Fifty shades growth by Marko Milovanovic

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

A Warning From Growth Devil This book contains growth hacks that will skyrocket your startup’s growth. Use them. Wisely. In less than 2 years over 100,000 entrepreneurs have read our blog and received great growth hacks to use in their business. But what separates these people from the success stories we’ve actually written -- entrepreneurs who have seen 100-450% growth in less than 12 months? …Action. This book contains fifty of the greatest growth hacks on the planet right now. Designed, tested and proven by the growth hacking greats. And this is a step-by-step guide to executing on them. The worst thing that could happen is that you read this book, put it down and do nothing with the knowledge you have gained. We will have failed you. But, we’re here because we believe in you, Mr/s Entrepreneur. We respect your courage in entering a world of unknowns. We admire your resilience in the face of defeat and your ability to keep on going when all hope appears lost. You inspire us. So, we care that you are successful. Be careful that you don’t find yourself in the Wasteland of Zero Results ™ A place where everything you do gets you no closer to success; where nothing seems to be moving the needle. Right now, you’re looking for ideas from people who have been there before you. You’re finding ideas everywhere. In fact, you’ve got over 100 ideas already. But ideas mean nothing unless you put them to action. Did you know that 90% of the ideas we’ve run at Growth Devil have failed? Even the ideas that have worked before for other startups, or ideas from growth hacking greats like Noah Kagan and Neil Patel.

50 Shades Of Growth

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That’s why we live up to a powerful mantra: Believe Nothing. Test Everything. No idea works every time. Every startup is different. Every customer is different. Every time you do something, the world is different. That’s why an experiment that worked yesterday isn’t guaranteed to work today. That’s why every day, you have to find and test new growth hacks. You have to become a full time growth hacker. You must believe what a growth hacker believes. You must act like a growth hacker acts. If success is as important to you as we think it is, read this book now and follow these steps. 1.

Gather a list ideas you want to execute.

Put 1-3 experiments in your calendar every week.

Run those experiments, diligently (ask for help if you need to).

Measure the results.

Learn what does(n’t) work, and ask ‘why’.

Repeat these steps, iterate and improve!

Sounds easy, right? It’s not. The biggest barrier you’re going to face on this journey is yourself and your old habits. The best thing you can do is invest in a community or coach that will hold you accountable. Find people around you and reach out to them, bring them into your life. Success will come to you.

SOURCE Justin Scott is the Chief Growth Hacker at Growth Devil -- a leading international Growth Agency mentioned by The Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine and Entrepreneur.com. He has personally coached over 1,000 entrepreneurs and developed a leading discipline of scientific growth called the Lean Growth Methodology™. Find @leangrowthguy on twitter.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

Introduction ABOUT THIS BOOK As youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve probably guessed this book is about eCommerce growth hacking. While many software and technology businesses have adopted growth hacking, eCommerce stores have been slow to try it out. In this book, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve collected 50 of the best growth hack out there and adapted them to eCommerce so that you have a place to start!

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR This guide is for eCommerce stores that are focused on growth and looking for new ways to increase sales. Your business does 6 figures and more in sales each year and you take an analytical approach to running your business.

HOW SHOULD YOU USE THIS BOOK Each page of this book contains one growth hack. The growth hack starts with a description followed by 4-5 steps on how to implement it on your store. You can either read the entire book in order or jump about. The best way to use the book is to scan through all the hacks mentioned here and then pick one that interests you most to experiment on. After that growth hack is done, come back again and find a new one!

ABOUT LEMONSTAND LemonStand is an eCommerce platform built for professional online retailers. Our software helps fast growing brands and the web agencies they work with to create beautiful eCommerce websites that stand out from the crowd. Head to https://lemonstand.com to find out more.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The Reason They Love You DESCRIPTION It begins and ends with customers. To sell a product, you need to understand the people you’re selling to. Customer feedback is crucial when starting or growing an eCommerce business. Of course, you need to know which feedback to listen to, and which to avoid. Like Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” By collecting and measuring the right feedback, you can discover what really matters to your most passionate customers and unlock rapid growth.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. If you’re just starting out, you’ll need to find your product market fit first. That means actually going out and talking to prospective customers, validating that there’s a problem worth solving, and then creating a product that solves that problem. Then iterate by creating prototypes and seeing how people are using it and if they get any benefit from it. 2. Once you have product market fit, it’s time to deliver value to the larger market. Start by talking to your early adopters to understand what they find most valuable about the product. Use popup surveys on your store to ask them why they are buying, or what’s stopping them from buying if they are about to drop off. 3. Now it’s time to iterate on your feedback. Make sure you’re clear on what value your product delivers on your site through stronger value propositions and product descriptions. Also answer some of the objections that stop shoppers from buying. 4. As you scale growth, referrals and word of mouth will start becoming important. Think about how your friends and family have influenced the products you purchase. I personally shelled out $2000 on a MacBook Pro because my friends swore by it. To drive referrals, you need to ask your customers whether they would recommend your products and why. Then use that feedback to improve your products and store to accelerate referrals.

SOURCE Sean Ellis is the Founder and CEO of Qualaroo and Growthhackers.com. In this webinar he shows you which feedback to pay attention to and which to avoid.

50 Shades Of Growth

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Up For Adoption DESCRIPTION In his book, Start With Why, Simon Sinek talks about TiVo and why it failed even though it was a revolutionary product and had a lot of backing. The reason was that they went after the back end of the product adoption curve, the late majority and laggards. They did this because that was the largest segment of the market, but the truth is you don’t need thousands of customers the moment you launch. What you really need to do is identify the early adopters in your market. The ones who get the problem you are trying to solve and will take a chance with your product even though it’s brand new. If you can get the early adopters on boards, eventually the rest will follow.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Figuring out who your early adopters are takes some customer research. Start by brainstorming the types of people you think have the pain or problem you’re trying to solve, and then do some real life interviews to validate your assumptions. 2. It’s not enough to interview people. You need some hard numbers to identify your early numbers. Create different landing pages, each one targeted at a certain group of people you identified in the last step. On the page, clearly describe the problem you’re solving and why your product is the answer. Add a video for a full explanation and a subscription box to gauge interest. Then track video views and subscriptions. 3. Now throw some traffic at your landing pages. The easiest way is using Google Adwords or some other form of advertisement. You can also try some free strategies, like using social media or online forums. 4. At the end, you should be able to identify which personas or target groups are your early adopters. These are the ones that spent the most time on the landing page, watched the video, and had the highest conversion rate to subscription. They are who you need to market your product to when you release it.

SOURCE David Arnoux is the co-founder of Twoodo. He writes about growth hacking, startups and lean methodology and posted this growth hack on the Twoodo blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

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Hairy Harry’s Hack DESCRIPTION So you’ve identified early adopters, yet launching a new product can be a daunting prospect. When it comes to launching a product in a centuries old industry with lots of competition, there’s a very real chance that you’ll launch to crickets. But that didn’t stop the founders of Harry’s, the boutique men’s shaving brand. A week before they launched, they kicked off a pre-launch campaign based on referrals that ended up getting them 100,000 emails of qualified leads who wanted to be the first to buy their products. Here’s how they did it.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Every campaign starts with a page. Harry’s founders created a simple two-page microsite. Page one was a splash page announcing the new store with a ‘Be the first to know’ email optin. On entering their email, visitors proceed to the second page where they’d get a unique referral link and easy social sharing options. 2. To get people to optin on the splash page, Harry’s created messaging that made visitors feel special. They used a beautiful image of their product and had a catchy line, but also left some mystery about exactly what they were selling. They also used the lure of exclusivity to influence visitors and get their email IDs. 3. Getting people to refer you, especially when they don’t know what you sell yet would have been the major bottleneck in Harry’s campaign. To solve this they reinforced the idea that people were getting front row seats to something exciting and made them feel cool by allowing them to get their friends in too. 4. The second part to getting people to share was the rewards structure. Harry’s had tiers based on number of referrals, and each tier had some free products associated. The highest tier, for 50 referred friends, was a reward of free shaving products for a year. 5. Finally, Harry’s made sharing fun and easy, with pre-written sharing messages, single-click social sharing, and progress updates on their goals and rewards.

