Anti-Churn Tactic: Discounts and Coupons

Discounts and coupons are a time-tested method for attracting and keeping customers. But throwing them around willy-nilly will lose you a ton of money. This article describes the best ways to target discounts and coupons for maximum return on investment.

Anti-Churn Tactic: In App Chat

In-App chat can be a great way to understand how and where your users are getting frustrated. But using it in a targeted way is critical to making sure your customer service reps don't get overwhelmed and your users stay happy.

Anti-Churn Tactic: Gifts

Giving SaaS users gifts helps boost their loyalty. But there's a good way to give gifts and a bad way, and your results will vary not just with the value of the gift but also with your gifting methods. Make sure you're maximizing your results by following this gift-giving advice.

More Bang for Your Buck: Ways to Stretch Retention Incentives.

Because retention incentives only work so many times, we need to find ways to stretch them farther. How can we keep more users, longer, for the same amount of money? The main thing we need to do is increase the perceived value of our incentives without increasing the real value of the incentives. If we give users something that feels like a million bucks, but only actually costs us ten bucks, then everybody wins. Behavioral economics can help us structure incentives to be more effective.

Anti-Churn Tactic: Drip Email.

One good way to retain users is to prod them with email at just the right time. Sending email at “just the right time” is often called “drip email.” Drip email is figuring out just the right time and just the right content to send an email based on the actual behavior of an individual user in an application.

What Is Churn?

For this article, we will focus on defining just one sub-component of LTV: Churn. For more detailed descriptions of other SaaS metrics, David Skok does an excellent job of breaking down basically all SaaS metrics in his blog.

Creating a Note in Evernote from Ruby

We recently had the opportunity to create a note in Evernote through their Evernote API. It was a little different from using other APIs because Evernote uses Thrift instead of XML/JSON-RPC like many other web applications. As with any integration, there are a few gotchas with this one.

Doing OAuth authentication in Ruby with Freshbooks

I just finished a 2-day saga trying to authenticate against Freshbooks from a Ruby on Rails application. Conceptually, connecting the two isn’t that hard and Freshbooks even has a documentation page describing the whole process. That, plus the widely-used Ruby OAuth gem and the equally useful Ruby Freshbooks gem should mean that connecting is a piece of cake, right? Well, I found that it wasn’t.

Posting JSON with headers in Ruby with Net::HTTP

Ok, so bits and pieces of this are spread all over the Internet, but I struggled to find a comprehensive example of: Using Ruby…and Net::HTTP…posting JSON…with a custom header…and telling me how to deal with the response. So, here is a comprehensive example.