In this bonus section, you'll get access to previously recorded live expert workshops and Q&A from PLG experts such as Todd Olson (CEO of Pendo), Tara Robertson (CMO at Teamwork), Nelson Joyce (Co-founder of Tettra), and more.
Ramli John:
All right. Thank you so much for that presentation that you recorded Sarah, I really do appreciate that. How's it going, Sarah? How are things with you? Your sound is all fixed up now, right?
Sarah:
Yeah. Yeah, good. I mean, par for the course for 2020, it's always going to be something, but yeah, really good and excited to answer any questions that people might have.
Ramli John:
Yeah. If you have any questions, type in in the comments, but this is not a traditional webinar, you can actually unmute yourself. The big reason why I brought this on, was that a big thing about any product-led business is making sure that right at the get-go from the pricing page, like you talked about from the forms, you're setting up people for success. So if you have any questions about pricing page, about optimizing forms, just type it in the comments. But I do have some questions that I had along the way while I was watching that.
Sarah:
Sure.
Ramli John:
One of the questions I had was there's always this tension between, should I ask this information, or should I not ask? At the bare minimum maybe you should ask email, address, password. You talked about the phone number, maybe that's not something you have, but there's this tension if you have a sales team, they want that information, right? They want more information. That's something I've heard over and over again from teams. How can teams figure out what are things that they should and should not have when asking people to, right at the beginning, when they're trying to sign up for something?
Sarah:
Yeah, it's such a hotly debated topic of what do we ask and when do we ask it? And when I used to do digital marketing for a fortune 500 company, we would have so many back and forth debates with the sales team, with product teams, because they felt like if I don't ask it, I'm never going to get it. And you get into this battle almost of, "Well, it's a field in my CRM and I need to have all this data populated in my CRM, so I have to ask it on my website." But that's where using a tool like form analytics can take that subjectivity out of it, it's not that back and forth. It's, "Well, let's ask it and let's see, is it causing drop-off?" And like that example that we saw in that presentation of that form that had a ton of different fields to fill out, you see people are dropping off at that phone number.
Sarah:
So if I'm the marketer or the person responsible for the experience on the website, I'm going to go to my sales team, and I'm going to say, "Hey, I know you guys think you really need this form, but we're losing conversions because people are seeing that and they think it's too much. So can we do what we need to do with email?" And then when you have that next interaction, that's when you can ask them once you have that relationship. But that's one of the things I love about these tools is because it takes that subjectivity out of it. And it gets you out of that uncomfortable situation of, "It's my opinion versus yours." Whether or not it needs to be there.
Ramli John:
I have a question from John. I'm not sure if it's a question at all, but in UK, I think there's a caveat where the tracking stuff, you probably need GDPR and stuff like that. How do you handle that with Lucky Orange, but how can other people handle that with this stuff that they're tracking, especially with privacy being a big issue?
Sarah:
Absolutely. So Lucky Orange is GDPR compliant, we're CCPA compliant. We go through all of the same processes. If someone reaches out, we have the ability to forget their information, just like anyone else that's compliant with GDPR would, and we take that privacy very seriously from a Lucky Orange standpoint. So one of the things that we also do is that if you saw in those examples, when someone types something into a form field, Lucky Orange does not capture that personal information. You'll see in a playback or a recording, those are all asterisks because we don't want your login. We don't want your password, because that really matters. None of us want to pass that through, and there are additional safety features in Lucky Orange, where you can designate sections of your website as sensitive information where we can scramble the text.
Sarah:
So let's say you're a financial institution, and maybe you have sensitive information when someone logs in you'd have something on the screen that says, "Hi John, your account number is..." If you don't want that recorded, you can enable text scrambling. So you still see the same placement of everything, but that sensitive information isn't captured and passed on. So that if you have a support team, that's looking back at recordings or heat maps, they're not going to see that individual's specific information.
Ramli John:
That makes sense. That totally makes sense, that is a big thing, and thank you for sharing that information. Like I said, if anybody has a question, just type it in the comments. I do have another one. I've done a few tear downs of onboarding. And one of the things I noticed, especially at the beginning, when you're going through the pre signup, the stages where you're setting the expectation, you talked about CTA's and even the psychology around the copy and the CTA, like whether that's start for free or start free trial, or get started for free... You talked a little bit about there was a whole section there on CTA's in the thing, but can you talk a little bit more about how, not just the CTA's, but that sets the expectation for people who are about to sign up for product-led businesses for, especially, setting them up for success.
