetResponse combines financial rewards with educational incentives by offering the referrer and the new user a $30 reward alongside a digital marketing certification valued at $200 after three successful referrals. This approach aligns with the professional development goals of many users.

Credits

While we don’t necessarily recommend cash rewards or discounts, credits can be a valuable way to drive referrals. Airtable provides a $10 account credit for each referral, and DigitalOcean offers a $200 credit for new users to explore their services for 60 days. Referrers earn a $25 credit once the referred user spends their first $25, making it attractive for both parties.

Best practices for a SaaS referral program that leverages the incentives heuristic

Once you have the idea to build a SaaS referral program or optimize an existing one, these are a few best practices to keep in mind.

Stay user-centered

The key to building a successful SaaS referral program is to prioritize the user. Conduct research to understand what they want and tailor the program to their needs.

Your rewards structure should be based on what motivates them, and then the UX should be seamless to your digital platform. For example, provide easy-to-share unique referral links and offer in-app dashboards for users to track their referrals and rewards.

Also, make the act of referring intuitive, reminding users when it is natural to the actions they’re already taking. By integrating these incentives directly into their digital experience, SaaS companies make referral programs an engaging and rewarding part of using their products.

Gamify the rewards system

Make your referral process fun, easy, and satisfying to refer users. One way to do this is to gamify the experience. Gamification is the use of game mechanics in nongame contexts, and many SaaS companies do this extremely well in their actual product experience but not necessarily in their referral experience.

Leveraging gamification to find ways to make tasks more engaging and to make the referral process entertaining encourages users to track their success, refer more customers, and unlock rewards.

Align incentives with your value proposition

Incentives work best when they’re aligned with what makes your product compelling, so your first step is to clarify your offer and/or value proposition.

Ask yourself: What core action do users find most valuable? What helps them realize the most value from your product?

Then, incorporate incentives that encourage users to make referrals. These don’t have to be financial rewards. Sometimes, the product’s value is plenty, like in the case of Dropbox where users get more storage (the product’s primary value) for sharing. Closer alignment to the value will encourage more sharing.

Strategically place incentives throughout the user journey

Users love incentives like upgrades, guarantees, and other promises, but can fail to see them when they are in the thick of purchase indecision, comparing a number of other variables.

Placing key incentives near CTAs can increase the visibility of the offer and increase conversion readiness.

Incorporate optimization

There is no one-size-fits-all referral program or incentivization strategy. To find what works for you, test and validate ways to make sharing a natural part of your product experience.

Some tools you can leverage to iterate on the experience include rapid experimentation, user testing, A/B testing, or simply talking to your customers or customer service team to identify pain points.

And if you aren’t sure how to do this on your own, hire an expert for support.

Incentivize referrals to spur SaaS growth

So, now you have a starting point for building a strong referral program with heuristics in mind. But, the Incentives Heuristic is only one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. The full list includes:

• Priming & Expectation Setting
• Trust & Authority
• Ease
• Benefits & Unique Selling Points
• Directional Guidance
• Incentives

Each heuristic can help you identify and theme optimization issues or opportunities. These are the building blocks for a theme-based roadmap and are indispensable for any data-backed product team.

At The Good, we leverage the heuristics and work with your team to implement optimizations and build viral loops that help you scale faster. Learn more about how we increase referrals and get in touch here.

The post Building Viral Growth: Leveraging Incentives in SaaS Referral Programs & Strategies appeared first on The Good.

New channels let you tap into additional audiences and volume, spurring growth and helping your business through harder times. After all, there’s a reason our parents always told us not to keep all of our eggs in one basket.

We’re big fans of an omnichannel approach, so we talked to a group of experts on the topic to get their thoughts on why and how to navigate it like a pro.

• Sam Selby, Co-founder, COO & President at Used Mobile Homes USA
• Myra Ryder — Director of Brand Strategy at Ka’Chava
• Dustin Kochis — VP of Retail Strategy and Sales, Ka’Chava
• Andy Wang — Managing Partner & CGO, KC HiLiTES

The case for DTC

For many retail products, adding a DTC channel is a surefire way to increase margins and grow your business.

However, adding a DTC channel isn’t just a way to grow revenue and margin. The upsides also include better relationships with your customers and greater insights to help you grow your brand.

Build stronger relationships with your customers

Dustin Kochis, VP of Sales at Ka’Chava, sees DTC as a powerful tool for connecting with customers. “We view DTC as a way to build stronger relationships with our customers. It’s allowed us to educate them on our mission and products in ways that retail can’t.”

Building these relationships via DTC is an approach that even legacy brands can leverage. Take Andy Wang of KC HiLiTES: when Wang acquired the decades-old company, he knew he wanted to take them digital. But it wasn’t just the margins he was after.

Wang had a vision for a new brand identity that he wasn’t satisfied to leave in the hands of retail partners to represent. To emphasize the brand’s quality and heritage, he built an image-driven website that not only sells products but tells the brand story better than retail alone could.

“We went direct to consumer not only because of the revenue and margin, but because it gives us the ability to control our own destiny. If you can build a quality relationship with your customer, that becomes a moat for your business.”

Own your data

While the benefits of DTC on education and relationships are laudable, there’s a notable third-order benefit of having an ecommerce channel that is arguably just as important: owning your data.

“Having a direct customer channel is everything because it allows you to learn about your customers,” says Sam Selby, Co-founder, COO & President at Used Mobile Homes USA.

Wang agrees. “People are too fixated on margin and revenue. There’s a treasure chest of information when users touch your website or interact with your content.”

Once Wang built his DTC arm, the benefits of owned data began to fuel his business in new ways.

“When we went direct to consumer, we got all of the emails and the psychographic details. It’s a huge help in understanding who your customers are. When you go through distribution, that gets lost,” Wang told us. “That’s another really important thing that has become an asset. Using emails, analytics, and attribution models, that is where the gold is.”

The use cases for good data go both ways. When Myra Ryder, Director of Brand Strategy at Ka’Chava, brought on a new VP of sales to help them go into retail, the existing data from DTC channels was critical in helping them to form a go-to-market strategy. “You really need the data,” says Ryder.

7 tips for thoughtfully entering DTC

If you’re sold on its benefits, the next logical step is to do some digging into how to make the transition from retail to DTC painless. Here are seven tips from the experts to help you make it as smooth as possible.

1. Define your DTC value proposition

Launching a DTC channel isn’t just about making your products available. It’s about understanding what unique value you’ll offer customers through this new channel.

According to Selby, to succeed, you need to articulate why someone should buy directly from you versus through retail. “You have to figure out what your unique value is because you’re not going to out-Amazon Amazon, and you’re not going to out-Target Target.”

2. Align your DTC and retail strategies

One common concern for retail-driven brands is how a DTC channel might impact existing retail partnerships.

Dustin Kochis, VP of Retail Strategy and Sales at Ka’Chava, emphasizes the importance of alignment. “Your DTC and retail strategies should complement each other, not compete. We’ve found success by ensuring that our retail presence reinforces the brand while DTC drives education and deeper customer engagement.”

For example, offering exclusive products or bundles online can differentiate your DTC channel without undercutting retail partners on price.

Selby shares, “To capture incremental customers without cannibalizing between channels, make sure you’re not just duplicating what your retail partners already offer.”

3. Establish a clear DTC marketing plan

Most business leaders already know the value of a marketing plan, but when opening a new channel, it becomes even more important.

Myra and Dustin from Ka’Chava say, “Whether it’s through partnerships, Instagram, or other ad campaigns, often there’s a familiarity with the brand once the consumer sees the product in-store. Leverage those educational, top-of-funnel touchpoints to stay ahead and top of mind.”

KC HiLiTES beefed up its digital marketing plans to generate a fast margin when it launched DTC. “We used a series of growth hacks to generate that margin. Then we had money to dump into marketing and could control the brand perception at scale,” said Andy.

4. Know what value your retail partners bring

Selby emphasized the importance of knowing the value of retail partners, measuring their value, and finding ways to optimize the channel so you can make the most of the DTC transition. “You really need to understand how retail is different because that will help you take advantage of DTC most effectively.”

Wang finds insight in the pricing models of retail partners. “If the price is the same anywhere you can find it on the web, at the end of the day, that distributor or dealer has to add some value beyond price. If your brand is powerful enough, it makes it so that that dealer has to add some strategic value.” That could come in extra exposure, a new customer base, or strategic learnings from their other partnerships.

“We only work with the partners that add value to our company as a whole,” finished Andy.

5. Invest in expertise

To thrive in DTC, your website needs to offer a seamless and engaging experience. Myra Ryder, Director of Brand Strategy at Ka’Chava, highlights the role of storytelling and user-centric design; “Customers expect more than just a product listing online. They want an experience that reflects your brand’s story and values. Your website should inspire trust, simplify the buying process, and communicate your unique benefits.”

She adds, “You need to find specialists and give it 110%… don’t divert people and time from other teams.” For Myra, that meant partnering with specialists like Dustin to own retail entry and The Good to optimize their DTC website.

6. Prepare for omnichannel success

Moving to an omnichannel approach comes with logistical and operational complexities. Andy Wang advises brands to prepare for changes in demand and fulfillment.

“When you add a DTC channel, you’re not just adding revenue—you’re adding complexity. From inventory management to customer service, everything needs to scale to meet new demands.”

This can include integrating inventory systems, ensuring consistent pricing, and aligning marketing efforts across channels.

And while channel conflict can set you back, there are plenty of ways to combat it. Even tweaks to the actual product can make your omnichannel strategy more successful. When Ka’Chava entered into retail, for example, they changed the packaging to reflect what DTC customers learned about via the website and shrunk down the retail package to land at a price point that was more palatable for new customers.

7. Don’t fret cannibalization

Kochis says there is “no magic formula” for predicting how a new channel will impact another channel’s sales, and the endeavor is short-sighted anyway.

