5 STEPS TO MASTERING ONLINE GROWTH

In this Episode, we are going to share with you MOBLE's philosophy for website growth. This is very much the secret sauce behind how to think to create a business website; acquired through years' of industry expertise and refined across hundreds of website projects.

We'll begin by referencing some classic sales and marketing models. We'll watch four seminal videos on website growth that will instantly define how successful web designers think. We'll finish by taking a look at the MOBLE growth model that combines everything we have learned into one easy to follow process.

If your website aims to generate leads and be the bedrock to grow your business, we highly recommend you take the time to understand the principles in this Episode. Thankfully, all MOBLE websites come loaded with the technology you need to help you seamlessly execute this theory into practice by applying what you've learned to your website.

Pirate Metrics 'AARRR' was a marketing model widely used from the mid 2,000's during the startup boom. It was infamously critical in the growth of many World leading Silicon Valley startups. The techniques looked at the importance of acquiring new customers with the least friction possible. Typically getting an email address as soon as a customer visits your website. Once you have acquired the customer you can then try to onboard them and move them through the funnel.

These principals completely changed the way we think about adverting spend and web page design, since ads would land customers on pages with the sole objective of just getting an email address, rather than trying to make an instant sale.

Acquisition Get the users to the website.

Activation Get users to sign them up.

Retention Get them to come back.

Referral Get them to tell others.

Revenue Get them to pay.

Pirate Metrics was a progression of the previously used Acquisition, Nurturing, Retention model that was originally the staple of Content Marketing and Marketing Automation. The success of Pirate Metrics was perhaps in defining the activation phase, putting emphasis on the design of the first customer experience, the magic moment. For Facebook, the magic moment was showing you your friends that are already on the platform in the first few seconds of signing up. Or, getting you to ten friends in ten days. For Uber, this would be showing you the drivers that are near you right now, or Uber Eats showing you your food moving in real time towards you, on a bicycle.

What is the magic moment for your business? Is it aligned with customer retention?

As Brian Balfour demonstrated in the video above, retention is key. It is paramount in completely changing your cost of advertising metrics, to completely defining how your web pages should be designed, and how they should be continually modified based on your results. Discuss with your team to decide what are the magic moments for your business. What is that moment when a customer realises your point of difference for the very first time? Once you have the answer, now think how your website can convey this magic moment in the quickest possible time.

Since Pirate Metrics was designed for Startups and particularly SaaS apps, perhaps one of the single most important growth metrics is DAU (Daily Active Users), or perhaps MAU (Monthly Active Users). This would measure the number of users coming back which has knock-on benefits for all other metrics and campaign ideas.

LinkedIn would send email notifications regarding endorsements, or people viewing your profile. Facebook would send you email notifications with Friend Suggestions and Freind Activity. Did either of these businesses ever send you an email newsletter?

What is the key attribute of your product that would encourage users to keep coming back?

Perhaps one of the most important principles of Pirate Metrics was to decide on the key metrics to track. In the video below Alex Shultz, Facebook, defines the  North Star; the one metric that everybody in the entire company is accountable for. If everybody in the company shares the same goal, they can think independently, allowing phenomenal knock-on benefits from culture right through to scaling.

What is your North Star, the key metric that you measure to laser focus your entire business?

The problem for Pirate Metrics was that the model didn't resonate for all businesses, especially not the SME. The model was primarily intended for Startups, so much so that is was often referred to as Startup Metrics.

The goal of startups at the time, rightly or wrongly, was to raise funding. Often to quickly satisfy seed investors, rather than to focus immediately on sales and cash flow to stabilise the business for true growth.

The idea for startups was to prove their concept sufficiently enough to acquire funds from investors. Use the funds to disrupt the market and acquire users, then worry about the business revenue model later. Facebook is a case in point. While this strategy works for the few, it does not work for the many. This can not be the attitude of small and mid-size businesses.

Simply put:

• Pirate Metrics would acquire signups to acquire capital investment.
  
• Small Business should acquire signups to acquire positive cash flow.