SOURCE Tim Ferriss needs no introduction. His blog is a fount of amazing hacks, including eCommerce growth hacks like this one.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The Lean Body DESCRIPTION The Lean Startup methodology is usually thought of as only pertaining to technology or software startups, but the principles behind it apply to any business, including eCommerce. In the previous hacks, we spoke about targeting early adopters, but how exactly do you do that? Many eCommerce businesses struggle to identify who their customers are, and they try to target everyone, which results in targeting no one. Lean Startup helps you define your actual customer and get precise with product-market fit. Let’s follow the story of Lavish Longboards to see this in action.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Stop targeting everyone. Lavish Longboards used to advertise to everyone from teenagers to 50 year olds. Most of the time, this will result in a loss. 2. Identify a core group to target, and double down on them if they seem profitable. Lavish Longboards decided to target only people who like #skateboards and #longboards on Facebook, and sales immediately grew 2.5x in 2 months. 3. Don’t worry that niching down will result in fewer sales. Understanding that one segment that works for you will help you dominate the niche and expand from there. Lavish realized that most of their customers from the niche they targeted were beginners, which meant that they could sell more advanced boards to them later. 4. Identify your power customers within that segment. These are your evangelists and will provide feedback on new product ideas. Lavish had a list of 10 power customers who they would pitch new designs to and would usually get a few pre-orders from them.

SOURCE Patrick is the author of the best-selling book ‘The Lean Entrepreneur’. His personal blog contains more case studies like this Lean Startup hack.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The Romantic Story DESCRIPTION Customers aren’t really buying your products. They’re buying the stories and emotions that come with it. They’re buying the looks they get when they wear your diamond earrings. They’re buying the compliments they get when they wear your Italian suit. They’re buying the comfort that they feel when they run in your shoes. You depict this on your store through customer stories. These are case studies of your customers who have actually used your product. They make your customers the hero of the story, and bring out all the emotions that come with owning your product. Apple and Fitbit are popular examples of how to grow using customer stories.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Before you can get customer stories, you need customers. Assuming you already have a list of customers, reach out to them to see if they’d be interested in sharing their stories. Often, you’ll find that customers are more than happy to share a story, especially if they really love your product. 2. Getting their story is the hard part. I mean, you don’t need to do it the Apple way and create videos. Keep it simple like Fitbit, but make sure it doesn’t sound like a paid testimonial. You really want to get into the emotional aspect of your product. 3. Ultimately this is a growth hack and another marketing tactic. Once you’ve got the customer story, start spreading the word around. Send it to everyone on your email list and social media channels, and make it easy for them to share. 4. One is not enough. Make it a regular part of your marketing. Create more customer stories every month and watch your business grow.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks like this one on the LemonStand blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

Rebecca Black DESCRIPTION Every now and then you see a blog post, video, or infographic go viral. Like that attrocious Friday song by Rebecca Black. And then you think all you have to do is create a silly video and it will go viral too. Everyone will start sharing it and your store will get featured on some large publication. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. Aside from the Friday video, going viral is not something that happens on its own. You need to make it happen. In this growth hack we’ll look at the steps you need to take to create viral content.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by defining your goal and target audience. Content without a well-defined goal or audience is like a ship without a rudder. By trying to target everyone with your content, you’re really targeting no one, and it becomes like any other piece of content out there. 2. For the actual content, you need to create something that feels personal. It really needs to appeal to the niche you’re targeting and make readers feel like it was created for them. Why do you think quizzes like “What Game of Thrones character are you?” do so well. People love reading things that represent them. 3. To make your content stand out, it needs to be really funny, controversial, interesting or valuable in some way. Make sure you don’t cross the line into offensive, racist, or insensitive like many brands have before. 4. Finally, you need to start distributing your content. Once it catches, it will spread because of its virality, but it needs that initial kickstart. Find forums that cater to your target audience, like a sub-Reddit, and email niche blogs to get them to talk about your content.

SOURCE Sam Parr is the guy who runs HustleCon, a conference that brings together the greatest hustlers and startup founders so they can tell their story and teach you how they did it. He wrote about this growth hack for GrowHack.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Timeless Beauty DESCRIPTION Viral content is great, but at the same time it can be short-lived, like most content. It’s not necessary to always create content that’s newsworthy, on-trend, or instantly popular. The alternative is for content to be relevant, useful, and sustainable. That’s where evergreen content comes in. Evergreen content is timeless and sustainable, and can attract readers years after being published because of its long-term relevancy. Let’s look at how you can create this content for your store.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start with some research to find out what content your readers find most interesting. Ask them for feedback in your emails, look at their comments on your posts, and find out which posts have the most visitors in your analytics. Use all this information to figure out what topic to write about. 2. Next, you need to find a unique way to spin your content. What’s not been said about your topic? What points of view have not been covered? You need to come up with some new insights because repetitive content never lasts long. 3. When you start writing your content, remember to be very comprehensive. Evergreen content is typically very long. The top performing post on the LemonStand blog every month is an article about tracking cart abandonment in Google Analytics. Even though it has been covered before, ours does well because it is the most comprehensive guide out there. 4. Finally, remember to make sure your content is timeless. Now that might be tough considering how quickly things change, but you can always go back and update it later. By keeping it up to date, you’ll ensure that it’s always relevant months and years after it was first published.

SOURCE Vincent Cassar is the founder of Keeping, a customer support app that works directly inside Gmail. He wrote about this growth hack on the Keeping blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The Moonlight Author DESCRIPTION Becoming a thought leader has numerous benefits, like press coverage and invitations to speak at conferences. It builds credibility for you and your company, and this leads to growth. Creating lots of content is a good way to do this. Better yet, write a book! But wait! You’re not a writer. You run an eCommerce business. Well, famous eCommerce founders who have also written books are Alexis Maybank of Gilt and Tony Hsieh of Zappos. Want to join their league?

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by choosing a topic. It has to be an important issue in your industry and possibly something that hasn’t been written about a lot. 2. Next, find 10-15 people who are experts on your topic. You can use LinkedIn or Klout to find influencers. Buzzsumo can help you find popular content resources. 3. Start reaching out to the influencers on your list. Send them a short, personal email asking them if they can get on a quick Skype call with you. 4. Before you start the interview, do some research on them. Use Skype Call Recorder to record the call and ask them important questions you want answered in your book. After that, use Speechpad to transcribe the interviews. 5. Now it’s time to publish the book. Hire a ghostwriter on Odesk to turn your interviews into an eBook. Then find someone on Fiverr or 99Designs to create a cover for your book. When your final version is ready, launch it on Amazon KDP and start promoting it!

SOURCE Justin Mares is the author of the popular Startup marketing book ‘Traction’. In this growth hack he explains his process for writing a book and how it can establish you as a thought leader in your industry.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The Downloadable Desire DESCRIPTION A digital product can be a book, an audio file, a video, or even a software. Anything that your customer can download and access instantly. By selling, or giving away, digital products, you can boost demand for your physical products. Famous examples of retailers using digital products to fuel growth are Michelin and Lonely Planet. This growth hack is actually pretty simple to implement. It’s mostly about creating the content. Here’s how you do it:

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by figuring out what digital product to create. If you sell products that are difficult to set up, you can create instruction or usage manuals. Better yet, if your products require a certain skill to handle them, you can create training books or videos. For example, if you sell SLR cameras, a course on photography will be a great digital download. 2. Actually creating the digital download is pretty simple because of all the tools available out there. If your digital product is an ebook, you can use a site like Liberio. Write your ebook in a Google Doc and import it into Liberio. It will convert it into an ePub ready to publish. 3. The actual price of the digital download is determined by how much effort it takes to produce. If it’s a simple ebook, you can probably give it away for free and use it as a lead generation tool. Ultimately, your digital downloads are meant to increase sales of your physical products, so that’s how they’ll bring in revenue. 4. The final step is to actually sell it, or give it away, to your customers. LemonStand has a digital downloads module built in to the platform. You can upload your digital product and sell it like any other product, or even set the price to $0 and give it away for free. 5. To make the growth hack more effective, you want to link your digital product to the corresponding physical product. When someone downloads the digital product, you can upsell them on the physical product. And if customers are browsing a physical product and choose not to buy, you can offer them the digital product instead and convert them into a lead.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks on the LemonStand blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The Q&A Date DESCRIPTION You’re producing a lot of content, so it only makes sense to maximize its effect. Repurposing content on Quora can help you get exposure to a new audience, drive consistent traffic back to the original content, and it’s a shortcut to SEO. Best of all, it only takes a few minutes per answer. Here’s the step-by-step process for repurposing content on Quora to drive lead gen & sales:.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start with keyword research. Target top traffic keywords and long tail keywords. Long tail keywords often have less competition (answers) on Quora. If there aren’t any questions matching your keywords, ask your friends or network to Ask the question, then a few days later go in and answer it. 2. Answer the question using your original content. Quora answers don’t have to be long. In fact, short and to the point is much better. Use bullet points and short paragraphs for readability. 3. Next, you need to get some upvotes and promote your answer. To increase upvotes, write a handful of tweets that link to your answers and schedule them to publish several times throughout the week. Make sure to customize the tweet text each time you share your answer. 4. There’s also a somewhat hidden “Promote” button which allows you to show your answer to a 100-500 people within Quora depending on the points you have. You earn points by asking and answering questions. 5. Repeat and scale this process every day. Spend 5-10 minutes each night answering questions and maintain an ongoing spreadsheet to keep track of it.

