mr michael tan

So your search campaigns are buzzing, you’re optimising your landing pages and driving loads of registrations? Job done? Not quite. You now need to welcome your guests, show them around, make them feel at home. One of the most important aspects of promoting the use of a service is the onboarding process.

And a good way to do this is via emails. Here’s a few examples. ( I’ve used examples of collaboration systems, because I’ve recently started a top secret project in the field).

Basecamp, email 1.

I think these guys do such a good job of selling. After signing up, you get a friendly reminder of your username, and an invitation to  fill in a survey. In fact, their CEO, Jason Fried believes that the two most valuable customer groups to ask for feedback from are those that have just cancelled their contract, and those that have just signed up. The idea is that a customer who has just signed up is fresh from the buying process and can offer insights into what caused them to purchase.

What Jason Fried taught me about selling software.

Basecamp, email 2

Two days after registering you get a invitation to introduction classes, that walk you through how to use the system.

Basecamp, email 3.

And once you’ve started your project, you get a nudge to start inviting your friends

Basecamp email 4.

And finally, one week after joining, you get another invitation for more training and a gentle reminder of when your free trial expires.

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“For a couple years, registered Airbnb users have been able to star the properties they browse, and save them to a list. But Gebbia’s team wondered whether just a few tweaks here and there could change engagement, so they changed that star to a heart. To their surprise, engagement went up by a whopping 30%. The star, they realized, was a generic web shorthand and a utilitarian symbol that didn’t carry much weight. The heart, by contrast, was aspirational.”

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670890/how-airbnb-evolved-to-focus-on-social-rather-than-searches#1

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I love online because it really is a balance of art and science.

Fab.com measuring social media.

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Great article from the economist.

“Consumers often struggle to realise, for example, that a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price. They overwhelmingly assume the former is better value. In an experiment, the researchers sold 73% more hand lotion when it was offered in a bonus pack than when it carried an equivalent discount.”

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I think alot of people don’t realise that ”Unless you log out after each visit to the site, Facebook can follow your actions as you view other sites on the Internet.”

The net effect is that facebook knows what websites your visiting, and can target ads to you when your on facebook.

Facebook exchange

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Lately I’ve been thinking about marketing. I’ve always felt instinctively that the marketers I’ve met can be broadly categorised into two groups, but it wasn’t until recently that the second group had a name – Growth Hacker

Traditional
These guys care about branding, they love the BIG idea and broadcast media. They normally work at agencies (even digital ones) and think in terms of fire and forget launch events. Favourite metrics are Facebook Likes.

Growth hackers
These guys care about growth (audience, membership and / or revenue). They care about engagement, and would choose blogger outreach over banner campaigns. They think in terms of campaign optimisation, APIs and platforms. Favourite metrics are CPA and LTV.

http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study/

http://www.thenewagency.com.au/post/22742197956/the-future-belongs-to-the-growth-hackers

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Lately I’ve been doing a lot of research into typography, and how it relates to the web.

It’s interesting, because it’s partly like judging art, ie subjective, but there’s also very real practical concerns based on usability (is it easy to read on computer screens?) as well as technical (will people be able to even see it?)

Here’s my top three tips -

• Use a small set of fonts only (three max) and be consistent in how you deploy them.
• Use a combination of san seriff and seriff fonts, perhaps one for headings, and one for body text. Make sure that there’s enough variation between the fonts for them to stand out. On the web, I think this is critical. Big, heavy heading fonts make it really easy for users to scan pages.
• Copy! Check out other sites you like and be inspired.

Here’s a really excellent selection of google web fonts – http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/

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For a recent side project, I used 99designs.com to create some custom cushion designs. I came away impressed with the service, and here’s five tips on getting the most out of crowdsourcing / 99designs.com

Think about how you categorise your competition -

I happened to be running a competition to design cushion cases. So the closest category I could find was Clothing & Merchandise > Other. Maybe not the sexiest category! I might have got alot more visibility (and entrants) had I advertised under t-shirts (exactly the same skill set required), or simply graphic design.

Think about how you describe your competition -

In the title of my competition, I asked for people who “love typography”. So what I ended up with was alot of letterpress typography designs. In retrospect, perhaps I should have asked for people to interpret a quote. That way I might have got illustrations as well as fancy fonts.