Pirate Metrics is a wonderful process, especially for customer retention. Though sales are the lifeblood of any business, with or without investment. So let's break down a proven strategy for sales.

A 5 STEP SALES PROCESS, THAT WORKS FOR EVERYTHING

Not everybody is in sales. Though if you're new to sales, or if you need a simple refresh, I'll refer you to Perry Belcher and his 5 step process for selling anything and everything. A simply brilliant presentation, that I encourage all MOBLE clients to watch before starting your website design.

The process is as follows:

Lead Magnet: Get an email address by giving something that proves your quality
Trip Wire: Get the customer trust with a low friction sale and an offer to buy again
Core Sale: Now you have won trust and proved service. You can offer your core product
Profit Maximiser: Immediately upsell
Customer Return Path: Get your users to come back.

M.O.B.L.E. 5 STEPS FOR WEBSITE GROWTH

So far we have understood two models for growth hacking.

Pirate Metrics that focused on getting people to sign up to websites and apps, yet was not focused on sales, and the other that was focused on sales strategy. 

To make your life easier MOBLE has combined these models into a simple solution that allows you to design your website for sales. Your MOBLE website has been designed to onboard customers at each step, including online forms, forms with payments, we even have eCommerce in production, and countless integrations are available.

So let's take a look at the MOBLE growth funnel. Can you see how this simplifies the best of both solutions:

Motivate: Get an Email Address, build your customer database
Onboard: Get a Credit Card for a low friction proof sale
Build: Get your Core Product Sale
Loyalty: Get your users to come back
Expose: Get your users to tell others

HOW MOBLE IS USED OUR MODEL TO LAUNCH OUR BUSINESS 

In this last step phase of the episode, we will uncover the thinking around how MOBLE used the MOBLE model to create our business and the steps a small team is taking to launch a global business.

As you can see in the funnel, each step has a bunch of activities to test and a bunch of metrics that we record at each step of the funnel.

MOTIVATE

Database Growth - Get an email address and sign up new customers to your customer database

KEY STRATEGY: Lead Magnets: Free Info, Free Stuff, Get the Price, Get the Answer, One Small Service

KEY METRICS: Cost per acquisition / per platform / per persona.

With a powerful marketing system at your disposal. The primary objective of any campaign should be to acquire more email addresses. Reaching your customers either by email, SMS or desktop notifications is an extremely low-cost marketing method an does wonders for your ROI.

This is the first step of the M.O.B.L.E. philosophy. You MOBLE website is complete we many forms designs that you can quickly customised and add to any frame, in any Layout.

What's more, each Form can be linked to your Marketing Automation platforms, so as so as somebody completes a Form on your MOBLE website you are already tracking them, they are instantly added to your customer list and segments in your preferred marketing Automation software.

Such is the importance of emails addresses, at MOBLE we often refer to them as social currency. Often if a business is sold the acquiring customer is buying the customer database. This is strongly correlated to the value of a company. We highly recommend that every ad dollar spent consider this and you MOBLE website is the perfect tool acquire as many email addresses as possible. 

If you ever decide to sell your business, or raise investment, your customer database size is often paramount to acquisition or funding value.

To grow your database you must:

1. Motivate people to come to your website
2. Motivate people to give up their email address

Cost per clicks are less profitable and more competitive than ever, thanks to the ever-increasing price of media.

Marketers must now look broadly at ways to advertise across a plethora of platforms. Irrespective of the platform, one thing is certain: If you can acquire an email address from targeted customers, you can continue to talk to them without having to pay for it in ads. That’s why it’s essential to build a targeted database of potential customers, then automate relevant communications to them.

Lead Magnets

Your website is one of the main places where new customers sign up. You must first motivate people to visit your website, then let your website take over this job, motivating visitors to give up their email address in exchange for something valuable.

To do this, we like to use lead magnets: Something of value given away in exchange for an email address.

