The stakes are high. According to recent industry data, the average SaaS free trial converts less than 25% of users to paying customers. That means roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of your trial users are walking away without ever becoming customers.

But the good news is that trial cancellations aren’t random. They follow patterns. Users drop off at predictable moments in their journey and struggle with the same features or tasks. Once you identify these patterns, you can systematically address them through trial optimization.

Understanding why trial optimization matters for reducing cancellations

Before diving into how to reduce cancellations, let’s be clear about what we mean by trial optimization and why it deserves your attention.

Trial optimization is the systematic process of improving every touchpoint in your free trial or freemium experience to increase the likelihood that users will see value, engage consistently, and ultimately convert to paying customers. It’s not about manipulation or dark patterns. It’s about removing unnecessary friction, clarifying value, and helping users succeed with your product.

The impact of effective trial optimization extends beyond conversion rates. When you optimize the trial experience, you also reduce customer acquisition costs, improve customer lifetime value, and build a stronger foundation for retention.

Understanding your specific trial model is the first step toward optimization. Different trial structures create different challenges and opportunities.

What is a freemium model?

The freemium model offers perpetual access to a restricted version of your product, either by limiting features or placing caps on usage. Think Spotify’s free tier with ads, or Canva’s basic design tools. The challenge with freemium is that users can stay indefinitely without converting. Your optimization goal is building reliance while strategically gating features that create urgency to upgrade.

What is a reverse trial?

In a reverse trial, users start with full access to all features for a limited time, then get moved to a freemium plan with limited capabilities. This approach, coined by growth leader Elena Verna, prioritizes maximum value upfront. Users experience everything your product can do, making the subsequent feature restrictions feel more pronounced. Trial optimization here focuses on ensuring users activate on premium features during that full-access window.

What is trial with payment?

This model requires payment information up front for full product access during a limited period. Users are charged automatically after the trial unless they cancel. The friction of providing credit card details means fewer signups but typically higher conversion rates, with opt-out trials converting at 49-60% compared to opt-in trials at 18-25%. Optimization here balances making signup worthwhile despite the friction while ensuring the experience justifies the automatic charge.

Five steps to audit and optimize your trial experience

Trial optimization looks different in each of these trial models, but one thing is true across the board: reducing cancellations requires a systematic approach.

You can’t fix what you don’t measure, and you can’t optimize what you don’t understand.

Here is a summary of the five-step framework for auditing your trial experience. For a detailed walkthrough, including specific templates and decision trees, see our article on auditing free user experiences.

Step 1: Identify drop-off points with data analysis

Examine your product analytics to pinpoint exactly where users abandon their trial journey.

• Track activation drop-offs in your onboarding flow
• Monitor which features users engage with versus ignore
• Calculate time-to-value and compare against churn timing
• Segment data by acquisition channel, trial type, and user cohort
• Layer in session recordings to see what users actually do before leaving

Step 2: Conduct user interviews to understand the “why”

Numbers show where users leave. Conversations reveal why.

• Interview 10-15 users, split between active trial users and those who churned
• Ask what value they found, what confused them, and what would make them pay
• Listen for the exact language they use to describe their experience
• Note any competitors or alternatives they mention for market context

Step 3: Benchmark your experience against market standards

Your users compare you to every tool they’ve used. Conduct some competitive analysis to gauge where you fall in the market.

• Document how competitors structure their trial experiences
• Screenshot monetization touchpoints, upgrade prompts, and limit notifications
• Study products your users mention in interviews, even if indirect competitors
• Identify where your experience creates more or less friction than market norms

Step 4: Map user actions with verb scoring

Break down every meaningful action in your product and score the friction required by running a verb scoring exercise.

• List discrete actions users can take (create, share, export, invite, etc.)
• Assign each a verb score from Anonymous to Gated
• Look for inconsistencies in how similar actions are gated
• Identify if you’re giving away too much or asking too soon

Step 5: Connect insights to create an optimization roadmap

Synthesize your findings to prioritize what to fix first.

• Friction without reason: unnecessary barriers compared to competitors
• Value leaks: popular free features that don’t drive conversion
• Invisible gates: paywalls users hit without understanding why
• Poorly timed friction: asking users to pay before they’ve seen value

Prioritize optimizations by impact (users affected), confidence (data supports it), effort (time to implement), and market alignment (are you an outlier).

Six strategies for reducing trial cancellations

Once you’ve audited your trial experience and identified optimization opportunities, you will have a clear roadmap for addressing issues.

Plenty of strategies might arise in your research. Here are a few themes we see often.

Accelerate time-to-first-value

The faster users experience value, the less likely they are to cancel. Industry benchmarks suggest that users should reach their first “aha moment” within 48 hours of signup.

Design your onboarding to guide users directly toward the action that delivers value. Use progress bars and checklists to create clear paths forward.

Remove any friction between signup and first value. If users need to integrate other tools, fill out profiles, or configure settings before experiencing core benefits, you’re creating opportunities for abandonment. Save non-essential setup for after users have seen value.

Provide personalized onboarding experiences

Companies using personalized experiences see conversion rates improve by up to 67%. Generic onboarding treats all users the same, but different user segments have different needs, different technical sophistication, and different use cases.

Segment users based on their role, company size, or stated goals during signup. A solo entrepreneur using your project management tool has different needs than a project manager at a 100-person company. Your onboarding should reflect these differences.

Use progressive disclosure to reveal features as they become relevant. Don’t overwhelm new users with every capability on day one. Instead, introduce advanced features once users have mastered the basics.

Implement strategic reminder systems

Trials between 7-14 days convert better than longer trials because they create urgency. But urgency only works if users remember they’re on a trial.

Send regular emails and in-app notifications informing users about remaining trial time. These reminders should do more than count down days. Each one should emphasize value, highlight features users haven’t explored, or address specific pain points.

Gate features strategically based on usage patterns

In our experience optimizing for SaaS, offering too many free features can actually hurt conversion rates. Users need to experience value from free features while simultaneously understanding what they’re missing from paid capabilities.

Place prompts for premium features adjacent to free ones. PDF Converter, for example, offers free file conversion but positions the premium, higher-quality option nearby. This ensures users understand the upgrade path without being pushy.

