I missed last week. Sorry.

Interesting stuff has been happening with my Capterra PPC campaign. I had a certain landing page that was capturing about one lead today, quite predictably, and that was nice. If nothing else it was nice for motivation.

I got a call yesterday from an unknown number and it turned out to be a lady from Capterra. She seemed to be really strongly of the opinion that instead of just an email, I should be asking for a phone number in my initial landing page. I’m inclined to believe she has some idea what she’s talking about because she seemed to have had a lot of contact with other businesses using Capterra (naturally) who were asking for a phone number up front. Since the one-lead-a-day thing was nice but wasn’t getting me a whole heck of a lot of engagement, I decided I didn’t have much to lose by giving the phone-number-up-front thing a shot. So I added a “phone” field to the “Get Free Demo” form yesterday. We’ll see how it goes.

I also released a redesign of my website yesterday. It’s more like a first pass at a redesign, but even this rough first pass is a big improvement in my opinion over what I had before. I still need to make sure it looks okay on various browser, devices, etc. (which I’m pretty sure it doesn’t right now).

I’ve been receiving feedback from a couple prospects I’ve talked to that my pricing structure is fucked up. Until recently the only difference between my $49/mo plan and my $99/mo plan was that the $99/mo one offered text reminders. People understandably found that to be a lot of money for such a small difference. So I changed the pricing structure to $29, $49 and $69 depending on how many stylists you have (1-5, 6-10, 11+).

Out of the leads I’ve gotten so far, there are two particular ones that have been the most promising. Both have said they plan to use the software. One of those two just told me so today, so I gave her an incentive to get her credit card on file within the next day. For some stupid reason I didn’t try to create any kind of urgency for the other prospect, but I should probably go do that. If even just one of these two prospects actually becomes a customer, I’ll be happy with the ROI and fairly happy with the rate of acquisition.

Overall I’m feeling pretty good about the state of things right now. The path to success is more illuminated than it has ever been. I have a highly predictable stream of qualified traffic coming in. I had (until I recently changed it) a landing page that was capturing leads at a predictable rate. The challenge now is to get a higher level of engagement with those leads. We’ll see what the presence of the phone number field does. My hope and expectation is that I’ll get fewer leads but more qualified ones that I can engage with more easily.