When brought on to help Ka’Chava enter retail, he warned the team about the possibility of seeing an initial dip in ecommerce sales, but he said not to worry. “It’s a long play,” says Kochis.

Unlock a DTC strategy like the experts

Launching DTC is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. As we established, data is your biggest ally in DTC. Track everything—from website traffic and conversion rates to customer feedback. Use these insights to continually refine your approach.

Expanding into DTC can unlock new opportunities for growth and customer engagement, but it requires careful planning and execution. By defining your value proposition, aligning with retail strategies, optimizing the digital experience, and adapting to omnichannel demands, you can set your brand up for success.

Ready to take the leap? We have many resources on DTC ecommerce from 15+ years of optimizing for brands like yours. Check them out here.

The post 7 Expert Tips On How Retail Brands Can Launch A DTC Ecommerce Channel 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.

Ultimately, the buyers aren’t cowardly; they are rational and thorough in their decision-making. Forrester reported that “an astonishing 43% of B2B buyers admitted that they make defensive purchase decisions more than 70% of the time,” meaning that less than 30% of B2B buyers are risk-tolerant.

And it makes sense. They are on the hook with their company and colleagues regarding the spending. In many cases, the purchase also has a direct effect on how they do their job day-to-day.

So, this raises the question of how B2B companies, like SaaS tools, can bridge the gap between risk-averse and purchase. The answer is trust.

There is plenty we could go into on the theory and psychology of trust-building, but instead, I’d like to focus on the actionable. Specifically, one great lever SaaS companies can use to build trust with their users is website optimization.

Read on to learn:

• How trust and authority fit into the Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization
• Strategies for identifying the trust gap in user research
• Specific tactics to build trust via the UX design and content of your website

What is the Trust & Authority heuristic?

It takes longer for B2B leaders to trust vendors, and on top of that, according to PWC’s Trust Survey, it is harder to regain that trust once lost. So, it’s crucial that SaaS companies establish and maintain trust in all their sales avenues, one of the most important being the website.

So, how do you ensure your website not only looks credible but genuinely inspires trust? The key lies in aligning your website with proven trust-building principles, like The Good’s Trust & Authority heuristic, and implementing targeted strategies to address common user hesitations.

Trust & Authority is one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization, a tool developed at The Good to theme common optimization issues and opportunities with the user at the center of analyses.

The Trust & Authority heuristic focuses on establishing and maintaining perceived trust, authority, and security throughout the digital experience. Issues like bugs, AI-generated images/quotes, or other elements that violate users’ sense of trust can lead to disengagement. Building trust, as we know, enhances users’ confidence in the website and typically leads to a better conversion rate.

To follow this heuristic and build trust with users, you can try tactics like mitigating bugs, featuring social proof, or adding additional educational “how it works” content for complex products.

But, before you begin to solve trust and authority issues, it’s important to identify where in the funnel users are dropping off because of heuristic violations.

Identifying user trust gaps through research

User behavior often reveals where trust is lacking. Here are a few signs you’ve violated user trust that you can look for in user research.

Bugs: When site elements or pages don’t function as intended or when they produce error messages or glitches.

Attentive/Intentional Reading: When a user slowly scrolls over content on mobile or desktop, their mouse hovers over text, typically line-by-line.

Halted Scrolling: When a user pauses on the site to possibly engage with content/reorient themselves, it could indicate that the user perceives a false bottom.

Dig even deeper by speaking to your customer support teams and conducting data analysis. Try to gather both quantitative and qualitative data that helps identify violations of the Trust & Authority heuristic.

Tactics to build user trust on your SaaS website

A visually cohesive and intuitive design contributes significantly to perceived trust. Users judge credibility in milliseconds based on aesthetics alone. Clean layouts, consistent fonts, and strategic use of white space can make your website feel more authoritative. But beyond visual design, what can you do to build trust with users? Here are tactics we’ve seen work time and time again.

Get creative (and more detailed) with your social proof

When marketing and optimization teams hear they need to build trust with users, minds rightfully jump straight to social proof.

But, to effectively signal authority in today’s digital world, you need to get even more creative and even more human. Here are a few ways to do it.

Try adding social media handles to customer reviews like ActiveCampaign

We all know that featuring expert testimonials can increase trust and confidence and increase conversions in the same way positive reviews can build user confidence to make a purchase decision.

But, it’s table stakes to include reviews on your site. Try to take things a step further and make those reviews more human. ActiveCampaign, for example, uses X handles on featured reviews to increase the credibility of quotes from real users.

Or add “customer since” dates like Dynamic Yield

Alternatively, if your reviews don’t come from social media or you’re featuring a case study as social proof, you can try other added authority indicators. In the case of Dynamic Yield, a label with “customer since” dates shows the loyalty of current users along with the results they achieved with the product.

Build social proof into the user journey, like U-screen’s forms

Humans tend to “reference the behaviors of others to guide their own behavior” (NNG, 2014). To leverage this tendency, you can build different types of proof, such as social proof, testimonials, and proof in numbers, into unique areas of the site. One place that can make or break the experience is form design.

U-screen does this well on their registration page with clear proof in numbers to accompany examples of their products’ output.

To achieve similar trust-inducing outcomes, the numbers, testimonials, and social proof you’re using should be the primary, or at least secondary, text on the form screen to catch the user’s attention.

Build trust with logos and badges

Another way that SaaS companies might think to build trust with users is by featuring client logos on their sites. But again, this is table stakes for most.

To build a stronger bridge between the risk-averse client and your product, try taking a supplemental approach to featuring logos and badges.

Borrow credibility from partners like Zapier

To integrate social proof and demonstrate the value of your product, you can borrow credibility from partners.

Zapier clearly includes logos from their integration partners in the hero section of the homepage, immediately building trust with customers who are familiar with or use any of the tools they partner with.

Show your certifications and badges like Dynamic Yield

Similarly, you can feature privacy certifications or data policy badges on your site, similar to what Dynamic Yield does. And if it is close to the CTA, even better!

Offer (and then stick to) a guarantee like Freshbooks

Guarantees can help prime users to make purchasing decisions and incentivize them to purchase. They give users a feeling that the brand is making a commitment to them. Highlighting guarantees in a quickly scannable way can increase a sense of trust, reduce decision paralysis, and highlight the value of a product.

Highlighting guarantees is great for sites with high-value products and/or companies with trust-reducing user-dependent variables. Freshbooks offers a full refund within 30 days of purchasing their product. It is similar to a free trial but framed differently.

Add a how-it-works model like SignNow

Describing “How it Works” for some business models and/or features can give users the context and confidence that they need to understand competitive differentiators like price and quality.

Doing so for complex products will boost user trust, encourage buy-in to the brand, and instill purchasing confidence.

SignNow describes the steps to enable dual-factor authentication for a PDF while showing a summary of how it works to show users how simple it is to protect a document with their tool.

Improving user trust increases registrations and retention

All of these are proven tactics we’ve seen across clients, but let’s remember one key part of optimization. Not everyone’s users are the same.

Adding an industry license badge to your product page is a great way to build trust. But you shouldn’t simply add the badge and pat yourself on the back. Job well done, right? Not quite. Now, you have to actually measure whether it creates the intended trust. Otherwise, you have no idea if your tactic satisfied the issue.

To track and measure this, we suggest planning with a theme-based roadmap.

With a theme-based roadmap, you can plan, communicate, and track the initiatives and associated metrics. You also have a clear path to conduct testing to make sure changes achieve results.

By aligning your website with The Good’s Trust & Authority heuristic, you not only build confidence but also position your SaaS business for sustained growth. Take the first step toward a more trusted digital experience—and watch how it transforms your registrations and retention.

Ready to optimize your website for trust and authority? Let’s talk.

The post How to Build User Trust on Your SaaS Website appeared first on The Good.

Well, you shouldn’t give away your entire product. It’s a strategic balance between unlocking features to engage new users and gating high-value features that warrant a paid subscription (we’ll get into how to decide what to keep in each tier later on).

This strategy is called freemium pricing, and it’s the source of growth for countless digital brands across the software industry. These brands attract millions of users with some free access and then charge for advanced features or uncapped limits.

Is the freemium pricing strategy right for your digital product? Let’s explore this technique to help you decide.

What is Freemium Pricing?

Freemium – a mix of the words “free” and “premium” – is a business model that offers basic features of a product or service for free but places richer or supplemental features behind a paywall. The fee is typically a subscription.

The free tier is usually a stripped-down version of the product, limited to only the basic functionality that users need to get a taste of the product without making a financial commitment. In some cases, upgrading from the base product to a premium version removes an unpleasant obstruction (e.g., paid Spotify accounts are ad-free).

Dropbox is a traditional example of a successful freemium model. Users can store up to 2GB of files for free, but if you need more space, you have to upgrade to a paid tier.

The goal of the freemium approach is to attract a large number of users who are happy to use a free product but unwilling to pay for something unfamiliar. Over time, some of those users decide to pay for the additional features.

The term “freemium” was coined in the early 2000s, but the concept originates with the freeware and shareware distribution models of the 1980s and 1990s that only charged users after they received some value from the product.

Examples of Freemium Pricing

The best way to understand freemium pricing is to look at some notable examples. These familiar companies are leveraging the freemium model well.

1. LinkedIn: Freemium + Free Trial

Most of us are familiar with LinkedIn’s free social networking platform with basic features, but you can also upgrade to a premium tier to get useful additional features, such as more direct messages, better searching, and insights about people and companies. The premium tier also offers a one-month free trial.

2. Google Workspace

Like most people, you probably use one or several of Google’s free products. But you can get advanced features – especially for businesses – by upgrading to one of their paid tiers. Premium plans offer higher usage limits, enhanced features, and additional services.

