Category Archives: Product Marketing

These are all my posts about Product Marketing.

Easy To Cancel makes it Easier to Sign Up

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Don’t you just hate it when you have to mail in a letter or call a phone number to cancel your “Free Trial”? Chances are your potential customers do too.

The only way to combat this notion is to tell your customers how easy it is to cancel your service right when you ask for their Credit Card information.

This comment on Hacker News blew my mind:

“The reason I think long and hard before signing up for new web services isn’t even the cost 99% of the time, but the uncertainty in how difficult it is going to be to cancel should I decide I do not want to continue.” George McBay

Checkout what Netflix does to combat this:

Step 1: They don’t show the credit card form. They just want to grab your email address so they can send you marketing emails in case you don’t sign up on the 2nd step.

(click on image for a bigger image)

Step 2: Make it very obvious that your customer can cancel online anytime easily. {tweet}

Do you know other ways to combat the “It Sucks To Cancel” notion? Let me know in the comments.

Getting Paying Customers is YOUR problem

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You can’t expect your users to stumble upon paying you. Sending your users email reminders and navigating them through a series of steps that will lead them to paying you is key.

One of my favorite freemium website builders, Weebly, does an incredible job. Here is what they do:

Step 1: Get the Users Email Address

Weebly Homepage

Weebly tries to get you into an account as fast as possible. The free sign up form is right on the homepage, they don’t focus on making you watch the video or go to a “Pricing Page”.

Step 2: Create an Easy Hook to Get the User Engaged

Weebly's Welcome Message

Notice the stripped out navigation. Weebly only gives the user two options right after you create an account.

Option 1: Fill out your website title and the type of site you are  building

Option 2: Close the browser

The “Category” question is really interesting. This probably helps Weebly understand who their top customers are and helps them target future customers as well. Another side benefit is Weebly can tailor the user experience based on what category the customer selects.

Step 3: First Sell – Get Your Users to Buy a Domain

Step 3 Weebly Choose Website Domain

If you purchase your domain with Weebly it is a major lock in factor. People hardly ever get rid of the domains they buy. I like how they make this part of their on boarding process and the default option checks to see if you domain is available.

Step 4: Send Timed Emails to Remind Them of Your Service

Step 4 - Weebly - Timed Reminder 1

Checkout how they use my name in the subject line and in the email. Open rates go dramatically up when you include the first name or business name of your customers.

I also really like the “Auto Log-in to Weebly” in the upper right hand corner. I never remember my password and a major barrier to entry for me would be having to go through resetting my password. The “Auto Log-in” removes that worry from my completely.

Step 5: Send a Hard Close Email with a Coupon to get Users to Upgrade

They end the email with a sense of urgency. They really make you feel like you are losing out if you don’t upgrade today. You only get this email if you haven’t upgraded.

When in doubt – Think Like Ikea

Ikea Store Map

Have you ever been to Ikea? If not, there is only one route you can take through the entire store. They make it super simple to buy everything you need. Don’t worry if you forgot something on your list, Ikea will remind you by showing you on your path to the checkout aisle. This worked on me about 2 years ago when I moved to San Francisco. I thought all I needed was a bed, some dishes, and a couch…. Ikea really opened my eyes by showing me all the things that I was missing on my list.

Do you know other companies that have amazing navigation that lead to paying customers? Let me know about them in the comments below.

Learn from Google+. Copy First, Innovate Second

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Instead of reinventing social networking from the ground up, Google+ just copied the best qualities of all the other popular social networks, which is why it’s so amazing and gaining traction so quickly.

Here are some things that I’ve noticed they copied:

Facebook’s Layout

Everyone is used to Facebook’s layout. So why not lower the learning barrier by making the user interface the same?

Facebook’s Likes

Google noticed that users really loved Facebook’s “Like” feature. Leaving a comment is a lot of work but allowing people to easily give you feedback with a click of a button incentivizes more status updates. Google copied the “Like” with a “+1” which functions identically.

Twitter’s Retweeting and Tumblr’s Reblogging 

Who doesn’t love a reblog or a retweet? Google made it super simple to share your friends status messages with your followers.

Twitter Followers 

It’s pretty cool when you can get an inside look at what your favorite American Idol is having for breakfast. Google makes following a possibility (something you can’t do on Faceb00k). This allows a one-to-many relationship and opens up the amount of connections you can have.

Quora’s Notifications

All top social networks (Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook) do whatever it takes to show you notifications. Google went to the extreme on this. You get updates at the top bar of all Google properties (Google.com, Google Reader, Gmail, etc) if you are signed in, and they also email you updates.

