Grades for February Employee Engagement: Once again, I need to do a better job of checking in with our team. This is a definite weak spot of mine. Sales Activity: As I mentioned above, we recently decided to aggressively throttle back our largest advertising expenses and haven’t seen it impact new customer sign-ups. That shouldn’t be surprising given the lack of sales it generated. We could pay up to $8.75 per visit and achieve a one-year payback. If you look at our actual cost of $5.86 and compare that to our hypothetical, you might think that we found a scalable marketing channel?! Wrong!! The free trial page converted at less than 5% and the free trial converted at 0%. There is no question that these aren’t our target customers. We had 100 new customer sign-ups from sources other than this review site while we batted a fat .000 from 1,000+ landing page visitors from it. Additionally, we have plenty of room for improvement here as well on the conversion rate-front and that’s a core area of focus for me.
Systems: I decided to delay hiring a part-time administrative assistant. I came to the realization that billing is an area we need to better define systems/ processes. We are building an internal tool to manage our billing, specifically our renewal process. Content: I updated our blog with two “new” posts but they were only recycled posts that I wrote in the past. This recycling of posts is valuable as I tend to update them when re-dating them but I still need to keep pushing out new content! Data:
Our recent decision to cut our largest advertising expense was a clear example of using data to empower decision making.
We need to get back to our core marketing activity of providing value via content and email marketing. Those who get value from our content will likely think of us first when looking for software tools.
Fun:
On an unrelated topic, I had very informal discussions this month about a potential merger partner for Harvest Profit. More on that towards the back half of 2019.
Work/Life Balance: I’ve started to finish up the work day a bit later than I’d like (6:30ish) but that’s partially a symptom of it being our busy time of the year. I continue to do a better job of unplugging in the evening, which is correlated with better sleep.
We have been able to push some new features out to our customer base and that’s always enjoyable work. We’re also working on a new development that I’ll talk about in the next couple months.