Growth Newsletter #072

About pages are one of the most-visited, yet under-utilized pages on websites.

People who visit this page are often primed to take action because they're already interested in your business—they’re actively seeking to learn more.

To capitalize on this qualified traffic, consider adding an email signup form on your about page. Make sure the CTA and value you’re offering are consistent with the themes you talk about on the page.

For example:

• James Clear offers a free habit-building email course that nurtures new subscribers to buy his book, Atomic Habits.
• Perfect Keto invites visitors to join their keto newsletter and access subscriber-only discounts and resources.
• Exploding Topics asks their about page readers to subscribe to their newsletter where they share emerging trends every Tuesday.

This tactic might sound obvious, but look around. Most companies don’t take advantage of it.

Some companies purposely make it hard for users to disengage from their products.

For instance, with autoplay turned on, YouTube and Netflix automatically show more content after the user’s video has finished. And publishers like BuzzFeed and Bustle use infinite scroll so that more content automatically populates as users move down their sites.

Companies do this to engage users for longer. But this kind of product experience may actually do more harm than good.

Why? Users feel trapped. Although they voluntarily continue to use your product, they may feel negative about it once they break away. They might even be more likely to perceive it as a mindless or addictive waste of time.

To avoid trapping users, consider building natural exit points into your product. That is, give users clear signals that a product experience has ended. Make it easy for them to leave.

A few examples:

• Instagram shows users a “You’re All Caught Up” message once they’ve seen all the posts in their feed from the last two days.
• The dating app Coffee Meets Bagel closes chatrooms after seven days—an exit point that encourages users to swap contact info with their matches or chat with new ones.
• Many mobile games show a post-game screen with options to return to the home screen or play again.

Exit points create a sense of completion and make it easier for users to leave with satisfaction. Users are less likely to feel bad about using your product for a prolonged amount of time.

Here are a few ideas for how to create exit points:

• Instead of enabling autoplay or infinite scroll, use “Next” or “Load More” buttons.
• Celebrate the end of a product experience by framing it as a big win. For instance, after completing a workout, a fitness app could show a message like “You crushed it—now it’s time to relax!”
• For a more transparent approach, show users how long they’ve been using your product and invite them to take a break. Example: ”You’ve watched 97 videos in the last hour. Want to rest your eyes for a bit?”

Unlike attention-trapping features that take advantage of users, exit points treat your customers more kindly and ethically. And since they help deliver a more satisfying experience, users may stick around for longer over time.

Books don’t work.

Think back to your favorite book from ~2015. How much of it do you remember?

And that was your favorite.

Humans just aren’t wired to retain information well after a single read. That’s not how we learn. We need activities, feedback loops, and metacognition (thinking about thinking about what we’re reading). We need to spread out learning over time.

Of course, retention isn’t just a memory problem. It’s a startup problem too. User retention is what drives sustainable, scalable growth. During onboarding, here are a few ways to boost business retention through cognitive retention:

• Do > show > explain. The more action-driven your user's education is, the more effective it will be. For instance, instead of starting users off with a bunch of tool tips and videos, Grammarly guides them to fix a dummy page’s grammar.
• Don’t show your user every feature. Over-educating a new user will overwhelm them. Spread out learnings—and new feature introductions—to avoid info overload.
• Connect through personalization. In general, personalization reduces friction and time to activation. Some ways to increase learning during onboarding, and make it more personalized in the process: 1) For B2B, offer a one-on-one webinar or demo. 2) Try a “choose your own adventure” approach to onboarding, with users picking their path.

Image: IBM

Following these steps increases the chance that users will reach their "aha moment"—the moment they realize real value from your product. And they need to do that to stick around.