Welcome to the 5th feature in our Expert Interviews series where we invite a panel of leading industry experts to answer Reply customers’ most burning questions related to growing their businesses.
One of the most popular marketing disciplines in recent times has been the creation of growth hacking.
I know from many conversations with Reply customers, that many are on a constant lookout for new growth hacks that can be applied to their own businesses.
So we reached out to some of the world’s leading growth hacking experts and asked:
And I’m delighted to say we’ve managed to convince seven leading authorities on growth hacking to generously share their words of wisdom with our readers.
What are the best three growth hacking examples you’ve seen in 2016?
Offering 3 payments instead of 1.
Facebook traffic sent 2 landing pages for a product that sold for $99. The original price was $199 so of course that $199 was slashed out and on sale for $99. Option 1 – Buy for $99. Option 2 – 3 payments of $33.
Option 2 with 3 payments had a 75.6% increase in sales vs the one payment of $99.
7 day trial vs 30 day trial.
Hubspot ran call-to-action A/B split test with 2 different trial versions. 7 day vs 30 day.
The 7 day trial increased sales by 110%
Using specific numbers in headlines.
A test for an opt in used the headline:
“How to add up to 1,000 people a day to your email list and make money every time you send an email?”
vs:
“How to Add up to 1,198 people a day to your email list and make money every time you send an email?”
The test that used 1,198 had a 34% conversion rate increase.
What are the best three growth hacking examples you’ve seen in 2016?
This year was a great year for growth. The increasing number of tools and the constantly changing algorithms definitely keep a marketer on their feet! So, after testing out some new and interesting platforms and tactics, here are my favorite 3 growth hacking examples from 2016:
Queue: The Viral Contest Platform
In 2016, we witnessed the launch of Queue, a viral contest platform that helps anyone who uses it grow rapid social media followings and increase social engagement.
The gamified community experience that Queue provides has helped greats like Vincent Dignan and Neil Patel (among others) raise awareness and generate a buzz around their offerings.
The first time I was introduced to Queue was for Vincent’s indie go-go book campaign.
It was amazing how exciting it was seeing my name rise up the rankings towards the grand prize…all I had to do was share my special referral link on social media and via email, and for every person who I referred, I was awarded points. Simple to implement.
Immediate gratification. Virality for Vincent. Great growth hack.
The Quora Hack
Earlier in the year, my co-founder Derric Haynie discovered at Splash that Quora was a valuable way to promote a blog post. The strategy is a lot like doing keyword research: essentially, you find low competition posts with high levels of impressions.
After you decide which questions are worth answering, you demonstrate your expertise and direct people to your blog for more information on the subject.
I heard it through the grapevine that the use of a version of this tactic led Quora to be the highest converting traffic source ever experienced for a few companies I know.
If you are an expert in a niche industry, it could be a high converting source for you as well, so try it out!
SocialBee for Twitter
My last favorite growth hacking example for 2016 is the use of SocialBee concierge for Twitter (and hopefully other platforms soon).
Ovi Negrean has built an awesome platform that is part content recycler (think Meet Edgar), and part growth machine.
After using SocialBee, we’ve seen massive increases in the Twitter followings of the brands we’ve tested it out on.
One of the accounts we’ve used SocialBee with grew from 3,000 followers to 8,000 real, targeted followers in 3 months, which is a great growth hacking example if you ask me.What are the best three growth hacking examples you’ve seen in 2016?
Here are the 3 best growth hacks I’ve seen in 2016:
A lot of companies are doing engineered marketing: using side projects such as free tools or tool directory pages to drive traffic to their websites. (example: http://www.growthtools.io/)
I saw a lot of countdown clocks on event pages with ticket prices going up after a limited time to create urgency. That works well!
We auto-visit our target group on Linkedin to get them to contact us with enquiries (tools: profilehopper, linkedin autopilot)
Here are the best growth hacking examples I saw in 2016:
The #3 at https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies/ — aligning content upgrades with search intent.
This one sounds pretty simple, but it’s very effective. If all the answers are already in that article, you can provide some additional insights and offer them as content upgrades.
Do some SEO optimization for extra traffic, couple that with marketing automation and you have a winner.
The automated email referral engine that Aladdin used to grow http://growthhackingidea.com/ was pretty impressive and clever, but I can’t find more details about it.
This pretty simple, yet effective tactic: https://customer.io/blog/loss-aversion-upgrade-emails.html It’s based on psychology and the basis is that humans are more likely to act when something is taken from them.
So, if you give them the premium version of your SaaS as a free trial and then you take it away, more of them should buy it, everything else being equal.
Over the past year, we’ve seen three of our largest targets grow to $1m businesses.
Running crowdfunding campaigns on their own sites, driving qualified traffic with remarketing ads, and expanding internationally with Facebook ads have been extraordinary in growing our clients Shopify businesses.
Idea in itself might sounds a little spammy but it worked for them and they quickly managed to bring lot of users and more importantly listings on their website and went viral in no time.
Dropbox. Initially dropbox came up with this idea but many different companies have used this and seem a considerable improvement in their user base.
Basic idea behind ‘refer a friend’ was to use their current users to bring new users to sign up and use at least the free version of the tool.
If an existing member refer the product to a friend and they signup, existing member will get additional space in their cloud space.
According to Bloomberg, dropbox valuation in 2014 was $10 billion. Number speaks how good this idea worked for them.
OKCupid. I will not really call it a Growth Hack but an interesting idea to attract millions of eyeballs by investing time on one creative content piece.
So, OKCupid already had a big database, they used that data to create fun and engaging infographic on dating, sex and other desires on both genders.
Since, its sex and fun at one place, it had to go viral and they managed to receive tons and tons of social shares and above all target audience’s attention.James Shamsi, has a wicked cool Snapchat hack. He was too stingy to pay $85 for TechCrunch’s summer party.
He created a geo-filter on Snapchat with his link. It got picked up by 64 attendees taking selfies. 7,000 impressions.
The attendees were big players in the tech field and investors. He got their attention without attending.
Andrew Medal has a sweet client acquisition method. He targets a high-profile company and writes an article on how they can grow. And releases it to Forbes, or Huffington Post. [The genius is that his agency can fulfill all the suggestions]
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What are the best three growth hacking examples you’ve seen in 2016?
