Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Growth hacking basics
Lecture: Calls to action
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0:01
Once you're doing well the content marketing, rolling out a ton of great content, turkey carving, sending out your email campaigns,
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maximizing the number of people who ultimately open up your emails and click through, and you get some tricks like open sourcing some code
0:15
in order to generate awareness and usage of you product, and you've got prospective customers looking at your site.
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What if they're just not signing up? If we take a look at the funnel, after a prospective customer has decided to evaluate your product and sign up,
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you've got to make it easy for them to actually go and do that. Let's take a look at a few examples that do it well.
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I already showed MailChimp as an example for email marketing, but now I just want to show their home page.
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Let's say you discovered MailChimp either by a recommendation of a colleague or you read one of their blog posts, and you go to the home page,
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you're immediately greeted with their value proposition and a button to sign up, not only sign up but sign up free.
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I'm sure MailChimp has done a whole lot of ab testing on this to figure out how to maximize the number of people who actually go through and sign up.
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And perhaps a lot of folks want to get started with an email list, who would eventually be great customers but they're concerned
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about paying money up front. And I know I was in this boat, I wanted to start an email list for Full Stack Python
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but I didn't want to pay 50 bucks a month in order to do that, when I only had like five or ten people on a list.
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So I used MailChimp, and I signed up for free, I went through this process and it only asked me three questions,
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an email, username and password, and I got started for free and I was able to use that up to two thousand email users a month.
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So what's great about this call to action on their home page it just makes it as easy as possible for you to sign up.
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Now that may or may not be applicable to your business, if you're only serving enterprise customers you're not just looking
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for just any person to sign up, your call to action maybe something like talk to sales, and while at first blush that may seem not great,
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because they're not actually going to be able to do anything immediately with the product, that may be just fine for your own business.
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So don't just blindly follow a call to action based on what other companies are doing, but take a look at a lot of these onboarding flows
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and see which one will most likely match up to the business that you are building. Let's take a look at a couple of more examples.
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So Trulia is a website for real estate and what they are trying to do here is rather than get you to sign up for an account,
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they really want to collect email addresses, so this is a landing page that they created rather than their home page,
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and you may get to this via some sort of google or facebook ad, and what they want you to do is enter your email address
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and then you can get a personalized estimate once you fill in some more details.
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So this is super effective because there's not a lot of effort that goes into this, you already know what your email address is,
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you punch it in and you click the 'get my personalized estimate' button. So something like this especially, if you have a much more expensive product,
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can be more appropriate because what you want to do is you want to get prospective customers' email addresses
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so that you could follow up with them later. Another example would be Zendesk, which is a software as a service help desk
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and they're dealing with customers of many different sizes, if you're building a one person business you could still use Zendesk
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in order to handle your help desk tickets. But they also have customers that are Fortune 500 companies with thousands of call center employees,
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so what they've done is they've recognized that they have two different customer bases, and if you're a self starter you can just click start a trial,
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or if you prefer talking to a salesperson, you can click up on 'sign up for a demo'
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if you're not actually the one who is going to be setting up the software yourself.
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So what can we learn from the three of these and many other call to actions or on a customized landing page for various businesses?
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It's no accident that the value proposition is very clear and in big bold letters. There is either one or two buttons, preferably less is better,
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and we see this in all three examples- value proposition, single button, value proposition in the form of a question of how much your home is worth.
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For your own business, if people are going to your home page or going to a landing page that you've created,
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but then they're just dropping off the bounce rate is too high, simplify and make sure that the value proposition is very clear
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and this can take a lot of iteration. I'll guarantee that there was at least hundreds if not thousands of hours
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that went into creating each one of these, what looks like really simple web pages, it takes a lot of work to make something simple,
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but simple is what converts the best, for most businesses. So I recommend when you're thinking about your own call to action,
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take a look at a lot of these onboarding flows, mix and match different pieces, think about how that works for your own customers,
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get your first version out there and then iterate on it like crazy to determine what ultimately produces the most results
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when measured in the percentage of prospective customers that land either on your home page, on your landing page,
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and get through the sign up part of your funnel.