Common lead magnets are:

• Free Info
  Such as this Pro Series
• Free Stuff
  Like a free trial or free event tickets
• Eye Balls and Handshakes
  Networking events, trade shows
• Get the Price
  If you don't disclose your pricing you can reveal pricing on form submission, or a free consultation
• Get the Answer
  Question that reveals the answer, such as a poll or reveal on form submission
• One Small Service
  If you can do one thing a low value and prove your worth, they are more likely to use you for your core product. This is effectively an onboard strategy also, so let's segway to the next point.

What Lead Magnets could you use for your website? Can you think of any not listed above?

When designing your website pages, think about key areas to place your calls to action. This might include a promo bar below the header, a form or button at the top of the page, or even a pop-up message via your marketing automation tool. This is one of the problems that you must solve in your design, so keep your page objectives in mind all the time. 

Did MOBLE use a Lead Magnet to sign you up?

Quite likely it was either the free course, the free coding tuition, of may the free landing page offer. We want to prove to customers that they can use MOBLE and love the software before they pay. So we’re giving the first 1,000 subscribers their first two pages for free.

If the customer’ business grows or they love the software, they’ll realise the value of MOBLE and start paying. It's fair for both the customer and for MOBLE: we essentially prove our value before asking for payment.

ONBOARD

The Proof Sale - Get your customers credit card details with a small sale to prove your service is of value

KEY STRATEGY: Trip Wire Sales: Promise/Prove/Deliver. Website A/B Testing, CRO

KEY METRICS: Cost Per Lead / Per Platform / Per Persona

Once you've got an email address and the customer signed up, it's important to have a platform through which you can communicate with them.

Traditional email marketing systems are quickly being replaced by inbound marketing, also known as marketing automation platforms. MOBLE is integrated with the very best inbound marketing software. We’ll cover each inbound marketing solution as part of this Pro Series to help you decide the right platform for your budget and database size.

Traditional email marketing systems tend to send emails to your subscriber base. Inbound marketing platforms take this a step further by learning about your customer behaviour and sending very specific messages based on actions they’ve taken, both in your emails and on your website.

Based on what the customers have done before, you can determine exactly what content to next present them with.

The Proof Sale

We use inbound marketing software to design your marketing automation funnel alongside your website.

Once we’ve motivated people to sign up, we must now try to get them on board. We often use these funnels to offer a small, low-priced solution and use MOBLE Forms to take the payment and securely store the customer's credit card tokens for the next sale. We call these low-price services a ‘proof of sale’.

The aim is to build trust, confidence and demonstrate your credibility to a new customer that would otherwise have no reason to buy from you. Once you’ve created this rapport, your next sale can be your core product. You will now have less friction and convert at a much higher rate. The hardest sale to make is always the first: You’re unknown, unproven and have to compete.

Secondary sales are much easier: You now have trust and credibility, and can build on this easily.

Examples of popular Proof Sales are:

• An audit
• A report
• A small design
• A small sample
• A small part of the larger service
  
  

DId you know? MOBLE Form Builder was made for Lead Magnets

MOBLE Websites come complete with a Form Build that can take one-time payments and subscription sales. We think proof sales are so important, every website should have the luxury to switch to online payments and start onboarding new customers.

The Trip Wire Campaign

Combining lead magnets and proof sales? That’s called a tripwire campaign: an irresistible offer with no risk.

The aim is to:

1. Onboard new customers
2. Reduce the cost of marketing spend

It’s cheaper to win new customers by giving things away, than it is to spend money on expensive advertising campaigns to convince them.

Lead magnets and proof sales work brilliantly together in a tripwire campaign. MOBLE likes to have an ideation session with our customers to develop as many trip wires, lead magnets and proof sales as we can think of.

Shortly, we'll show you where on MOBLE you can go to log your ideas for lead magnets and proof sales, rank them in order of execution, and record their success.

Essentially, we like to test everything, on every platform, then learn what works for which type of customer. We never stop improving!

Did MOBLE use a Trip Wire Campaign to sign you up and take your payment?

If so, you've used MOBLE as a free website, added many pages and are happy to pay a monthly subscription.

We want to prove to you the value of our service and then ask you to pay a small monthly fee to use more features and pages.