3. Zoom

Zoom exploded during the pandemic, largely due to its free tier that lets anyone try the basic product for free for an unlimited period of time. However, once you start using it regularly, the paid features will start to look very attractive.

4. Zapier

Zapier users are limited on the type and number of “zaps” they can run each month. Once you have a workflow setup, it’s easy to decide to pay to keep things working smoothly.

Which Features Should Be Free?

Now that you understand how the freemium pricing model works, let’s talk about your product.

Which features should be free, and which should require payment?

Before deciding which features to gate or keep free, it can be helpful to conduct a verb scoring exercise.

Verb scoring is the act of evaluating actions that users can take in your and your competitor’s products and then scoring them based on the level user of entitlements (or the amount of friction) required to perform the action.

Verbs are the core features of your product broken down into discrete actions, such as creating a ticket, editing a transcript, or sharing a document with a friend. For instance, if users can create and resize a document, create and resize are verbs.

Once you understand all your product’s verbs and how they affect the user experience, you can tweak your product strategy to optimize for user acquisition and conversion to paid accounts.

Learn more here: 9 Use Cases For Verb Scoring To Support A Successful Product Strategy

Once you understand the current state of both your and your competitors’ verbs, you can move on with adjusting to a freemium strategy.

Free Features

The free version of your product should include the core value features that a majority of your users care about the most. These are the features that solve their basic problems and help them realize the purpose of your product.

How do you determine which features users care about the most?

In some cases it will be obvious, but in most, It’s a strategic process that will depend on your product. Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Dropbox, has a decision tree to help leaders answer what should be free vs paid.

Paid Features

Once you know which features are part of your product’s core value and should be free, everything else should go into the premium tiers.

There are three ways to add gates to your product for upgrading:

• Functional limitations: Limits on the specific features users can access. Example: YouTube Music offers offline watching to paid users, but not free users.
• Quota limitations: Limits on how much users can use features. Example: DropBox offers 2GB of storage to free users but much more to paid users.
• Support limitations: Limits on the customer service users get from the company. This is usually only associated with enterprise-level products that require deep customization.

What’s important, however, is that your users clearly understand the benefits of upgrading to a paid account. In most cases, this means making your offer simple. It should be something people understand intuitively and something they can share easily with their friends.

Dropbox is the quintessential example: “Upgrade from 2GB to 2TB of storage” is as simple as it gets. (There are other benefits, but storage is the main driver.) Once a satisfied user hits the cap, they are likely to upgrade.

Finding the Balance

Admittedly, the right balance of free and paid features is tricky to find. You’ll have to start with your best guess (based on data and research, of course, not a shot in the dark) and optimize as you learn more.

Keep in mind that the main goal of the freemium pricing model is to attract new users to your product. If that isn’t happening, it could mean your free offering isn’t compelling enough. In this case, you’ll need to provide more free features or better features.

But what if you have many users but no one upgrades to a paid tier? In this case, it probably means you’re giving away too much. You’ll have to reduce your free offering so users have a reason to pay for the product.

What are the Advantages of Freemium Pricing?

So, what makes the freemium strategy so great? Why do so many digital brands use it? Let’s look at the benefits of freemium pricing.

1. Attracts a Large User Base

Freemium pricing lowers the entry barrier for many customers. They can try your product without making a commitment. Naturally, this leads to more users. Think of every free user as a “warm lead” that you can convert into a customer.

Furthermore, a large user base creates more brand visibility. You end up with more people talking about and sharing your product.

2. Provides Valuable User Feedback

With more users trying your product, you can access a broader range of feedback. This information helps your team identify ways to improve the product. It also helps you understand your product because you can distinguish between who would use it and who would pay for it.

3. Creates Opportunities for Upselling

Over time, freemium users become hooked on the core features and start to desire the rest. With the right incentives at the right time, converting them into customers is straightforward.

This is especially true for businesses that use your product as part of their workflow. Eventually, it becomes painful to switch to a new product.

4. Builds Brand Loyalty

Many people appreciate companies that allow them to try before they buy, and that positive experience can translate into long-term loyalty. Even if some users never convert, they might recommend your product to others.

What are the Disadvantages of Freemium Pricing?

Those benefits of freemium pricing sound great, right? Like all pricing models, there are some downsides. Understanding the challenges of freemium pricing will help you minimize their impact.

1. High Operational Costs with Free Users

Supporting a large base of non-paying users can get expensive. You’ll need to maintain servers, customer support, and other resources for users who may never convert to a paid plan. This is unsustainable if the cost of maintaining those users outweighs the revenue of paying customers.

2. Difficult to Monetize

In some cases, it can be challenging to find the sweet spot for monetization. Offering too few features in the free version can discourage sign-ups, while offering too many can hurt freemium conversion rates. Finding the right pricing structure requires constant testing and adjustment.

3. Potential Devaluation of Your Product

When users get something for free, they may not always perceive the product as valuable. This can make it harder to justify the price of your premium offerings. The perceived value of your product needs to be clear, or users might never consider upgrading.

Alternative Pricing Strategies

While the freemium business model is right for some organizations, it’s not the only option. Depending on your business model and goals, you may want to explore other pricing strategies.

In fact, it’s perfectly fine to use multiple pricing strategies at the same time. For instance, you might offer a free trial and then switch to usage-based pricing. Or you might go with a freemium model with premium features charged on a per-user basis.

The point here is that you have a lot of options, so it’s important to conduct thorough research to learn about your customer base and experiment with different models.

Let’s take a look at a few more of the popular pricing options.

1. Free Trial

Instead of offering a permanent free version, a free trial gives users access to all the product’s features for a limited time. The free trial period usually lasts seven to 30 days. Users feel a sense of urgency to decide whether to buy before the trial ends. Like freemium pricing, free trials let users experience the product before buying.

2. Tiered Pricing

Tiered pricing offers several plans at different price points, each with its own set of features. These additional tiers allow you to offer plans that meet the needs of different customer segments. If a user is willing to pay more, they get more value.

3. Usage-Based Pricing (Pay-as-You-Go)

In usage-based pricing, users only pay for what they use. It’s a great model to attract users who may be hesitant to commit to a flat subscription fee. For instance, a cloud services customer can’t pay much until they have users, but they also won’t use your product much.

4. Flat-Rate Pricing

Flat-rate pricing is the most basic model: users pay a single price for all features, typically on a monthly or annual basis. This pricing is easy to understand and appeals to users who want simplicity and predictability.

5. Per-User Pricing

Common in SaaS, per-user pricing charges customers based on the number of users who will access the product on the same team. It’s scalable and easy to understand, especially for businesses that want to manage costs as they grow.

Freemium Product FAQs

We dived deep into freemium pricing, but you may still have questions. These FAQs will help!

Is a Free Trial the Same as a Freemium?

No, a free trial provides temporary access to all features, while a freemium approach offers a limited feature set indefinitely. That said, free trials and premium models are often used together.

Does Freemium Pricing Increase the Number of Potential Customers?

Yes, it often attracts more users since there’s no upfront cost, which helps build a larger user base. But it only works if your free features are truly valuable for your potential customers.

Can Freemium Lead to a Loss of Income?

It can if too many users stay on the free plan without upgrading or if the cost to support them on the basic version exceeds revenue. To avoid this, it’s important to carefully select which features are free and which are paid and Implement a smart conversion strategy.

What Should You Consider Before Using Freemium Pricing?

Consider your core offering, customer acquisition costs, conversion strategies, support costs, and how to balance free versus paid features. All of these concepts work together as part of the freemium model.

How Do You Convert Free Users to a Premium Plan?

Convert users to premium plans by showing the value of premium features, using targeted messaging, and creating usage limits that encourage upgrades. Like all strategies, this requires careful research into your customer and experimentation to find the optimal balance.

What Percentage of Users Typically Convert From Free to Paid?

Conversion rates for freemium customers vary but are often between 2-5%, depending on the product and market. But that doesn’t mean that 5% is your ceiling. Some well-optimized product strategies have achieved greater conversion rates.

How Long Should You Expect Users to Stay on the Free Plan?

Many users will stay indefinitely, but successful conversion often occurs within the first few months. If you don’t see a reasonable number of conversions within the first three months, consider adjusting your conversion strategy.

Is Freemium Pricing Suitable for All SaaS Products?

Not always. It works best when there’s a clear upgrade path (basic services vs. premium services), and the free features provide value without giving away too much. Free features should also be relatively inexpensive for the SaaS to provide.

How Do You Avoid Cannibalizing Paid Sales With a Freemium Plan?

By offering enough value to free users without giving away advanced features that drive upgrades. If a majority of your users are sufficiently served by the free features, consider adding more limitations.

What Metrics Should You Track in a Freemium Model?

Track user acquisition, activation, average conversion rate, churn rate, and customer lifetime value.

Can Freemium Impact Brand Perception?

Yes, positively or negatively. A well-executed freemium can build goodwill, but a poor free offering can harm brand value. It’s a good idea to conduct some brand monitoring when you launch your freemium pricing product.

What are Some Common Mistakes SaaS Companies Make With Freemium?

Offering too many features for free, lacking a clear upgrade path, or failing to effectively monetize the user base. Alternatively, some companies leave too many features behind the premium tiers, which fails to attract enough users.

Is Freemium Pricing Right for You?

The freemium pricing strategy is a powerful technique, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for every digital product. And even if it makes sense for your product, it has to be handled carefully.

For many brands, the solution is to bring in an outside optimization team who will help you explore options and find the right path.

Our Digital Experience Optimization Program can help you unlock the full potential of your website, app, or digital product by optimizing the user experience according to your pricing strategy.

The post How To Use Freemium Pricing To Drive User Acquisition and Adoption appeared first on The Good.

The link sends you to a product page on an ecommerce website. You see the same binoculars but no mention of birds. It seems like a great device, but you wonder what makes them suited for bird watching.