Use clear visual cues like lock icons, “Pro” badges, or color contrasts to differentiate free from paid features.

Provide proactive support during critical moments

Customer support engagement during trial periods can significantly boost conversion rates.

Don’t wait for users to ask for help. Implement triggered messages based on behavior patterns. If a user hasn’t logged in for three days, send a helpful email with tips. If someone tries to use a gated feature multiple times, offer a personalized demo or support call.

For high-value potential customers, consider human touchpoints. A quick call from customer success at day three of a 14-day trial can answer questions, provide personalized guidance, and significantly increase conversion likelihood.

Design thoughtful cancellation flows

Not every cancellation is preventable, but many are. When users attempt to cancel, use that moment as an opportunity to understand why and potentially offer alternatives.

Implement exit surveys that capture cancellation reasons. According to data on subscription churn, understanding why users leave is critical for preventing future cancellations. Are they leaving because of the price? Missing features? Poor onboarding? Bugs?

Based on cancellation reasons, offer segment-specific alternatives. If someone is canceling due to price, offer a discount or payment plan. If they barely used the product after the trial, extend the trial. If they’re leaving due to missing features, ask which features would keep them.

Common mistakes that increase trial cancellations

Even well-intentioned optimization efforts can backfire. Avoid these common mistakes that actually increase cancellation rates.

Making cancellation difficult

Some SaaS companies deliberately make cancellation difficult, requiring users to call or email rather than cancel with a simple click. This dark pattern might delay cancellations temporarily, but it can destroy trust and create negative word-of-mouth.

Make cancellation simple. The goal isn’t to trap users; it’s to create such a good experience that they don’t want to leave.

Gating core value too aggressively

If users can’t experience your product’s core value without upgrading, they’ll cancel before converting. The free version should deliver genuine utility while creating a desire for premium features.

Neglecting mobile trial experiences

With increasing mobile usage, trial experiences must work seamlessly across devices.

If your onboarding is desktop-optimized but breaks on mobile, you’re creating cancellations for a substantial user segment.

Sending generic email communications

Automated email sequences that ignore user behavior feel impersonal and often go unread. According to research on trial optimization, personalized communication based on user activity significantly outperforms generic campaigns.

If a user hasn’t logged in since signing up, an email about advanced features is irrelevant. If they’re actively using the product daily, countdown reminders may feel pushy. Segment communications based on engagement levels.

Trial optimization frequently asked questions

What’s the ideal trial length to minimize cancellations?

The optimal length depends on your product’s complexity and how quickly users can experience value. Simple products often perform better with 7-14 day trials that create urgency.

Complex B2B tools may need 30-60 days for users to properly evaluate capabilities. If you are completely lost, start with 14 days and adjust based on your activation data and time-to-value metrics.

Should I require a credit card for trial signup?

This decision significantly impacts both signup volume and conversion rates.

Opt-out trials (credit card required) convert higher but generate fewer signups. Opt-in trials (no credit card) convert lower but attract more users.

The right choice depends on whether you prioritize higher conversion rates per trial or a larger volume of trials and how much more utility the full tier offers versus a free trial.

Most product-led companies start with opt-in trials to maximize exposure, then consider opt-out trials once they’ve optimized the trial experience.

How can I tell if my trial cancellations are normal or problematic?

Track cohort-specific metrics. If certain user segments, acquisition channels, or trial lengths show notably different cancellation patterns, those differences reveal opportunities for targeted optimization.

What’s the most important metric to track for trial optimization?

While trial-to-paid conversion rate matters, activation rate is often more predictive.

Activation measures whether users complete key actions that indicate they’ve experienced value. Research shows users who reach activation are significantly more likely to convert.

Define your activation criteria based on behaviors that correlate with conversion, then optimize to increase the percentage of trial users who activate.

How often should I test and iterate on my trial experience?

Trial optimization is continuous, not a one-time project.

High-performing SaaS companies test constantly. Start with your highest-impact opportunities identified during your audit, then implement a regular testing cadence.

Track results for statistical significance before making changes permanent. Plan quarterly reviews of your trial metrics to identify new optimization opportunities as your product and market evolve.

Can I reduce trial cancellations without changing my product?

Yes. Many cancellations stem from poor onboarding, unclear value communication, or inadequate support rather than product deficiencies.

You can significantly reduce cancellations by improving onboarding sequences, providing better in-app guidance, personalizing the trial experience, implementing proactive support, and strategically positioning upgrade prompts.

That said, if users consistently cancel, citing missing features or bugs, product improvements may be necessary alongside trial optimization.

Build a systematic approach to trial optimization

Reducing SaaS trial cancellations isn’t about quick fixes or growth hacks. It requires systematic analysis of your trial experience, a deep understanding of user behavior and needs, and continuous optimization based on data.

The five-step audit framework provides a structured approach: analyze data to find drop-off points, interview users to understand why they leave, benchmark against market expectations, map actions with verb scoring, and synthesize insights into a prioritized roadmap. Each step builds on the previous one to create a picture of optimization opportunities.

Implementation matters as much as analysis. Accelerate time-to-value, personalize onboarding, implement strategic reminders, gate features based on usage patterns, provide proactive support, and design thoughtful cancellation flows. These six strategies address the most common causes of trial cancellations, but keep in mind that your analysis will likely surface other unique issues.

Most importantly, treat trial optimization as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time project. User expectations evolve, competitors improve their experiences, and your product adds features. Regular review and iteration ensure your trial experience continues performing as your business grows.

At The Good, we’ve helped SaaS companies reduce trial cancellations and improve conversion rates through our Digital Experience Optimization Program. We conduct comprehensive audits using heatmaps, session recordings, and user research to identify exactly where trial users encounter friction. Then we build custom optimization roadmaps and validate improvements through experimentation.

Ready to reduce your trial cancellations and accelerate growth? Schedule an introductory call to discuss how we can optimize your trial experience for better conversion and retention.

The post How Do You Reduce Cancellations During SaaS Free Trials? appeared first on The Good.