Sarah:
Yeah, you're right. That onboarding process and those first few initial interactions that you have really set the stage with people when they're evaluating software. All of us have gone out there and signed up for a free trial of software, right? And we're evaluating several other ones, and so everything matters. You want it to be reflective of your overall experience and figuring out what's going to resonate, what is going to drive more conversions, a really easy way to do that is hopefully you're doing some AB testing and you know that this converts better than that phrase converts and that you're constantly trying that out and you're testing it. I think the big thing with websites is you're never done iterating on your website, and going back, and evaluating it because what worked for you right now may not be the same thing that's working for you in six months.
Sarah:
How many of you on the call have had to think about what you're doing differently because of all the changes that we've seen with COVID? You have to go back and you have to continually optimize and test and be looking at, am I seeing my conversion rate drop? Well, okay. I need to get in there and try and identify that, and look at those elements in those pages where they used to be getting good engagement, but now things are dropping off. And do I need to go in and refine that? Is it my language? Is it a browser issue? Maybe there was a change that Chrome made to its browser and all of a sudden that button that you had from a CTA standpoint is broken now. It's all sorts of things like that, where your website isn't... It's not an end, the finish line at the end of a race. It's more like a marathon and you've got to constantly be going back in and looking for opportunities to refine.
Wesley Bush:
And I guess on that note too, sorry, Ramli.
Ramli John:
No worries.
Wesley Bush:
But how do you really go about prioritizing? "Okay, these are the experiments we're going to be running." Because I know for a lot of folks here, they are constantly trying to do these experiments, but I think one of the main challenges is just well, what should we do first?
Sarah:
Yeah. That's a great question. Especially if you're a smaller business or solo entrepreneur, just getting started, you're like, "Gosh, how do I prioritize my day? There's so many demands on my attention." But a good place to start would be if you have conversion pump funnels that you're tracking, look at where that drop-off is happening. So if you know that you have a specific series of actions that you want to guide users down while they're on your website, and you're seeing increasing drop-off from one step of that funnel to the next, jump into that conversion funnel. And if you're using a tool like Lucky Orange, you can start watching recordings to see what people are doing, and that's a great way to prioritize it if you're looking at paths that people are taking on your website too. If you're seeing anything that's different or unusual patterns or behavior, one of the other places I always encourage people to look is, look at the differences in the experience for your desktop users versus your mobile users.
Sarah:
And especially look at your conversion rates for those, because you might be tempted to say, "Oh, I don't get a ton of traffic on desktop." But what if you looked at that and you saw that even though you don't get a lot of traffic, your desktop visitors are converting higher. It seems counterintuitive, but that may be an indicator that even though you're getting a ton of traffic from mobile, there might be something wrong with your experience because mobile isn't converting as much. So, little things like that can help you prioritize and see where the problem areas might be that are preventing you from getting more conversions.
Ramli John:
I have a follow-up question to that related to experimentation. Traditionally, when people think about AB testing, and I'm still trying to figure this out, honestly, when people think about experimentation and AB testing, usually they look at more higher funnel stuff like increasing the signup conversion. Is there a way to make sure that, let's say you're split testing a page, that you can actually see that all the way to product engagement, where people who landed on this page, they actually activated or retain longer than versus this page, so that it's more like down the funnel split testing. Have you found any tools or any way to make sure that you're not split testing surface level metrics, but more like deeper level of metrics?
Sarah:
Yeah, in Lucky Orange, we can pass in custom user data. So if you have someone who has created an account and you're passing that through, you can kind of see from that initial, I came in, I clicked on that call to action, I created an account, and now I know who you are. So I know that that interaction not only was that conversion, but went all the way through from a free trial even to a paid account, if that's the sort of custom user data that you're passing in. I think it all comes into understanding what those steps are along the way and just looking at the tools that allow you to track that.
Ramli John:
Sorry, I'm just reading this question from Henry, let me read it out loud. So Henry asked, "Nowadays, there are a number of platforms you can use to build marketing websites. We have made some mistakes in choosing one and only finding one later of serious technical issues due to the way click tracking was implemented. Do you have any recommendations for those still looking for a platform for building marketing websites?"