SOURCE Sujan Patel has 12 years of experience in digital marketing and co-created Content Marketer, a tool to help automate and scale content marketing. He is also an avid blogger and writes for Forbes, Inc, WSJ and Entrepreneur. In his spare time he authored the Growth Hacking eBook 100 Days of Growth.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The Performance Audit DESCRIPTION A full website audit will help you examine your overall site performance and identify areas of improvement. Your store might have a number of issues that you just don’t know about, so a regular audit will uncover them. The audit will also help you create and implement new goals to take your growth to the next level. Getting your SEO right can double your organic traffic. Here are the steps.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Go to QuickSprout. Plug your site URL in the search box and click the “Log in with Google” button. 2. The tool will return an analysis of your eCommerce store. It will show you if there are any major errors or warnings in terms of SEO. It will also return your Speed Score, which directly affects your Google rankings too. 3. Start by tackling the main errors that the tool throws up, then move on to the warnings. These will seem like minor issues, but they actually make a big difference in the long run. 4. Next, move on to the SEO and Speed recommendations further down the report. Again, start with the high priority recommendations and then move on to the lower priority ones. 5. Finally, you might also want to score yourself against your competitors. The QuickSprout tool allows you to check 3 competitors simultaneously and shows you where you’re lagging. Set monthly goals to beat them and then come back again in a month to check your progress.

SOURCE Neil Patel is the founder of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, and the brains behind the Quick Sprout blog. The auditing growth hack first appeared on his personal website.

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The Moving Man DESCRIPTION Building links to your store is crucial if you want to up your SEO game and start showing up on the first page of Google results. Nowadays, the consensus seems to be that you need a blog to build those links, but the truth is you don’t. If you’re a boutique eCommerce store, you may not have the resources to create killer content every week. In that case, you can still use white hat techniques to build natural links straight to your product pages. Here are the steps.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by finding sites or resources, in your niche, that have changed names, shut down, rebranded or moved. Basically, resources that are outdated. Your competitors might even have some! The idea here is that you want to find websites that are linking to these resources, because now those links are outdated as well. 2. A simple Google search for phrases like “rebranded as” or “page no longer exists” for your industry will throw up sites and pages like this. They’ll still have functional URLs, but the page content will say “This site has moved”, or “The page/service no longer exists”. 3. Once you’ve got a list of these functional but outdated URLs, it’s time to find the sites that link to them. There are a number of backlink checking tools like Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to find these sites. Just upload your list and generate a list of linking sites. 4. Now you need to contact the owners of those site and send them a polite email notifying them of their outdated links and asking them to link to your site instead. They will want to do it because it gives them a chance to update their content, and you’ll get a link for your hard work! 5. Another way to get more juice out of this is to find competitor brand names that haven’t been linked to at all. It’s as simple as searching for the brand and then looking up blogs that have mentioned them but not linked to them. You can then reach out and tell them to link to you.

SOURCE Brian Dean is an expert in SEO and linkbuilding, and runs the popular blog, Backlinko.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The YouTube Sensation DESCRIPTION If you’re creating product videos, and you should, you’re probably already using YouTube. However, it’s not just a place to host videos. It’s actually the second largest search engine behind Google, and the third most visited site in the world. Many brands have started using it as a channel to drive traffic and growth. In this growth hack we’ll look at how you can get more views, likes and comments on your YouTube videos, and ultimately drive more traffic to your eCommerce store.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Let’s assume you already have a Youtube account and some product videos. If you have people sharing or commenting on them, you need to respond. Thank them for sharing and reply to their comments. 2. YouTube also shows you a list of all your fans. Under your Video Manager, you’ll find a tab called Community. Here you’ll find a list of people who interacted with your videos in some way, not just subscribers. It will only show you the most influential ones, and gets updated every day. 3. You can sort the list by engagement and see who your superfans are. Then you can find the usernames of each one and when you upload a new video, you can notify them. These early interactions will give your new video a boost and help it rank faster. 4. You can also sort your fan list by the number of subscribers they have. So if you find any with thousands of subscribers, these are the people to watch out for because they are influencers. YouTube has a messaging system that allows you to reach out to them and partner up. 5. Finally, you can automatically create a Google+ circle of your top fans if you have a Google+ channel. This will help you cross promote your content.

SOURCE The Youtube hack was published on Matthew Woodward as a guest post by YouTube pro Philip Zeplin who runs his own channel, about Japan, along with NovelConcept.org.

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The Insta Glam DESCRIPTION Instagram started off as an image sharing app but has quickly grown into a powerful marketing channel for eCommerce stores. The emphasis on visual content allows stores to share their products, and customers to show off how they are using them. Like any other social network, Instagram is all about creating an engaged community of raving fans. For Foundr Magazine, it has become one of their largest channels for driving new customers. They managed to rack up over 110,000 followers in just 6 months. Let’s see how.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Before you start posting content to Instagram, you need to understand what your target audience wants to see. The aim here is to get them interested in your content, rather than immediately purchase from you. Foundr did this by posting inspirational quotes. Don’t forget to add your branding, like a logo or URL. 2. To drive more engagement, start asking some interesting questions. Question related posts on average drive over 300% more interaction than normal images for Foundr. Another thing you can do is ask them to double-tap or ‘like’ the post and to tag their friends in your posts. One of Foundr’s posts asked followers to tag someone they know will be successful, and that resulted in 1,600 comments. 3. Run giveaways and contests on Instagram. This will generate more interest in your products and you can set up contest rules like following your account, liking your posts and tagging friends to grow your following simultaneously. 4. Finally, you want to start driving sales to your store. This requires a powerful call to action in your Instagram bio. Foundr sends followers to a landing page that contains some really helpful, free content in exchange for an email. This results in 10,000 leads each month.

SOURCE The Instagram growth hack appeared on the Gleam blog, where Stuart McKeown, cofounder of Gleam, interviewed Nathan Chan, co-founder of Foundr, about their growth hacking strategies.

50 Shades Of Growth

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The Selfie Confidence DESCRIPTION Scroll through your social media feeds and you’ll certainly come across someone sharing a selfie with a new product they just bought. Hey, you might even see someone sharing a product they bought from you! And that’s awesome because then other people will see it and want to buy. That’s a lot of free promotion and content being generated for you. Unfortunately, most of your customers don’t have a very large network, so it doesn’t have a large impact. With this growth hack, you can re-post those images on your store to maximize the impact and show shoppers how your customers are enjoying your products.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. The concept is simple, really. Customers take a pic of them using your product and they upload it to their social networks with a hashtag. All you need to do is keep track of these hashtags and then pull those images into your own feed to display on your product pages. 2. Instagram allows you to embed images into your site by generating some HTML code. You’ll need to keep track of anyone mentioning your hashtags on Instagram and then, if you want to post that image on your site, copy the embed code for it. 3. With the embed code in hand, head over to your LemonStand dashboard and go over to content blocks. You need to create a new content block for each product. In the content block, use some HTML to create a table of images with the Instagram embed code for each image. 4. When you’ve done that for each product, you need to head to the product page editor and drop the content block in there. After you’ve done that and saved, you’ll see the Instagram user generated content show up on each page. If you ever want to update it, just get new embed codes and change them in the corresponding content block.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks like this one on the LemonStand blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Twitter Creeper DESCRIPTION Twitter is probably the coolest marketing tool of our generation. It allows you to interact with people all over the world without requiring email addresses. It also lets you see what people are interested in and what gets them talking. You can even get lists of people who follow your competitors. With all this information, you can drive qualified traffic to your store with a good conversion rate that results in sales. Let’s see how.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Follow people who are interested in your products. Start by looking at your competitors and see who’s following them. You can then follow those people and expect that some of them will follow you back. 2. For more qualified followers search for keywords related to your product. If you sell shoes, search for phrases like “need shoes” or “looking for shoes”. 3. It’s not enough to just build a following. You need to interact with them and engage them. Reply to their tweets and add your thoughts to their conversations. As you do this, people will come to recognize your brand and they’ll start to visit your site to see what you can offer them. 4. The final step is to convert your followers into customers or subscribers. Using Twitter Cards, you can create visual and engaging tweets to announce your discounts or freebies and get followers to sign up from within Twitter.