The company had assembled a list of proof points they could showcase on their homepage: years in business, number of integrations, customer counts, implementation guarantees, security certifications, industry awards, analyst recognition, and more. But they only had space to highlight four of these benefits prominently below their hero section. They faced the classic messaging dilemma: which trust signals would actually move the needle with prospects evaluating B2B software?

This is where MaxDiff analysis becomes valuable. Instead of relying on stakeholder opinions or generic best practices, we could let their target buyers vote with data on what mattered most.

What makes MaxDiff analysis different from other survey methods

MaxDiff analysis (short for Maximum Difference Scaling) is a research methodology that forces trade-offs. Rather than asking people to rate items individually on a scale, MaxDiff presents sets of options and asks participants to identify the most and least important items in each set. This forced-choice format reveals true preferences because people can’t rate everything as “very important.”

Here’s why this matters: traditional rating scales often produce compressed results where everything scores high. When you ask customers, “How important is X on a scale of 1-10?” most people will hover around 7 or 8 for anything remotely relevant. You end up with a spreadsheet full of similar numbers and no clear direction.

MaxDiff cuts through that noise. By repeatedly asking “which of these five options matters most to you, and which matters least?” across different combinations, you build a statistical picture of relative importance. The math behind MaxDiff generates a best-worst score for each item, showing not just which options are preferred, but by how much.

For digital experience optimization, this methodology is particularly useful when you need to prioritize limited real estate on a website, determine which features to build first, or figure out which messaging will actually differentiate your brand.

How we structured the MaxDiff study for maximum insight

In the project for our client, we started by defining the target audience precisely. The company was a B2B SaaS platform serving mid-market operations teams, so we recruited 60 participants who matched their customer profile: director-level or above at companies with 50-500 employees, working in operations or supply chain roles, currently using at least two SaaS tools in their workflow, and actively evaluating solutions within the past six months.

From the initial audit and stakeholder interviews, we identified 11 potential trust signals the company could emphasize on its homepage. These included things like:

• Concrete numbers (customer counts, uptime percentages, integrations available)
• Credentials (security certifications, enterprise clients)
• Promises (implementation timelines, support response times, money-back guarantees)
• And more

Each represented something the company could truthfully claim, but we needed to know which ones would build the most trust with prospects evaluating the platform.

The survey design was straightforward. Each participant saw these 11 benefits randomized into multiple sets of five items. For each set, they selected the most important factor and the least important factor when considering whether to adopt this type of software. Participants completed several rounds of these comparisons, seeing different combinations each time.

This approach gave us enough data points to calculate a robust best-worst score for each benefit: the number of times it was selected as “most important” minus the number of times it was selected as “least important.” Positive scores indicate a strong preference, negative scores indicate a low importance, and the magnitude of the scores shows the strength of feeling.

The results revealed a clear hierarchy of trust signals

When we analyzed the MaxDiff results, the pattern was striking. The top-scoring benefits shared a common theme: they provided concrete evidence of proven reliability and satisfied users. The bottom-scoring benefits? They emphasized company scale and marketing visibility.

The four highest-scoring trust signals were clear winners. G2 or Capterra ratings scored 38 points (the highest possible), indicating this was nearly universal in its importance. The number of active customers scored 30 points. An implementation guarantee (“live in 30 days or your money back”) scored 25 points. And SOC 2 Type II certification scored 16 points.

These weren’t arbitrary marketing metrics. They were the specific signals that would make someone think, “this platform delivers real value and other companies trust them.”

The middle tier included operational details that registered as minor positives but weren’t decisive: the number of successful implementations (7 points), availability of 24/7 support (6 points). These signals suggested competence but didn’t particularly move the needle on trust.

Then came the surprises. Years in business scored -5 points, indicating it was slightly more often selected as “least important” than “most important.” The number of integrations available scored -11 points. AI-powered features claimed scored -15 points. Employee headcount scored -36 points. And recognition as a Gartner Cool Vendor scored -55 points, the lowest possible score.

Think about what prospects were telling us: “I don’t care that you have 200 employees or that Gartner mentioned you. Show me that real companies like mine trust you and that you’ll actually deliver on your promises.”

Why customers rejected company-focused metrics

The findings revealed an insight into trust-building that extends beyond this single company. B2B buyers weigh social proof and reliability guarantees far more heavily than they weigh indicators of company scale or industry recognition.

When a business talks about its employee headcount or analyst mentions, prospects interpret this as the company talking about itself. These metrics answer the question “How big is your business?” but not “Will this solve my problem?” From the buyer’s perspective, a larger team or Gartner mention doesn’t necessarily correlate with better software or smoother implementation.

By contrast, user reviews and customer counts answer the implicit question every prospect has: “Did this work for companies like mine?” A guarantee directly addresses risk: “What happens if implementation fails?” Security certifications address legitimacy: “Is this platform secure enough for our data?”

The AI-powered features claim scored poorly, likely because it felt trendy rather than practical. Prospects for this specific business weren’t primarily concerned about cutting-edge technology; they wanted a platform that would reliably solve their workflow problems. Leading with an AI angle, while possibly true, didn’t address the core decision-making criteria.

Years in business scored negatively for similar reasons. While longevity can signal stability, in this context, it didn’t address the prospect’s immediate concerns about implementation speed and user adoption. A company could be around for years while providing clunky software with poor support.

From insight to implementation: turning research into revenue

The MaxDiff analysis gave the company a clear action plan. We recommended implementing a four-part trust signal section directly below their homepage hero, featuring the top four scoring benefits in order of importance.

This meant reworking their existing homepage structure. Previously, they had emphasized their implementation guarantee in the hero area while burying customer counts and ratings further down the page. The research showed this approach had it backward. Prospects needed to see evidence of customer satisfaction first, then the implementation guarantee as additional reassurance.

We also recommended removing or de-emphasizing several elements they had been proud of. The employee headcount mention, the Gartner recognition, and several other low-scoring items were either removed entirely or moved to less prominent positions on the site. The goal was to prevent low-value signals from crowding out high-value ones.

The broader lesson here extends beyond this single homepage optimization. The MaxDiff results provided a messaging hierarchy that the company could apply across its entire go-to-market strategy. Email campaigns, landing pages, sales conversations, demo decks, and even their LinkedIn company page could now emphasize the trust signals that actually mattered to prospects.