Color’s Nearby Tab

Google knew that early on peoples newsfeed would be pretty empty since most people would have less than 10 connections when starting out. So they adopted Color’s idea, which is to show you what people near you are posting. This allows you to feel an instant sense of community and engages you right away.

I’m not bashing Google here by any means. I love Google+ and I think they made a smart move by just going with what already works. Once they reach their 25M+ users next week, like PC Magazine predicts, then they can innovate like crazy and change the world.

Update: Awesome comment on Hacker News to this post:

I want to point out that so many companies get the “copy first” part right, but never get around to the “innovate later” part. Copy first is becomming a mantra. Facebook was a copy of The Face Book, in fact. The reason facebook is what it is is that they did get around to innovating later. The reason there’s no competition for the iPod is that the competition never got around to innovating (or in MSFT’s case, got around to it way too late.) – econgeeker

The World’s Greatest Up-Sell: Facebook Pages

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Facebook is getting really good at making money. They do a great job up-selling their ads with Facebook pages. I want to reveal their strategy in hopes you can do the same to your business.

Step 1: Create a Facebook Page without even knowing it

They promote the ability to create a Facebook page in lots of interesting ways. My favorite one is on user profiles. Facebook asks you to enter in where you work and automatically creates it into a Facebook Business Page that other users can “Like”. This will prompt the business owner to have lots of “Likes” before their page is even started.

Works at Flying Cart - Facebook Page

Step 2: Invite all your friends so you can actually name it.

They prompt you to invite all your friends. They actually don’t let you name your page until you have received at least 25 likes. This gets you to start obsessing over the # of likes you have.

Facebook Pages - Invite Your Friends

Step 3: Sell ads to get more “Likes”

When you are on your own Facebook Page they show you what your advertisement could look like with a call-to-action button that says “Get More Likes”

Sample Ad for a Facebook Page to get you to start advertising

Step 4: Keep the “Like” obsession going with analytics

They email you weekly insights on how many fans you have and get you really worried if the numbers are going up or down. At the bottom of the email they have a convenient link to promote your Facebook page with ads.

In summary what Facebook has done is pretty brilliant. They have other users collecting “Likes” for your business before it even launches. They then get you obsessed with the number of likes you have. Then they up-sell you ads to get more likes.

This is an old strategy that works

This strategy has been around for years. My first recollection of this is Yellow Pages. They list your business in their directory for free. You either learn about their service from a client that told you they found you through Yellow Pages or you were also an end consumer yourself. Once things get rolling they ask you to “upgrade” your profile by bolding your name or placing an advertisement in their book.

Yelp follows this model as well. They list every business possible  for free and up sell ads.

Google probably takes the cake on this. They crawl the entire web. Give you Google Analytics so you know that customers are coming from Google. They then upsell you ads so you can get more people to your website through them.

In conclusion, if you run a business that has massive amounts of use, consider doing some soft upsells like Facebook.

Who is doing FREE right?

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Photo by Brad Stabler

Giving something away for free is easy. Making money on free is hard. Here are a few companies that are doing it right.

On The Web

Mail Chimp's Pricing Page

Mail Chimp

MailChimp has a gazzilion competitors in the hosted email marketing space. They make their free plans (2,000 contacts) crazy huge. The switching costs of a hosted email provider are pretty high – attract people to your free plan, get them hooked, and make them pay when they are more successful.

Keep in mind that MailChimp is funded and I bet their spam monitoring team is quite big.

WordPress

WordPress.com/.org and other popular open source products – WordPress has done a great job creating the best blogging platform and the best part is that you can self host a copy of WordPress for free. A few years back they launched wordpress.com a hosted version of WordPress for $15/mo – perfect for non techies or people that don’t want to deal with the server headaches. Also a great way to leverage their extremely strong brand name, “WordPress”.

Free Credit Report

FreeCreditReport.com – They ask for your credit card info so they can check your credit score. They then auto-enroll you into a $14.95/mo plan so you can monitor your credit score. Is this super scammy? Yes. If you choose to do something like this – get ready for a ton of angry customers and chargeback fees. I decided to add them to this list because they just added a big banner at the top notifying people of this AND they are a good free service for checking your credit score.

DropBox

DropBox is one of my favorite companies that is doing Free right. They use their “Free” plan as a way to get new customers. First they offer a very generous 2GB storage “Free” plan and they let you earn more free space for every friend you successfully refer.

