The Growth Newsletter - The Growth Newsletter #060

The Growth Newsletter #060

This newsletter curates growth insights from the Demand Curve community. It keeps you up-to-date on growth tactics.

 

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1. Offer mid-term subscription plans

Insight from Profitwell and Demand Curve.

 

Many subscription companies default to offering monthly and annual plans without thinking about the in-between.

 

But mid-term options like quarterly or semi-annual plans offer serious benefits:

• Compared to monthly plans, there are fewer billing problems and frustrations like canceled credit cards.
• They reduce monthly churn since customers are locked in for a longer period. And customers don’t mind because the commitment isn’t as daunting as an annual plan.
• Your company can get paid sooner, meaning fewer concerns with planning and budgeting for the long term (a common challenge with annual plans).

Offering a mid-length subscription option can be a win-win for both you and your customer. It’s worth testing if your product:

• Has seasonal appeal. For some products, demand regularly fluctuates based on customers’ needs and schedules.
  • Example: CareGuide, a platform that helps people connect with caregivers, offers a monthly, quarterly, and annual plan. The quarterly plan might make sense for parents who need to hire childcare over the summer, when school isn’t in session.
• Doesn’t need to be replenished quickly. Customers may not exhaust all of your product in a short period, e.g., clothing and skincare products.
  • Example: FabFitFun, which delivers a seasonal box with a variety of lifestyle products, offers quarterly and annual plans. Since many of its curated boxes have accessories, cosmetics, and grooming products, it would feel excessive to receive new ones on a monthly basis.

2. Praise your competitors and share bad reviews

Insight from Ariyh and Demand Curve.

 

Consumers now have a sixth sense for inauthenticity. We can tell when a brand is jumping on a bandwagon just because it’s the trendy thing to do, or when they’re saying all the right things but not following through with all the right actions.

 

How can you overcome consumer distrust? Two possibilities are to talk about your competitors and share bad reviews.

 

It sounds illogical. But by talking about competitors and bad reviews, you'll:

• Create a warmer brand perception. Transparency and authenticity increase brand trust.
• Surprise seen-it-all-before consumers. Most brands talk about themselves (and only in a positive light). Acknowledging competitors and addressing bad reviews is novel.
• Overcome key objections, like they’re not as good as x competitor or any concerns that often come up in negative reviews. Praising competitors might increase perceptions of competence, and addressing bad reviews is a direct way to dispel whatever objections are discussed in them.

Talk about your competitors. In a series of Facebook ads for a fictional car wash company, an ad that praised a competitor got a 5.4% click-through rate (“Precision Car Wash congratulates LikeNew Car Wash. Our fiercest competitor and the Industry Best 2020 Award recipient!”).

 

Compare that to a 3.3% CTR for a self-promotional ad (“Precision Car Wash is proud to receive the Industry Best 2020 Award”) and 1.8% for an ad with a third-party endorsement (“The Industry Best 2020 Award committee is proud to announce Precision Car Wash as this year’s Best 2020 Award recipient”).

 

Praising a competitor seems risky and unlikely. When a brand does it successfully, they come across as genuine. And sincerity is skepticism’s biggest foe.

 

Share bad reviews. Peloton did this earlier this year with ads featuring negative comments like “overpriced coat rack”—followed by praise from those same people a few years later.

If you share bad reviews, balance them with positives like Peloton did. Prove that either 1) the criticism is no longer valid or 2) it was never justified to begin with.

 

Don’t overdo either of these tactics, or it could start to backfire. Always keep copy fresh and authentic.

 

3. Pointed interview questions for your next SEO hire

Insight from Search Engine Journal.

 

Hiring for SEO positions is a notoriously difficult and time-consuming process.

 

Unless you're an SEO expert yourself, you likely lack the domain knowledge needed to properly vet candidates and entrust them to deliver results. And SEO is an investment—results often take 6-12 months. That requires massive trust in who you hire.