When MaxDiff analysis makes sense for your business

MaxDiff is particularly valuable when you’re facing a prioritization problem with limited data. It works best in these scenarios:

• You have more options than you can implement. Whether that’s features to build, benefits to highlight, or messages to test, MaxDiff helps you choose wisely when you can’t do everything at once.
• Stakeholder opinions are conflicting. When internal debates about priorities can’t be resolved through argument, customer data settles the question. MaxDiff provides quantitative evidence for decision-making.
• You need to differentiate in a crowded market. If competitors are all saying similar things, MaxDiff reveals which specific claims will break through. Often, the winning messages are ones companies overlook because they seem “obvious” or “not unique enough.”
• You’re optimizing for a specific audience segment. Generic research about “customers in general” often produces generic insights. MaxDiff works best when you recruit participants who precisely match your target customer profile.

The methodology has limitations worth noting. It requires careful setup, and you need to know which options to test before you start.

If you don’t include the right benefits in your initial list, you won’t discover them through MaxDiff.

It also works best with a reasonably sized set of options (typically 5-15 items).

And the results tell you about relative importance, not absolute importance; everything could theoretically matter, but MaxDiff reveals the hierarchy.

How to use MaxDiff findings in your optimization strategy

Once you have MaxDiff results, the application extends beyond simply reordering homepage elements. The insights should inform your entire digital experience.

Your messaging architecture should reflect the importance hierarchy. High-scoring benefits deserve prominent placement, repetition across pages, and detailed explanation. Low-scoring benefits can either be removed or repositioned as supporting rather than leading messages.

Your testing roadmap should prioritize changes based on MaxDiff findings. If customer reviews scored highest in your study, test different ways of showcasing reviews before you test other elements. Let the data guide your experimentation priorities.

Your content strategy should emphasize what customers care about. If service guarantees scored highly, create content that explains the guarantee in detail, shares stories of when it was honored, and addresses common concerns. Build your editorial calendar around the topics MaxDiff revealed as important.

Your sales enablement should align with customer priorities. If the research showed that prospects value licensing credentials, make sure your sales team knows to emphasize this early in conversations. Create collateral that highlights the trust signals that matter most.

The most effective companies use MaxDiff as one tool in a broader research program. They combine it with qualitative research to understand why certain benefits matter, behavioral analytics to see how users interact with different messages, and continuous testing to validate that the predicted preferences translate into actual conversion improvements.

Turning guesswork into growth

The SaaS company we worked with started with a dozen possible messages and no clear sense of which would build trust most effectively with B2B buyers. After the MaxDiff analysis, they had a data-backed hierarchy that let them confidently restructure their homepage and broader messaging strategy.

This is the power of asking prospects the right questions in the right way. Not “do you like this?” which produces inflated scores for everything. Not “rank these 11 items,” which overwhelms participants and produces unreliable data. But rather, through repeated forced choices, revealing the true importance of each element.

If you’re struggling with similar prioritization challenges (too many options, limited space, stakeholder disagreement about what matters), MaxDiff analysis might be the tool that breaks through the noise. It transforms subjective opinion into statistical evidence, letting your prospects vote on what will actually convince them to choose your platform.

Ready to discover which messages actually resonate with your customers? The Good’s Digital Experience Optimization Program includes research methodologies like MaxDiff analysis to help you prioritize changes based on real customer preferences, not guesswork.

The post MaxDiff Analysis: A Case Study On How to Identify Which Benefits Actually Build Customer Trust appeared first on The Good.

Fritz O’Connor, former VP of Marketing at Ironman 4×4 America, exemplifies this approach. With over two decades of experience spanning manufacturing, sales, and marketing leadership, Fritz has developed a methodology for building high-performing organizations that deliver results consistently, even in challenging circumstances.

A marketing leader built for manufacturing

Fritz’s career journey reads like a masterclass in understanding customers across different industries. Starting in the printing and paper industry, he cut his teeth in structured sales training programs that taught him the fundamentals of professional sales and business operations.

“I’ve spent my entire career in sales and marketing roles. Almost exclusively in the manufacturing sector for companies that make stuff,” Fritz explains. This foundation in manufacturing would prove invaluable throughout his career, giving him deep insight into the complexity of bringing physical products to market.

His two-decade tenure at GE further refined his skills across diverse business environments. “We always used to say we can work in any industry, anywhere in the world, and still get paid by the same company,” he recalls. This experience working across plastics, appliances, and GE Corporate gave him a unique perspective on how great companies operate at scale.

But it was during his time at GE Corporate that Fritz discovered what would become his career-defining framework: differential value proposition (DVP). Working in a marketing consulting role with virtually every business in GE’s global portfolio, he helped launch this customer-centric approach to messaging and positioning throughout the organization.

This systematic approach to understanding and serving customers became foundational to Fritz’s ongoing success.

Implementing systems and frameworks that take teams from features to solutions

Originally coined by the founder of Valkre Solutions, Jerry Alderman, the DVP framework transforms how companies think about customer messaging and competitive positioning. Fritz became a master at implementing this methodology across diverse organizations.

“What are you offering? Be it a product or service that is better than the customer’s next best alternative,” Fritz explains. This might seem simple, but the implications are profound. Rather than competing on features or price, DVP focuses on solving customer problems in ways that competitors simply cannot match.

The challenge, as Fritz learned during his GE implementation, is that DVP represents a fundamental shift in thinking. "Every business, product, or service has a value proposition, but not every value proposition is differential. So many companies have the same value proposition. The white space is that differential part."

"It's about switching thinking from a feature to a benefit. For example, a blue appliance is not a differential value proposition. It's a feature."

Fritz teaches teams to make this shift by leading with problems and solutions.

"It's how it makes the consumer or customer's life better, how it solves that problem. You have to identify what the problem is. You have to articulate how you can fix that problem in a different way, better than anybody else."

This shift from features to solutions requires teams to understand their customers' actual problems, not just their stated needs.

For leaders, this translates directly into more effective product messaging, clearer value propositions, and ultimately, higher conversion rates.