Since you only visited the site to learn about the binoculars’ bird-watching advantages, you leave the page in frustration.

This misalignment between the marketing campaign and the destination page happens all the time. Shoppers often fail to find what they expect because a traditional product detail page is simply too general.

For these cases, we need landing pages. They’re similar to product detail pages, but they have a different purpose. They certainly don’t replace the product page. Both of these pages work together to create a high-converting digital experience.

Landing Page vs. Product Page

Landing pages and product detail pages are both important parts of your digital experience. This is true whether you run an ecommerce store, media platform, SaaS, or any digital product where you want visitors to take some kind of action.

However, these tools each serve different purposes, so they shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Knowing when to use each in the customer journey will make all the difference.

What is a Product Detail Page?

A product detail page (PDP) is the page of an ecommerce website where individual products are showcased in detail. The content of this page is designed to educate the customer on this specific product and provide all the information they need to make a purchase decision.

A well-optimized PDP is an important part of the marketing funnel. It builds trust, eliminates friction, and makes shoppers more comfortable about buying. It also improves the shopping experience and encourages repeat visits.

In our experience, the best PDPs include the following key elements:

• Clear and concise name of the product.
• A description of the product, highlighting its key features, benefits, and unique selling points.
• High-quality images from multiple angles.
• Videos demonstrating the product’s use or its features.
• The price of the product, including any discounts or special offers.
• Ratings and reviews from other customers.
• Technical specifications such as size, weight, color options, and materials.
• Information on product variants (e.g., different colors or sizes).
• Real-time stock status.
• Prominent buttons like “Add to Cart,” “Buy Now,” or “Add to Wishlist” to encourage conversions.
• Suggestions for similar or complementary products.

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a page designed to complement a marketing campaign. It’s where visitors land after interacting with off-site marketing techniques like ads, affiliate links, and social media posts.

A landing page is focused on driving customers further down the funnel and may not be geared toward one product. They provide education and information in the context of the marketing campaign.

For instance, if the campaign is directed at dog lovers, the landing page should speak directly to dog lovers, even if the product is applicable to different kinds of pets.

Oura Rings is a great example of a product landing page. It’s informational and targeted toward tech enthusiasts who also care about style. (They have traditional product detail pages as well.)

What is the Difference Between a Landing Page and a Product Detail Page?

The major difference between a product detail page (PDP) and a landing page is context.

Visitors usually arrive on a product detail page from a category page. There’s a heavy shopping mindset at play here. Visitors are specifically looking for products and comparing options. It doesn’t align with a specific campaign, so it doesn’t target a specific audience segment or problem.

A landing page, however, is “landed on” from an external site (or email). Since visitors will view the content through the lens of the marketing campaign that brought them to the page (usually reading from top to bottom), it should match the campaign in terms of target audience, tone, and offer.

This means you can customize the content of a landing page based on visitors’ reasons for arriving. You can lean in on whatever angle you used to get people to the page in the first place.

Landing Page vs. Product Page Comparison Chart

Do Landing Pages Convert Better Than Product Pages?

The trend we have seen across our clients is that sending traffic to a landing page is better for the user journey and, therefore, a strong tactic to increase conversions.

This is due to the alignment between the landing page and the marketing campaign. If a paid ad claims the product helps busy parents save time, and the landing page says the same, the visitor is reassured that the product meets the ad’s promise.

Conversely, product detail pages have lower conversions because there’s little connection between a paid ad and the page’s content. The visitor is left to figure it out for themselves.

“It’s all around context for the visitor,” says Jon McDonald, founder of The Good. “The visitor is not going to know everything about your product or your brand as well as you do. Sending them to the product detail page is making too many assumptions. [You’re assuming] that the consumer will figure everything out for themselves, and that’s just not true. So sending them to a dedicated landing page will increase your conversion rates.”

Can I Use a Product Page as a Landing Page?

Yes, but we wouldn’t recommend it. It’s best to have unique, dedicated landing pages for specific marketing efforts. This lets you align the landing page with the campaign’s goals and the customer’s journey.

Should I Drive Traffic to a PDP or a Landing Page?

Typically, you should drive traffic to a landing page. This lets you align the page with the audience who sees the off-site message. This connection improves the odds that the visitor will be educated and properly primed by the landing page content and purchase the product.

Even so, there are exceptions to every rule. You may choose to send traffic to a product-specific landing page or a product page based on what a shopper is searching for.

For instance, suppose a shopper searches for a “podcasting microphone.” In this case, the shopper needs education because they don’t know what they want to buy yet, so you should link them to a landing page that’s optimized for “podcasting microphones.”

But if the shopper searches for “Shure SM7dB Dynamic Microphone,” it’s a safe bet that they’re past the need for information and are ready to buy. You can send them right to the product page.

The same is true if someone searches for a model number. That person knows what they need, so it’s best to get out of their way by putting as few barriers between them and the sale as possible.

As you can see, it is all about creating a seamless customer journey and moving shoppers through your funnel. In most cases, that means sending paid traffic to a landing page.

How to Create and Optimize Landing Pages

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of driving paid traffic to landing pages let’s walk through some best practices to help you craft landing page designs that create a great user experience and push your visitors down the sales funnel. We’ll also show off some landing page examples.

Define Your Goals and Target Audience

Before you start building a landing page, it’s important to understand exactly who you’re creating the page for and what you want to achieve.

Keep in mind that a dedicated landing page doesn’t just sell products. It can capture leads through an ebook, webinar, or demo sign-up or thank visitors after they make a purchase or subscribe to your email list. Define what your page should accomplish before you build anything.

Note: For the sake of this article, we use a lot of product-focused landing page examples, but your goals may vary.

Then, consider your audience. This target audience might include your entire customer base or just a segment of it. This should be the same audience you use in the aligned off-site marketing campaign.

Refer to your internal data to familiarize yourself with the page’s audience. Make sure you understand the types of words and images that are most effective for those people.

Create a Benefit-Focused Headline

Without a doubt, a compelling headline is the most important element on your landing page. This bit of copy should focus on benefits, not features. You aren’t necessarily describing the product; you’re explaining how the visitor’s life will be better with it.

Again, refer to your repository of knowledge about your customer to find the perfect words to suit their unique situation for your landing page headline.

Creatorpreneur is an effective product landing page example here. Notice how it uses specific words in the headline and subheading that appeal to its audience, like “creative,” “scale up,” and “sustainable growth.”

Match Images and Copy to Your Audience

Unlike a product detail page, where you show stark images of your product, your landing page offers the freedom and space to get more creative.

This is the place to use images and video to form a human connection. Use big lifestyle photos, explainer videos, and full-width hero images. A relevant video can increase your conversions by 86%.

Most importantly, match your media to your copy. If your headline and supporting text refer to athletes, your pictures and videos should include them as well.

It’s no surprise that Apple’s MacBook Air landing page is top-notch. It’s full of large, powerful images and clear language that appeals to tech-loving creatives. An image doesn’t do this page justice, so make sure to visit to explore the interactive elements.

Keep the Important Information Above the Fold

Visitors are more likely to stay with your page if they see the most important information right away without having to scroll. We refer to this section using an old newspaper phrase: “above the fold.”

What goes above the fold? Your headline, value proposition, clear call-to-action (which could be a button or form), and usually some kind of media that helps the visitors connect with the content.

Peloton smartly keeps all of the important information right at the top. The call-to-action sends you to a product detail page (that’s also worth checking out).

Let Them Buy If They Want

The call-to-action on a landing page typically links to a product detail page, but some visitors may decide to buy while they are still on the landing page. For these people, it’s smart to give them a shortcut by offering an “add to cart” button somewhere on the page.

Generally, it’s best to keep this option out of the way, perhaps in a sticky bar at the top or bottom or a slide-out sidebar. Notice how the landing page for Cowboy e-bikes has a sticky section at the bottom so visitors always have a path toward conversion.

Of course, this is only relevant if the page’s goal is to sell something. If you have some other goal, a link to purchase might be a distraction.

Include Social Proof

People prefer to buy from brands they trust, which is why social proof is such an important part of marketing. Case studies, testimonials, ratings, reviews, and even an indicator of the number of times a page was shared on Facebook can make people feel better about your products.

But not all social proof is equal. Some are more powerful, depending on the product and the audience. For instance, an endorsement from a basketball player on basketball sneakers is always going to ring louder than an endorsement from, well, anyone else.

The Dyson Corrale is a great landing page example. Notice how it uses three kinds of social proof: a rating system, customer reviews, and user-generated content from social media.

Remove Navigation and Distractions

Typically, a landing page is not for browsing. The purpose is for the visitor to consume the content and then move forward in the predetermined direction via the call-to-action.

This means any other opportunities on the page to navigate somewhere else are simple distractions. It’s best to eliminate or minimize them.

This means no header, footer, sidebar, or navigation menu. You might decide to make your logo clickable on your homepage so visitors don’t get stuck, but otherwise, only the call-to-action should be clickable.

Use Straight-Forward Calls-to-Action

Your landing page should provide plenty of information for visitors, but ultimately its goal is to encourage them to take the next step. This means you need a call-to-action.

Your call-to-action will depend on the purpose of the page. Landing pages generally don’t sell products, but they can. In most cases, your landing page will send the visitor to a product detail page, capture their email address, encourage them to share, etc.

For the best conversion rates, use simple and clear language for your calls to action. Don’t try to make them clever or witty. Get right to the point. For instance, Medik8’s regime-builder uses a simple, clear, and impossible-to-miss call to action.

We also find it helpful to use the first person in your calls to action. It helps the visitor identify with the action better. Here are some examples:

• Download My Free Guide
• Grab My Webinar Seat
• Choose My Subscription Tier

Finally, make sure your call to action fulfills its promise. If you promise a guide on the next screen, it must be there. Otherwise, you’ll lose all credibility.

