42 Memory Lane Hail Mary: Month Two
Wobbly landing
Welcome to month two of the 42 Memory Lane Hail Mary Series with Lynne Hannah, Founder and CEO.
This series documents 42 Memory Lane's journey to launch Willa, the world's first digital family album.
If you missed it, here's Lynne's last update, and an overview of the series. Last month dealt with the details of Facebook campaign development and the importance of messaging on landing pages.
As you'll read below, Lynne and team have reached the point where a startup realizes that just because they built something doesn't mean that it will be easy to get people to buy it. Or even give up an email address to say that they're interesting in maybe one day buying it.
Nothing about acquiring customers is easy. Never ever ever.
You test. You tweak. Words. Colors. Design. Fonts. Images. Boldface. Exclamation points. All caps. No Caps. Words, again. More white space. Larger point size.
You do this dozens, if not hundreds, of times to dial in the ONE call to action that tips a customer to type their email into an empty white box and click on a brightly colored button, giving you hope to keep going.
That empty white box. So cruel.
Now we're getting real with the insanity that is early stage customer acquisition.
42 Memory Lane: month two
Milestones
Our Facebook ad campaigns have been in market for a little over two weeks. Campaign details:
We have two ad sets: Moms and Brides, with filters in each set to narrow our key demographics
Our call-to-action (CTA) is an ask for an email address to receive more information when Willa launches on Kickstarter
Our click-rate cost averages .29/click
In the first 16 days of the campaign, we had over 144K impressions, with a 4%-5% conversion rate to the landing pages, equally spread between the two markets. Sounds good right?
Setbacks
One of our co–founders left. More to come on that in a future update. It’s a nuanced subject with angles about life balance, obstacles, speed and expectations.
Our biggest surprise, however, is that we are not converting on the landing pages. People are clicking through from the Facebook campaign but we aren’t getting email addresses. Not even close to what we need.
Key Learnings
Running a Facebook ad campaign is not intuitive. We were lucky to have an advisor with experience in Facebook ads who stepped in to help.
Here are the highlights of our campaign:
Our daily ad caps are $60/market/day for the two markets, Moms and Brides.
We set the Facebook algorithm to benefit us, not Facebook, by not putting in a total campaign spend.
The first 24 hours are crucial for learning about ad bids. We started with .50 ad-bid caps. We removed the caps in the first couple of hours to learn where the floor was and where we could cap in a meaningful way.
Our advisor continuously monitored the ups and downs on bids for the first day.
We found that weekends are especially inexpensive for us.
Overall, our Facebook ads have been performing well and our conversion to the landing pages is good.
Here's a look at some of the ads...
These two Facebook ads far outperformed the others in driving clicks to the landing page. We believe it's because of the humor, and that these are the kind of moments you most want to save and remember.
These ads did not do well. Too generic? Too weird? Who knows.
We had two Bride ads from the beginning. The other one didn’t pull at all and this one is doing so well we never launched another to try and beat it.
And now for the maddening part....
We're missing the goal on our landing pages. We have thousands of landing page hits, but only 30 emails. Arghh!
We’ve tested different headlines, different graphics, different order of graphics, different CTAs, (I love this…I want this…Sign up for a huge discount…Get $50 off… be the first to know when we Kickstart…).
We’ve tested clean and minimal designs, and designs with more detail.
Despite all the iterations, it's been crickets.
I even called the tech guys at Wix (our landing page host) to make sure the contact form is working.
There have been so many tests on the landing pages that it's hard to choose which ones to share. Here are a few of the most recent...
Messaging around saving time with a CTA of HUGE discount.
Messaging around ease, also with a CTA of HUGE discount.
Messaging around saving your sanity, CTA of $50 off upon launch.
For Brides we anchored on adding video to their wedding album.
So why aren't the landing pages converting?
Willa is an entirely new product category with a multi-pronged solution. We knew we would have a challenge messaging what the product does in a concise, easily digestible way.
Our experience in testing and focus groups has always been:
Woman Tester, “Does it do this, this, this, this and this?"
Us, "Yes, it does all that. And also this."
Woman Tester, "OMG I want it!”
It's never been a quick, one line benefit payoff. It takes some explaining.
We look like “another device to be managed” when the user doesn’t have the benefit of a direct interaction. We’re a left turn into a world that’s easier.
It may be that the immediacy and single dimension of a landing-page experience just can’t convey the benefits to a harried mom or bride.
Google Analytics furthers the mystery showing a bounce rate after spending 1:30 minutes on the landing page. So visitors are looking, and watching the videos, but the CTA isn’t compelling to them.
Next steps.
Because we aren’t hitting the desired metrics, we’re pulling the Mom and Bride campaigns and plan to test our third potential market, Baby Boomers.
The Baby Boomer demographic needs a place and a way to organize newly digitized content (old photos, albums, film, slides etc.) to tell their life story, organize old memories, etc.
We’ll give the Baby Boomer Facebook campaign one week. If its crickets like this campaign…time to pivot to another strategy (or retire 😬).
Ask.
Underwire encouraged us to reach out to readers. If you have an idea or thought about how to optimize our landing pages, please email me.
Catch up on the beginning of this series here. Lynne talks about setting up the Facebook campaigns (and their pesky algorithms), team assignments and the challenges of landing page messaging.