Overcoming the "this is how we've always done it" challenge

One of Fritz's biggest career wins (and ongoing challenges) centers around implementing the Differential Value Proposition (DVP) methodology across organizations. The implementation at GE became both a success story and a learning experience in change management.

"As you can imagine, anytime you try and launch a new process in a company the size of GE, you can be met with resistance. Especially when you're coming out of corporate."

This resistance taught Fritz a crucial lesson about implementing change: "I don't view that as a challenge or a stumbling block, but as a fantastic and wonderful opportunity because when you flip those people, they become your biggest proponents."

His approach centers on listening first, then demonstrating value in the stakeholder's own language. "It's a listening journey. You've gotta understand what the challenges are that of the people with whom you're working, whether it's an external customer or an internal customer."

"Proactively listen and walk in the shoes of the people I'm working with. When I'm trying to introduce something as significant as DVP or other business tools."

This listening approach helps identify the real challenges and resistance points, making it possible to address them effectively.

The foundation: accountability, responsibility, and challenge

But having the right frameworks isn't enough. Fritz learned that execution depends on creating the right team culture. He is quick to credit his teams as the backbone of his successful projects, and one of the ways he supports them is with clear organizational principles.

"I have a few underlying business principles that I've gained along the way that are the foundational threads for me," Fritz explains. "One is, any team I work with or works for me, my job is to make them as successful as possible."

This people-first approach manifests through three guiding principles:

• Accountability: Holding yourself and your team responsible for deliverables and outcomes
• Responsibility: Taking ownership of significant business challenges
• Challenge: Embracing difficult problems that create meaningful business impact

"The way I do that is through three guiding principles, which are accountability, responsibility, and challenge," Fritz notes. "I want to be entrusted with significant responsibility that is helping to solve a significant business challenge."

These principles translate into a simple but powerful operational mantra: deliver on time, complete with excellence.

"I know those all sound like buzzwords, but they're not meant to be. And we don't treat them as such. We treat them as very simple guiding principles to keep us focused."

Putting it all together at Ironman 4x4

When Fritz joined Ironman 4x4 America, he found the perfect opportunity to apply all of these frameworks.

Ironman 4x4 is a global company that sells off-road parts and accessories for 4x4 vehicles (lift kits, suspension parts, bumpers, etc.). They have been around since the 1950s, but were new to the United States, so Fritz had the opportunity to find new ways to market their complex "fitment" products, or parts that must work with specific vehicle makes and models. This complexity creates both technical and marketing challenges that Fritz's team had to solve systematically.

His sales background gave him an invaluable perspective on marketing effectiveness. "If you spend any time in sales, that means you're around customers, whether those are B2B or B2C customers. And you learn what's important to them."

This customer proximity taught him the critical principle of "show me, don't tell me." Rather than relying on feature lists or industry awards, effective marketing demonstrates value through customer experiences and outcomes.

"We always, in both sales and marketing, it's easy to get into the trap of just talking, talking, talking, describing stuff, talking about features and benefits. Talking about the industry's best. Nobody cares about your industry. They care about how your product or service is going to impact them."

The key to marketing complex products, Fritz knew, is understanding how customers think about their problems. Rather than leading with technical specifications, the focus should be on the customer's end goal and the emotional drivers behind their purchase decisions.

Fritz emphasizes the importance of demonstrating value rather than just describing it: "Really, visual storytelling, video storytelling, placing the customer in the scene so they understand your value. That ability comes from firsthand experience of seeing that happen in the sales arena."

A data-driven website replatforming

His POV shaped everything he was involved in at Ironman 4x4 America, from new product introduction processes to website optimization. Fritz implemented structured new product integration toll gates with clear deliverables and cross-functional accountability, ensuring every product launch was executed with precision across creative, digital, and channel marketing.

His customer-centered thinking and frameworks proved essential when his team tackled a complex website migration from an outdated platform to Shopify. The project was based on their understanding that a website change was necessary to better serve their audience and increase ecommerce sales.

Working with The Good on a DXO Program, the Ironman 4x4 team executed the redesign and replatforming with data-driven methodology. Rather than relying on opinions about what the site should look like, they embraced rapid prototyping and continuous testing.

"Any decision made without data is just an opinion, right?" Fritz notes, referencing CEO Luke Schnacke's philosophy.

"We try to be very data-driven, which is why it was so important for us to work with The Good, to get that data and share it with the team managing the website replatforming so that they were making data-driven decisions on design and functionality."

They didn’t wait for a “perfect website” to figure out what customers wanted. They tested and got feedback throughout the entire process to make sure they were developing the right ideas.

"I realized we were never going to do it perfectly," Fritz recalls. The team was getting bogged down in opinions about checkout processes, product customizers, and overall site design. "We could end up using half our development budget on building something that doesn't perform."

"Ultimately, we agreed to launch and then test the heck out of it. We didn't want to overburden the development pipeline with projects that don't have a financial impact."

This represents a fundamental shift in thinking. They went from trying to build the perfect site to building a testable foundation for continuous improvement.

The beauty of working with The Good in this situation, Fritz explains, was "the rapid prototyping, the test and learn. We could very quickly get feedback and iterate and then test and learn again."

Multiplying results through partnership

Leveraging an external partnership accelerated progress beyond what internal resources could achieve alone and held the team accountable to the frameworks and goals of staying user-centered and data-driven.

"If you're not an expert, I would recommend doing a website project with a company like The Good. It wasn't a cost, it was an investment," Fritz emphasizes. "And I think that Ironman 4x4 is the beneficiary of the investment that they made with The Good as they migrated over to Shopify and learned about what customers would like."

The partnership enabled intentional, studied testing with proper dependencies and measurable results tracking.

"That whole test and learn methodology is done in a very structured, deliberate way. Making changes in a waterfall, with the proper dependencies articulated, and then tracking the measurable benefits of changes, and then tweaking accordingly from there."

This approach breeds confidence because it's entirely data-driven, removing guesswork from critical business decisions.

Lessons for marketing and sales leaders

For marketing and sales leaders looking to build similar operational excellence, Fritz's approach provides a roadmap: start with principles, understand your customers deeply, make decisions based on data, and never underestimate the power of strategic partnerships to unlock potential.

