How Speed Adds To The Bottom Line

In 2009, Google published an article showing that when it took people another 200 - 400 milliseconds to get search results, people used their product less.

The same has been true for us at Rugby Bricks.

When people used to buy our products, they would have a 3-step process.

1. They’d have to click on the product

2. Then they’d have to click “Add To Cart”

3. They’d then have to go to the cart and the checkout

4. To reduce these steps we added a “Quick Buy” button so people could buy directly on that page

This change alone accounted for a 20% increase in sales YoY.

We are all-time poor.

Most customers want the things they need yesterday.

Make it faster and easier for them to get that and you’ll see more revenue.

Notes: This principle applies to everything from SaaS (which is known as time to value) to sales.

Reduce the time to give people what they need and you’ll make more money.

The 80/20 Rule

When I was new to marketing, I tried one hundred different things simultaneously. But when something worked, I had no idea which of the hundred was the winner.

Then, when I finally found a couple of tactics I could rely on, I swung too far in the other direction and only used the tried, tested, and true.

The right balance is somewhere in between those two extremes. For me, it's 80/20.

I now spend 80% of my time and money on stuff that works and 20% on new experiments—hunches that I hope work but that most of the time fail.

This new approach has helped me get better results in two hours a week than what I used to achieve with twenty. In this downtrodden economy our leads per week numbers at Compound are exceeding those of even 2022. When we were at the peak of the Labour Government operation money machine.

This year I've tried:

1. A referral program competition

2. Post checkout vouchers

3. Negative CAC ad campaigns (scroll to the bottom of the post)

4. Promo deals for students

5. Website speed optimisations

The post-checkout vouchers and student promo deals flopped.

The website optimisations worked a little.

The referral competition and negative CAC campaigns won big time.

It's almost cheating. When you swing at a pitch in baseball, the best you can hope for is a single, measly home run. When you swing in marketing, the upside is unlimited.

And better yet, you can stack these winners on top of each other.

Thanks to our referral competition and negative cac campaign, we brought in 92 leads in May. More than double what we did last year.

The main point here is to test regularly. Most tests fail. But the winners more than makeup for the losers.