SOURCE Austin Allred is the co‑founder of Grasswire. He’s also the author of a book called The Hacker’s Guide to User Acquisition, which is the source for this growth hack.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Twitter Jacker DESCRIPTION Twitterjacking is all about hijacking trending hashtags to promote your brand and add new followers. It sounds like a shady tactic, but when done tastefully it can lead to a large number of followers. A good example of Twitterjacking is how brands use hashtags for major events like #Grammys or #SuperBowl. You’ll see brands leveraging the popularity of those events to run their own promotions and drive traffic back to their site. Here’s how you can copy the hack.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. It starts with finding the right hashtag to hijack. You need to be aware of all the major events happening in your industry and what hashtags are trending on Twitter. The more relevent the hashtag is to your store, the better this hack will work. 2. Start getting noticed by favoriting and retweeting what other people are saying on that hashtag. When you retweet someone, acknowledge them by mentioning their Twitter handles explicitly. 3. Another strategy to get noticed is including photos. A study by Hubspot shows us that tweets with images often attract more leads and customers. 4. Ultimately, there are going to be a handful of tweets that do really well, so you want to latch on to those and milk them for as much as you can. That’s means you need to keep an eye out for top performing tweets and feed those back into your stream. You can even copy top performing tweets from other brands, modified for your brand of course, and tweet those out. 5. Finally, you need to own the hashtag and stay on top of search results for it. Many popular hashtags have Twitter bots that automatically retweet them. By combining hashtags, you can generate enough retweets that you’ll come out on top.

SOURCE Chase McMichael is the CEO and Co-Founder of InfiniGraph. He wrote about the Twitterjack hack on Search Engine Journal.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Social Chatter DESCRIPTION Twitter isn’t just about following and retweeting. It’s all about connecting with people from all over the world. But if you’re a startup eCommerce business, it’s hard to connect one on one with them. That’s what Twitter Chats are for. By hosting your own chat, you can talk to hundreds of people at the same time, and get them engaged. Let’s see what you need to do to run a successful one.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Before you go hosting your own Twitter Chat, it’s prudent to participate in other chats first. This will help you understand how they work and what the best practices are. Typically a chat lasts around an hour at a specified time and the moderator just asks a bunch of questions while participants answer. 2. Your chat will need to have a hashtag. This is so that participants can identify it and tag their answers accordingly. If you run regular chats, use the same hashtag so that people start to recognize it as a thing of its own. 3. You want to bring some consistency and predictability to your Twitter Chats by running it at a certain time on certain days of the week. So for example, you may run a chat every Wednesday at 2pm. This just makes it easier for people to participate regularly. 4. Before you start each chat, plan the overall theme or topic and the questions in advance. Make sure it’s related to your store, and ask your fans or customers what they’d like to discuss in the chat. Most importantly, make it interesting so that participants have fun. 5. While your chat is running, don’t just stop at asking questions. See who’s answering, reply to their answers, or retweet them. Encourage others to answer more or add to existing conversations. As more people join in, it will attract others on Twitter and grow organically.

SOURCE Nicole Miller is the community champion at Buffer and wrote about this growth hack on their blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Social Celebrity DESCRIPTION Wouldn’t it be great if Messi could endorse your new shoe brand, or if Jennifer Lawrence could endorse your perfume. Unfortunately, only massive brands like Nike can afford to sponsor them. On the other hand, with the pervasiveness of social media these days, we see Youtube stars and Twitter power users being born every day. These social celebrities influence thousands of people, but at the same time they don’t cost as much to sponsor as a Messi. Let’s explore how you can get them to endorse you.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by finding hidden or undervalued opportunities in social media. For example, fashion brand Lord & Taylor found that many fashion bloggers had hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. Couple that with the visual aspect of the app and it makes for the perfect fashion campaign. 2. Make sure the people you want to sponsor have audiences that are aligned to your store’s market. For example, Mizzen+Main found that their target market liked listening to Tim Ferriss’s podcast. By sponsoring the podcast they immediately generated sales. 3. Finally, find people who are authentic and transparent. These are people who have painstakingly built up large followings by being human and for the purposes of building relationships, rather than gaming the system or buying followers. 4. Once you’ve found your ideal celebrities, contact them for your campaign. Lord & Taylor shortlisted 50 Instagram celebrities and got them all to wear one dress from their new line. The dress went viral and brand recognition shot through the roof.

SOURCE Nate Desmond is a growth hacker who enjoys parkour. He first wrote about the social celebrity growth hack on his personal blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Nasty Girl DESCRIPTION While social media networks are definitely tools for growth, there’s a key component that many retailers miss, and that explains why they aren’t successful at driving sales through them. That component is called relationships. It’s not enough to have large followings so that you can spam them with links. The true power of social media lies in the ability to connect with anyone anywhere in the world. As Nasty Gal found out, this allowed them to have conversations with fans and create a deep connection that eventually lead to sales and customer loyalty.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. You first need to have a very clear idea of who you’re targeting before you start hitting social networks. Nasty Gal knew exactly who they were selling to, how old these people were, what they wore, and what social networks they hung out on. 2. The next step is to target these people on social networks. Simply trying to gain as many followers as possible is not the best solution. You want quality over quantity, so post content that attracts your ideal customer. 3. As your following grows, you’ll start to see people engaging with your posts. Don’t ignore them like many brands do. Respond to them, strike up conversations, and be a human rather than a corporation. 4. Create a story out of every new product or promotion and share that with your followers. Ask them for their thoughts on new product ideas, or feedback on existing products. Find out what they want so that you can give it to them.

SOURCE Morgan Brown is a growth hacker. He first wrote about Nasty Gal’s growth hacking strategies on GrowthHackers.com.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Snapchat Stimulation DESCRIPTION When I first came across Snapchat, I dismissed it as yet another messaging app that would quickly fade away into oblivion. Yet, in the few years it has been around, it has already grown to almost 200 million monthly active users! Basically Snapchat is starting to look like a marketing channel with a large number of users, most of whom are engaged and willing to give you at least 10 seconds of their time to view your promotions and buy from you. On top of that, it’s completely free to use and you don’t need to pay for ads. It’s like email on steroids! Sounds like a dream, right?

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. If you’re just getting started on Snapchat, you’ll need followers. Chances are a large number of your fans on other social networks will have Snapchat too. Get them to follow you by promoting your account on other networks and promising them something cool for following you. You can also hire Snapchat influencers to help you grow your following. 2. Consumers love promotions. Every time you have a sale going on, send your Snapchat followers a coupon. Flash sales work great because they are unexpected. Customers don’t know when the next one will come around so they’ll want to cash in on the short-lived coupon you just sent them. 3. You can also run your own contests on Snapchat. This is a great way to get followers engaging with your brand and sending you snaps, instead of just the other way around. More engagement means more loyalty, and you can reward that loyalty by sending them more discounts on your products. 4. It’s painful to launch a new product line that you’re excited about only to hear crickets. You can send a sneak peak to your followers and get them excited about what’s coming. At the same time, you can also build your following by letting people know on other social networks that you have exclusive sneak peaks only on Snapchat. 5. People love stories. By telling your story through Snapchat, and sending followers photos and videos of what goes on behind the scenes of your brand, customers will start to trust you more. Show them who your team members are, or what goes on in your factories.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks like this one on the LemonStand blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Reddit Excitation DESCRIPTION I have a love hate relationship with Reddit. I know that it can be great for driving qualified traffic to your store, but at the same time Reddit can be unforgiving if they feel like you’re trying to sell to them. The community is very clear about providing help and value, rather than promoting your own agenda. That’s why this AMA hack caught my eye. AMA stands for Ask Me Anything, and is an invitation to a community of people to ask you questions about your business. It gives them a lot of value but at the same time promotes your company. Here’s how you can run one.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. First head to the AMA sub-reddit. You’ll see that many other people do AMAs and not all of them are celebrities or even mildly famous. Have a look at some of the popular AMAs running right now so that you get a good idea of what yours might be like. For example, have a look at this subscription eCommerce business that got thousands of upvotes and comments. 2. Your AMA starts with a good title. Something informative and eye-catching so that it stands out and attracts people. Be clear about why anyone should care about you and how you can help them. For example, the owner of the subscription box business says he quit his job to start it, and that implies he took a huge risk which is pretty interesting. 3. In the description, write your bio along with a brief explanation of what you do. Also let people know what skills, knowledge or expertise you’ve built up as a result of your experience and what types of questions you can answer. 4. Reddit also requires you to show proof that you are who you say you are. You can add links to your personal site, eCommerce store, and even your social media channels. If you don’t have enough proof, your thread might be removed from Reddit. 5. To maximize the impact of your AMA and get the most eyeballs on it, you need to time it right. After all, an AMA only runs for a couple of hours, and after that the window closes and there are no more questions. To figure out what time to start your AMA, use the analysis tool on RedditLater.