Start with principles, not tactics

Before implementing any marketing or optimization program, establish clear guiding principles. Fritz's framework of accountability, responsibility, and challenge provided a foundation that influenced every decision and created lasting organizational change.

Understand your customer's next best alternative

Move beyond feature-benefit messaging to understand what your customers would do if your solution didn't exist. This "next best alternative" thinking is the foundation of truly differential value propositions.

Convert resistance through understanding

When facing organizational resistance to change, focus on understanding stakeholder concerns rather than pushing solutions. Meet people where they are and demonstrate value in their language.

Embrace data-driven decision making

Resist the temptation to rely on opinions or best practices. Instead, create structured testing methodologies that let customer behavior guide optimization decisions.

Invest in external partnerships strategically

Recognize when external expertise can accelerate progress. The right partnerships provide capabilities and perspectives that internal teams may not possess, ultimately delivering better results faster.

Starting an optimization journey

Fritz's approach to building and scaling teams, including Ironman 4x4's US marketing operations, demonstrates how principled leadership, customer-centric thinking, and strategic partnerships can create sustainable competitive advantages.

"There's no obstacle too big that can't be overcome with data and optimization, right?" Fritz states emphatically. "The whole point of being data-driven and optimizing is to get time back and to become more efficient."

His advice for other leaders facing similar challenges?

"Get to yes. Figure out how to do it. Don't say, this is why I can't do it. Say this is how I'm going to do it. Here are things I need to do in order to do it. Then hold yourself accountable. Make it happen. Do it."

The secret, according to Fritz, lies in celebrating small wins that compound over time: "Little steps, I always like to say, celebrate the little wins. Go after the little wins because they compound on one another and then all of a sudden you're gonna look back and go, holy mackerel, I can't believe I am where I am."

The secret is consistency: "And it starts with data as your foundation and optimization as the accelerator."

For ecommerce leaders looking to build similar operational excellence, Fritz's framework provides a proven template: establish clear principles, understand customer problems deeply, make data-driven decisions, and never underestimate the power of strategic partnerships to accelerate growth.

Ready to optimize your ecommerce experience with data-driven methodology? Learn more about The Good's Digital Experience Optimization Program and discover how strategic partnerships can unlock your growth potential.

The Good helps ecommerce brands like Ironman 4x4 optimize their digital experiences through research-backed testing and strategic partnerships. Our team combines deep technical expertise with proven methodologies to deliver measurable results for growing brands.

The post Fritz O’Connor Stays User-Centered and Leads with Data During Uncertain Times appeared first on The Good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution 1: Make the experience worth the premium

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

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

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

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

What this looks like in practice:

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

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

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

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

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

What exclusive access looks like:

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

Solution 3: Build loyalty programs that compete with discounting

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

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

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

Loyalty programs that work:

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

Solution 4: Optimize every conversion touchpoint

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

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

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

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

What a powerful optimization strategy looks like:

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

Solution 5: Leverage tech to offer innovative shopping experiences

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

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

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

What technology differentiation looks like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content strategies that differentiate:

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

Solution 7: Try product bundling to create value

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

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

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

What strategic bundling looks like:

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

Solution 8: Create unbeatable service experiences

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

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

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

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

What service excellence looks like:

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

Understanding customer psychology and your unique users

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

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

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

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

Compete on value, not on price

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t get me wrong, A/B testing is incredibly powerful. It’s the gold standard for high-stakes, high-traffic decisions where statistical significance matters most. But when it becomes your only tool, you create unnecessary constraints that can paralyze decision-making and slow innovation.

The reality is that different decisions require different levels of rigor, confidence, and investment. Luckily, there is a complementary approach that fills critical gaps in your experimentation toolkit. By understanding when each method is most appropriate, teams can make faster, more informed optimizations while maintaining the rigor needed for their most high-stakes decisions.

Creating “experience rot”

A/B testing borrowed its methodology from medical intervention studies, where 95% confidence intervals and statistical significance aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re life-or-death requirements.

But we’re not rocket scientists, and we don’t always need the same level of assurance in product decisions to move towards the right outcome.

A/B testing can be overkill for the decisions product teams need to make daily. Yet teams have become so committed to this single methodology that they’ve created what researcher Jared Spool calls “Experience Rot,” the gradual deterioration of user experience quality from teams moving too slowly or focusing solely on economic outcomes.

The costs of slow testing cycles are tangible and measurable:

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

But the problem runs deeper than just speed. Many teams face contexts where A/B testing simply isn’t feasible. Regulatory challenges in healthcare and finance, low-traffic scenarios for B2B products, technical constraints, and organizational politics all create barriers to traditional experimentation.

By the time a test idea passes through all the bureaucratic loopholes and oversight at an organization, it’s often no longer lean enough to justify testing. Without an alternative testing method, teams are left without any data at all.

So, how do we:

1. Circumvent the challenges of A/B testing, and
2. Prevent experience rot?

Enter rapid testing

Rapid testing isn’t about cutting corners or accepting lower-quality insights. It’s about matching your research method to the decision you’re trying to make, rather than forcing every question through the same rigorous, but often slow, process.

Like A/B testing, rapid testing helps you understand if your solutions are working. Unlike A/B testing, rapid tests are conducted with smaller sample sizes, completed in days rather than weeks or months, and often provide qualitative insights that A/B tests can miss.

“The speed at which we obtain actionable findings has been impressive,” says Gabrielle Nouhra, Software Director of Product Marketing, who leverages rapid testing with The Good for research and experimentation. “We are receiving rapid results within weeks and taking immediate action based on the findings.”

The key is understanding when each approach makes sense. Not every decision requires the same level of rigor, and smart product teams create systems that allow critical insights to move faster.

A framework for decision making

So, how do you decide when to use rapid testing versus A/B testing? The decision starts with two critical questions: Is this strategically important? And what’s the potential risk? With those two questions in mind, you can map your ideas on a simple 2×2.

High Strategic Importance + Low Risk = Just Ship It. If you can’t explain meaningful downsides to a change but know it’s strategically important, you probably don’t need to test it at all. These are your quick wins.

