May was a bit of a crazy month to say the least. Let’s start with our products.
Shutting down 2 out of 3 products
At the end of May I decided to focus 100% of our energy on our Agency Reporting product. From now on that is all we offer, a tool to enable freelancers and agencies to send beautiful analytics reports to their clients (our homepage will be updated tomorrow but here’s a sneak peek).
Unfortunately this meant letting over half of our 42 paid customers go. It also meant that most of the work we have done in the last 2 months on our content analytics product will go to waste as will months of work we put into the dashboard product.
It’s been hard but I think it’s the right decision, I’m looking forward to focusing on 1 product from now on. Rather than bog this report down in the details of this move I’ll just quickly summarize the reasons:
- We are a small team of me and 1 developer and it became obvious that we couldn’t support 3 different products.
- The idea of having 3 different products didn’t sit well with me. I want to be able to easily explain what Informly is to people and I want them to be able to do the same.
- Our agency reports product has had less effort put into it than any of our products but it represented 70% of the revenue. Despite not optimizing the product at all, we continue to get paid users sign up for it and I continue to get people telling me that it’s something they want.
- The content Analytics product was personally interesting to me (and to others) but the data just wasn’t actionable enough for people. People don’t want to pay for data – they want results and turning this data into results is a big job. I think there is definitely an opportunity here and I have some big ideas about what it can do but I can’t fully commit to right now. I may come back to it later on. For now my priority is to build a business. For anyone who is interested in content marketing analytics, this Moz product sure looks pretty sexy.
That’s pretty much it. For me it means going back to an idea that I had a year ago so it’s been hard. But I think I got a bit carried away with my ideas and what people were saying rather than what they are doing. From now on hopefully I will be able to focus my efforts on marketing more and just making small changes to a product that I know works and I know offers value to people.
If this were politics I would be in trouble but luckily in the startup world we are allowed to do this sort of thing. In fact there’s even a name for it! The Zoom-in pivot (see here). Ah… I feel better already.
If you have any questions about this feel free to reply in the comments below.
Setting up Infusionsoft
The other thing that occupied most of my time in May was setting up Infusionsoft. Here is a summary of the main components of this story.
Why we moved to Infusionsoft
If you are friends with me on Facebook (you should be) you would have heard a lot about my dramas with sending auto responders with MailChimp. On top of that I also had a bunch of emails being sent by a tool called Intercom for people who signed up to my products. Intercom is awesome but having 2 different tools for sending emails wasn’t ideal and neither tool made it easy to manage complex sequences the way Infusionsoft does.
Both Jake Hower and Trent Dyrsmid had shown me through Infusionsoft and I was pretty blown away by how powerful it was.
Since signing up I have cancelled Kiss Metrics, Intercom and MailChimp which effectively means I’m only paying $65 a month more and I have all of this stuff in the one place and a lot more.
*Note Infusionsoft isn’t a particularly good analytics tool but for what I need I can get all of the data I need from there, Google Analytics and direct from our database. I wasn’t using KissMetrics too much other than to measure on-page conversions (which you can do in analytics), and the funnel of signups to activation to purchase etc (which you can do in Infusionsoft). I ended up using Intercom a lot for looking at who was using Informly as they do a much better job at making this easy. But Infusionsoft will do it all now and 1 product works better for me.
Setting up Infusionsoft
I found setting up Infusionsoft quite easy although also very time consuming due to how many emails I was sending. I did hit Jake up quite a lot on Skype (thanks Jake you are awesome), I had to do a little bit of Googling but other than that I had Infusionsoft more or less setup in a day or two (I didn’t do any training either, but I think there is lots of training available).
It took me a bit longer to finalise all of my sequences and work out exactly how I was going to use the thing. In the last few weeks I have:
- Brought across my list (5,500 or so people), this part was easy.
- Set up my basic templates.
- Created all of my email courses
- Created sequences for all 3 of my products (yes unfortunately again a lot of wasted work).
- All up the product sequences and email courses totalled 83 different individual emails.
- Set up an Affiliate program (launching soon)
- Set up all of our customers and invoices in the system
Here is an example of what a typical sequence looks like after someone signs up for Informly.
High level sequence
To summarize the steps above:
- Someone signs up for a Trial (we run them through a sequence that runs throughout the trial)
- If they become a paid customer they are moved off onto a paid sequence
- If they cancel they are moved off to a cancelled sequence.
Trial sequence
Here is what part of the trial sequence looks like:
After someone signs up for a trial Infusionsoft creates a task for me to check their account to make sure everything is looking good (this happens later in the sequence too). Then after 2 days they are sent some advice on how to set up client reports.
After another 2 days they are given some more advice on using the app. The sequence continues with various emails throughout the 3 week trial and culminates with emails asking them to sign up to the paid version towards the end.
If you have any questions about any of this feel free to ask them in the comments below. I’ve become a huge fan of Infusionsoft, the way this visual campaign builder works is amazing.
