Acquired our first 2x MRR customer
by Marc ThomasWe recently increased the price of our most popular paid plan by 50%. Each time a new customer signs up to that, we get paid significantly more.
Our lowest paid tier is our most popular
The breakdown of customers on paid plans on doopoll is as follows:
Previously, the pricing of that was:
Solo – £9/mo
Plus – £40/mo
Super – £100/mo
Back in January, we began to focus more deeply on acquiring customers through organic search. That strategy has definitely paid off. Here's our organic traffic for the past year.
Roughly 1 in 20 free signups to doopoll converts to paid at the moment – and that usually happens within 14 days.
So the growth is good.
The mechanics of growth on a low-cost tier are hard
We saw that the majority of people were signing up to the Solo plan initially because our funnel is great at getting them to that point.
The customer profile of that plan is usually individuals looking to do a single survey which means that it also has a high churn after the first month and an almost 100% churn after month 2. So LTV between £9-18 on average.
We're not hugely concerned about that because it's the nature of survey tools: individuals need surveys sporadically, but organisations (the bulk of the business) pay more and use for a lot longer.
If we ever want to get paid traffic to convert to that plan, the maximum CAC we could spend previously would be £6 – which is not good viable when the paid channels for survey tools are so hotly contested.
We increased the acceptable CAC
The headspace that those £9 signups were taking plus the low acceptable CAC that we had to play with meant that increasing the price of that tier was the only logical move.
So we did. It went from £9 to £15.
We just had our first signup to the new pricing and no complaints from any users to say that it's unacceptable.
This means that we can now potentially spend £10 to acquire a new customer on that tier. Or we can continue to acquire them organically.
But either way, we're expecting this will have a great impact on the MRR in the long term.
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Wow. I am actually looking to do the same with my startup.
Thanks for sharing.
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Would love to understand how you run PPC campaigns. Are you using FB or Google Ads or both? What have you found works well and not so well?
Any advise for someone who is dipping their toes into PPC world?
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Generally we run short experiments with ads to test messaging and funnel changes more than anything. It’s not a channel that really works for us in terms of conversions. We have acquired customers this way, but it’s not been something I’ve really been able to scale for doopoll yet.
We experimented with Google. Sends good conversions for slightly too much — will probably try it again before too long. Found that we did well here with the sorts of things we already rank for close to pain points of our customers. Competitor search terms also work for us but vary wildly in expense. Branded terms are pointless for us.
Facebook sent us low price conversions but also low quality. That was to do with a disconnect between the language we used for targeting in one territory versus another.
Actual example: event organisers in the U.K. generally refer to corporate event organisers. In the US, I got a lot of rap DJ conversions which is not at all the market and also burns my cash. Lesson: make sure your targeting works for each region.
Quora was cool for volume and price. But not great for conversions. In fairness, I’ll probably give this another go before too long. I think it takes them a little longer than other platforms to train their targeting when you have a new account. I ended up pausing the campaigns because I didn’t want to pay for generic visits to our site.
Finally, I’ll likely give Reddit a try sometime later this year. I’ve never tried that before so who knows.
Main thing: getting better at paid channels all the time but it’s expensive and if you’ve never done it before you’re quite likely to waste a lot at the start.
I much prefer organic channels.
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Smart move on increasing your price. I think CAC is something almost all founders overlook. Acquiring a customer is hard, and usually expensive! Depending on your industry it's very challenging to get your CAC under $100, let alone under $10. If your pricing is only $10 a month you're in for a bad time.
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Our pricing ranges from £9/mo to £1000+/mo so it's a pretty broad church. Around 70% of our business is enterprise (which isn't accounted in the above).
I'm still not sure you can say this with anything close to certainty though:
If your pricing is only $10 a month you're in for a bad time.
On the contrary, we've acquired customers for as low as £4. There's a whole heap of variables there. Not least what other channels you're using.
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Congrats!
The website copy mentions doopool replaces Dynamics 365 - I am curious to know which feature/product within Dynamics 365 platform are you referring to?
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Yeh, that's a funny one eh?
It turns out that a lot of our customers previously used the surveys functionality within Dynamics. It's a common objection: 'But we already use Microsoft's survey tool'
They quickly discover that doopoll does a whole lot more and performs better.
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Nice post - can I ask what strategies you've used for your organic search improvements?
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You sure can. There are two parts to this:
- We started focusing on making our surveys more shareable. This resulted in a lot of backlinks. Previously we added a backlinks in our embed code but stopped doing this because Google’s policy on it was ambiguous. We still get lots of people linking to doopoll surveys without us asking or them doing anything directly. This increases our domain authority.
- We started to target our customers pain points more directly. We wrote around 5 posts that send us the majority of conversions. We write another one of these when we find bottom of funnel search term but other than that our content output is quite low.
Does that answer your question?
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Thanks for the reply - and it certainly makes sense. Your blog content is well written. Do you use any particular tools for tracking how you are ranking or to research keywords based off the customer needs you are writing about? I'm just using Google's own stuff right now and slowly increasing the average rank.
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Thanks Glenn. That’s very kind. Actually, our blog content is mostly not the thing that converts for us. It’s marketing pages that aren’t hugely obvious but they look quite like blog posts.
Yes — I make extensive use of Ahrefs but generally only to monitor performance. The thing with pain point work is you can’t really search for it easily unless you have the pain.
The best thing to do is to consider what your users are trying to do when they use your product and then works backwards from there. You’ll only need a few well written posts most likely.
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
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Cheers!
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