Sarah:
Yeah, so true. There are so many different types of platforms that you can pick and that you can choose. And you've mentioned technical implications around being able to get different tools implemented, I would say there are a couple of things to do. One, whenever I have to do something like this, I always have my list of priority features of what are my non-negotiables? I have to be able to do this. And that's in my vetting, but also doing your homework on the integrations that are important and that matter to you. So, I would really look at that and I see some love for Notion out there, that is a really good tool. But yeah, I think it's you have to know what your non-negotiables are and really validate those integrations. And I think most platforms, hopefully you can get good response back from their people if you're like, "Hey, does it do this? Or does it not do that?" But yeah, that's where I would start.
Ramli John:
Oh, that's a good response, yeah. And yeah, you're right. Shout out to Notion, Notion can do everything, right? Like I just found out they can do really relational database. People have built full apps on that. I want to go back to websites and setting expectation. I'm curious, what are some pet peeves you have specifically for setting that expectation and let me share you one of mine. One of my pet peeves with people who are setting up a site or people who are thinking about improving their onboarding is the CTA, just a random, generic CTA, like continue, or next, or watch video.
Ramli John:
What video? One of the things that as a new user you have is anxiety. You're anxious about, "If I click this, will I get a virus? Or will I get spam?" Right? Some anxiety there. For me that's a big pet peeve is just some generic CTA can actually cause people to turn away. For you, what are some things, you must have reviewed a lot... Working at Lucky Orange you must have reviewed a lot product-led websites. For you, what are those things that are like, "Man, just get this fixed."
Sarah:
Yeah, no, that's a good one. I think one of my big things is not... Websites that don't do their homework around when and how people are going to use their tool and what that process flow might be between desktop and mobile. It just seems like it's something that should be second nature to us now, that your mobile experience and your desktop should be really good. But I feel like in the rush to mobile only/mobile first that people have really neglected to think about what the experience is both ways. And it's so frustrating to me that if you've got time, and you're on your phone, and you're trying to sign up for something, and the flow is really different between how I do things in mobile versus desktop. And they seem like they should be really simple things, like it used to drive me crazy that on Slack, on desktop, I could mark a message as unread if I wanted to come back to it, but I couldn't do that on mobile.
Sarah:
I'm like, "Why?" Those sorts of little things in that process where your user's like, "Yes, I've figured this out. I know how to do it. I feel really good." You talk about that anxiety that someone has, like when we all have a new tool and we have those moments of anxiety about, "Am I using it right?" And then you feel like you've mastered it only to switch contexts and you haven't. I think that's a really big thing for product-led growth, when you feel like you've mastered it only to have the rug pulled out from under you, and you're like, "Well, I can't use it here." And I go back and forth between my mobile and my desktop all the time during the day, so this tool isn't good for me because you guys haven't thought through the user experience, and that is one of my big pet peeves.
Ramli John:
That's such a good point. I never really thought about it. We were talking to the head of growth at Deputy, Francois Bondiguel, and one of the things they noticed was that people signed up for the app on mobile, but finish onboarding on desktop. So, that's one of the insights that he brought up was that, like you said, you got to make sure that that experience is seamless. Do you have any tips around that? Around making sure that that experience is seamless? You already talked about looking at data, but making sure that they're watching out for that information and data connecting the dots.
Sarah:
Yeah. Testing, obviously, is a big one, when you're going through that experience, approach it from the user's perspective and think about the things too when they're in those contexts. My context, most of the time when I'm on my desktop, is that I'm not having connectivity issues or anything like that. But if I'm on my mobile and you're asking me to do something that's super detailed... Where am I? What am I doing if I'm on my mobile phone? Am I waiting for an appointment? Am I waiting somewhere? Those sorts of things where you're asking me to do something that's really detailed, and you may have spent a lot of time with your UX team thinking about, "Oh, we need all of this information."
Sarah:
But in that example that you mentioned, if you know people are signing up on mobile, don't ask them for as much information because I don't want to sit there and have to scroll 17 screens in a signup process on mobile. Ask them just what you need to get them into the tool. And if you know they're going to revert over to desktop, then ask the rest of that information later on in the process, when you know that they're in that adoption stage and not just in the sign-up stage.
