So someone like Jim Laurain drops into your DMs. You already follow all the industry best practices, but Jim says there’s a better way.
Well, yeah, there’s always room for improvement. Everyone knows that. The real question is: how much upside can you potentially see from making your messaging better? This can be a hard question to answer, especially if you’re stuck in the rut of thinking about your messaging in terms of A/B tests.
A single message has a very limited impact. But a great messaging strategy can shape the ways your users engage with your app or your site.
If you can catch your customers or users just when they’re starting to cool down, or can let them know about a product that just adjacent to the stuff they’ve bought before, and if you can do that without making them feel like they’re being spammed, you can ratchet up a user’s behavior to the point where they might have originally bought only once a month, and now they buy twice a month. And you can take those who buy twice a month and get them to buy three times a month. That’s not short-term impact. That’s shifting your baseline.
That’s the true impact of good messaging.
So how do you estimate that impact?
We’ve put together a little tool to help you explore the possibilities. It takes four different inputs:
- Total # Users This is the total number of people on your app or site who you think you could influence. You could take your total user base. You could take your monthly active user count. Pick a number that you think is realistic.
- Avg. $ per Transaction You want your users to do something that makes you money - that’s what keeps you in business. Pick an average transaction amount - an estimate of the average revenue you get from each conversion event.
- % Margin on Transactions This is the percentage of revenue that you tend to see in actual profit. Again, pick a number that you think is realistic.
- # Weeks to Estimate This is how many weeks you want to estimate the impact over. We’ve set the default to 4 weeks so you can see how much you’d make from better messaging over a month period, but change it to whatever you want.
The table below shows different incremental profit amounts for different possibilities.
The rows are the percentage of users who you think messaging could impact. The columns are how many extra conversion events per week you think messaging can get them to do.
The box at the top lets you keep a tally of what you think the possibilities are.
So let’s, for the sake of illustration, keep the defaults of 100,000 users, $10.00 average transaction amount, and 5% margin. We’ll also keep the timeframe at 4 weeks.
If you think it’s possible to influence just 2% of your users to do one more transaction a week, then go ahead and look up that amount in the table - it’s $4,320.
Click on that number, and you’ll see it’s added to the box at the top, and your total profit has changed.
Now maybe you think you can get half a percent of users to do 5 more transactions per week—That’s $5,200.
Click on that. It’s now in your box, and your total has been updated. You can see how quickly the figures add up.
So go ahead and play with the figures. Try different assumptions. Find a total that you think is realistic.
Moving the needle for just a small percentage of your users quickly compounds into real value. And, if you’re using a system that continues to learn your users and adapt, these numbers will only grow towards the bottom right of the chart over time.
So, is optimized messaging worth it?
You decide.