SOURCE Roy Povarchik consults startups on growth hacking, content marketing and building products people love. He share tips, lessons and case studies on how to grow your startup and your community.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Personality Test DESCRIPTION You know all those personality tests you keep seeing on Facebook? The ones that go, “Which Game of Thrones character are you?” or “If you were a dog, what kind of breed would you be?” Well, it turns out those tests are incredibly popular. Plus, with Facebook’s built in viral engine, many of them get shared pretty quickly. If you see your friend doing it, you want to do it too, if only to compare results. Funifi used this hack to great effect, collecting 2,700 emails and 6,200 pageviews with barely any spend. Here’s how they did it.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. You’ll need a survey plugin to implement this hack. You’ve probably already got a Wordpress blog connected to your eCommerce store. With something like the Sailabs survey plugin, and some brand designs, you can create fun tests for readers to take. 2. The power of personality tests lies in the distribution, and the viral nature of social networks. After your readers do the test, you want them to share the results for their friends to see. A popup with some sharing buttons works nicely. 3. To give it an initial push and get that viral engine rolling, you might want to personally invite friends and family. By sharing your own results for the tests on social networks and then tagging friends, you can get the word out to them and their networks. When they do it, they’ll spread it forward. 4. You can also try some targeted outreach to influencers and bloggers in your niche, or even spend a couple of hundred dollars on social media ads. 5. The last but final ingredient is collecting the email address of the participants. The best way to do this is to ask them to opt in at the end so that they can their results via email. Since they’ve already gone through the whole survey, they’re extremely curious about the results so they won’t mind doing this.

SOURCE Andrew Michael is the founder and CEO of Funifi. He published this growth hack on his Medium blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

Partners For Life DESCRIPTION Growth hacks need not all be online. Some savvy eCommerce stores have used offline growth tactics to reach new audiences. One example is UNIQLO’s partnership with the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in NYC. They sponsor Free Fridays and allow people to enter for free between 4:00pm and 8:00pm. This does wonders to their brand recognition and helps them get in front of a new niche.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Partnering with another brand allows you to inherit their image and reputation. Just as UNIQLO became cool and artistic by partnering with MOMA, so too can you by finding the right partner. Be clear on how you want your audience to think of you, and find a brand that already symbolizes that. 2. Another aspect to consider is the audience of the brand you partner with. It needs to align with your target market too. For UNIQLO, they saw that most people who visited MOMA also cared about fashion, which made it the perfect brand for them to partner with. 3. Finally, think about the viral aspect of it. By that I mean the partnership should be share-worthy. When people find out that Fridays are free at MOMA, they’re going to tell their friends and bring them along for a group outing. That viral component increases your exposure. 4. After you partner with another brand, it’s natural to start thinking about sales. However, understand that this hack may not necessarily result in immediate purchases. The point is to expose your brand to a larger audience and get people to talk about you. With the right partnership, even non-customers will be advocating you because they’re just excited about it. In time, this will result in higher traffic and more sales.

SOURCE Bryan Lee is Tutum’s resident growth hacker. He wrote this growth hack on their Medium account.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Grand Opening DESCRIPTION When Apple had their grand unveiling of the new iPhone 6 last year, Fernando Campos and Nick Shum decided to steal some of the spotlight and shine it on their eCommerce startup. They realised that Apple’s customers were the same as theirs, so the hundreds of people queueing up outside Apple stores were the perfect opportunity for them to promote their startup. Warning! This growth hack requires some hustle. Be prepared to step outside your comfort zone and possibly get chased by security guards!

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by figuring out which major companies or events have audiences that are similar to yours. Nick and Fernando sold products to people interested in health, design, technology and productivity. Those customers were the type of people who loved Apple. 2. Now find a major event run by these companies that draws large crowds. Events like these usually happen once a year, but there’s always a grand opening or conference that people queue up for. Apple’s iPhone launch at stores across the world are an example. Other examples are a concert night, the opening night for a movie or play, a major fashion event. 3. Before the event starts you need to do some prep work. Create a discount offer and a corresponding landing page. Print out the offer on a flyer that you can hand out to people at the event. 4. This is where you need to bring your hustle. When you go to the event, start passing around the flyers to everyone there. The security guards may not appreciate your entrepreneurial spirit, even though you’re not really doing anything wrong, but don’t let them get in your way. 5. For a bigger impact, get your entire team to target different locations for the event, assuming it’s happening in multiple places or cities. You can even hire students to go around to various events and hand out the flyers.

SOURCE Leigh Buchanan is an editor-at-large for Inc. magazine. She writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The XXX Path DESCRIPTION Communities are great because they automatically qualify potential customers for you. Regardless of what products you sell, you can find a passionate community around it online discussing news, content, and their experiences with different brands. Communities also give you insights into who the influencers are, what product people love or hate, and what content does well. This information will help you fine-tune your marketing and growth strategy. Let’s see how to quickly scrape communities using X-Path and extract relevant data from them.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by scoping out your data requirements. The data you can get on members varies by community. Check the profile page to see what type of information is available for each member. Common types are names, website URLs, blogs, and social media accounts. 2. Now set up an Excel spreadsheet with column headers containing the data you want to scrape. The first column will be the profile URL, and after that you can enter columns like Name, Website, Twitter URL, and so on. 3. Now comes the magic. You’ll need to install SEO Tools for Excel, which is the crawler that looks at the profile URL and then extracts information from it. So let’s say you want to get the name. You’ll need to know the x-path of the name field on the profile page. This can be done by right-clicking on the name and clicking Inspect Element. The developer tools will open up showing you the HTML. Over here, right click again and hit copy x-path. Then go back to your Excel sheet and under the name column enter this formula - =XPathOnUrl(Profile URL Cell, “x-path”). For full instructions, watch this video. 4. As you can see, the X-Path formula is pretty powerful. You can simply copy and paste the formula for a number of URLs and you’ll have all the data in no time. You can also repeat the process for getting social media profiles, follower counts, profile images, and many more. 5. Be creative with the data you want to get. For example, if you want to find influencers, scrape the number of times each member has posted and then sort your sheet. Or to find the most popular content, scrape the views or comments for each post.

SOURCE An award winning digital marketing consultant, Matthew Barby oversees digital strategy at Wyatt International

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Party Playlist DESCRIPTION Spotify has become the music player for young adults. If you’re targeting people from the teens up to people in the late 30s, chances are a large number of your target market listens to Spotify. In fact, I’m listening to it right now! Brands like Reebok and BMW are just two of many that have tapped into Spotify as a growth channel. And I’m not talking about advertising on Spotify. I’m talking about creating playlists! Let’s see how this works.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. First create a profile on Spotify. It’s just like any other social network in that people can follow you and get updates on what music you’re playing and the playlists you created. 2. Next up, you need to start creating some playlists. This depends on the type of music your customers like listening to. For example, Reebok creates music for running, because they target people who like to run. Do some research to find out what your customers like and then collect the best tracks into one awesome playlist. 3. You might want to create multiple playlists to cast a wider net. Reebok has playlists for running, yoga, dancing, and other activities that require shoes. 4. Now you need to spread the word about your playlists. Share them on your existing social channels. The great thing about Spotify is that when someone listens to or follows your playlist, that automatically gets shared with their friends on Facebook. As more people start listening to your playlist, that viral factor will kick in and your brand will get tons of exposure. 5. To get some extra attention, you can partner up with influential people and create a playlist with their name on it that will attract their followers.