Ramli John:
That's fascinating you said that. Now that I recall that conversation with Francois, and we're going to link that episode, the podcast episode, after the show, is that they have a different experience for people who sign up through mobile versus people who sign up through desktop. So they segmented it out. They ask different questions, they ask them in different order, because yeah, you're right. If you're going to ask for like, "Hey, enter a long piece of information here." The desktop piece will be very, very long. We have a question, actually from Wes, Wes is asking, "What is your favorite product-led website?" Like you said, you've gone through a lot of product-led websites, which ones are like, "Hey, they're doing something right here. You got to check them out. Check out their CTA's, their signup forms and their pricing page."
Sarah:
Yeah. That's a great question, and I'd have to put Notion in the list, right? Great tool, but I think it's all about utility. The features of a really good product-led site are ones that they're asking you exactly what you need to know to get you there fast. Anything where you've got a ton of calls to action or duplicative information, just get me to this fast. I know Evernote used to have a really nice clean design to their website. I haven't looked at it in a while, but they called out their value propositions of why I should use this tool, what it's going to help me do, and lots of repeats to get me into the site right away. So I really liked that. I think calling out that, "Okay, I'm not just a tool, but here's the benefit that I get to what I do from using your app." Is really good too, and anything where you can push them into that adoption sooner, rather than later.
Sarah:
One of my pet peeves, when it comes to product-led growth sites is when you're like, "Oh, this is a great tool. I really want to get in there. I really want to use it." I was looking at some tools the other day for proposal automation, and I'm like, "Okay, this is great. You're doing a nice job walking me through what the value proposition is, what the features and functions are. So I can check that off." But then it was all, "Call us to set up a demo." And I just couldn't get in there and use it, and that drives me crazy when you don't let me do a free trial if you aren't ready to unveil pricing or anything. But I think the best product-led websites give you the opportunity to get in there, get hands-on, play around with it. So that way you can decide whether or not it's for you. And then hopefully that helps further down the customer journey that you're weeding out those people who are like, "Yeah, this isn't for me." So you're not wasting time on them from a marketing standpoint. If you do have a sales team and you're doing more outbound, that you can kind of filter out those people too.
Wesley Bush:
And this is totally unscripted, I know we haven't even brought this up to you, but given that everyone stayed till the last five minutes I wanted to ask you if you are okay ripping apart one student's lucky website and just letting them know what are some of those PLG mistakes they're making on their website, because I think it'd be really constructive for them to really have that feedback if you're up for it of course.
Sarah:
Yeah, sure. Sure, let's give it a go.
Wesley Bush:
Awesome. So would anyone like to volunteer their website to get shredded here? Just put it in the chat box. All right. I see Ana. We probably only have a chance to go to one of them, but all right. Got David as well. Awesome. So you should have the ability to share your screen. I will let you pick whichever one in the chat box you want Sarah. There's a Smart Nutri app, Finalcad, kingdom.co... Ladies first. Okay, so Ana, you go first. Here it is. Smart Nutri, do you want [crosstalk 00:21:49] or do you want to go through yours?
Ana luiza Lube:
[crosstalk 00:21:49]. I can share my screen here or [crosstalk 00:21:57].
Sarah:
Yeah.
Wesley Bush:
Yeah.
Ana luiza Lube:
Okay. So are you seeing?
Sarah:
Yeah.
Wesley Bush:
Yeah, I can see it perfectly.
Ana luiza Lube:
It's in Portuguese so if you want I can translate.
Wesley Bush:
[crosstalk 00:22:16] that would be great, yeah.
Ana luiza Lube:
The first sentence here is, "It's the app that is going to revolution-ate the way that you..." Oh my God, I forgot the word. It's a nutritional app, so it's an app that's going to revolution-ate the way that you eat.
Sarah:
Okay. Well, my first comment for you here is your hero image that you have of the woman on the phone. I would pick one that focuses less on the fact that it's an app, but more around what it does. So maybe highlighting something around nutrition. If this is something where you're helping people pick healthier foods, highlighting that, because really that's what you're selling. You're not selling the app, you're selling what the app can do for you, and that would be a great thing to AB test too, to see if this image that you have of the woman who's using an app, versus that context that's very specific to what your app does. I would try that and see if that works a little bit better for you maybe in terms of conversions, because you're giving people more context to what they'll be getting.
