Behavioral economics may be dead, while still being taught, researched, and practiced. The last article explains why.
Plus: a template for the ideal SaaS website (if such a thing even exists), a deep dive into product analytics, and 25 tactics on how to limit and prevent failed payments and involuntary churn.
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The Anatomy of the Ideal SaaS Website: Best Practices [powered by search]
The process of designing a SaaS website usually goes a little like this:
- Collect random inspiration from other SaaS websites for a mood board
- Ask product, engineering, customer service, and sales teams what they need
- Design the website by committee
After working with dozens of SaaS businesses, “powered by search” created a practical site map for high converting SaaS websites. This visual framework is designed to show SaaS companies how to structure their site, but also helps marketers see where content and resources should be strategically placed.
The article goes on to describe each section, explain the reasons why the given elements should be in that section or that page. A very detailed overall guide.
It’s good for starting from scratch but also helpful to check your SaaS against this framework and see if maybe you have things to improve, with clear reasons why.
Product Analytics: Growth, Engagement, Retention [PM4UX]
A very detailed and thorough article about product analytics, with many examples, charts, processes.
Key insights:
- All great product managers spend time diving deeply into data and seeking to understand it as thoroughly as possible.
- Learn to work directly with data to avoid dependence on others and to make data analysis an ordinary part of your day.
- Instrument (add product analytics) to everything you build, so that you won’t be “flying blind” when you launch.
- But don’t track everything; focus on key user and system events.
- Optimizing funnels can be a great complement to UX and other ways to improve an experience so that more people are able to complete it to their satisfaction.
- Not all product analytics boil down to growth but many do.
- Growth actually consists of many different elements that can all contribute to a growing base of users, paying or otherwise. Among these are awareness, acquisition, activation (and engagement), retention, referral, and sometimes revenue (or AAARRR for short).
- Don’t manipulate or harm people using the excuse that the data made you do it.
- Be careful not to chase the wrong metric off a cliff.
Failed Payments and Involuntary Churn — A Definitive Guide [Chargebee]
The more efficient your renewal process, the fewer customers that will churn out because of a payment issue.
This is the definitive guide to making concrete plans that, on the one hand, help you recover as many failed payments as you can, and on the other, help you keep your renewals as frictionless as you can so you don’t lose any customers via failed payments.
Table of contents:
- Payment is due – planning before things go wrong
- First try failed – collateral damage
- Retrying a payment method – damage control
- Dunning emails – communicating retries
- Post dunning action – moving forward
- Sending out an Invoice – revenue recovery for enterprise customers
- Tying it all together
The death of behavioral economics [Jason Hreha]
An interesting take on behavioral economics. The premise of the article—behavioral economics is dead, despite still being taught, researched, and used.
Why?
Two primary reasons:
- Core behavioral economics findings have been failing to replicate for several years, and *the* core finding of behavioral economics, loss aversion, is on ever more shaky ground.
- Its interventions are surprisingly weak in practice.
Example:
A paper was recently published by a couple of researchers from UC Berkeley. They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials run by two “nudge units” in the United States.
An impact these nudges had on average…
1.4%
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Until next week!
Radek Sienkiewicz
PS. How is the summer over now? I’m very afraid that I will start hearing Christmas songs soon. Each year they seem to start earlier and earlier.