SOURCE Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and the co-author of the Wall Street Journal best-seller, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content and co-author of the best-selling book on content marketing, Content Rules. She wrote about this growth hack in Entrepreneur magazine. Sign up to hear more from Ann at AnnHandley.com.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Striptease Video DESCRIPTION Unboxing videos are quickly becoming a popular way for potential customers to research your products before buying. Most unboxing videos are created by other customers, so when people watch it they know that it’s sincere and not being paid for. A survey done by Google shows that one in every five consumers has watched an unboxing video. And 62% of those people watched it because they were researching that product. The best part is, your customers will be creating them, so you have no work to do except for getting them to start making unboxing videos.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. The first thing you need to do is invest in quality product packaging. Unboxing starts with an unopened box, and because these videos will be seen by thousands of potential customers, you need to wow them with packaging. 2. Much like Xbox and many other brands have done, you can create your own ‘unboxing’ video. All you need is a good video camera and some lighting. Then, come up with a short script for the video. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. All you’re going to do is open up the box and explain each component of your product. 3. Hop onto YouTube and find users in your niche with a large channel following. For example, if you look at Loot Crate’s unboxing videos, you’ll see the guys making them have other videos aimed at geeks. When you find these people, bribe them with a free product sample or a special affiliate link. Once they accept, just send them your products and watch them bring new customers in for you. 4. Get your own customers in on the unboxing action. The more videos you have out there, the larger your reach. If you look at Dollar Shave Club’s unboxing videos, you’ll see that they are done by regular customers who don’t have special affiliate links. They simply created the video because they were excited about the product.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks on the LemonStand blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Public Scandal DESCRIPTION You see all these obscure startups and eCommerce businesses become overnight successes because of some press they receive and you just wish that could happen to your store. Well, like with anything else, hoping is not the best strategy. That’s why this growth hack is all about providing you with the steps you need to follow to gain that PR boost.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Before anything happens, you need a one sentence pitch. Here’s a sample template - My Company <name> is developing <offering>to help <target audience> <solve a problem>with <a secret sauce>. Simply fill in the blanks for your business. 2. Now you need to make a list of the most relevant reporters in your industry. These are the people who you know cover topics about the products you sell. If there are any major publications dedicated to your industry, you’ll find the reporters in the author section for each post. Also, do some research on each reporter so that you can get a better idea of who they are and what they’ve written before. This will help you write more personal emails to them. 3. Now it’s time for the pitch. You want it to be short and sweet with a really catchy title. A good title is referencing one of their previous articles. Then in the body you say you’ve read the article and that you have a product related to it that you think their readers might like to hear about. 4. Another important aspect of pitching is timing. Reporters get hundreds of emails from other founders too every day, so you need to pick a time when they aren’t inundated with so many requests. Typically, they like getting checking email in the morning. Another indicator is looking at their past social media behavior, like when they tweet, because it’s likely they are also checking mail at that time. 5. Sometimes, reporters don’t display their emails on the news site, so you’ll need to guess it. This is pretty easy because it’s likely to follow a common template. Use a tool like emailhunter.co to figure out what it is. When you have it, send the email!

SOURCE Dmitry Dragilev is an experienced PR marketer. He runs JustReachout.io which provides 1 on 1 help for startups writing email pitches and finding most relevant reporters. He published this hack on OkDork.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Native Implants DESCRIPTION Native ads are advertisements that are integrated into the core user experience of a website or app. They aren’t like banner ads that are almost intrusive and have nothing to do with the website a person is on. Instead, they usually come in the form of sponsored content and are very relevant to the publisher’s audience, like the sponsored posts on Forbes or Buzzfeed. The big benefit of native ads are that they allow you to distribute your content to a wider audience. By picking the right publishers you can target audiences that will be interested in your products. When done right, you can see higher click-through rates and lower cost per click than other forms of online advertising.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Find the right publisher. If you sell shoes, you’re better off advertising on a fitness or lifestyle website than on a cooking site. This means you need to have a deep understanding of your customer and what websites they like to read. 2. When you’ve identified publishers with the right audience, start creating relevant content. Study the publisher and see what articles have done well in the past. Then, create similar content. Remember, this is about adding value to readers, not pushing products on to them. 3. Before you publish your content, create a Call-To-Action. A short line at the end of the article asking readers to click through to your site will do the trick. For higher click through rates, offer readers something relevant to the article, like follow-on content or a discount. 4. Create a landing page for people who click on your CTA in the sponsored post. This will convert them into subscribers or customers at a higher rate. SOURCE Brian Balfour is the VP of Growth at Hubspot. Read more about the native ad growth hack on his personal blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Beast Mode DESCRIPTION Most retailers lose money on Google Adwords. Chances are you’ve tried it and found that it’s just not profitable enough to keep using. There are two reasons why this happens you’re not tracking the right things, and you’re using a set it and forget it strategy. The Beast Mode growth hack takes a holistic view and makes you think in terms of Campaigns, instead of Ads. It will make your ads more relevant, which reduces your cost per click and improves profitability. Here are the steps.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. AdWords Beast Mode starts with targeting the right customer persona. You want to identify the customers with the highest Life-Time Value. Figure out who they are, what they have in common, what products they tend to buy, and why those products. 2. With a well-defined persona, you can start picking the right keywords. Think outside of your brand and product names to discover which keywords your target persona would search for. Most importantly, focus on the intent behind the keywords. 3. Next, you need to create precise ads. Instead of generic copy, you want to capture the needs, wants and intentions behind the search. For example, if you’re targeting “business interview suit” your ad should say something like “Get the suit, get the job” rather than “Buy custom suits!” 4. It’s not enough to get people to click on your ad. You’re still wasting money if you don’t convert them when they reach your site. That’s where landing pages come in. Instead of sending them to your homepage, send them straight to a category page or product page that’s relevant to the search term.

SOURCE Drew Sanocki is a successful eCommerce retailer and advisor to many major eCommerce brands. He talks more about the Adwords beast mode on his personal blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Card Sharp DESCRIPTION Twitter Cards have been around for a while and they allow you to make your tweets richer in terms of visual appeal and functionality. Instead of limiting you to text, like regular tweets, Twitter Cards allow you to attach images, videos and even products to your cards that users can interact with within Twitter. While many B2B businesses have leveraged Twitter Cards to collects leads, most small eCommerce businesses haven’t really taken advantage of it. In this hack we’ll explore some simple steps for you to accelerate growth using Twitter Cards.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Before we begin, you need to make sure you have all the ingredients to create a successful Twitter Card. The most important one is what you give in return for email addresses. This can be the same as what you have on your store for email collection, like an ebook or a product discount. 2. To create the Twitter Card you also need an attractive image, a link to your privacy policy, a fallback URL which hosts a form as an alternative to Twitter’s call to action, and a thank you page URL which users see after submitting their email ID. 3. Finally, you need a web hook to capture all your leads from Twitter and send it to a spreadsheet, email list or whatever else you have. You can use Zapier to do this easily. 4. Now that your Twitter Card is ready, you need to reach your target audience with it. Twitter allows you to target certain keywords but that’s not the best approach because keywords can be too vague and may not have buying intent. Instead, target Twitter communities where your customers most likely hang out. For example, if you sell athletic wear, keywords like #clothing or #fitness are too vague, but there might be a more targeted sub-group that will have a better response to your card. 5. Don’t be afraid to keep testing new groups and communities to see which ones respond best. Start with small budgets to promote your cards and then when you find a group that converts well, double down on that.

SOURCE Jordan Skole wrote this post while he was the director of marketing at Ambassador. He has now moved on to Benchmark, an analytics application for enterprise location management.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Facebook Stalker DESCRIPTION Data shows that many times people tend to research an item on their mobile device, and then purchase it through their desktop. So, wouldn’t be awesome to drive those sales faster and not lose any of them? People love Facebook and you probably already run some ads there. All you need to do is to retarget those that visited your e-commerce website via mobile and did not convert. Remember that in sales, repetition and relevancy rules.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. The first thing you need to do is to put some of your marketing budget aside and design two kickass Facebook ads. One that will be served to mobile users only, and one for desktop retargeting. This is the most important part. Just be awesome. 2. Create a Facebook Custom Audience for those who visited your website but did not purchase. In order to do so, build an audience using “People visiting specific web pages but not others.” Include the URL of your main page (e.g. product, category or offer page) and exclude your “Thank you” page so you don’t count visitors who did not buy. You will be asked to install a piece of code in your pages so the audience can be built properly. 3. Now create the ads and, in case you use product images, add some photos with the product in focus in front of a blurry background. As for the bidding, oCPM rocks. With this bid, your ads are served to people who are more likely to convert. For this, you need to install another piece of code to your website. Just follow the instructions on Facebook. 4. Start your campaign, and keep an eye on the results. Make sure to monitor your conversions and optimise your ads if needed.

