Pete Ericson reviews the Balance the Grind website and subscription funnel to identify why free-to-paid conversions are low and how to improve them. Key findings: the homepage lacks a clear tagline or statement that the site is a 3,000+ interview archive about living and working better; the free registration flow should be simplified (remove first-name field, make copy benefit-oriented); the paid paywall/upgrade flow is confusing (inconsistent copy, unclear pricing display, geolocation/currency toggles causing currency mismatches on Stripe checkout); the current $2/month price is likely too low (recommends ~$4.99+ and/or annual-only to avoid Stripe fees and improve margin); technical bugs (a server/plugin "bad request" that locks users out when logged in) are blocking conversions; email strategy needs higher frequency (daily or several-times-weekly), more prominent buttons/CTAs, and reuse of archival content; include upgrade CTAs in newsletters (example: Small Boats layout).
Questions this video answers
August 13, 2024
About 3,000 interviews/articles (claimed by reviewer)
Chapters
In this video, we're going to review Balance the Grind and the subscription system in order to see what we can do to help boost conversions. Now, one of the things that I'm aware of is that we have about 3,000 articles here, let's call it. From what I understand, it's 3,000 interviews that have been published and I don't see that anywhere. When I land on the homepage, what I would do first is make sure that it's integrated somehow, perhaps as a tagline with the logo. When I come here, I'm not really sure what I'm getting. I might find an interesting article in Google or on social. I'll get here, read the article, and then I'll come back to the homepage. And the homepage should have maybe a little more information about what is actually here. And what I have seen so far is that this is really a database of how to live and work better based on interviews from successful people. So I would add that to the top. Now let's go in and take a look at some of these articles and see what the flow looks like. Now, I've already read an article, this is my second article and I get stopped with a free registration, which is great. And if I look in the back end, I can see that there are in fact a good number of new free registrations coming in through the funnel. I think this can be improved though. First of all, let's make this more direct. In other words, in George, your first article, that's not really a very direct way of telling people to what the benefit is. And the benefit is that they can read this article. That's the motivation of the reader. So I would change this to read this article now that's what I want to do as a reader. And then I would rework the copy here so it's again a little more direct. Something like create a free account and get more of Balance the Grinds top or Balance the Grinds articles directly to your inbox. So they know they're going to get the newsletter and they know that they're going to get access to this article. The first name. This is unnecessary. This is just an extra step. I would remove it and just stick with the email and password and okay, so let's register processing and now it's unlocking the content and let's see what I get here. Okay, so I get access to this article. That's great. Now the email gets sent off to the email newsletter system and it's should be segmented as free. So that There's a free list that is built and. And then when somebody pays to upgrade, there should be a paid segment. Now let's go back. I'm going to read another article. So I got my one free. I got my email address. Hop into another one. That. And here we go. All right. Look at that. So now I get stopped on the second article. Get unlimited access to all our premium content for less than a cup of coffee. Yeah, this is good. Again, I would weave in the 3,000 article database of how to live and work a better life with these interviews right in here. So I would say getting access to premium content, that's a feature. What's the benefit here? The benefit is you're going to live and work better based on our database of 3,000 plus interviews with successful people. So I would write up some copy with that. All right, now let's go upgrade. Okay. Now I know that there's some geolocation happening here, but I think what it's doing is it's really killing the conversion rate. So I'm in the US and the copy says for just $2 a month or $25 a year, you'll get unlimited access. So I would add some more copy. I'd probably add an image here. Successful person. Now I'm a little confused because it says $2 monthly, but up here it says $2 or $25 per year. That's a little confusing. And when I go to upgrade now I have my name, my address and I just have to continue to payment. And that's great. Oops, hang on a second, let me go back. Enter a last name. Okay. Now continue to payment. Okay. All right. And I'm ending up on stripe checkout, but now it's Australian 750 per month, so that's confusing too. Not really sure what I'm getting here. This is part of the low conversion rate from free to paid. Free's doing great. Paid is underperforming this checkout. When it's time to pay. This needs to be reworked. I would probably keep it simple in the beginning. Maybe just stick with Australia for the as the first market to tackle and then work your way out. So this is causing a lot of confusion and it's definitely part of what is killing the conversion rate. The other thing too I just want to mention is that $2 per month is a price that needs to be changed. First of all, it's too cheap. The bottom end in US dollars that we see of even B2C publications and this seems to be a cross between B2C and B2B is about 499 per month. That's really the low end of subscriptions. Part of the problem of having a $2 price too is that Stripe is taking $0.50 out of each subscription. So it's killing the profit. In the interest of simplicity, I would probably offer an annual only and just stick with annual and you can at least make a profit on the sale amount. Okay, now trying to get back to the upgrade your account page, but it doesn't. It's not happy with. With this. Yeah, okay. Bad request. This is something else to look at. I'm glad this happened when I was reviewing the site before. I got this. As soon as I. The site works fine, but as soon as I'm logged in this bad request triggers and there's no way to exit. So there's something wrong with the server setup, there's plugin conflict. Something is happening to create this bad request. And then once this happens, you're locked into this never ending cycle of bad request. I can't even on the homepage. I just can't bring the homepage up anymore. This is something else that is absolutely killing conversions. Definitely something to look at. If you need help with with server setup, just reach out. We can certainly help with that if you need. Okay, so what else is there? The last thing I'll mention is on the email list I pulled up. I pulled up a sample email here and I believe that the email frequency is far too low. The ideal frequency is daily sends the reader back to your site and. And shows them the upgrade messaging to paid every day just about. And that's what we need today for people to convert. I think this might be weekly newsletter or every two weeks. I like the layout. This is a good intro. You got a nice image here. This call out here needs to be a button. Buttons convert better than text links. So I would have maybe a little button that says hey, subscribe on the button. And just as a subtle call out to subscribing this. This intro is a bit long and it takes a little. And don't worry about the social icons here. We're trying to get this clean. This is your sort of main article and it's. It takes a little too long to get to. This might actually be longer. So you can get people reading this copy and then want to finish the article, maybe another paragraph just to really get some traction with it. So slim this down, cut this in half I'd say at the very least and then get people hooked on this article. And then I like the fact that there are other articles in here, but it's actually too much. I have 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, we have a call out for books here. This should, this would be a great call out for subscription instead of the books. The books is good, but maybe they deserve their own email promotion. And then we have. Now we have even more articles that are showing up down here. So it's a. What I think would be better is to. If you could create a, maybe every other day newsletter or twice a week, three times a week. See if you can bring the cadence up for the. The number of newsletters, slim down these stories. Bring. If you have 3000 articles in your archives, bring up one of the archival articles as a feature story. Maybe it needs a little updating, maybe not. But you can count on the fact that most people have not seen most of your articles. We're just too busy and too distracted to see everything. Leverage the archives that you have, bring them back and feature them in your newsletter. And that'll bump and bump up your newsletter frequency. So that'll bump up the frequency of your list. Now at the bottom here, I don't see anything that says upgrade. This would be a nice place for, for an upgrade message. I'm going to feature here Small Boats. Let's take a look at what they're doing. I've shown this before, but let's go down their articles. It's a very nice layout, very effective. Here's they're looking for content but then at the bottom here, this. Join the Small Boats community and you'll receive a bubble bullet and then a big button. Join Small Boats today. This is something that should be at the bottom of every free newsletter. And then when somebody pays and they end up in the paid segment, they obviously won't see this. And you can have other call outs, other actions for your paid crowd. But this is. So have a, have a small call out at the top and then have a. This bigger benefits oriented call out at the bottom. All right, that's enough on the email. I think that's probably a good enough amount of things to look at before moving along further. Hope that's helpful.