In Physical Retail Stores

Free Cone Day - Emphasis on the Store Locator

Ben & Jerry’s

Ben & Jerrys – Where is your local Ben & Jerry’s? I had no idea until Free Cone Day happened. I google map’ed it and went. Now I know exactly what route to take to remedy my sweet tooth.

Apple

Apple’s Free Engraving – When you engrave someones name on the back of an Ipod you can no longer sell it on eBay. The value decreases. I mean who is going to buy my IPod with the engraving “Stud Muffin”. “By offering free engraving, Apple makes these used devices less valuable to other consumers. Who wants a weird engraving chosen by the previous owner on his iP*d?” – Eli Douardo

On Television

Snuggie

Snuggies and All Infomercials – “But wait, there is more”. Technically they aren’t giving you anything for free but they act like it. If you buy the product today you get a bunch of extra free stuff which gets the customer thinking that they are getting something for free.

Conclusion: If you are going to give something away for free, make sure you know how to earn money from it.

Do you offer a free product or plan? Let me know if it is working for you and how.

Text Me A Link

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Screen Shot of Square giving you the ability to text me a link

As soon as I registered for Square they gave me the option to have the download link texted to me. It is actually really hard to find Android apps even when you know the name.

If you are selling a mobile app and you have a website chances are much higher that I’m going to download your app if you text it to me. Making things easier on the user always increases conversion. This is something you can easily pull off with Twilio.

Public Stats: Twitter and YouTube make me care

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Graph showing Rishi's # of followers

I have no idea why but for the past few days I have been obsessed with the number of followers I have.

It probably has to do with the fact that it is public and everyone can see it. Or maybe it has something with the fact that if someone has a ton of followers we think they are more important than others. I often find myself looking at how many followers other people have to determine if they are worthy of my follow.

Public stats has worked on me over and over again.

First it was YouTube. Since people could see how many views a particular video has, I wanted to promote the crap out of it. I also would email all my friends so I could get 1 more view. If a video is over 5 minutes long and it has less than a 1,000 views I will most likely turn it off before the 1 minute mark (unless it completely engages me).

Next it was LinkedIn. Since the number of connections was public I really wanted to hit the 500+ connections landmark. I quickly lost interest in connecting with more people after I hit the 500+ goal because you can’t publicly see how many connections someone has past 500.

Now it is Twitter. I find myself checking Twitter Counter on a daily basis to see if my # of followers has grown. Do I think it is pathetic?… yes, I do. Will I still check my twitter numbers tomorrow… yes, I will.

Conclusion: If you want your users to care. Show them stats and make it public for everyone to see.

Side Note: I wonder if I would have done better in school if my grades were displayed publicly.

Am I the only one that is like this? Do public stats make you care? Let me know in the comments please.

How Meetup.com Brings in the Cash with Personalized Email Marketing

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meetup.com logoMeetup.com rocks at email marketing! In this blog post I’m going to show you how they make money with their emails. You should walk away from this post understanding the power of personalized location based email marketing and how it can increase user engagement.

Meetup User Life Cycle Comic Teaser

Meetup.com User Life Cycle Comic below

First the Basics:
What is Meetup?
So lets say you wanted to get a bunch of like-minded people to talk about books, web development, parenting, etc. You can go to Meetup.com and launch a “meetup”. You can also go directly to their site and search based on your interest and zip code for a meetup in your area.

How does Meetup.com make money?
Meetup.com charges the organizers a flat monthly fee ($19/mo) to run a “meetup”?
Note: that they don’t have a free plan or trial. Instead they explain why they need to charge and a picture of their entire team. They also try to incentivize you to sign up for 6 months rather than doing a month to month plan (this probably helps them increase retention since it takes 3-6 months to get your meetup really going).

Meetup.com's pricing pageWhy would anyone want to run a “meetup”?
Lots of reasons. But here are a few:
Meet like minded people, recruiting, seminars, business development, build a small community. Oh… also you can charge people to attend your meetup so this can turn into your own business.

Now the Good Stuff. How they do email marketing:
It is meetup.com’s financial incentive to make sure people attend meetups. Organizers are likely to keep their meetup going if people show up.

Step 1: Incentivize the “Organizer” to market the meetup using their existing community and location.
Meetup tells the organizer to email their contacts, post flyers up, and publish an ad on craigslist in their city. This helps meetup.com reach new users.

Step 2: Automatically assign email alerts to the user based on the meetup they joined. For example I joined a board-game meetup and it assigned a bunch of tags for me based on that meetup:

Meetup.com auto tagsThe beauty here is not only do they know I’m into board games but they know that I’m also located in San Francisco. Now, whenever a new board-game meetup is created in San Francisco I will get an email alert.