Optimize for Search Engines and Google Shopping

Good SEO helps people find your pages through search engines. This is an important way to bring people to your page organically without spending money on ads.

Even better, you should optimize your pages specifically for Google Shopping. This can enhance your visibility and attract more potential customers to your site. Combined with a robust product feed, Google is more likely to display your products in their search results.

Here are some strategies to ensure your landing page is optimized for Google Shopping:

• Include relevant keywords and key attributes (brand, product type, color, size) in your product titles and product descriptions.
• Use high-resolution images that meet Google’s specifications.
• Implement structured data markup to provide Google with detailed information about your products, including price, availability, and reviews.
• Ensure that the information on your landing page matches the information in your Google Shopping product feed.
• Design your landing page to be clean, attractive, and easy to navigate.
• Ensure your landing page is device-friendly and mobile-friendly.
• Optimize your page for quick loading.
• Use clear, descriptive URLs that include relevant keywords.
• Optimize meta titles and descriptions to improve click-through rates from search results.
• Ensure your product feed is regularly updated to reflect accurate information.
• Use tools like Google Merchant Center to identify and fix any errors in your product feed.

Test and Optimize Your Page

It’s important to optimize your landing page over time through iterative testing. Use A/B testing or rapid tests to determine which elements are working/not working and how your page can better reach its customers and goals.

Testing can also benefit more than a specific landing page, as you can apply what you learn to other pages on your site or your organization as a whole.

Consider Your User to Deliver the Right Digital Journey

When deciding whether to drive traffic to a landing page for a product detail page, it’s important to think about the user and their journey. Landing pages are the right choice when paired with marketing campaigns—such as paid ads—because they create a seamless experience for the user.

We typically recommend driving traffic to a landing page for a better, tailored customer journey. However, there are a few niche cases where it’s right to send traffic directly to a product detail page.

If you aren’t sure which is right for your unique situation, connect with us. We can help you optimize your visitor’s digital experience by building an optimization program that keeps you focused on what is proven to move the needle.

Learn more about our Digital Experience Optimization Program.

The post Driving Paid Traffic To A Landing Page vs. Product Page: What Is Better? appeared first on The Good.

According to the US Click-and-Collect Forecast 2022, US consumers spent $96 billion on BOPIS orders in 2022, which accounts for 9% of all ecommerce sales.

Nearly two-thirds of US retail chains offer these “click and collect” services, and for good reason, as 72% of US consumers say they are more likely to buy online from a store that offers BOPIS services.

There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic played a role here. Many customers used buy-online-pickup-in-store and curbside pickup options simply to avoid crowds.

Businesses offering larger or more complicated products also often offer BOPIS to make sure customers get exactly what they want (and need). For example, a motorcycle or bike shop might allow you to customize and purchase online but encourage you to pick up in-store to get your seat custom-fit before riding off into the sunset.

And BOPIS shows no sign of slowing down. According to the Global Buy Online Pick Up In Store Marketplace Forecast, the global BOPIS industry was worth $243.89 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to $703.2 billion in 2027.

BOPIS is a key part of an omnichannel retail strategy and a personalized customer experience. It blends the in-store and online experiences so customers can choose how and when they get their products. So, in order to be competitive, it’s important that you understand and offer BOPIS services.

What is BOPIS (or BOPUS)?

BOPIS meaning: Buy Online, Pickup In-Store is a shopping method where customers buy products through an online platform and then pick them up at a physical location instead of waiting for delivery.

BOPIS is sometimes abbreviated as BOPUS. It also goes by other names, like curbside pickup, click and reserve, online order pickup, click and collect, or “Buy Online, Collect In-Store” (BOCIS). It’s all the same process.

When you shop like this, you get all of the convenience of browsing for products at home without having to wait days–or weeks–for delivery. In some cases, the store will bring it out to your car for you.

Retailers like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy have embraced BOPIS to bridge the gap between online convenience and the immediacy of in-store shopping. Stores love this arrangement because it means they claw back an online sale that might otherwise go to online-first retailers like Amazon and can leverage their existing physical store network.

How BOPIS Works

The BOPUS business model is pretty simple: The customer orders online but collects the item at a physical location. Let’s walk through the shopping and order fulfillment process.

Step 1. Customers Buy Online Through Your Website or App

A customer browses your website or app until they find the products they need. They add those products to their shopping cart like they would for any online purchase.

At some point during the digital experience, the customer is given the option to have the item delivered or pick it up at a local physical location. In some cases, the customer must also select a time to pick up the item.

In order for this to work, stores must enable real-time inventory updates between the local POS system and the website or app. Otherwise, a customer may purchase a product that’s out of stock at their desired location.

Step 2: The Retailer Fulfills the Order

Next, the website or app sends the order to the chosen physical store. Employees are notified of the order and instructed to pick it off the shelf and prepare it for pickup.

A notification is then sent to the customer that the item is ready to pick up. In email form, they look something like this:

If, for some reason, the item isn’t available, the employees must trigger a message that notifies the customer and lets them know what happens next. In some cases, an out-of-stock item can be sourced from a nearby location, as long as the customer is informed along the way.

Step 3: The Customer Retrieves the Order

Finally, the customer picks up the order at your store. Depending on your click-and-collect strategy, they may pick it up at a third-party location, such as the post office, a UPS/FedEx location, or a local locker specifically for ecommerce pickups.

If the store has the resources, they may offer curbside pickup, where the customer drives right up to the store, and an employee promptly delivers the item right to the car.

Why BOPIS is Effective for Ecommerce Businesses

Now that you understand how BOPIS works, you might be wondering why you should bother. Let’s explore the perks of buy-online-pickup-in-store services and why they’re a great opportunity for retailers.

Boosting Customer Satisfaction

BOPUS offers customers the convenience of online shopping with the instant gratification of picking up their purchases in-store. This creates a better shopping experience for many customers who simply don’t want to wait.

Is it right for every customer? Of course not, which is why BOPUS can always be an option, but never mandatory.

Reducing Shipping Costs

The customer always pays for shipping, whether the shipping fee is added at checkout or built into the cost of the products.

If the shipping fee is an add-on, the customer can avoid it by retrieving the items themselves. For example, with furniture retailers, shipping costs can quickly get into triple digits because of item size. So, picking up the item can save hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars.

If the shipping fee is built into the price, the store keeps the extra portion even though they aren’t shipping the item. This simply increases the margin.

This is a big win for customers, as well. It’s the top reason people like BOPIS.

Driving In-Store Traffic

BOPUS brings customers into your brick-and-mortar store to pick up their orders. This creates an opportunity for additional sales. More foot traffic means additional purchases, as stores can capitalize on impulse buys and cross-selling opportunities.

Enhancing Customer Relationships

When customers pick up their orders in-store, businesses have a chance to interact with them face-to-face, strengthening the bond between the brand and the customer.

These personalized interactions foster trust and loyalty, which ultimately leads to long-term customer relationships and deeper customer satisfaction.

Encouraging Returns and Exchanges

BOPUS simplifies the returns and exchanges process by allowing customers to handle them in person, even if they made the purchase online. This provides a convenient solution for resolving issues, reduces return shipping costs for the business, and minimizes the time and resources spent on processing returns.

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How to Display BOPIS on Your Site (with Examples)

Displaying the BOPIS option on your site is relatively straightforward. Your job is to introduce it during the browsing experience so customers can’t miss it.

Let’s walk through the BOPIS process using Target as an example.

1. Build a BOPIS Landing Page

Shoppers may need a little help understanding your BOPIS model, especially if they’ve never used this kind of system before. It’s smart to build a simple landing page that explains how it works for your store.

Target does a great job here. Their page includes everything you need, including links to download the app, instructions for how to use it, returns information, and even a Starbucks upsell.

2. Have the Customer Select a Location

At some point during the process, the customer will need to select their preferred location. When you click the location link at the top-left of any Target page, an overlay appears that offers store options. Selecting a store saves it for your future orders.

3. Provide the BOPIS Option on Product Pages

Give customers the option to select BOPIS on each product page. This helps them plan the rest of their shopping experience.

Target smartly uses a visual selector on the product page. It’s impossible to miss. Additional information is provided beneath the selector, including the current location, pickup time, and order availability.

Clicking the “Check other stores” link gives the user the option to change stores. This is helpful if the product is out-of-stock at their usual store or if they prefer to pick it up at a different location (perhaps they’ll be in the area).

4. Give BOPIS and Delivery Options in the Shopping Cart

It’s smart to present the BOPIS-or-delivery choice on the shopping cart page as well. This is helpful for customers who chose incorrectly on the product page (some people shop quickly!) or may want different options for each product. Include a “change store” link as well.

Optimizing the BOPUS/BOPIS Experience

Now that we’ve outlined the core moments in a BOPIS web journey, let’s talk about optimizing the experience. Your job is to present this choice in a simple, pain-free way without distracting from the checkout process.

1. Pre-fill Important Details During The BOPIS Experience

Modern shoppers want more than a frictionless online shopping experience. They want a dynamic experience that’s tailored to their needs and preferences.

The most straightforward way to personalize the BOPIS experience is to give the customer the ability to select their preferred store. Better yet, meet customer expectations and reduce distractions by using geolocation to identify and select the closest store for them.

Next, promote local offerings based on user-selected stores. For instance, if a customer selects your Cincinnati, Ohio location, show them promotions specific to that location.

2. Set Proper Expectations on Your BOPIS Landing Page

Remember that landing page we spoke about earlier? Here are some tips to make it effective:

• Make it easily findable in your main navigation.
• Clearly explain how BOPIS works. Provide step-by-step instructions for the entire process, including the in-person part.
• Mention any special promotions or deals they get for using BOPIS.
• Include a dynamic section that displays any local promotions for the currently chosen store or an opportunity to replace anything that is unavailable.

