Bad channels and the wrong customers

Problem: You’ve launched your product, it’s getting plenty of coverage. People are signing up, but no one is actually using it.

Sometimes they’re not using it because they have no need for it. You can make something easy-to-do, quick-to-do, simple, clear and obvious, but if none of the people you attract want to do it, then it’s all for nothing.

You may as well try sell wedding dresses to single guys.

How to fix this: You’re attracting the wrong type of people through bad marketing channels. Fix your marketing. More importantly, filter out bad channels so they don’t pollute your data and prevent good analysis.

Example: A friend runs a wedding website. One day their conversion rate sank from 6% to 0.5%. They panicked and rolled back recent updates thinking they’d screwed up.

They hadn’t. They were Techcrunched, hardly a great source of brides to be.

Key idea: Eliminate bad channels that cost money, and filter out the ones that don’t from your data. Don’t waste time stressing about, A/B testing or trying to convert dead traffic.

This is the first in a series of short posts asking a simple question. “Why won’t my users do X”, where X can be anything. Next we’ll look at problems around Discovery, Value Proposition, Complexity, Competition, and Conflict.