📕 The role of social scientists in retention, Keywords for conversion, Ditching the Facebook pixel...
Happy Friday! This week we zoom in on a new approach to customer retention strategy, uncover a silent growth killer, and feature an SEO case study courtesy of one of our readers (keep sending us your favorite listens and reads!)
Let’s get to it.
🥼When companies start to see high rates of customers churning, the knee-jerk reaction is to throw money at retention campaigns to stop the bleeding; some may even release new features to quell dissatisfaction. But neither of those tactics uncovers the root of the problem; they just treat symptoms. The actual solution is to talk to your customers, which is typically delegated to the marketing or customer success teams. But there’s a growing case for bringing on social scientists to execute customer research strategies. Social scientists study human behavior and dive deeper than high-level survey responses when it comes to quantitative insights. They don’t come cheap, but identifying how to slash churn can be worth the cost.
🔑 The keyword strategy for your content will differ based on where buyers are in their journey – this case study breaks down how to target people deep in the consideration phase. Here’s what stood out: review sites are starting to rank higher on SERPS, so it’s important to monitor your keywords on these third-party sites as well. Consider adding a dedicated review page to your website, especially if you’re already collecting that data through NPS surveys or customer feedback forms. To dovetail on that point, adding a comparison page where you go head-to-head with your biggest competitors can have a huge impact on driving traffic. The study found that people who were in the consideration phase searched for alternatives to brands they were already familiar with at an alarming rate.
🤔 With paid marketing channels getting more saturated, customer acquisition costs are on an upwards trend, pushing founders to focus on retaining customers to increase their LTV. So annual plans are the strong preference, even if sold at a discounted rate. But there are a couple factors to consider before locking customers into annual contracts, the most important being company/product maturity. If you’re still in the early days, a monthly pricing model allows you to monitor churn more effectively, especially if you’re continuing to iterate or validate your product. It’s not a secret that high-touch, enterprise customers are morse suited for annual contracts, while products without a lengthy implementation period do best selling monthlys.Â
💰 Product debt is a topic that isn’t often discussed but can be a silent killer of growth. The debt is incurred when companies try to optimize their product at all costs without having a real vision of how those improvements will solve their customers’ problems. To grow your product in the right way, your roadmap needs to include fixing short-term needs and keeping where your industry or vertical is going in mind. You want to make sure you don’t become a feature factory – companies who focus on churning out new features often get into a habit of building things their customers don’t need. Eliminating these low traction areas of your product is a great starting point for managing product debt.
🔩 In a recent episode of Confessions of B2B marketer, Ahref’s CMO Tim Soulo discussed some of their unconventional approaches to B2B SaaS marketing. When building their inbound marketing machine, they uninstalled their Facebook pixel and removed Google Analytics from their site. Instead, they focused the bulk of their attention on creating an excellent product and highly educational content. At times they outsourced content creation to thought leaders who were featured as guest posters. This created a ripple effect where thought leaders began talking about Ahrefs to their audiences at conferences and through their social networks, which ultimately drove customers to their site. So they weren’t just outsourcing their content creation; they were outsourcing a nurture element of Ahref’s marketing strategy.Â