Be a great communicator –

It’s critical to providing excellent feedback. I rated every single design and commented on nearly all of them. Designers appreciate feedback and you end up iterating much faster, maximising the chances you get to a design you love. Even time spent commenting on a design that you know you won’t choose isn’t wasted as other designers can learn from that feedback.

Comment publicly –

At first, I corresponded directly with individual designers. Whilst this was great, I found I would end up writing the same feedback for multiple designers. Posting comments publicly saved time and ensured an even playing field.

Be open minded –

Getting a design that wasn’t what you’re expecting, but you ended up loving was a real treat.

A note on exploitation –

Crowdsourced design sites like 99designs.com and designcrowd.com.au have been getting a bit of flack lately from design professionals. Basically, some of them feel that the cheap prices hurts the industry and devalues “good” design.

Here’s my experience.

It cost me $150. I received 85 entries. Of which, say 15 were duplicates (same design in different colours). So dividing the cost by the remainder of the designs, that works out to $2.14 per design. Assuming each design took on average an hour (which seems fair, I had some beautiful hand drawn entries which would have taken hours, as well as some slapped together photoshop jobs). That works out to just over $2 per hour, which is obviously not great.

The winner though, gets everything. So he / she has earned $150 for one or two hours work, which is pretty good (Aussie dollar being what it is and all).

So if I was a designer, would I use 99designs? I think if I needed to build a portfolio, or I was between higher paying jobs then sure. I’d probably be really picky about which contests I entered though, and I’d probably wait till the last day before submitting, so that I can learn from feedback without spending my time.

As a contest holder, would I use 99designs again? For the right project, definitely. It was cheap, I got great results and it was fun.

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Interesting.

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My first facebook page is now live and it’s a big one. Swiftcover is probably the UK’s most well known insurance company, and they’ve just launched a brand new advertising campaign. Previously, they had Iggy Pop selling car insurance (huh?) and they’ve replaced him with a family of talking dogs (huh?).

Anyway, the job for me involved building a wordpress template from scratch (so that it can grow over time) and working out how to set up a facebook app, build a page, configure the social graph and much more.

Pretty cool!

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One of the hardest things about purchasing fashion items online is that it’s impossible to try them on before purchase. Here in the UK, ASOS gets around this by making it so easy to return items that you end up purchasing five pairs of jeans in different sizes just to try on, knowing you’ll end up shipping 4 pairs back.

Sydney based eyewear retailer Sneaking Duck also has a great idea (not sure about scalability though) – they’ll send a bike courier over with five pairs of glasses for you to try -

“The service, which is at this stage only available for Central Sydney customers, enables Sneaking Duck customers to get their five favorite frames delivered to their home (or office) to try-on with outfits, or to get the opinion of significant others for free, prior to purchasing.” – powerretail.com.au

Not only does this let the customer find the right specs, but what a great viral marketing opportunity!!

I’ve not had a chance to try the service, but here’s what I hope they’re doing -

• Sneaking Duck offers custom specs, an uncommon service that people don’t know much about, but would probably be interested in.
• When people try on specs they’re always asking for second opinions from the people around them. Take that opportunity to not only close the first sale (the person who’s trying on the specs) but more importantly, to expose the brand and service to all those other people in the office.

• Specifically, this might involve -
• For any deliveries to an office, don’t send a surly bike messenger. Pay a bit more to send someone who’s been trained on what sneaking duck offers. Have them answer any questions from anyone in the office and promote the brand.
• Give out a bunch of leaflets and leave them at the office. If it seems like there’s lots of potential (maybe an architect or advertising firm) think about customising the leaflets with the company’s name and a limited offer. Something that might get shared on their notice board. Maybe see if the original purchaser could be a brand advocate somehow?
• Think about some sort of group discount (without jeopardising the first sale obviously)

• This hits on:
• Peer to peer discovery – “Sally from marketing is asking for my opinion on these custom specs, I wonder what they are?”
• Implicit peer recommendation – “Sally’s pretty cool, these custom specs must be pretty cool”
• Product demo – “I get to see the quality of product before making a purchase – that never happens online”

Smart way to turn delivery into a subtle sales pitch.

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You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are. You may think you know where you are, but without a thorough website content audit, it’s likely that you don’t.

11 steps for a content audit.

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