4 Easy Growth Hacking Wins

Hi everyone! It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been busy creating and teaching a class which has become the #1 bestselling class ever on Skillshare (I’ll be posting about how that happened next week, so stay tuned!).

This week I want to talk about 4 easy growth hacking wins to help improve the chance that a product will succeed.

1. Figure out ONE easy acquisition channel

In the end, you’ll probably have a big strategy in place for all of the different ways you’ll get new users (SEO, Adwords, Blogs, PR, etc). But for now none of that matters. You need to get easy traffic so that you can test the rest of your assumptions we’ll talk about shortly.

You also don’t need to worry about whether it will scale. One of my favorite methods is going to events and physically telling people about my products. It’s called hustle. Do it.

Most of the readers of this site have come from one of two places:

1. Classes that I teach
2. Slideshare

It’s not much, but it’s enough traffic and it works for me so I keep doing it. If you’re having trouble finding places to get traffic for free, check out our recent post on Places to Start Acquiring Users.

2. Simplify your homepage to increase activation

You can get huge returns from focusing on your homepage and other landing pages in the early days. Follow this checklist:

• Is your product’s value proposition less than one sentence and across the top of the page?
• Does your call-to-action (what you’re asking people to do) require as little work as possible on behalf of a visitor to complete?
• Is your call-to-action on the right-hand side above the fold?
• Does your call-to-action stand out and is the button green or orange? (Bonus points if your sign-up form is less than four fields and embedded on the homepage itself.)
• Do you have a big, high-quality image that stretches across your homepage? (Bonus points if it’s an image of someone smiling.)

I’m not guaranteeing that these are the best performing combinations for your product, but they’ve been tested and proven to work so it’s a great starting point.

One of my favorites in terms of simplicity is BrandYourself

There are some things BrandYourself could probably be doing better, but they’ve got a 30% activation rate, which is hard to beat.

3. Send emails to increase retention

Sending a single welcome email is not good enough. Write an email that gets sent to users 3 days, 7 days, and 21 days after they sign up maybe sure they remember to come back to use your product.

There’s a saying in the marketing world that you need 7-10 repetitions of an ad before people even remember seeing it. I like to think that you need to remind someone to come back to your site 7-10 times before they ever think of doing it on their own.

Make sure to have strong subject lines to optimize for email open rates (shoot for at least 25%) and strong calls-to-action to get people to click back through to your site.

Check out Customer.io’s blog Great Email Copy.

Pro Tip: Create Win-Back email campaigns

Write an email specifically targeted to users who you’ve lost at some point in the sign-up process. Maybe they only ever gave you their email or maybe they signed up but never set up their account.

If you have a 50% drop-off during the signup process and you can get half of those people to come back, then you’re getting 50% more users every day.

4. Streamline your product for that AHA! moment

What is the core activity of your product? For Twitter it’s reading tweets and for Soundcloud it’s listening to a song. Don’t let anything get in the way of your user and that activity. It’s the first thing someone should see after they sign up.

If you can, discover your product’s AHA! moment. It’s the moment when a user really gets what your product is about and if they reach it they’re much more likely to come back or recommend your product to a friend.

Twitter looked at usage numbers and realized that once a user follows 30 people, they’re more or less active forever, but if they couldn’t get a person to follow 30 people, that person was unlikely to ever come back.

Can you think of any other easy growth hacking wins that other people should know about? If so, post them in the comments below.

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