Publishing live from Business of Software 2011 - Patrick MacKenzie (@patio11), Internet Speaking Guy, Bingo Card Creator,  Kalzumeus Software founder, and much more, applies solid engineering principles to marketing...

Patrick's first company was BingoCard Creator (BCC - bingo cards for elementary school teachers). He's also on Hacker News, an Internet speaking guy, and "gainfully unemployed" (which really means he consults).

BingoCard Creator – his first successful company - about 5000 customers

There’s a perception that “Marketing is basically witchcraft”. Marking is about changing people’s behavior.

Your business is set up to cause a Series of Fortunate Events.
Funnel:
100,000 people find your website
25,000 people start trial
Poor funnels kill companies.

Examples of funnels
-    Email
-    Trials
-    Sales cycle
-    Core use of product
-    Checkout

What do you do with a funnel?
1.    Describe
2.    Measure
3.    ???  (Optimize this once you have metrics)
4.    Profit

Some tools:
Kissmetrics, Google Analytics (free), Mixpanel, Hubspot

Shorter is probably better. Remove as many steps from the process as possible.
Improvements compound multiplicatively.

Sometimes it’s good to try radically simplifying. Got much better results that way when he did it.

A/B testing – important!

Most common outcome – no convincing evidence of change

Not to sell you something but for A/B testing you have options…
- Your programming testing probably has A/B library
- Write your own (1 week project)
- Visual website optimizer
- Optimizely

Good places to test:
- Home page
- Landing pages
- Pricing page
- Shopping cart
… software’s behavior?

Some things are unexpected - you have to test to know. For example, putting Google checkout as an option in addition to PayPal created a higher conversion rate overall, and also a higher conversion rate through PayPal (maybe made things more legit?).

Look at what they do, not what they think they think or what they say.

Your goal is to change the lives of your user.

Good things to test
-    Headlines
-    Offers
-    Calls to action
-    Prominent graphical elements
-    Really important microcopy

40% more people bought something when there was something inserted by someone w/ no marketing experience who knew nothing about the product – just a simple text change.

The headline really matters – put appropriate resources there.

Systematic A/B testing prints money.

Consider: for more mature products only… how hard is it to move your needle 1%?

Why doesn’t everyone do this??!

Eliminate all friction from the purchase process!

Incubating a culture of testing.

For every user you can say one thing: Everyone ran your software the first time. How many folks measure how many people run it the second time?
40% ran BCC a second time. That’s a pretty standard number and it's appalling.
You have to totally nail the first impression.

Never start with an empty screen. Users don’t know where to go.

For example, Balsamiq has fake data imported into it.

One thing we don’t do enough: customize the user’s trial experience.
Most users start at the same point. Often you can know something about that user before they start the trial – use that.

Giving easy options for starting increased BCC conversion by more than 20%.

Guide them to greatness – show them the fun bits and make them feel successful. For example, World of Warcraft has the Quest Leader who teaches you how to interact with the software.

A lot of us spoil the fun bits – we keep them hidden.
You can sell anything to enterprise if you can help them save time and/or make money.

“I don’t hate Zynga, I just love all things that are good and true in the world.”

When you’re doing A/B testing on offers, how do you avoid pissing people off by showing different pricing? The libraries typically track cookies so someone only sees one price