 

So, if you're thinking about hiring an SEO operator and don't have the time to brush up on technicals or source a trusted referral, use these sample interview questions to help expedite the interview process and find a qualified candidate:

• How do you check whether a URL is indexed by Google? Every operator should know the site: command. This displays all indexed pages in the SERPs.
• How do you block a URL from being indexed? This question is meant to see if they actually know the purpose of a no-index tag and don't confuse it with blocking a page in robots.txt. The former tells Google not to index a page while keeping it in the sitemap. The latter keeps pages out of Google's index completely.
• What are the most important SEO ranking factors, in your opinion? No definitive answer here. Listen to their perspective and see if they can explain how multiple ranking factors contribute to overall rankings. A good candidate will: 
  • Back up their answers with data and relevant experiences.
  • Have on-the-job examples to share.
  • Avoid absolute statements and not be afraid to say "it depends" (SEO is nuanced and case-specific).
• What SEO myths have you had enough of? Only an experienced SEO should be able to answer this question. Ask them to elaborate on their favorite SEO myths and how they navigate them in their work. Their answer should provide insight into their learnings and strategy—the development of their process.
• What are some quick technical SEO wins? No right answer here, but you want to see if they can differentiate between and prioritize low-impact, high-impact, low-effort, and high-effort optimizations.
  • For example, compressing images and deleting thin content are low-effort, high-impact actions. Optimizing meta descriptions on blog posts is a high-effort, low-impact one.
• A site that's been online for 9 months is getting zero traffic. Why? There are a million reasons why an established site might not be getting traffic. They should be able to offer several possible scenarios—with solutions—that illustrate why that is. This question is meant to explore their ability to problem-solve, think critically, and be creative—all requisite SEO skills.
• How do you perform a technical SEO audit? Like the last question, there are many ways to skin a cat. The point of this one is to check if they have a process in place for auditing a website. Some follow-up questions:
  • What tools do they use and how do they use them?
  • What are the first things they look for in an audit, and why?
  • How have they resolved particular issues and what were the results?

Bonus: Ask the candidate to explain their SEO strategy in a way a child could easily understand. This is harder than it sounds, but if they can get the point across without all the jargon and technical mumbo jumbo, that's a good sign they know their stuff.

 

Check out the article for the full list of questions.

Brand new links

New from the blog: We've been digging into cold email.

• How to write a cold email—a tactical guide to help you write cold emails that get responses—and conversions.
• Cold email templates and examples. Use these templates to craft high-converting email outreach. They cover everything from booking a sales call to landing a partnership.

While we're here, what cold email subject lines have worked for you? Reply to this email to let us know (and send us an example)—we'll feature a handful of our favorites on the blog and link to you.

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Tool recommendation: Better ecommerce product recommendations lead to higher average order values. Suggestr increases store revenues by 7-11% (proven by a/b tests) by automatically offering high-converting product recommendations. They're backed by Y Combinator and the team is ex-FB. If you run an ecommerce store on Shopify, we suggest you try a free 30-day trial—just write to aditya@suggestr.co or fill out the form here to get started.

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Growth role: Almanac raised $34M from Tiger. They're building a top productivity tool for distributed teams. If they win, they'll displace Word and Docs to become the tool most of us use every day to do our work. They're looking for a strategic growth lead who will play a foundational role in scaling the company. More information here.

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Startup role: Casa is looking for a VP of Revenue to lead their revenue-generating teams, optimize go-to-market strategy, and help Casa grow through the next major phase of its company lifecycle. This hire will lead the sales, client service, business development, and international teams.

 

Casa helps individuals secure their bitcoin simply and safely, without worrying about risk of loss. They're growing quickly and are one of the largest security providers in the crypto space. Apply here.

New marketing jobs

 

If you're looking for a top growth role, check out the opportunities below from our job board. Companies can post jobs here.

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Something fun

Via toothpaste for dinner.

Want more growth tactics?

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Reply to this email. Let us know what would be most helpful to you this year. What topics would you like us to cover? We'll continually improve this newsletter based on your feedback.

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Who's Demand Curve? We're who startups rely on for professional growth. We'll teach you how to improve your ads, funnels, landing pages and more. Take a look at our Growth Program. Or Bell Curve will grow your company for you. We've worked with clients like Microsoft, Segment, Tumblr, Ancestry, and Perfect Keto.

 

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— Julian, Nick, Grace, Joyce, Dennis, and the DC team.