3. Optimize Local Landing Pages

If you have landing pages for each store, it’s important to optimize them as well. They should include information about your BOPIS program and/or a link to the main BOPIS landing page. Use proper schema markup so it displays properly as a Google Business page.

For the sake of customer convenience, include any information the customer needs about the location, like directions, store hours, and additional departments or services that may be available.

Check out this great landing page from DressUp.

4. Mitigate Errors on Product and Category Pages

Your product and category pages that offer BOPIS services should clearly identify which location offers them. There can be no confusion here. If a customer shows up at the wrong store, they will not be happy, even if the mistake is their own fault.

Furthermore, clicking the store’s label should give the customer the option to change locations. This process should be simple and intuitive without breaking the checkout flow.

5. Make Sure Your Website and/or App is Bug-Free and Speedy

Make sure all of your BOPIS components are mobile-friendly and functional on all browsers and devices, including your landing page, store selector, and other widgets. Broken tech is one of the surest ways to lose a sale.

Furthermore, take care to integrate your website/app with your inventory tracking system. Whatever software guides your BOPIS system needs to know inventory levels at each location.

6. Establish a Pick-Up Location

Designating a pick-up location seems like a minor part of the process, but it’s actually a key step. Remember that your customers are using BOPIS because it’s convenient. If they spend 10 minutes looking for the pickup location, you might wipe out all of their time savings.

Put your pickup station near your main entrance at the customer service desk or a specialty desk for online customers. Label it clearly with obvious signage. And make sure your team is ready to verify the order and hand over the products quickly.

7. Keep Your Customer Updated

Customer engagement is key here. Since BOPIS requires your customers to appear in person, it’s critical that you keep them updated regarding the process of your order.

On one hand, you want them to arrive as soon as the order is ready to reduce their wait, but if you notify them too soon, there’s a chance they show up before you’ve picked out their order.

Keep your customer well informed about the process. Notify them when you receive the order, when you start picking it, and when it’s ready. Include clear instructions to help them collect it, especially regarding what they have to do (visit a desk, reply to a text, etc.).

Target notifies customers with push notifications. Customers can respond in-app to the BOPIS team with questions or instructions.

8. Build BOPIS Into Your Marketing

Your BOPIS system is a marketing asset, so make sure to include it in your promotions. Send regular reminders to your audience about their ability to pick up in person.

If you promote to local customers with social media ads or display ads, indicate somewhere that your products are eligible for local pickup.

BOPIS should also make an appearance in your cart abandonment emails in case they object to your delivery times.

Common Questions About Buy Online, Pick Up In Store

Still have questions about BOPIS and how it works? Here are some common questions people ask about buy-online-pickup-in-store.

What is the difference between BOPIS and curbside pickup?

BOPIS involves customers ordering online and picking up their purchases inside the store. Curbside pickup, on the other hand, allows customers to remain in their vehicles while store staff bring their orders directly to their car, so the transaction is completely contactless.

Is BOPIS the same as click and collect?

Yes, BOPIS (Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store) and click and collect refer to the same service. Both terms describe the process of customers purchasing items online and then picking them up at a physical store location.

What is ROPIS?

ROPIS stands for Reserve Online, Pick Up In-Store. It’s a service similar to BOPIS, where customers reserve items online and then pick them up and pay at a designated store location. This approach allows customers to secure specific items before visiting the store, but they still have to pay in person.

How long does it take for BOPIS orders to be ready for pickup?

Typically, BOPIS orders are ready for pickup within a few hours to one business day, depending on store policies and order volume. Stores send a notification when orders are ready for collection.

Does BOPIS allow for returns or exchanges?

Generally, most stores allow returns and exchanges for items purchased through BOPIS. Some stores require customers to bring it back to the original location, whereas others allow returns at any location.

Is there a fee for using the BOPIS service?

In most cases, BOPIS is offered as a complimentary service, though some stores have minimum order requirements or fees for expedited pickups.

What are the disadvantages of BOPIS?

Potential disadvantages include limited product availability, longer wait times during peak periods, possible confusion with order pickups, and the need for customers to travel to the store, which may not be feasible for everyone.

BOPIS and Your Digital Experience

Buy-online-pickup-in-store is just one small component of your business model and entire digital experience. It works alongside the other features of your online presence to create a streamlined, robust, and personalized shopping experience for your customers.

If you’re looking for strategies to improve, our Digital Experience Optimization Program is a custom plan for ecommerce and product marketing teams that unlocks the full potential of your website, app, or digital product. Learn more.

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The post BOPIS: How Buy Online, Pick Up In Store Works and How to Improve the Experience appeared first on The Good.

Why does this happen? Well, in the case of Google Shopping, those users are often in a comparison mode. When the product page was invented, the only way to get there was via the homepage and global navigation on your site.

But, users are now going straight to the product without even walking in your proverbial front door.

When our team looks at data and runs interviews with prospects, we hear that they are often net-new and they are trying to maximize by comparing your products to others.

So they are comparison shopping, and that can cause you to lose sales.

But, you can stand out from competitors and turn the challenges caused by users landing on PDPs into a strength.

This is the recipe for success to convert more of your product page traffic and make the most of the holiday visitors.

Step 1: Understand your customers

Before you do anything, you have to build your understanding of your audience through user insights. That means figuring out where they are coming from, how they are behaving, and what is important to them.

We categorize user insights into three buckets:

Foundational (Observation): Foundational user insights are observations, or facts about behavior that are foundational to understanding the user journey. On their own, they do not signify challenges or blockers to conversion, but they give context that is important to understanding the user and painting a fuller picture of a user experience.

Often, these are discovered through tools like Google Analytics and can help us understand:

• How the users are behaving on site
• What content they engage with
• Truths about users like age and location

Foundational insights will only shift slowly over time or with new campaigns.

Situational (UX Challenges): Situational insights are pain points that impede the user’s ability to navigate the site and reach their goals. While users are not necessarily aware of these UX challenges, the issues can delay or prevent positive outcomes like task completion, conversion, or user satisfaction.

These insights can help you understand:

• What works on your site
• How much effort it takes a user to convert
• If users are satisfied with their experience

These show if users can complete a task to their satisfaction when given a context and an interface.

Motivational: These largely qualitative insights are about mindset. Users may experience apprehension or lack motivation when the product or experience does not align with their wants, needs, or commitment level. So, motivational insights give us context to how we might better understand users.

Issues of motivation or apprehension represent a disconnect between what users want, the effort they are willing to expel, and the perceived payoff of that effort.

Motivational insights answer questions like:

• What motivates users to purchase?
• Are users connecting to our product?
• What is holding users back from purchasing today?

Conducting regular research to understand your users will help you pinpoint why users aren’t buying from you today and build a better shopping experience tomorrow. Beyond Google Analytics, use the below tools to collect user insights:  

• User testing
• Heat mapping
• Observational analysis
• Surveys

Step 2: Define the Opportunities and Solutions

After step 1, we should understand our users. We know:

• Foundationally, who they are and how they are behaving on-site
• If users complete desired tasks and if they are satisfied with their experience
• What motivates users and what demotivates them

But it’s one thing to have that insight; it’s another to know what to do with it.

Every site is different, but let’s take a look at some treatments that all aim to solve similar problems.

We mentioned that for Google Shopping or other paid traffic, the product page is likely one of the top entry points to your site. Let’s imagine that 60% of your sessions start on a product page and that you have a high bounce rate.

We know why: many users who land on your site from a Google product listing will be comparison shopping. They likely have multiple tabs open and they are going tab to tab comparing products.

So, the opportunity is to increase intentional browsing. It’s not enough to just slap a product page up with some generic copy and call it a day. What you want to do is encourage users to browse the parent category and explore more products rather than abandoning the site if the product doesn’t meet their needs.

You want them to stay on your website instead of going to your competitor’s site which sells the same or a very similar product.

A few ways you’ll notice brands encourage users to stay on-site include:

• Adding breadcrumbs that allow for easy on-site navigation
• Featuring more shopping pathways in the buy box area
• Show recommended products above the fold
• Establish trust and authority on the PDP

All of this increases the likelihood that even if shoppers don’t land on the perfect product, they can explore more like it.

Step 3: Validate Your Solutions

You’ve done steps 1 and 2: understand users and conversion barriers and define the opportunities and solutions. Now it’s time to validate your solutions.

We’ve gathered all this great data, and I recommend you don’t stop there. There’s a difference between being data-informed and actually data-driven.

That’s the real secret to leveling up against your competition: validate

Taking good ideas to your designers and throwing them on your site is a shotgun or spray-and-pray approach. Some of the ideas will work, and some won’t. Industry-wide, that percentage is only 10-20% of ideas actually convert better, so up to 90% of development effort is totally wasted.

So, instead of shotgunning, we recommend a systematic approach. Strategically validate some of the riskier decisions with rapid prototyping and tactics, including:

• A/B Testing
• Task Completion Analysis
• Sentiment Testing

There you have it. You’re losing sales to competitors on traffic you paid for because the users are comparison shopping. You can fix it by following our three-step approach: understand your users, identify opportunities and solutions, and validate your ideas.

Dig Deeper

• Dive into the evaluative research methods you can use to support your effort to be a data-driven organization: What is Rapid Testing and How is it Different from A/B Testing?
• Explore strategies to convert comparison shoppers on your site and make the most of Google Shopping traffic: How to Optimize Your Google Shopping Traffic and Improve Your Ecommerce Bounce Rate  

The post Why am I losing sales to competitors on paid traffic? And how do I fix it? appeared first on The Good.

While we focus on the on-site experience and don’t run optimization programs specifically for email marketing, we’ve collected plenty of learnings on the topic after 15+ years optimizing the digital experience for ecommerce and product marketing teams.