Recap

Here is the process so far:

1. Lead Magnet - something you give away to get an email address and grow your database.
2. Proof Sale - something you sell to you database at a low value to prove your service, reduce friction and build rapport.
3. Trip Wire Campaign - an irresistible offer combining the Lead Magnet and Proof Sale, which finally leads to the core product sale.
4. Core Product Sale - another nice segue into the next section, 'Build'.
   
   

Exercise

Now write down as many lead magnets and proof sales as you can. Think about how these can be placed in sequential order in a tripwire campaign. Next, we'll show you how you can record these ideas in MOBLE CMS, start to plan the roll-out to recording the success of each idea through your MOBLE website.

BUILD

Core Produce Sale - Offer your core product at the full price and then deliver

KEY STRATEGY: Lead Scoring: Upsell, Cross Sell, Forecasting

KEY METRIC: Cost per Sale / Per Category / Per Persona

When most business owners build a website, they consider what key product and services they’d like to show on their website. They start by listing their core products and services and don’t even consider the first two phases: motivate and onboard.

Similarly, in online marketing, when people are creating ads, they start with the core product. Trying to sell a higher-priced product from the outset might appear to have a higher ROI, but this is often not the case. Removing friction by motivating and onboarding people at low cost can often lead to higher ROI, especially in highly competitive markets. It's a bit like asking for marriage before a first date: You’ll have a lower conversion rate.

Similarly, when you design website pages, it’s essential to list your core products. This is often what people are searching for and what you rank for. So in designing website pages, we need to consider techniques to motivate an onboard people on core product pages. This might be toploading the page copy with an incentive, clever use of signup forms, prominent, sticky call to action and phone number in the header.

If you've made it this far in the Episode you will be well versed in this philosophy of building websites for growth. To test your understanding now let's look at how the tripwire method, compares to a direct core product sell for a company selling gym subscriptions:

GYM CLASS SUBSCRIPTION

• $50 per month Subscription
• 5 months average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• $250 average per sale per Customer

ADVERTISING COST

• $3 Av Google Adwords Cost Per Click
• $600 monthly Click Budget
• 200 Clicks in total
• 1% Conversion Rate
• 2 Sales for $600 per month

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

• - $100 investment loss
• - 16.76% ROI

In this scenario, Google AdWords as a platform would run a loss and might not be the best option as a marketing platform to sell your core product, at least until you’ve improved certain key metrics. If advertising is running a loss, you need to think of other approaches. You can either:

1. Reduce your advertising spend with other techniques and platforms
2. Improve the conversion rate on your website
3. Improve the average Customer Lifetime Value.
   (I.e. improve Loyalty and Retention, that's the next step)

AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

If you thought about selling the gym subscriptions online with the MOBLE philosophy, you perhaps could focus on the motivate and onboard by offering a free week gym pass. That means you wouldn’t jump straight into the core sale, but prove to your users that your class was worth it, for free. You thus remove the barrier to entry and encourage active participation.

• built rapport and trust with you
• made new friends
• seen the motivational value in training as a team
• experienced your expertise and amazing service
• felt good about the benefits of the product

Rather than Google AdWords, you might consider alternative marketing platforms more in line with giving free things away. These might include Facebook, with its lower cost per click. But even if you still used Google Adwords, your conversion rates might go up because you’re motivating people with a free week pass, with no risk.

If you knew that 25% of all people taking the pass would sign up, what would this do to the metrics?

GYM CLASS SUBSCRIPTION

• $50 per month Subscription
• 5 months average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• $250 average per sale per Customer

ADVERTISING COST

• $3 Av Google Adwords Cost Per Click
• $600 monthly Click Budget
• 200 Clicks in total
• 9% Conversion Rate
• 18 free passes
• 25% Conversion Rate
• 4.5 Sales for $600 per month

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

• $525 investment gain
• $87.5% ROI

You can see that by thinking about the motivation and onboard steps rather than going straight into core product sale, you’ve created the opportunity to gain more leads for the same spend.

