Doing Words

Casual visitors need low, low barriers before they’ll stick

// November 12th, 2008 // Communication

 

You have to go a long way and add a lot of value if you want to get consumers to change an established pattern of behaviour. Sometimes you may find you have to massively subsidise their use of your product for a long time before you’re able to directly charge them anything at all. But it’s worth doing, since you’re paying for your site visitors.
 

Assume every visitor costs you money

Many of the startup business plans I work with assume that every visitor to the website will be ‘organic’ (finding their own way there) and assume that they will be ‘purpose driven’ (they have come to the site because they’re serious about finding a product in this category.

If only that were the case. In reality, unless you spend no money on search engine advertising, nearly all of your traffic for the first 12 months will be from your paid ads. You’re spending money getting them there, so that puts a real imperative on making sure as many of those visitors as possible becomes a customer, even if they’re only on a free account.

Forget about paying customers, focus on getting a customer

You have 10-30 seconds to convert a casual visitor. Take a long, hard look at the pre-registration sections of your website and strip out anything that might be a reason for the user to leave and look elsewhere. Let’s look at an example.

Backboard is another service in a crowded market that provides solutions for getting feedback on your work. It works for individuals with clients, teams and corporates and lets them share docs online, annotate and comment on them.

You can see classic pricing theory in the way their pricing chart is structured: surround the product you want people to buy with similar products that are much more expensive and cut-down products that are not that much cheaper.

But in Backboard’s case, your competitor is not other startups offering sharing/annotation products. Your competition is established behaviour: emailing docs to people and getting replies via email; and even worse: meetings! Both are apparently ‘free’ to use, well understood, zero-risk, and not that badly broken.

To get people to choose browser-based email over client-based email, Hotmail and Yahoo! had to offer consumers a tremendous amount of value in features and free-ness in order to get signups to scale. Late-comer Google, looking to leapfrog Yahoo!, Hotmail and client software, had to give away gigabytes of storage and invented all-new features that were best-of-class and better than anyone could reasonably expect to see offered for free.

So Backboard’s pricing chart is wrong because the only free product in the table is, in my opinion, not compelling enough to compete with meetings and emails. It’s not only boring, it’s potentially risky to use. Am I going to get in trouble if my boss hears someone else say that the mockup I sent around ‘wasn’t secure’ or ‘available to the whole internet’? Because that’s the question that arises when I see those security features aren’t included in the free product.

The ‘individual’ product – with all the features but limited to one account – is the product that should be offered for free. Get enough individual users in an organisation using Backboard and you have a chance to make something viral happen – colleagues notice most of the office early-adopters using Backboard and they might try it themselves. But if there’s just one guy – the eccentric, linux-using, smartphone-brandishing one with the long hair and the black tee shirt – it’s never going to take off.

Don’t bury your best feature

Finally, there’s a row missing from the pricing table: “storage.” It says elsewhere on the page that Backboard gives you unlimited storage, but says it in just about the most unappealing way possible:

“We do not restrict the total size of your account, but there is a file size limit for each upload (20 MB is sufficient for most files).”

What? Hello? You’re missing the biggest feature you have! Splash “UNLIMITED STORAGE!” in a new row across all your products in the table. Or better still, advertise 100GB for the free account, 1TB for team accounts and 10TB for office accounts. You want people to think, “100GB? For FREE? WOW!”