Income
At the end of May I was on track for my 30% monthly grow target having increased monthly subscription revenue from $603 to $774 (28%) and increasing paid customers from 37 to 42. Unfortunately though having cancelled the subscriptions for everyone on the content analytics software and the analytics dashboard product that brought us back to 16 paid customers totalling $476. So effectively a 20% drop in revenue which considering the fact that we lost half of our customers is pretty good.
I’m trying not to worry about this too much it’s such a small amount of money it doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether I can grow each month from now on. If I can hit my 30% a month target then that loss will feel pretty insignificant in no time at all.
Website traffic
Given everything that happened in May I wasn’t surprised to see my traffic tank a little bit after such a great month in April. Here is what my visits chart looks like now after a drop to 12,108 visits in May (a drop of 17%).
Here are some other highlights:
- My traffic from Google was up to 3,545 (up 8%). This continues to be huge growth for something that gets none of my attention. I believe in creating great content and a great product and Google will look after itself. So far so good.
- My traffic from Twitter was down 32% and LinkedIn 42%. I didn’t do much content at all in May so this is most likely the reason.
Top traffic sources
Content
It wasn’t my best month content wise given everything else that went on but I still had a few wins. Here are the main posts that came out in May and the results.
- Let me increase your blog conversions for free – This was a call for a contest where I agreed to re-develop someone’s blog to get it converting better. All the work for this has been done and a post will be coming soon with all of the details.
- 6 secrets to startup success with Matt from Vooza – This was a hilarious podcast I had a lot of fun making. Normally podcast episodes don’t generate a lot of visits or shares but this one did. It had 780 views, 560 downloads, 74 likes and 27 tweets. It even got 4 conversions which is cool (email optin).
- Practical Content Marketing (free ebook) – I released this ebook at the start of may. It’s had moderate success with 273 views and 35 conversions on the page. I’ve also put a pop-up on the site (that only shows to engaged users – done with pippity) that had been filled in quite a lot as well (37 times in the last week – converting at 12%).
- 6 hacks to boost the conversion rate of your content – This was a post as well as an email course. It had 642 views and 18 tweets. I am also using it for my blog homepage now as the main featured optin (this may change after changing focus to agencies).
- Increase your blog email conversion rates with this free blog review tool [FREE TEMPLATE] – With this post I provided all of the detail that I was running through for the winner of the conversion competition as well as what I’d learnt from reviewing 28 of the other applicants’ blogs. In addition I provided a download to the actual template I had used. This post had 651 views and 65 conversions making it the second highest converting post on my site – second only to a dedicated email course landing page.
- I also released 3 other podcast episodes including this one with Trent from Bright Ideas about infusionsoft.
Here is the top content visited in May:
Guest content
Guest content wise it was a pretty quiet month too. I appeared in 4 podcasts but none have been published yet. Eeek I hope that’s not a bad sign but I’ll report on those when they are published hopefully in next month’s report.
I also wrote one guest post for Ana Hoffman’s Traffic Generation Cafe 10 ways to explode your web traffic conversions today. I think it did quite well with 210 tweets and 54 comments (half were from me….comments that is not tweets).
Ana has quite a big audience but still I think these are pretty good results for a post on her blog.
For my site it provided 51 visits and 20 email optin conversions (39% conversion rate). This is due to the use of a high-converting landing page (see below). Some visitors came to the homepage but most hit this landing page. Those that hit the landing page converted at 58%.
20 email optins is a pretty good return for 1 guest post but in future I will be targeting my guest posts more towards agencies and freelancers because of my shift in strategy so I would expect lower numbers but more targeted lists.
Conversions
The conversion totals this month are not going to be all that meaningful because a lot of people signed up to products that are no longer available. In total I had 460 conversions broken up as follows:
- Email signup 278 (down from 297 however in both months a lot of these were existing subscribers)
- New user for the now defunct dashboard app or content analytics app 109
- New agency user 17 (this is the product I will be focusing on from now on)
- New email signup for emails relating to agency users 47
From now on the main conversion stat I am going to be interested in is new app users (referred to above as agency users). I need to get this up much higher than 17 in a month – probably close to 80. I will also look at email optins and with Infusionsoft I will be able to figure out which users are agency users even after they opt in (see this podcast on how I will be able to do that – I haven’t set it up yet).
Podcast stats
My podcast downloads were very steady in May, 3,505 downloads in total down from 3,600 in April.
The results are pretty disappointing though. I’m really not seeing any growth in my podcast and haven’t done for some time. I still enjoy doing it and will continue to but I get much more impact from my other content.
There are lots of things I get out of the podcast that never appear in stats though so it’s very difficult to measure the effectiveness of it. I have built some great relationships in May, had a lot of fun, learnt a lot all great things that come from having a podcast.
App statistics
From now on I will be reporting on more details of the Informly app now that I can focus 100% on it. As of tomorrow (6 June) there will be a revised new user process, updated design, updated sales page (homepage) and other changes that will help me refine the whole process of getting customers on board.
So I won’t report on anything here but I will report next month on what results I’ve achieved on that front.
What do you think?
I’d love to know what you think about the results above. Suffice to say I’m hoping June will be a better month.