Ana luiza Lube:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). The girl, it's because we gave online consultations with the nutritionist, so she's a nutritionist and she's in the couch, so it's in the moment of the photo. So just to be clear because it's in Portuguese and I really don't know if you can read everything, so...
Sarah:
My Spanish is a little rusty, so I can pick up a few words here and there but I am definitely not Portuguese. But yeah, it looks like maybe your call to action in that yellow Starburst is you can get a consultation online without a plan, am I...
Ana luiza Lube:
Yeah, in the, I don't know how to say [foreign language 00:24:16] but in a six month plan you can get a consultation for 9.90 [foreign language 00:24:25] per month.
Sarah:
Okay. So a couple of thoughts on that. I don't know if that yellow Starburst is clickable or not.
Ana luiza Lube:
It's not.
Sarah:
But I would maybe think that that would be something I would use a heat map here to see if people think it should be clickable, because people might want to click on that as thinking that's like a call to action. And then on your plans too, if you have the option to use a plugin for your website that does automatic currency conversion for you, that can be another thing that trips people up when it comes to converting. Because if you have someone who's looking at this site, but that's not in their local currency, then they might just discount it all together because people are lazy when it comes to websites and they don't want to do that homework themselves to try and go do the currency conversion there. That would be a couple of things I would check.
Ana luiza Lube:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So here we are telling to compare the plans. So we are showing the month plan and the six month plan.
Sarah:
Okay.
Ana luiza Lube:
And we tell the benefits of it.
Sarah:
One of the things, when you have these plan comparisons, if you can make it easy for people to consume, like in a grid or a checklist of, "I get these features are included in my annual plan. And these features, you don't get these features in the six month plan." That can be a good way to push people over to your higher value plan because they're looking at it like side-by-side, and they can see, "Oh, I don't get that on the lower plan. But if I moved over to the higher plan, these three boxes now have check marks next to them that didn't before." That can be another way to encourage people to click over to that higher value plan.
Ana luiza Lube:
It's so nice that you can't read, but you're just telling everything, and that's very nice.
Sarah:
I'm trying here.
Wesley Bush:
Sometimes it's almost, when you don't fully understand the words, you're looking at everything else too.
Ana luiza Lube:
Yes.
Wesley Bush:
I think it's a great example because, oh, course, text is one of the main ways we communicate with each other. But as you can see, with images, colors, and all these other pieces, there's so much beyond just text. So I really appreciate it. And Ramli did you want to go through the last piece of this for today?
Ramli John:
Yeah. I know people have to leave and thank you so much, Sarah. I really do appreciate it.
Ana luiza Lube:
I'm going to stop sharing, okay?
Ramli John:
Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, I forgot, you're still sharing.
Wesley Bush:
Oh, yeah. Thank you so much Ana, by the way, this was awesome.
Ramli John:
You're still sharing. I forgot you're still sharing your screen. Yeah.
Ana luiza Lube:
Sorry.
Wesley Bush:
No it's all good.
Ramli John:
I just want to thank you Sarah so much for this. I think that's something that we're going to try and feature. I'm going to try a little bit more with Wes maybe to tear down everybody's, or some people's, website, not everybody. But it looked like that's when people started perking up and typing their addresses. But Sarah, thank you so much. We are already over by a minute with your time. I'm not sure if you had another meeting. You were so gracious and so generous with your time. For everybody else thank you for showing up and like I said, it looked like the last five or 10 minutes is when everybody started getting excited with the presentation. So Wes and I will try something like this in another session. If you don't have anything else, thank you. Have a great weekend. Sarah, once again, thank you. Have a great weekend yourself. For all the Canadians it is a happy Thanksgiving. That's myself, and Wes, and anybody else. For everybody else just have a nice weekend. I'm going to-
Sarah:
Bye guys.
Ramli John:
Thank you, and if you have any questions, I'm going to stick around for the next five minutes and just...
Ana luiza Lube:
Thank you very much, Sarah. That's the only thing I want to say. Sorry about my English, because I was very nervous about it.
Sarah:
No, it's great. Your English was great.
Ana luiza Lube:
I was forgetting words.
Sarah:
Yeah, no problem.
Ana luiza Lube:
Thank you very much.
Sarah:
Have a good weekend everyone. Thanks for having me.
Wesley Bush:
You too. Thanks for coming on, Sarah.
Sarah:
Yeah, bye.
Wesley Bush:
All right, bye.
