PLG: How To Build Marketing Into Your SAAS Product

Separating product from marketing is never a great idea for any type of software but, for Software-as-a-Service, it can be a recipe for disaster. That’s because SaaS functionality is a double-edged sword: Get it right and it can aid your marketing; but copy it blindly from your onpremise version – or otherwise get it wrong … Read more

Is “Too Frictionless” Even A Thing?

Personally I love frictionless CX and I was glad that I could make a business out of my passion when I launched Conversion Rate Optimization as one of the services of my company’s Digital Marketing+ offering. All along I’ve been debating with myself and my customers whether there’s an optimum level of being frictionless or … Read more

Product Or Service? CBSA Helps You Take The Dilemma By The Horns

Many technology vendors sell analytics as a product. However, many marketers want to buy analytics as a service (because it’s easier to get a tangible Return on Marketing Investment that way). This results in a dilemma of whether to position analytics as a product or service. Before exploring ways to address this dilemma, let me … Read more

When Should Mobile Apps Ask Their Users To Register?

Just like some people will never pay for a mobile app – or any digital content for that matter – I’ll never use a mobile app that forces me to register before I’ve had a chance to try it out. Of course, this rule doesn’t apply to mobile banking, Twitter, HootSuite, and other mobile apps … Read more

Thank God Google Acquired FeedBurner Along With Its CAPTCHA

When we separated our company blog from my personal blog Talk of Many Things, I had to migrate our business email subscribers from the latter to the former. Since I couldn’t find a way to automate this, I resigned myself to doing it manually. Because I’d chosen Feedburner to manage the feed and subscriptions of … Read more

How To Make Co-Creation Work?

It’s over a decade since the late C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy wrote their seminal book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers. During this period, users have written millions of articles on Wikipedia and posted zillions of updates and photographs on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks. Judging by the explosive … Read more

How The Obama Credit Card Decline Shapes The Future Of Analytics

President Barack Obama’s credit card got declined in a New York restaurant. Because, to quote Obama himself, “…I guess I don’t use it enough, so they thought there was some fraud going on.” While this is the most high profile example of predictive analytics going awry, it’s not the first, and it certainly won’t be … Read more

Apple Pay Puts Banks Squarely At The Center Of Mobile Payments

Like many, I’ve long held that nothing is broken with plastic cards for instore payments and made the case for mobile wallets to stick to gift, loyalty, ID and other forms of non-payment cards (see Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments). Until I read this line about Apple Pay: “Every … Read more