Low Strategic Importance = Deprioritize. Not everything needs to be tested. Some changes simply aren’t worth the time and resources, regardless of the method you use.

High Strategic Importance + High Risk = Test Territory. This is where both A/B testing and rapid testing live. The next decision point becomes: Can you reach statistical significance within an acceptable timeframe? Are you technically capable of running the experiment?

If the test isn’t technically feasible or traffic constraints make the time-to-significance longer than is acceptable, rapid testing becomes your best option for de-risking the decision.

Rapid testing in practice

Rapid testing encompasses various methodologies, each suited to different types of questions. Here are just a few examples:

First-Click Testing helps confirm where users would naturally click to complete a task. Perfect for interface design decisions and navigation optimization.

Preference Testing goes beyond simple A/B comparisons to evaluate multiple options, often six to eight variations, helping teams understand which labels, designs, or approaches resonate most with their target audience.

Tree Testing reveals where users might stray from their intended path, using nested structures to understand navigation behavior without the distraction of full visual design.

The beauty of these methods lies in their speed and specificity. Rather than testing entire page redesigns, rapid testing allows you to validate specific hypotheses quickly. Which onboarding segments will users self-identify with? Where should we place a new feature to maximize engagement? Which design elements increase trust among new visitors?

Rapid tests can also guide our A/B testing strategy. If we’re entertaining multiple options for new nomenclature within an app experience and we’re just trying to understand which label users think would be most accurate or most likely to represent those outcomes, running a rapid test can narrow down those options and help us decide what to A/B test.

Building a rapid testing practice

Implementing rapid testing effectively requires more than just choosing the right method. Teams that see the best results follow several key principles:

1. Impact pre-mortems: Before testing, clearly define what success looks like and what impact you expect if implemented. This helps connect testing activities to business outcomes and prevents post-hoc justification of results.
2. Acuity of purpose: Keep tests focused on specific questions rather than trying to evaluate everything at once. A/B testing often encourages comprehensive evaluations, but rapid testing works best with precise hypotheses.
3. Pre-defined success criteria: Establish clear benchmarks before you start testing. If 80% of users can complete a task, is that a win? What about 60%? Define these thresholds upfront to avoid moving goalposts when results come in.
4. Mute context: When testing specific elements, remove unnecessary context that might distract from the core question. Full-page designs can overwhelm participants and dilute feedback on the element being tested.
5. Sunlight: Even experienced researchers benefit from collaborative review of test plans. Transparency builds confidence in the process, and a peer review of test designs helps identify potential issues before execution.
6. Share: Circulate your impact, what you’ve learned about your audience, and get people excited about the work. The goal is to build visibility, create a case for why this work is valuable, and encourage people to make decisions with data.

The compound effects of speed

Teams that successfully implement rapid testing alongside their existing A/B testing programs see remarkable results. Our clients report 50% improved A/B test win rates, better customer satisfaction scores, and significantly faster time-to-insights.

But perhaps most importantly, they report better team morale. There’s something energizing about seeing results from your work quickly, about being able to iterate and improve based on real user feedback rather than lengthy committee discussions.

It’s never too late to pivot. The idea is to move from long-term decision making, where we send something through the whole development and design cycle only to come up with a lackluster outcome, to form a process that helps us get quick, early signals.

Making the transition

The goal isn’t to replace A/B testing. It remains the gold standard for high-stakes, high-traffic decisions. But by adding rapid testing to your toolkit, you can accelerate the decisions that don’t require months of statistical validation while still maintaining confidence in your choices.

As decision scientist Annie Duke writes in Thinking in Bets, “What makes a great decision is not that it has a great outcome. It’s the result of a good process.” Rapid testing gives teams a process for rational de-risking that emphasizes both speed and quality.

The question isn’t whether you should test your ideas; it’s whether you’re using the right testing method for each decision. In a world where speed increasingly determines competitive advantage, teams that master this balance will consistently outpace those stuck with only one tool in their kit.

Ready to accelerate your decision-making process? Our team specializes in helping product teams implement rapid testing alongside existing experimentation programs. Get in touch to learn how we can help you cut testing time without sacrificing insight quality.

The post How To Make User-Centered Decisions When A/B Testing Doesn’t Make Sense appeared first on The Good.

But you aren’t crossing a finish line; you’re summiting a mountain. Reaching the peak feels like completion, but experienced climbers know that’s only halfway. The descent is equally challenging and requires different skills and focus. In the same way, optimization requires a different approach than a website launch.

You’ve successfully achieved a huge accomplishment, but you’re only partway through. You still have to climb down the mountain or, in this case, optimize your website based on user feedback.

In our decades in business, we have discovered that the most successful companies view launch day as “day one” of an optimization journey. If you want to do the same, this is the playbook to follow to maximize ROI on redesign investments.

The benefits of optimization post-website launch

By leveraging optimization post-launch, you can expect benefits like the following:

• Objectively and quickly determined opportunities for change
• Easily determined priorities according to potential impact
• Less waste of resources on changes that won’t work
• Higher ROI because you have success rates at a lower cost

Leveraging optimization after launching a website is a high-performing, systematic way of getting better results from your hard work.

In an ideal world, you conducted a data-driven redesign. You carefully derived measurements of what was actually happening on the site and feedback from customers to inform the process.

In this case, you have already conducted user testing and received clear customer feedback on your new site. You’re set up to seamlessly start collecting post-launch data and begin identifying improvement opportunities to build on the momentum you’ve generated.

If you haven’t, don’t fret. You can still reap the rewards of optimizing your site post-launch. As long as you don’t “set it and forget it,” you’re in a much better position than most of your competition.

The best optimization tools post-launch

What do you need to get started?

Our recommended toolkit for optimization post-launch includes:

Quantitative data

• Google Analytics: Analyze traffic sources, user behavior, and conversion paths. GA is essential for comparing pre/post-launch performance and identifying underperforming segments or pages.
• Heatmaps: Visual representations of user clicking, scrolling, and movement behavior that reveal which elements attract attention and which are ignored. Allows you to optimize content placement and identify what does/doesn’t resonate.

