Growth Newsletter #079

Small changes to the way you convey your prices can have an outsized impact on conversion.

One of our favorite pricing tactics? Anchoring—setting expectations so that your price becomes more attractive.

Here are a few ways to use price anchoring:

• When listing items, include the higher-priced items first. Think about a wine list. Seeing higher-priced items near the top of the list creates a price anchor and makes the other items on the list feel less expensive.
• Use specific numbers to encourage people to spend more. This works for quantity as well as pricing. Snickers grew sales by changing its quantity anchor from "them" to "18."

• Break down your prices into smaller units. £4.57 per day feels more attractive than £1,668 per year.

Check out more sharp pricing psychology tactics here.  

P.S. Katelyn Bourgoin is running a buyer's psychology session live at our Growth Summit. She'll dig into pricing psychology and leave you with actionable tactics to test. If you haven't already, register here (takes less than one minute, totally free).

Direct mail is wildly overlooked as a channel—its average response rate is 9%.

Compare that to 0.4% for organic social and 0.6% for paid search.

One of direct mail’s most effective uses today? Automated retargeting.

Here’s a simple way to test it:

• Identify site visitors who abandon cart and create two segments.
• Keep one group as the control. Send them your standard abandoned cart email flow.
• For the second group, skip the abandoned cart email and instead, send a beautiful postcard in the mail with a unique QR promo code (say, 10% off first purchase). You can set this up to send within 12-24 hours of the cart abandonment.
• Test the conversion difference between groups.

Direct mail engages people who might not otherwise respond to digital retargeting. One study concluded that marketers see a 300-400% lift in conversion rates when targeting cart abandoners through direct mail.

You can use a tool like Inkit, Lob, or Rejoiner to automate this whole process.

A quick way to rank higher in Google: Turn unlinked brand mentions into backlinks.

If you have an online presence, there are likely mentions of your company that don’t currently link back to your site. Consider searching for these and convincing the owner of the content to link to you.

Having more backlinks (especially from high-authority domains) sends a positive signal to Google that could increase your rank.

Here’s how to do it:

First, find unlinked brand mentions.

If you have Ahrefs, use its Content Explorer tool. Search for your brand name and exclude your domain. Example: For HelloFresh, that search would look like: “HelloFresh” -site:hellofresh.com

If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can look on Google using these search operators:

• intext:[keyword] Use this to specify your brand name. The “intext:” portion tells Google to find pages with content including this specific keyword.
• -[domain.com] Use this to avoid getting results from a specific site. That could be your own site and social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and so on.

For HelloFresh, that’d look like: intext:HelloFresh -hellofresh.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -twitter.com

Make sure you look for variations of your brand name. Check misspellings like “Hello Fresh” with a space.

Once you have a list, reach out to the content owners. Keep it short and sweet. Prove that you’ve read the article and make a case for why they should link to you.

Voilà—low-hanging fruit backlinks.