We recently answered the question “how do I improve sales from email?” for a client, and I thought our audience might like to know the answer. Here’s a summary to get you started.

1. Analyze last year’s holiday email marketing campaign

Before diving into the nitty-gritty of this year’s holiday email campaign, analyze the previous year’s Black Friday & Cyber Monday campaigns. This can help inform the upcoming holiday season sales.

Looking at YOY sessions and ecommerce data highlights trends and identifies what days have the highest potential for conversions. In this client’s case, we saw the day before Cyber Monday had the highest revenue and conversion rate, indicating an opportunity to remind users of the sales end date and create a sense of urgency.

Understanding your peak conversion days can help you focus your marketing efforts on the most fruitful periods.

2. Review landing page performance and optimize emails accordingly

Analytics also provides insight into what landing pages perform best. For this client, we saw users who landed on the homepage or a category page rather than directly on a product page converted the most often. This indicates that users needed more information about the company and other products it offers before being ready to decide on and purchase a product.

We can’t assume that just because someone is on your email subscribers list, they’re a devoted brand loyalist. Instead of linking to individual products in your email, try linking them to the main category page to encourage exploration. Shoppers can utilize the information you already have on your site to make product decisions rather than relying on the content you can fit in the email.

Holiday shoppers want to learn more about the brand and compare products. They don’t necessarily want to make a decision about a product in the email and navigate directly to the product page.

FREE EBOOK

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A Guide to Email Marketing For Ecommerce Businesses

3. Use data-backed tips to write holiday email marketing copy

Effective copywriting is the backbone of a successful ecommerce holiday email campaign. To maximize your campaign’s impact, we’ve gathered some simple but data-backed copywriting tips that have improved sales from email for clients:

Quantify the deal

Remind users of the value they are getting with language like “the best deal you’ll get all year.” Providing tangible metrics, specific calls to action, and emphasizing the savings can capture the recipient’s attention and interest.

Here’s an example from Fitbit, who shares that “the biggest deals of the year are here.”

Create a sense of urgency

Presenting a timeline for the special offers can create a sense of urgency and drive action. Phrases like “ends tomorrow at midnight!” can be more effective than vague statements like “save all weekend long.” Users are more likely to act when they perceive a limited time to take advantage of a deal.

Check out this header from Grammarly’s Black Friday sale emphasizing “one day only.”

Highlight your unique value proposition

Don’t just focus on the deal; emphasize the synergy between the incredible offer and your outstanding products. Make it clear in your email that users aren’t only getting a great deal but also a high-quality product that aligns with your brand’s value proposition.

The sub-header in this Canon email says “Gift now. Create year-round.” The message emphasizes not only the brand value of sharing moments together during holiday time (gift now) but that their product is a creative gift that keeps giving (create year-round).

4. Segment your subscribers and personalize your campaign

Segment your email list based on user data like purchase history, browsing behavior, and engagement levels. Send custom messages that will resonate with each audience.

For example, some clients create segments for loyal customers who have previously made multiple purchases, potential customers who have shown interest but haven’t converted yet, and inactive subscribers who need reengagement.

Tailor your email content to cater to the specific needs and preferences of each group.

5. Validate your email content (and your offer)

Experiment with different elements such as email subject lines, images, CTA buttons, and email content. By comparing the performance of different versions, you can fine-tune your emails to maximize engagement and conversions.

To get ahead of the competition, don’t wait to A/B test during your holiday email marketing campaign. Instead, get early and quick validation from rapid testing. Here are two rapid testing methods you could try:

Preference tests

Preference testing takes multiple designs or pieces of copy and presents them to the tester by asking, “which one of these do you prefer?” or “which one of these do you think is more effective?”

You can display multiple options of your email, offer, copy, or images to get quick feedback from qualified users on what to implement.

5-second tests

5-second tests show users an image for five seconds, take it down, and then ask them what they remember seeing.

Use this test to validate your email layout and to make sure that you are communicating the main message quickly and effectively to your target audience. The test helps you understand what a reader’s first impressions will be and what stands out visually.

Set your holiday email marketing up for success

Optimizing your ecommerce holiday email campaign requires a combination of data analysis, effective copywriting, and strategic execution.

By leveraging insights from past holiday email campaigns, segmenting your email list, crafting engaging content, and creating a sense of urgency, you can increase your chances of a successful holiday season.

The key is to focus on improving the user experience by understanding your customers’ needs. Then, you’ll be able to provide obvious value that meets them where they are.

The post 5 Ways to Improve Sales from Your Holiday Email Marketing Campaign appeared first on The Good.

Digital products can leverage the same strategy. Instead of using landing pages, demos, ads, and clever copywriting to sell the product, why not just let the user try it for free?

Of course, free trials and freemium models aren’t new. But many SaaS leaders fail to optimize this unique type of customer experience and let the product drive growth.

That’s where the ROPES framework can help.

Created for SaaS leaders, the model we explore in this article will help answer key questions, including:

• What are the key stages of a product-led growth customer journey?
• What core competencies does a team need to drive growth via the product?
• What metrics and milestones are important to track for a free trial or freemium product?
• How can we make the most of subscribers by retaining and reducing churn?

Keep reading to explore the growth levers you can pull to drive product-led growth.

The Old Customer Experience Model

While there are several frameworks for the customer experience, they tend to overemphasize the importance of marketing and break down when applied to free trials and freemium products.

Take the RACE framework, for instance. This popular framework consists of a series of steps to help brands engage their customers throughout the customer lifecycle.

But this framework – and many like it – are almost entirely devoted to marketers doing the marketing. It says very little about the period when users actually use the product.

When it comes to freemium products or free trial products, marketing doesn’t make the sale. The product does the work.

In this case, the success of a product is not based on how well a brand communicates with a customer before the conversion. It’s based on how well the product solves real problems for its users. The product leads the growth.

What is Product-Led Growth?

Product-led growth is a strategy that emphasizes the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.

Companies that successfully implement a product-led growth strategy often benefit from increased customer loyalty, higher conversion rates, lower customer acquisition costs, and sustainable long-term growth.

Traditionally, companies have relied on sales and marketing tactics to create leads and drive customer adoption. Ads and websites had to do most of the selling, and the onus was on the potential user to read ads, navigate websites, choose between feature matrices, and at times go through a complicated sales process (on or offsite).

In a product-led growth model, companies remove as many obstacles as possible to acquiring free registered users.

This approach often involves offering a free or freemium version of the product, allowing users to experience its value before committing to a paid subscription. If the experience is good enough to keep them using it, and the paid features are valuable enough, then the hope is that users will ultimately convert into paying customers. In this way, the product serves as the main vehicle for customer acquisition and expansion. Companies focus on building a product that is intuitive, user-friendly, and delivers immediate value to customers.

Free trials and freemium models are popular with companies like Canva, Adobe, and Spotify. Just like test driving a car, they let you test drive their product and discover the value on your own, before making a purchase decision. Freemium models also work well for digital publishers who give away some content for free, but lock premium content behind a paywall.

To see this in action, learn how The Telegraph improved its onboarding experience and increased subscriptions.

Free Trial/Freemium and the Revolution in Product Experience

The move toward freemium and free trial models has fueled the product-led growth era.

While product-led companies like Apple have been proving the value of good design for decades, one primary activation point for this product-first approach is the rise of freemium and free trial models.

Let’s talk definitions for a second.

Freemium

The freemium model is a customer acquisition model providing access to some of a product to a potential customer for free without a time limit.

Freemium products like Spotify and Canva offer a free, slimmed-down version of a product to build a large base of free users. When the free version is clearly valuable, there is a low barrier to entry, so users sign up willingly. During use, users discover that the tool ultimately provides enough free value that users will stick around and continue to engage with the freemium version. (Example: Loom) Ideally, as their reliance on the tool grows, so do their needs, and they eventually convert to a paid user.

Free Trial

A free trial, on the other hand, is a customer acquisition model providing a partial or complete product to a potential customer for free for only a limited amount of time.

Free trials for robust productivity products like Airtable are great because they allow users to explore the full capabilities of the tool before making a purchase decision. The urgency created by a limited-time trial inspires the user to take action before the trial ends.

Note that some companies use both the freemium and free trials models, such as The New York Times and Canva.

The promise of any free-to-paid model is that if the product can build enough value into the free version, while still gating certain features, users will build reliance on the free version. When they eventually tire of the limitations imposed on free users, they’ll convert from free to paid and upgrade to access more features.

Product Led Growth and Traditional Sales Models

In both freemium and free trial models, the user’s evaluation period is deferred. Instead of deciding if the product is worth the money based on landing pages, demos, webinars, and marketing materials, users make decisions based on the real value the product brings to their life.

This diminishes the length of the up-front consideration period and places the evaluation period inside of the product use phase.

In essence, a user’s likelihood to convert has less and less to do with how compelling sales content is. It has a one-to-one relationship with engaging onboarding and a great product experience.

The formula becomes refreshingly simple: If the product creates more value than its cost, people will buy.

And the effect is good for users. By allowing users to test drive the product, we necessitate a good product experience. Because users make a purchase decision based on the potential of the product to solve their problem, companies are incentivized to make great products—from great onboarding and tutorials to ease of use and even feature expansion.

But what does it take to be product-led? While there are a number of frameworks that dictate how to market and convert using a traditional sales model, the existing literature on how to build products that do the selling is scarce.

We need a new framework for designing a great customer experience where the product is front and center.

That’s why we’ve created  The ROPES framework.

Introducing the ROPES Framework

The ROPES framework is designed to help product-first leaders think about, optimize, and improve the end-to-end customer experience.

It covers everything from registration to cancellation and will help product-led companies:

• Define key stages in the customer journey
• Identify important metrics to measure each stage, and
• Understand the elements, forces, and factors that help or hinder engagement at each stage of the customer journey

Let’s walk through the ROPES framework. We’ll explain how our model can be used to understand what makes a great product experience, what levers you can pull at each stage of the customer journey to improve acquisition, conversion, and retention metrics, as well as who on a SaaS product team should be leading the phase.