SOURCE Savvas Zortikis is the VP of Growth at GrowthRocks. You can read more growth hacks on the GrowthRocks blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Captivating Video DESCRIPTION Advertising channels like Google and Facebook have become so popular that the costs have become too high for many smaller eCommerce businesses. But there’s a hugely untapped channel that has over a billion monthly active users. It’s called YouTube. YouTube advertising looks like it might be expensive but, if you do it right, you can achieve some really low costs per clicks. Here are the steps you must follow.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Obviously you need to have a video ad ready to advertise on YouTube. See what your competitors are doing to get a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Ideally, you want a really high quality, captivating video to reflect the quality of your brand. Try to be inspirational or quirky, and grab their attention in the first 5 seconds. 2. YouTube has multiple ad formats. The cheapest is the TrueView In-Stream format which appears before a video and can be skipped by viewers. You won’t get charged if people skip it or don’t watch more than 30 seconds of it. 3. Next, create some tight targeting for your ads. Create different ad groups that are targeted at different audiences based on search queries. Add in negative keywords so that your ad doesn’t show up for the wrong searches. 4. By default, YouTube has one bid for each ad format. If you use multiple format, you drill down and manually enter different bids for each. It’s important to keep an eye out on the bid and tweak it regularly so that you improve your cost per acquisition. 5. Finally, you want to personalize your dashboard to view the relevant metrics and track your ad performance. Add in additional metrics like converted views, cost per converted views, impression share, conversion rate and website clicks.

SOURCE Eric Siu is the CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain, which does YouTube advertising, Facebook advertising and content marketing. He also video interviews entrepreneurs like Noah Kagan, Rand Fishkin and more on his blog, Growth Everywhere.

50 Shades Of Growth

https://lemonstand.com

The Bounce Reduction DESCRIPTION It’s not enough to have high traffic. Many times, we see that people go to a site, browse around, and then leave immediately to do the next thing. Ultimately your store needs to convert these visitors into subscribers and customers. Fortunately, with this growth hack, you can instantly double the conversions on your site. With a few simple tweaks, you can set up relevant popups to capture these email addresses. Let’s explore how.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by finding the pages on your site with the highest bounce rates. Use Google Analytics to track this and head to Content > Site Content > All Pages to find traffic stats for all your pages. Sort by bounce rate. 2. Next, figure out what you want to offer visitors. Think of it as a little gift in return for them subscribing to your email list or purchasing from you. It could be a free product, or a discount on their next purchase. For each page, you can create a targeted offer based on what the page is about. 3. Now it’s time to make the pitch and present visitors with your offer. Since you’re only targeting pages with high bounce rates, which means visitors are leaving anyway, you can afford to be a bit aggressive. Use a pop-up to get your offer in front of visitors. It may be irritating, but it works. 4. Finally, you want to track conversions on your popups. See if they are working and figure out how you can improve them. Maybe you’re firing the popup too early, or the gift is not relevant to your visitors. Test out new ideas and then track them again to see if there’s an improvement.

SOURCE Garrett Moon is is a founder at Todaymade, a web development and content marketing company, and the makers of CoSchedule, a WordPress-integrated app that makes content marketing and social media easy. He wrote about this growth hack on the Kissmetrics blog.

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The Mobile Closer DESCRIPTION Saying that mobile commerce is growing is like saying that the sun rises in the East. Everyone knows it, but oddly enough most retailers aren’t doing anything about it. In fact, many don’t even have responsive sites! If you’re one of the savvy ones who already has a mobile-friendly store, then you’re probably seeing a lot of traffic on it. But what to do with all those visitors? Most people use mobile to browse instead of buy. That’s where the mobile popup comes in. Instead of letting that traffic go, you can capture them as email addresses by offering a discount or freebie.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. As you probably guessed, you need some software to create the mobile popup. Qualaroo is our weapon of choice here. After you create your account and follow the installation instructions, head to your dashboard and create a new mobile survey. 2. In the “Question Text” field, put in your Call To Action, like “Email me here”. In the “Description”, you explain what people are getting in return for their email. It may be a discount coupon code or a free ebook. Then have the popup redirect to a Thank You page after visitors enter their email ID. 3. Add some targeting to your survey to make it more personalized. For example, you can target a certain category of products and offer a discount only for those products because you know visitors are interested in them. You can also add a delay so that it only pops up after shoppers have been browsing for a while. 4. When you’re done designing the popup, run some tests to make sure everything is working well. Don’t forget to check if the email addresses actually come through and go into your email software. If it’s all good, activate it and watch your email list grow!

SOURCE Casey Armstrong is a full stack marketer who focuses on customer acquisition and revenue growth for startups.

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The Freeloader Attraction DESCRIPTION Everyone wants free stuff. That’s why giveaways work so well. With a single giveaway, you can collect thousands of subscribers who are interested in your product, even if it is because they might get it free. Of course, the last thing you want to do is announce that you’re giving something away only to see no one sign up. You need a plan of action and we’ll show you how in this growth hack.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. A good giveaway starts with an interesting prize. Obviously, the more valuable the prize, the more attractive it will be, so you need to decide how much you want to spend on this campaign. Don’t just give away your own products. Think outside the box and give away related products that your customers might like. If you’re a clothing brand, give away some nice shoes to go with your suit. 2. When you launch the giveaway, announce it on all your social channels and blog. Let people know that it’s a limited time deal to urge them to enter. You also want to make sure entrants can share the giveaway to increase their chances of winning. 3. For an extra push, find some strategic partners. For example, you can reach out to other blogs and ask them to write about your giveaway. You can also cut deals with other brands to share email addresses if they actively promote your giveaway. 4. Another way to get more attention to your giveaway is ads. Your costs per click for this will be a lot lower than regular products ads because more people will click through to get their chance at winning something. 5. After the giveaway is done, follow up with participants. Announce who the winner is and thank the rest for participating with some special offers and deals for your products.

SOURCE Nate Smoyer manages partnership marketing and advertising for Logos Bible Software, the world’s leading Bible software company. He wrote about this growth hack on the Growth Republic blog.

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Samuel L. Hackson DESCRIPTION You spend so much time creating beautiful product recommendation emails for your customers. It’s too bad only your existing customers see them, though. Wouldn’t it be nice if those emails could actually bring in new customers? Of course, you add a ‘Forward to friend’ link, but no one actually forwards them. The problem is they are just too lazy. The solution? Do it for them! This growth hack shows you how.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Decide exactly what you want the email to accomplish. What is the objective? What is the call to action? 2. Write out your subject line and body text. Keep it short. Include a link in the body so the recipient can visit the landing page or website you want to drive traffic to. 3. Take that same text and drop it into this handy Encoder. If it’s easier, add your subject line and body text separately. Click “encode.” 4. Next, in a plain text editor, copy the text from the Encoder and drop it into the following formula to create your automagic, Samuel L. Jackson email: mailto:?subject=PASTE SUBJECT HERE&body=PASTE BODY HERE 5. Now test it. Hyperlink a word ( just like you would a website) with “mailto:?subject……” and click it. 6.

Hyperlink the text in in your email or webpage.

SOURCE Noah Kagan is the Chief Sumo at AppSumo. The Samuel L. Jackson hack first appeared on his growth hacking blog OkDork.

