Alright so I’m now almost towards the ending of my Growth Marketing Mini-Degree from CXL and I feel whatever stuff I’ve learned so far is collectively now starting to make sense as a singular, cohesive growth strategy. The Good thing about this mini-degree is that since there are multiple topics spanning across multiple growth channels, it’s so easy for you to make a full fledged growth plan for any client/company and prioritise and execute plans. Even though when it comes to applying these theoretical concepts practically my confidence is a little low as of now, but still this is good knowledge to have and put to test later on.
Okay, so this week I ended up completing 3 course:
- Retention by Val Geisler
- Creating good retargeting audiences for targeting, exclusion and then lookalike modelling (basically audience segmentation for Google Ads)
- How to create an SEO Content Calendar.
I’ll discuss all 3 courses briefly.
- Retention by Van Geisler — This course will teach you how to define and identify retention points for your customer base, how to slow down or flatten churn, and how to improve retention long term. Know the difference between good and bad retention.
- Identify the keys to really great retention
- Implement strategies that will positively affect your churn rate
- Learn how to improve retention long term.
So, there was a study done by Bain & Company. They’re the inventor of the Net Promoter score. They said that increasing customer retention by 5%can lead to an increase in profits 25 to 95%. The likelihood of converting an existing customer into a repeat customer is 60 to 70%,while the probability of converting a new lead is five to 20% at best.
Most of the leverage in improving these retention curves “happens in how the product is described,” the onboarding flow, and what triggers”you set up to drive ongoing retention.
It’s not about how powerful the app is, or the piece of software. It’s not about how useful it is to you.It’s about habits and customer psychology and human attention span, and that’s what we’re addressing here.
A retention rate is the percentage of customers who are still with the company after a specific period of time. It asks in essence that a user perform any action, leave, and then come back and perform another action. That’s what you’re looking for here. If the answer is yes, the user has been retained. If not, they’ve churned.
So, retention rates for users are based on action. So, you have to ask what is an action? By default, most companies define action very loosely. It’s typically referred to as any event the user takes with their platform, including simply opening it. So, to get a more refined sense of whether they’re actually measuring the users’ likelihood to return, some product teams tighten up that description, and include only valuable events.
So, it might be a purchase, it might be a sign up, it might be completing an onboarding checklist, or shares or other things that make sense for that particular business. And then you want to know what the period isin which retention is measured. So, you determine the period over which you’ll measure that retention for your customers.
The point that you’re looking for is typically where the percentage of users drops below the point where the revenue they generate covers the acquisition cost for all those users acquired at the beginning of the period. (Acquisition cost > Revenue).
SEGMENTATION
If your customer can understand the core value of your product as quickly as possible, when they see how it’s going to help them from that very first interaction through in the next couple of weeks and beyond, they are going to keep using the service. They continue to see that same return.
As soon as they stop seeing that value in their lives and their business, that’s when they start to question whether they should continue to be their customer or not.If the core value isn’t obvious from the beginning in that short-term crucial, crucial short-term retention phase, the onboarding period, they’ll log out and they won’t ever come back.
2. Creating good retargeting audiences for targeting, exclusion and then lookalike modelling (basically audience segmentation for Google Ads)
This course was a very basic, to be honest unnecessary course, Like I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, I’m not a fan of courses where the instructor is merely ‘discussing concepts’ and only talking about a topic, I would like to see practical examples and how to put those concepts to action.
So many things were completely generalised and unexplained.If I didn’t know Google ads or if it weren’t for insights shared in Facebook ads by Curt Maly, I wouldn’t have understood this course, I’ll be painfully honest.
So yeah, this lesson was basically finding the right audience to target for your Google ads, how to segment them and what tools to use to do so. That’s pretty much it. Here’s a few insights:
When retargeting you must divide your audience into 30–60–90 and have different call to actions for each segment.
This is because a person re-visiting your site within 90 days may have a laser intent of purchasing than a person visiting within 30 days. But the advantage would be that all these audiences would become a part of your retargeting.
10–50K audience lists make an optimal lookalike audience.
Check out insight tool for your in-market audiences.
Only website tag and rule based re-marketing lists can be used to generate similar audiences.
3. How to create an SEO Content Calendar by Dan Shure
Start by doing a seed rush for your client. Which is basically brainstorming keywords related to your client’s line of business and jot them down in a google sheet. Next is researching and noting their monthly volume- you should focus on keywords with a high search volume since these are the ones mostly written about by high DA websites.
Next use tools like:
SEM Rush
Moz
Ahrefs
Buzzsumo
Keyword Explorer
To find out the high rambling websites for the following keywords. And then you should also compose your title to make it click-worthy. This is as much art as it is science. Here are some RESOURCES. One is a list of power words on Sumo.com which I really love. It’s an excellent list, as well as a tool called YoRocket that’s made by BackLinko that will let you evaluate your title tags in WordPress for its click-worthiness.
Make sure you’re producing at least 3–4 SEO worthy articles every month to gain traction. Pay attention to the quality, quantity and type of content you’re producing.
Alright this is it from Week 9, see you next week!
