AARRR Audits: 5 Marketing Experiments to Grow This AI-Powered Science Startup (Issue 1, Part 1)
SciSummary.com is an AI-based platform that summarises academic papers. Here's how I'd improve its digital marketing.
Welcome to AARRR Audits
If you don’t already know, AARRR, which stands for acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, is a growth framework popularised by Dave McClure. It is especially popular among big tech companies (like Skyscanner, where I used to work).
This week, we take a look at SciSummary, a platform that uses AI to create easily-digestible summaries of scientific articles, and how we can boost its growth.
Acquisition
Paid Acquisition
According to its founder Max Heckel, SciSummary has a monthly traffic of 160k on its website. That’s a decent number, but on average, only 1-10% will convert to registrations. That means SciSummary is missing out on turning as many as 158,000 visitors into users.
💡Experiment 1: Launch retargeting campaigns
You’ve probably been retargeted before: You view an item on a site, leave, open Facebook, and find the product you were looking at being advertised to you.
Retargeting allows you to show ads to people who’ve previously visited your site, across the web and on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and others.
70% of users are more likely to convert when retargeted, so it’s definitely a channel you shouldn’t ignore.
Note 1: Before investing in any paid marketing, you’ll need to make sure the economics make sense by taking into account things like conversion rates from free to paid plans, and the individual platforms’ customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Note 2: A pre-requisite for retargeting is to install the necessary pixels. Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc. each have their own processes for doing this.
Activation
Now that we’ve acquired traffic for our site, we need to ‘activate’ these visitors.
Activation is the action you want visitors to take, and it means different things for different businesses. For Skyscanner it was searching for a trip. For SciSummary it can be a sign up or generating a summary.
Home Page
Currently, SciSummary users have to sign up BEFORE they can use the product.
This means that it takes users at least 4-5 steps before reaching their Aha moment.
What’s an ‘aha’ moment? Appcues defines an ‘aha’ moment as ‘a moment of sudden insight or discovery. In software, it’s the pivotal moment when a new user first realizes the value of your product and why they need it.’
I like how one of SciSummary’s competitors, Scholarcy, does it. With Scholarcy, it takes just two to three steps to get to the aha moment. It shows potential users the product BEFORE they need to sign up. This makes each ‘ask’ per step more manageable, because users know what to look forward to.
Here’s how Scholarcy’s user journey goes:
Just click here
Upload or paste a link
NOW give me your info / sign up
💡Experiment 2: Create faster a-ha moments
A/B test faster aha moment by letting users upload a paper before signup, then hide the final summary behind the registration process. Compare sign up rates between the tests to see what works better.
Pro Tip: Use an A/B testing tool
One thing we recommend before doing any tests on a site is to install an A/B testing tool. These let you compare performances between your control (your current site) and any variables (the tests you want to implement).
I recommend VWO.com, which has a free plan if you’re just starting out.
Retention
With retention, it’s important to segment your audience into life cycles, or stages in their buying journey. For this audit, I decided to look into 3 segments
Tirekickers - people who sign up but don’t use the app
Activated users - people who’ve generated at least one summary
On the fence - users who’ve reached their freemium/free trial limit but haven’t converted to paid users yet
Tirekickers
SciSummary uses a freemium model, so they’ll want to encourage users to continuously use the product.
According to a survey conducted by Lenny’s Newsletter, around 40% of freemium B2C users hit an activation milestone (in Scisummary’s case, this is summarising an article).
We can encourage the remaining 60% to hit this milestone by suggesting interesting articles to summarise via email.
💡Experiment 3: Email drip campaigns
SciSummary can send users a list of 5-10 articles per day that users can summarise. Use catchy headlines about relevant issues like ‘Study shows higher sperm counts in men who lift heavy objects’ or ‘A third of transgender children on puberty blockers suffered mental health problems, study reveals.’
Note: This same sequence can be sent to users who have activated but haven’t reached their limit.
Activated Users
After receiving their first article summary, users receive an automated email with the details of the original article, plus the summary.
These automated emails tend to have high open rates, making them a fantastic opportunity to transform free users into paying customers.
💡Experiment 4: Upsell with transactional emails
Brands can use transactional emails to upsell its premium service and encourage repeat visitors.
We’d recommend making these changes to SciSummary’s existing transactional emails:
Display the users’ remaining words and have an upsell CTA (e.g. ‘You have 2,000 words left. Upgrade your account now for unlimited article summaries.’)
Replace the full summary with a clipped preview that links to back to the site. You want to encourage users to come back to the site where they can see your upsells, and where they can upgrade their account.
Before After
On the Fence Users
Findings
We tried going through the process of summarising the article and made the following observations:
The Good: I received an automated email reminding me that our text couldn’t be summarised, along with a CTA to upgrade.
The Bad: The upsell email used the same subject line as the others, which meant it just got hidden under the same thread. Changing the subject line would help this email stand out more.
The Ugly: It’s been four days, and I haven’t received a follow-up email. Ideally, you want a sequence of emails spread out over a few days to encourage users to upgrade.
Recommendations
💡Experiment 5: Create an email sequence for users who’ve reached their limit
Sending at least 3 follow-up emails increases your chances of converting free users to premium. Email is an essentially free channel so there’s no reason not to do this.
TLDR
Retarget people who’ve already been on your site.
Get people to the aha moment faster.
Set up personalised & optimised email marketing campaigns to send users down the funnel:
From sign up → To creating their first summary
From creating their first summary → To reaching word limit
From reaching word limit → To conversion into paying user
Revenue and Referral
Nothing here yet! If you’d like to get some tips on the revenue and referral stages of the AARRR funnel, sign up to our newsletter, and we’ll see you next week!
3 Things Before You Go
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