Yesterday was the deadline for my goal of reaching $1000/mo in revenue by 3/31/2015, which I missed bigtime. My current revenue is about $380/mo. It made me think that for my next goals I should choose something closer to the beginning of the funnel where I have more direct influence.
So here are my new goals. These are all conversion rate goals.
| AdWords CTR | 1% | Already previously achieved |
| Trial sign-up | 5% | 4/13/2015 |
| Activation: provide stylist names | 50% | 4/27/2015 |
| Activation: provide service names | 25% | 5/11/2015 |
| Activation: schedule at least one appointment | 10% | 5/25/2015 |
| Paying customer | 5% | 6/8/2015 |
So let’s talk math for a second. Let’s say I buy 1000 AdWords clicks for $1000. If I have a 5% visitor-to-trial conversion rate and 5% trial-to-customer conversion rate, then 5% of 5% of 1000 is 2.5. So under that scenario a paying customer would cost $1000/2.5 = $400, which would almost certainly be profitable. I realize the cost of 1000 clicks would probably be more than $1000, but even at $3/click the cost of acquisition would still only be $1200, which I think would probably still be profitable.
As of March my trial sign-up rate was about 11/900 = 1.2%. (That’s 11 trial sign-ups and 900 unique visitors in March.) I’m meeting with my designer later today to kick off a so-badly-needed website redesign. I expect a more professional-looking site to convert a little better even without much in the way of copy/content improvements. I’ll be much more motivated to put effort into content improvements once I’m no longer ashamed of the site, once I “believe” in it.
The next coarse-grained conversion that happens is trial to customerhood, but that’s kind of a big gap inside of which a lot needs to happen. You could put another conversion between trial and customerhood called activation. Many prospects sign up for a free trial but then never even log in once. They really need to put in some stylists, some services, and some appointments. I think I could help grease the chute on that process by creating some sort of multi-step “setup wizard” where the first step is to enter some stylist names, then services, etc. Such a wizard would also make it super super easy to pinpoint the exact step where people fall off the wagon. The only information I have now is that they never logged in after signing up, and that doesn’t tell me much. If I could just get 10% of trial signer-uppers to put in some stylist names, services names, and schedule at least one appointment, that would be a big improvement over where I am now.
So those are my new goals. I think they’re within more realistic reach than many of my old ones. Wish me luck.
Is it possible to have some sort of cron job that checks if a user has actually entered stylists or has a schedule in place and sends a polite, nudging email that they need to do so to really the get most (or anything) out of Snip?