When Introducing A Little Friction is a Good Thing

It’s common advice for operators to remove friction from their experience. It’s so common, I’ve written multiple pieces about it. For example, in 2021, I wrote:

One example [of friction] is the actual subscription process. Have you ever visited a page and it asks for every single piece of personal information imaginable? You finally get to the end, you put your credit card in, and then the page lags out. Everything you’ve input has been lost and you have to start all over again.

A mistake that we make that eCommerce companies don’t is we don’t optimize our paywalls. More specifically, we don’t try to find ways to make it a cleaner and more optimal experience. Visit your average, legacy b2b media company and the subscription process is atrocious.

The advice in that piece remains the same and is unbelievably important for publishers to get right because it could have an unknown, negative impact on the business.

For example, in the above piece, I wrote about how The Wall Street Journal requiring people to call to cancel their subscription has a negative impact on the brand. I refuse to pay for WSJ because if I ever decide to cancel, I don’t want to call. And so, for years, I have not paid for it.

One reason why they might be struggling to sign up the younger generation is because of this. Millennials and younger are more resistant to making phone calls than our older friends and colleagues. Knowing we’ll need to call to cancel might be enough to get us to never sign up in the first place.

This friction might appear to help the business, but in fact, it could be preventing them from getting new people to sign up. This is bad friction.

However, not all friction is created equal. There are some scenarios where the addition of healthy friction can help the business without irritating readers enough to do harm.

One example, which I think a lot about, is newsletter growth. The natural advice is to make it as easy as possible to get people to the landing page and then signed up. But is this actually the right approach?

I was at a newsletter operators dinner the other night and there was a clear divide in how legacy media and newsletter-first companies grew. For those of us at newsletter companies, we have become expert at paying to grow. We know exactly how to get someone to convert and have worked on reducing friction on our landing pages. But for legacy media companies, they have a lot of things they are trying to promote at the same time—other content, advertising, paid subs, etc. The goal is to not just acquire newsletter subscribers.

And yet, the legacy media brands that were investing in high quality newsletters were having no issue growing. I realized something: the added friction of people reading the content before subscribing might actually contribute to a healthier subscriber base.

Think about the best landing pages. They’re super clean, minimal, with a big box to get you to sign up. We’re not trying to distract with anything. And so, when someone signs up on this page, they’re making a decision based on very little data.

In our minds, we just want the conversion as quickly as possible. But for the reader, they don’t know if they’re going to like it or not. What if they don’t? They’re more likely to stop engaging or unsubscribe. Our initial data will tell us the landing page is working, but does the lifetime value of that subscriber say its working?

What if, instead, we put additional content on the landing page, such as a preview of the latest newsletter? Now, people could take a look and determine whether they want the product. What we’ll find is that some people don’t, actually, want that newsletter and they’ll refuse to subscribe. Conversion rates might drop. But will the people who did convert be more engaged?

The issue with this is that it is incredibly hard to track. Most newsletter operators are not doing cohort analysis to see the engagement of subscribers by source. But if they did do this, they’d better know the health of their acquisition.

Another opportunity to introduce friction is with monetization on the newsletter sign up page. Earlier this week, I signed up for one of Workweek’s newsletters. It was one of your standard ultra-clean pages with just an email box showing. But then I was redirected to the first-party data page and I saw something interesting.

My screenshot is not the highest quality, but one of the questions asks me “is balancing risk management and conversion optimization a priority for your business?” Clicking yes prompted a second CTA, which asks if I want to download a “strategic guide.”

When I finished signing up, I was redirected to a sponsored white paper. And I realized that Workweek was monetizing the sign up. It was introducing additional friction because it believed it could generate sufficient revenue to offset the loss of potential first-party data.

This runs counter to the “ask fewer questions” advice. However, it also makes a lot of sense. If it costs $10 to acquire a subscriber and Workweek is getting $100 for that lead, it only needs to convert 10% of its subscribers to the lead gen offering to be break even on its user acquisition. This introduces a fascinating negative CAC scenario where it’s making money on user acquisition. For a business that has to be extremely conscious of cash, this is a smart way to keep the flywheel moving.

As an aside, there are obviously limitations with this. My suspicion is that most of these lead gen partners are going to want more senior-level contacts. However, Workweek doesn’t ask any buying decision-level questions before the lead gen, so I’d be curious how many leads are not valuable.

The friction that’s introduced here does have negatives for the business itself. Could it interfere in users giving the important first-party data that Workweek also needs? Possibly. And so, understanding the conversion rate and LTV of subscribers who do and don’t see one of those lead gen offers is important.

In both of these scenarios, you’ve introduced a little bit of friction, but the outcome might be better for the business. But the key is doing it in a way that doesn’t irritate the reader. Monetizing a landing page? Probably not offensive. Forcing me to call to unsubscribe? Annoying as hell. Pick your friction carefully.

Are there examples of good friction you can think of? Hit reply and let me know. Or, join the AMO Slack, and let’s chat. Have a great weekend!