Previously, people weren’t interested in buying for whatever reason, but you’ve removed barriers and motivated them to at least try your service, by giving them a free sample. Even if people didn't sign up you, can then continue to speak to these leads in the future via email promotions, at no ongoing cost. So there is always the chance to onboard them later and not have to pay again for this person in an ad, thus further reducing ad spend and further increasing ROI.

There are many variables and many techniques and practices to build to the core product sale. In this article, we just scratch the surface using an entry-level example to explain the process. It is important for a website designer to understand these marketing principles for design.

For more information from MOBLE, you can review MOBLE's Strategy solution. This is where we come into your business and run a dedicated session, providing you with a full strategy report across your entire business. In coming episodes, we’ll release a step-by-step guide to running your own strategy sessions.e will also release a step by step guide as to how to run your own Strategy sessions.

THE KEY TAKE AWAY

Building a customer database is a key principle for website design and should not be underestimated. It can save you money in ongoing advertising and plays a key part in improving the metrics that matter. Your job as a designer is to understand these powers at play ‒ you can make a key difference in conversion optimisation.

To reference Alec Baldwin in the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross, when designing your pages: ABC: Always be closing. Create a design that considers your objectives and delivers it in the best way possible. Don't go home with the steaks knives.

LOYALTY

Renewal - Review of your retention rates, pricing, and products

KEY STRATEGY: Content Marketing, Loyalty Programs, Line Extensions, Continuity Programs

KEY METRICS: Retention rate, Support Requests, Product Scores

Now your customers are provided with value and are paying, how long will they remain engaged? What strategies can we put in place to ensure your customers remain your customers?

Regardless of your business position, it’s more cost effective to retain an existing customer than to buy a new one.

At MOBLE, we set up CMS Customer Scoring for our customers, so we can determine how proficient they are at using the MOBLE software. We know when customers might need a little more help, or what kind of information they might require. We use inbound marketing solutions to help communicate these messages along with pages on MOBLE CMS.

By understanding the key metrics, we can forecast retention and highlight the customers most likely to cancel. We can proactively encourage them to receive more value for our services, both throughout the year and in the lead-up to their renewal.

A great website page retains customers by providing the right information in the right way. We'll talk much more about customer loyalty and retention in Series 7.

EXPOSE

Go Viral - The rate of growth via referrals

KEY STRATEGY: Competitions, Content Marketing, Loyalty Programs, Continuity Programs, Sequential Trip Wires, Influencer Marketing

KEY METRICS: K Factor, Growth Efficiency

Expose is one of the most rewarding things your business ever does and is a factor in achieving the tipping point for your brand. This is the holy grail.

Once you have a solid understanding of the first four principals you on M.O.B.L.E. you are ready to Expose. But it's important not to jump ahead and try to use expose strategies before you have a fully-tested, well-oiled ship by continued execution and interaction of our first four steps.

Expose or be Exposed

At MOBLE we like to say Expose or be Exposed.

This means if you haven’t perfected conversion rates in the motivate, onboard and build funnels, or if you haven’t worked out how to maximise your retention rate in the loyalty phase, then any work you could do in attempting to 'go viral' could be detrimental. Wasted efforts, wasted time and wasted resources!

Whether you’re growing your customer base or taking online payments, growth is compounded when your loyal customers share your organisation with their peers. Warm referrals are perhaps the most valuable of all and need to be managed expertly. They’re an essential factor in cost-effective, rapid and sustainable growth.

We score your customers across a range of metrics to identify those customers that are brand evangelists and who are more likely to be high-value influencers. We can email and SMS you as soon as customers reach this level, so that you can be sure to personally engage them and build out more personalised incentives for a referral.

We aim to guide you towards designing for all phases along the MOBLE funnel. We’ll break down each of the stages in the coming series and show you how these are used to build beautiful website pages, built for a real purpose, to convert new customers and to make people happy.

Congratulations! You made it to the end. Now to finish off the session we suggest that you create your own model. 

Here you can see a table that you can easily recreate in a spreadsheet. Use the table to plot out use ideas for your campaign then make sure your website is set up to accommodate your strategy.

In Series 7, we'll break it down for you in a practical guide. Website launch blurb. Possible spreadsheet download.