“Are you willing to experiment and learn more in 3 days then most do in 6 months?”
OK, silly me. Of course you do!
The problem (and the solution) lies in your Lean Marketing Funnel…you know, what most people still call “sales funnel”; the one you nudge customers through.
What most folks don’t realize is that most companies only focus on traffic and revenue. The problem is that those vanity metrics, in itself, are not very insightful. The magic is what happens in between all those steps.
Here’s how I would increase revenue for these 5 companies…
How to Get Started
The Lean Marketing Funnel represents the major stages of the customer lifecycle for nearly every product. In between these stages lies great potential, to improve the customer experience, to focus on:
- Acquisition – People come to your site after they’ve heard about you through friends, blogs or social media. Offering superb customer support through your site is key as this is the critical point in which decisions are being made.
- Activation – If people believe they will benefit from your offer and it helps them solve a problem, they’ll become users by either creating an account, signing up for a newsletter, or some other form of activation.
- Retention – Customers come back to the site through focused emails campaigns and stay active through product features that keep them engaged.
- Referral – Happy customers refer others through viral product features and other incentives.
- Revenue – You monetize active users through optimizing your behavioral email campaigns, lead generation offers, subscription and customer development.
You just convinced these people to start using your product or service and now it’s time to get creative by moving customers from one state to the next.
Why not take advantage of the momentum you’ve built and engage with your customers throughout the Lean Marketing Funnel?
The good news is that experimentation with growth hacks is not hard and won’t take up a lot of your time.
Today, I will share some easy growth hacks you can get started with right NOW!
And I’ll walk you through 5 real-life examples of online businesses that can benefit from these hacks.
Acquisition – MrPorter
People that buy at MrPorter, go there for a specific reason. A affiliation with a brand, a sense of striving towards being a gentleman. Fact is that a gentleman has friends, which also recommend certain products online. A great way to tap into this via Facebook’s Social Graph.
Hack #1 – Social Really Works
- Use a weekly “roundup email” that shows a customer the items that their friends either liked or bought. This to encourage conspicuous consumption. Ask them specifically to share these MrPorter recommendations with their friends via social networks. This will drive repeat sales and customer acquisition, by making use of strong ties.
Here are some extra tips on making MrPorter more social:
- Start a blog by making “What to wear” and “Style help” your premier resource pages and have guest editors write about nearly every personal style-related topic;
- Set up a series of educational emails that showcase different brands, teach a customer on gentleman behavior and proper etiquette on style. Have them signup with their email adress for such a 30 day email course. Cold leads will become paying customers!
Activation – EndClothing
Whenever people are making decisions that are constrained by time, you can create a sense of urgency. Groupon grew substantially by employing this psychological tactic, because it forces people to be impulsive and since people are already emotional shoppers: it works!
Hack #2 – Sense of Urgency
- Everybody loves wishlists. Those items that you actually want, but hold out on. Setup an automated email that targets customers who have added items to their wishlist and make sure the copy of the email leaves them no choice but to act now. Making smart use of this knowledge and creating a sense of urgency, since the product most likely won’t ever return, has an very powerful effect and can often make them buy.
Here are some extra smart tips:
- Experiment with a different colour (orange is kinda lively) on the Add-to-Basket button;
- Put the Add-to-Basket button and the Add-to-Wishlist button next to each other. Make a clear distinction between action colours and passive colours in terms of overall design;
- Include social sharing buttons, such as NeedSupply on their product pages.
Retention – Coolblue
“Do you think all customers are created equal?”
Hack #3 – Upsell and Bundle
The fact is that customers always make repeat purchases when there are additional accessories available for it. Especially when people have shown interest in a specific product in a specific category. This is especially lucrative when you combine your sales data with product recommendations that have high profit margins.
- Review all your orders to distinguish buying patterns. Setup an email that combines products with high profit margins in a specific category (create a special package: Sony LCD tv + Blu-ray player + hifi-set). By having a well crafted email template and a single call to action, you can kick back and watch the upsell happen!
Referral – OurBubble
Your Coming Soon page could be better!
Hack #4 – Incentives
People are curious by nature. By adding some mystique to your pre-launch campaign, you can easily gain people’s attention. By combining concise copywriting, perceptible quality of the goods and a visually-striking site you can convince people that it is worthwhile to sign up.
Set up a tiered-incentive structure during pre-launch where people can tweet during the following steps to get new signups:
- After 1 friend signed-up, you get a sneak peak at the site;
- After 5, exclusive access to the site;
- After 30, a free fashion item of an collaboration;
- After 50, 5 hours of free consulting on online marketing.
By setting up a tiered-incentive structure,you can allow people to share the site to their personal potential.
Revenue – Buffer
Pricing can be a big deal, but it isn’t that hard.
The key is to NEVER screw with existing customers! You can either leave them on the current price point or do the following if you want to grow.
Hack #5 – Let Them Spend More
The key to getting your existing customers to upgrade is to let them upgrade at just the right time.
- Set up an email that goes out to existing customers that pay on a monthly basis. Ask them to upgrade to the annual plan in exchange of two months for free (a 20% discount). Just include a strong call to action and let them upgrade with a single click. You’ll increase your customer lifetime value and your cash flow.
Now It’s Up to You…
What’s the ONE thing you are going to experiment with from this list?
And how do you plan on using it to your advantage?