Qualitative data

• Usability testing: Structured observation of real users completing key tasks on your new site. Reveals pain points invisible in quantitative data alone and provides direct insight into how customers actually experience your redesigned user journeys.
• Session recordings: Video captures of actual visitor interactions with your site that expose unexpected navigation patterns and friction points. Helps you identify where users get confused, hesitate, or abandon their journey on specific pages.
• Customer feedback tools: Direct voice-of-customer collection mechanisms, such as surveys and feedback widgets, that capture qualitative insights about the redesign, highlighting immediate improvement opportunities from your most valuable asset: your customers.

Experimentation

• Rapid testing: Quickly validate design and content changes without dev support. Get efficient feedback on elements like CTAs, headlines, and pricing or product page components.
• A/B testing or multivariate testing: Get statistically significant proof to validate riskier design and content changes without full deployment. Test in context and make sure any further website updates will drive target user behavior.

What to do post-website launch step-by-step

With those tools in mind, you’re ready to get started.

Step 1: Rapid response protocol and the basics

The best way to celebrate a website launch is to get your organization together for a post-launch bug-squash-a-thon.

During the first 72 hours post-launch, get cross-functional teams together to hunt for bugs on the new site. Document any technical issues in a central location and use a simple prioritization framework so your devs know what to tackle first.

Implement fixes while the bug hunt is going on so people see the improvements in real time and are motivated to keep searching. Keep in mind that some of these bugs will indicate larger UX issues, so don’t delete them after solving them; keep them available for review later in the week.

Your only other priority in the first three days post-launch is to ensure all of your tooling is set up correctly. Make sure your Google Analytics is tracking the right metrics, get your heatmapping software working on the new site, and be sure any customer support functions (chatbots, etc.) are up and running.

Step 2: Compare pre and post launch data

Revisit your baseline metrics to get started reviewing pre- and post-launch data. Specifically, compare KPIs before and after the redesign and compare those across top channels and device types to get a foundational understanding of what is working and where to dig in.

Example key performance indicators to track immediately:

• Conversion rates by traffic source and device type
• User engagement metrics (time on site, pages per session)
• Cart abandonment and checkout completion rates
• Customer acquisition costs vs. lifetime value

To effectively do this, set up before/after comparison dashboards and circulate them with your team.

Layer heatmaps on top of this to understand how performance changed on a page-by-page basis with more context.

When you identify where things aren’t improving, you can identify low-hanging fruit optimization opportunities and areas that need more testing to understand what is going wrong.

Step 3: Refresh user testing and competitive analysis

Once you have a baseline of data and changes, you’ll want to conduct user research and testing. Have real people use your new site to discover its flaws and give their feedback. If you didn’t conduct testing during the refresh process, you might also find it helpful to have them use both versions of your site (the old and the redesigned) to tell you which they prefer.

Even if you have plenty of user testing data on the old site, it’s crucial to gather impressions of the site update and collect ideas for additional optimization. You can send the site to the same user testers for comparative feedback, and also be sure to get your site in front of new users for an unbiased and completely fresh perspective.

Specifically, conduct usability testing with new users to help uncover accessibility issues and where customers are getting stuck on the path to conversion.

It’s also a good time to study your competitors. What features and systems work well for their digital properties? Their success doesn’t guarantee success for you (even if your audiences overlap perfectly), but it can be a good reminder of what’s going on in the competitive landscape after many months of focusing on your own website.

Step 4: Build an optimization roadmap

Based on your GA data, the heatmaps you’ve set up, the user testing you’ve conducted, and the competitive analysis, you’re ready to start building an optimization roadmap.

A clear roadmap will help align optimization efforts with business objectives, allocate resources for continuous optimization, and generate buy-in from leadership at your organization.

Theme the categories of problems and opportunities that you identified in steps 1-4 (more on this in our article on theme-based roadmaps). Then, prioritize the themes to create a clear 90-day plan of action.

Some outcomes of your roadmap could be:

• Using initial post-launch data, you identify underperforming customer segments and decide to theme personalization opportunities based on their early behavior patterns.
• Traffic source performance is lower than your benchmark, so you create a plan for optimizing landing pages based and adjusting paid media strategies.
• Session recordings show customers getting lost while looking for more information on a specific product, so navigation and directional guidance become the main focus for your next phase of optimization.

Step 5: Delegate or outsource

With a roadmap in hand, it’s time to optimize. At this stage, the post-launch excitement might be starting to fade, but this is the step that sets successful teams apart.

If you have an internal optimization team, set up a meeting cadence and reporting framework that drives accountability, and you’re off to the races.

For teams that are struggling with:

• Data interpretation challenges
• Testing velocity limitations
• Expertise gaps in specialized areas
• General confusion about what to do next

You may need external support. Sometimes, it’s hard to read the label from inside the jar when you’ve been working on the site for so long. A partner like The Good can lend the expertise and fresh perspective to make sure you drive ROI from your redesign investment.

Double down to keep the momentum going

Your website improvement journey doesn’t end with launch; it evolves.

The businesses that treat their website as a living, breathing asset rather than a static project are the ones that consistently outperform competitors.

By implementing the five-step process outlined above, you’re positioning your organization to capture immediate wins while building a sustainable optimization practice that drives continuous improvement. 

Each insight gained, each test run, and each improvement made compounds over time, creating an ever-widening gap between your business and those that “set it and forget it.”

The post You Launched A New Website; What’s Next? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

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Episode Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Okay,

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Why not make something off of it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: interesting,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

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

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Garrow: Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Stop killing our conversion right over there.

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

Jon MacDonald: Yeah hundred percent.

Ryan Garrow: Don’t ignore that.

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Love it. Have at it.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

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

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

About This Episode:

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

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Episode Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We should put that on there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: DocuSign does a great one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you have to have that understanding first, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: It’s not here.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, it’s not here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon MacDonald: That’s a great idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Garrow: There’s more money. Yeah,

Jon MacDonald: yeah.

Ryan Garrow: You can pay those influencers more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appreciate it.

Ryan Garrow: Anytime.

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

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

About This Episode:

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

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Episode Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Garrow: podcast out of it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know you love that name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Garrow: velocity.

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

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

So set those clear expectations and watch your conversion soar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.