Stage 1: Registration

The first part of a product-led strategy is the registration stage. This is where you present the product in a compelling way that makes people want to register. Your goal is to get them into the product as quickly as possible. Your tools are ads, navigation, banners, paywalls, pricing tables, and the signup experience.

This stage should be driven by the marketing team in collaboration with UX designers. They should work to make signing up as simple and painless as possible. Aim for ease of use, low perceived effort level, and minimal hoop-jumping throughout the registration process.

Your registration form should avoid asking unnecessary questions, as longer forms get lower conversion rates. Instead, you can collect the information later to personalize the product to user needs and mine data.

Key metrics of the registration stage:

• Unique visits
• Return visits
• Engagement with key actions (e.g., watch a certain video)
• Lifetime value (LTV)
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Renders
• Registration starts
• Registration completion

Important competencies to optimize registrations:

• Ad & media buying strategy – Graphic design for ads, social, etc.
• Relationship management – While ads and word of mouth are foundational approaches to getting in front of your target audience, some products with especially niche markets  (e.g., B2B software) benefit from referral partnerships, industry events, and comarketing.
• Web design & development – You’ll need this support for any custom website elements.
• Visual design and copywriting – You need a team that can create a clear and compelling case for why users should go through the registration process.
• User experience design – Make sure instructions are clear, forms are concise and designed for high efficiency, and the form design prevents but helps remediate errors that would prevent a successful registration.
• Conversion rate optimization – Test and optimize each component of the registration process.

Stage 2: Onboarding

The onboarding process is where we want users to have an “aha” moment. Specifically, users should launch the product, view helpful guidance, and engage with whatever product features will be most likely to lead them to find value and continue engagement.

In the user onboarding process, your tools are onboarding emails, push notifications, in-product notifications, coach marks, trial timers (which create urgency), favorites/bookmarks, and payment terms.

Key metrics of the onboarding stage:

• Product launches – Some products launch automatically upon registration (such as web apps like Canva), but others will require users to take an additional step (such as Autodesk and other desktop apps).
• Health metrics – These vary depending on the nature of your product. What actions might users take to get to the aha moment? Identify what actions users must take to have a sticky experience and lead to engaged users. In Canva, for instance, users are “healthy” when they use templates, start projects, share projects, or add team members to their account.
• Email and push notification open rates – Teams may send notifications to their users to help them learn and return to the product.

Important competencies to optimize onboarding:

• UX Research – Sticky products have great-looking and highly functional designs. A UX researcher can help you clarify your user personas, the use cases that matter to them, and the interface design that will be most intuitive and actionable.
• Visual design – In the age of Apple, users associate sleek professionalism with actual functionality. A designer will be able to marry beauty, ease of use, and business goals.
• Email marketing — Sometimes users need a little support understanding the capabilities a product has to offer. Email campaigns help users understand use cases and the literal how-to of working the product.
• Analytics — While most marketers know their way around Google Analytics, there’s a difference between simple MAU/DAU reporting and segmenting-based user activities and multi-step flows. Working with an analytics professional who is deeply skilled in data analysis will give you foundational knowledge about the actions that lead to conversion.
• A/B testing — This will help you learn, with statistical certainty, which metrics impact retention and conversion. While an analytics skill set can help you form hypotheses, A/B testing can prove which actions are ultimately causal to retention and conversion.

Stage 3: Product Experience

The product stage is where users engage with the product frequently. So, optimizing this stage of the experience means improving the product itself. Make it easy to use and personalized to their needs. Drive down the investment cost (in terms of time and money) as much as possible. Offer plenty of tutorials and help content so users don’t get stuck. Most importantly, make it easy and compelling to upgrade to a paid subscription.

Key metrics of the product experience stage:

• Product launches
• Engaging with push notifications
• Monthly active users (MAU)
• Daily active users (DAU)
• Deeper feature use (in the case of Canva, for instance, this might include the use of folders, collaborating with team members, or using the screen recorder).
• Conversions to paid tiers (i.e., monetization)

Important competencies to optimize the product experience:

• Data analytics — Understanding how users engage with a product and what activities are associated with retention, conversion, and cancellation.
• UX research — Understanding both quantitative and qualitative aspects of customers and their experiences will help you understand not just who is using your product, but what they want to get out of the tool, what is preventing them from converting to paid, and what will keep them happy.
• Product management — A product manager who is truly tapped into their audience and business goals will have an easy time prioritizing features, tools, and tech needed to keep users happy in the long run.
• A/B testing – To test and validate how to improve conversion rates and monetize free users.

Stage 4: Evangelize

In this stage, the goal is to leverage your built-in audience (current users) to grow your user base. You’ll notice that many of the most successful products from collaboration tools like Adobe Acrobat and Loom to entertainment tools like TikTok bake tools to share, invite, and collaborate with others into the product loop, thereby creating lots of registration opportunities.

Key metrics of the evangelize stage:

• Share
• Invite
• Form/ Signup renders
• Registrations via share touchpoints

Important competencies to optimize the evangelize stage:

• Data analytics – To understand how and where people share, and whether or not those share entry points are leading to registration.
• UX research – To understand what might prevent users from sharing or registering via a shared journey.
• A/B testing and evaluative research – To test and validate how to improve evangelization metrics and registrations for new users
• Product management – To create, prioritize, and maintain evangelization-focused initiatives

Stage 5: Save

Lastly, we have save or win back, which is where we prevent cancellations, reduce churn, and if users ultimately do cancel, we try to win them back. Ideally, users won’t reach this stage, but it’s a necessary component of the product life cycle.

Your tools in this stage include conflict resolution techniques, payment reconciliations, save offers, win-back offers, and outreach programs. It’s also a good idea to make re-subscribing easy. This gives users that cancel a smooth path to reengage with the product in the future.

Key metrics of the save stage:

• Cancellation starts – The number of people who clicked the cancel button and started going through the cancellation flow.
• Cancels – The number of people who completed the cancellation process and how many people exit the funnel.
• Churn – Percent of total uses lost in a given period.
• Saves – Percent or number of times a user started to cancel, but the cancellation was not completed.
• Re-engagement (open emails, etc) – Number of users who, within a period after canceling, engage with winback campaigns (emails, ads, etc.).
• Winback – Number of times a previous user signed up for a paid account anew.

Important competencies to optimize the save stage:

• Data analytics — To evaluate cancellation flow start, drop off, and success of re-engagement campaigns.
• UX & research — To understand why people are canceling and how to prevent it.
• A/B Testing and evaluative research — To test and reduce the volume of successful cancellations and test campaigns (email, ad, etc.) to re-engage churned users.
• Save and remarketing strategy — To architect the strategies and tactics to defer cancellations and win users back.

Product-Led Growth FAQs

Here are some common questions we often hear about product-led growth, the product experience, and how to improve free trial to paid conversions.

What makes a great product experience?

A great product experience is intuitive and user-friendly, with a seamless and engaging interface that allows users to easily accomplish their goals. It delivers value by effectively addressing the user’s needs and pain points, providing tangible benefits and solutions.

Additionally, a great product experience is reliable, stable, and performs optimally, minimizing errors and downtime. It also offers a high level of customization and flexibility, allowing users to adapt it to their preferences and workflows.

Lastly, a great product experience includes excellent customer support and ongoing updates and improvements based on user feedback, ensuring a positive and evolving user experience.

How do you increase conversion from trial to paid?

To increase conversion from trial to paid, focus on demonstrating the value and benefits of your product during the trial period. Simply put, the product needs to create more value than it costs. Here are some tips:

• Offer personalized onboarding, providing guidance and support to help users fully explore and understand the product’s capabilities.
• Implement targeted email campaigns and in-app messages to engage with trial users, highlighting the additional features and advantages of the paid version.
• Provide limited-time incentives, such as discounts or exclusive offers, to create a sense of urgency.
• Foster a positive user experience through responsive customer support.
• Utilize customer success stories and social proof to build trust.
• Continuously monitor and optimize the trial experience to improve conversion rates.

What is the freemium strategy?

The freemium strategy is a business model where a company offers a free version of its product or service with limited features or functionality. At the same time, they also provide a paid version with additional premium features or enhanced capabilities.

The goal of the freemium strategy is to attract a wide user base by offering a valuable free offering. This serves as a marketing tool to generate user adoption and engagement. Consequently, the company then converts those free users into paying customers who opt for the premium version of the product.

Canva is an example of the freemium strategy that offers a free version of its graphic design platform with a range of basic features and templates accessible to users. This free version allows users to create visually appealing designs without the need for technical expertise.

Canva monetizes its platform by offering a premium subscription called Canva Pro, which provides advanced features such as additional templates, enhanced collaboration tools, and access to a vast library of premium elements.

What is the difference between free trial and freemium?

The main difference between a free trial and a freemium model is the pricing and access to features. A free trial typically offers full access to all features of a product for a limited time. As such, this allows users to experience its complete functionality before deciding to purchase or upgrade.

On the other hand, freemium provides a permanently free version of the product with limited features or capabilities. Freemium users can upgrade to a paid version to unlock additional advanced features or to access the product without limitations.

Free trials offer a temporary full-feature experience to drive conversions. On the other hand, freemium focuses on offering a valuable, but restricted, product experience to attract and retain users.

Let Us Guide Your Product-Led Growth Strategy

We’ve explained why the old customer experience framework isn’t suitable for some organizations and offered a new model that puts the product at the center of your marketing. Now, our ROPES framework is the perfect tool to govern the product-led growth of SaaS companies and digital publishers.

If a free trial or freemium model is right for your product, we can help you use your product to grow your business with custom services.

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