Step 3: Ask the new user to update their interests. This is done in the app and each email alert they send out.

The more things meetup learns about you the better they will be able to fill up their new meetups by alerting users.

Step 4: When a new meetup is created alert the people that are interested in it. This will help organizers fill up their meetups and keep them as a happy paid customers.

meetup's email announcement for things you are interested inSo, What’s The Point?:
Community driven sites can increase retention by simply alerting customers via email when something of interest happens on your site. So ask your users what they are interested in and let them know when it happens.

Meetup's User Life Cycle - How they Keep Paying Customers Happycomic art work by jenniart. feel free to reblog or embed this comic

If you have a community driven site and need help with figuring out how to make this happen just let me know in the comments or here. I would be happy to help you out. I’m also constantly tweeting about web marketing so feel free to follow me.

Update 3/23/11: Awesome quote in the comments by Ish

“Bottom line you are playing with fire with email alerts — make sure its clear to the user whats causing the alerts to happen and give them fine-grained tools to control them.”

Creating Cultural Change and How Orabrush is Doing it

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Creating cultural change to sell products isn’t easy. But it has been done been done before. Deodorant, cigarette’s for women, and razors have all successfully created cultural change.

Not wearing deodorant is now considered gross. Hairy arm pits or legs are now considered gross. Cigarette companies targeted women by calling cigarette’s “freedom torches”. All three of those changes were backed by companies in order to sell more products.

There are four main things that go into Cultural Change:

  1. Doctors (or a bunch of smart people) must approve it vocally
  2. Successful people and people you know must be seen using it
  3. Must be a mass consumer product (sold in the hundreds of millions)
  4. Mainstream users would say the wrong thing to do is to not buy it

I believe Orabrush, an easy to use tongue scraper, is going to make cultural change happen. I predict in the next 5 years not scraping your tongue is going to be considered gross.

I learned about Orabrush yesterday because my twitter and facebook stream was filled with likes. Here is how they are making it happen:

#1 The person that invented the Orabrush is a doctor and they use “Dr. Bob” in all email communications and on their website whenever they need to establish credibility.

#2 They are getting everyone you know to tweet about it. If your friends are doing it then it is totally okay for you to get one as well. The power of social influence is a big one here. They strongly incentivize you to “follow” and “like” it. Here is a break down of how they are getting a ton of people to follow:

A. On their website they have a call to action asking if you want the Orabrush for free? Yes of course I want one for free.

B. They then show you a three step process on how to get the Orabrush for free
C. You click on the first step and they make it super easy for you to like and follow them.
D. They then make you subscribe to their YouTube page. I like how they add “(it’s free too)” since the word “Subscribe” might make people think otherwise.
E. The next step is to put in your shipping information and pay for shipping. At this point I was like “Man! I have to pay for shipping???”
F. I then clicked on “Why do I pay shipping?” and I saw this picture of the inventor. The $3.99 shipping fee didn’t seem so bad after I saw the hard working inventor behind it.

 

#3 In order to get mass adoption they are giving their product away for free. This works really well for Orabrush. Their product is pretty cheap but marketing it isn’t. In order to get a ton of people to buy the Orabrush they need to get a giant handful of influencers to start using their product.

 

#4 Checkout their very compelling video. They do a great job convincing you that in order to avoid bad breath you have to use the Orabrush. They show gross pictures and images or what your tongue looks like if you don’t scrape it.

 

Well done Orabrush! As a long time tongue cleaning fan I hope you win.

 

If you liked this post. You will also like one of my most popular blog posts: How to Win with an Online Store (hint: Don’t sell things available on Amazon)

2011 The Year of The Marketplace and How to Win

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I got some quick advice from Gary Swart of ODesk and he said the best way to build a marketplace is to make sure the “buyer” and “seller” are the same person. If they aren’t the same person building a marketplace will be very costly and time consuming.

Lets take a look at eBay. Buyer and Seller are practically the same person. You only really need to market to one type of person and both sides of your marketplace grows.

Now for example lets look at Twitter. I joined twitter to just follow a few people. After a few weeks I started tweeting as well. Same thing happened with me on Quora. The “follower” became the “contributor”. You will see similar patterns with StackOverflow, Airbnb, StumbleUpon, and Fon.

If you take a look at ODesk or Etsy (both very successful companies) they both spend a lot of time and money on advertising (Search Engine Marketing in ODesk’s case and Grass Roots Community Building in Etsy’s case).

Conclusion: If you want to build a marketplace make sure you only have to market to one person.

This blog post was inspired by a tweet my buddy Noah posted a few days ago.