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The Personal Touch DESCRIPTION Studies show that 74% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content (like offers or promotions) appears that has nothing to do with their interests. That means those discount offers you show your customers are actually more likely to turn them off if they aren’t personalized! There’s enough evidence to show that personalizing your CTAs, like discounts and promotions, will result in higher conversion rates and more sales. The point is to show your shoppers the right offers at the right times, so that they are more likely to buy into it. Let’s see how.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. You need software that to create the personalized CTAs. There are a number of them out there but we’ve found OptKit to be really good. Plus it’s free! Create an account and follow the instructions to install the script in your store. See the full growth hack for details. 2. In your OptKit dashboard, create some CTAs or ‘Kits’. You can create CTAs based on actions they take on your site, device they use, number of times they’ve visited, site that referred them, and many more. There are numerous targeting and personalization settings, so play around and try something creative. 3. If you’re still not sure what you can do on your site, try this one. An eCommerce site that used OptKit noticed people were staying a long time on their cart, but not converting through. They targeted that segment of traffic with a series of CTAs that nudged them towards the checkout with time-sensitive discount coupons. They were able to recover $2000 within the first two weeks of using it.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks like this one on the LemonStand blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

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FAQ Me DESCRIPTION The big difference between online and offline shopping is shoppers can’t actually touch and feel the product. They need to rely on images and videos on your store to get an idea of its dimensions. This throws up problems in industries like fashion where people need to try on clothes to be more comfortable buying them. That’s not to say people don’t buy clothes online. The point is, the more information you can provide your customers, the more likely they are to purchase. In the case of Roller Skate Nation, simply adding a FAQ section to their product pages increased purchases by 69%! How’s that for a growth hack?

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. For every one person that calls in with a question, there are nine others who simply leave for a competitor’s store. By providing as much information as possible up front, you’re pre-empting any questions or objections these shoppers might have and keeping them on your store. 2. The best way to figure out what questions are going unanswered on your product pages is to look through your support emails, chats and call history. Collect all these questions and compile them into product-specific FAQ sections. 3. There are some basic questions that must be answered on all product pages, regardless of whether people have asked about them before. Anything to do with shipping, refunds, returns and exchanges must go on your product page to convey that there’s no risk in buying your products. 4. When you have created your FAQ sections, it’s worth testing different styles and positioning on your product page. For example, Roller Skate Nation found that placing FAQs below the product details resulted in higher conversion rates.

SOURCE Cara Harshman tells stories at Optimizely. She was the second marketer to join and is now a Content Marketing Manager and Blog Editor. Read more about growth hacks like this on their blog.

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The Dynamic Wordplay DESCRIPTION Shopping on Amazon is always a fun experience for me. Every time I visit the ‘Everything Store’ I see new content, and that means no two visits are ever the same. It keeps me coming back for more, even if I don’t buy something most of the time. You can mimic the Amazon experience on your site with very little investment and level the playing field. Dynamic content makes your store interactive by displaying content on your site based on certain events. These events can be anything, from a page view to adding certain products to the cart. Let’s see how.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. To start with, you need to define a trigger for your dynamic content. What conditions need to be met for your content to display? It could just be a page load. For example, on Hotels.com the trigger is that a customer is looking at the hotels page. 2. The next step is to define the piece of content that gets displayed when the event or action in step 1 triggers it. On Hotels.com, the content is ‘X people are looking at this hotel right now’. The ‘X’ is a variable that represents the number of people on that same page at that moment. In LemonStand, you can add this in the Content Blocks section under Editor. 3. So now you know what content you want to display and where it should go. All you have to do is drop the content block in the right place and, voila, your store has dynamic content!

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks like this one on the LemonStand blog.

50 Shades Of Growth

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Quit Playing Games DESCRIPTION Ok, I know gamification has received a bad rap over the last few years, and slowly fallen from grace. But I firmly believe that most people just didn’t execute their gamification strategies well, and that’s why it didn’t work. In this growth hack, we have a good example of exactly how to gamify your eCommerce store. With this hack you can increase engagement and get customers to come back for repeated purchases.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Gamification only works if you have a meaningful reward system behind it. Rewarding customers with badges is not a good strategy because ultimately they can’t really do anything with them. In fact, badges and points are the means for customers to get their rewards. And the rewards can be as simple as discounts or free products. 2. Start by creating different tiers of points and assign rewards to each tier. Lower tiers are easy to get, so the rewards should not be too big. But once people get to those tiers, they’ll want to keep going and get the larger rewards at higher tiers. That means progression should be possible, but steadily more difficult. 3. To earn their points, get people to do things, like purchasing, reviewing or sharing a product. You want a mix of activities that have different weights. A simple tweet should earn fewer points than buying an expensive product. 4. As customers progress upwards, you might want to try egging them on by showing them how they stand against friends, or giving them status badges that they can show off. Little things like this add a sense of competition to it and motivates customers to collect more points. 5. For more ways to win points, think outside the box. Customers get bored doing the same thing, no matter how many points they get, so try out fun stuff like awarding points for participating in a quiz, photo contest, or some other creative marketing campaign.

SOURCE Alex Patterson runs Growth Devil, a growth agency with a new way of thinking. He wrote about this hack on their blog.

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The FOMO Manipulation DESCRIPTION Creating urgency is all about creating that feeling or fear that a customer is missing out if they don’t take a certain action immediately. It’s the difference between saying there are three tickets to the movie and there are only three tickets to the movie remaining. The first one is a statement, while the second implies that if someone else picks up those three, you won’t get to see the movie. Brands like Groupon, Amazon and Gap use this psychological effect to nudge customers towards a purchase. If you find that customers are on the fence about buying your products, building in some urgency will help you close the sale.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Start by figuring out your offer. It needs to be a pretty significant offer for it to be relevant. At the same time, you don’t want to do a 50% discount sale if it means incurring losses. In many cases, something as simple as priority shipping or free shipping is effective enough. 2. Next, you need a limit. This is all about time-sensitivity, and the more time-sensitive your offer, the more urgency it creates. A sale that ends tonight is more powerful than a sale that ends next week. However, if the sale ends next week but there aren’t many items left, then that adds urgency too. 3. Good copy adds to the urgency. Use words like “Buy Now” or “Get it today” rather than just “Buy” or “Add to cart”. Change your cart CTAs to a more urgent color like red. 4. A live timer also helps. Seeing time run out makes it look even more urgent, even if the deadline is two days away like the Groupon example. In LemonStand, you can simply drop a script like this into your product page. Then, use the sales feature to create your discount.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks like this one on the LemonStand blog.

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The Scarcity Desire DESCRIPTION Have you ever been standing in the isle of the store looking at the dizzying array of items, say cold or allergy medicine, when you notice there’s only one box left of Allegra, but a dozen boxes left of all the other options? Which one did you buy? Much like the urgency technique, scarcity also triggers the fear of missing out. But, it also has another component to it, social proof. When you see that last box of Allegra, it means that Allegra is the most popular option and that if you don’t get it now, someone else will. This tactic works well in online stores too.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. The most important thing to remember is that, even though this is a powerful tactic to use, you should always be honest. Don’t say that a certain product is scarce even though it isn’t. There are ways to show scarcity without faking it. 2. The most common method is the low stock notification. You’ll need to be tracking inventory in your online store and set up an alert for when a product’s stock goes below a certain number. You can program your store to display this alert on the corresponding product pages so that shoppers can see them while browsing. You can also show the exact number left, so if there’s only one unit remaining it pushes shoppers to purchase faster. 3. If you have a product with different options, like a t-shirt with different sizes, showing that some sizes are not in stock, like the really small or large sizes, can indicate scarcity too. 4. If your product is in stock, there are other ways to indicate scarcity. You can show an alert telling a visitor how many other shoppers are looking at the same product they are looking at, or how many already have it in their carts. This also works as social proof because it indicates that many other people are thinking of buying the product.

SOURCE Brandon Redlinger is a marketing and business strategist, and he wrote about the Scarcity hack on his Medium blog.

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The Plain Jane DESCRIPTION Cart abandonment continues to plague the eCommerce industry, and will continue to do so, unless retailers do something about it. Most retailers think that once in the cart, customers are inclined to finish the purchase, when in reality it’s quite the opposite. One way to quickly reduce cart abandonment on your store is to use an enclosed cart. This means stripping away unnecessary details and placing the focus on completing the purchase. Let’s see how this works.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. When customers are in the cart, the last thing you want them to do is click to another page and forget about buying. To stop this from happening, you want to remove the navigation that’s usually present in the rest of your site. Instead, add a ‘Continue Shopping’ link somewhere in case customers really want to add more items to the cart. 2. Make sure important links like ‘Shipping and Returns Policies’ or ‘Terms and Conditions’ are still present on the site, but instead of having them redirect customers to a different page, consider making them popups. 3. Keep your trust elements, like contact information, security seals, and live chat, on the checkout page, but don’t allow them to compete with the primary goal, that is checking out. 4. Ultimately, the aim of the checkout page is to get customers to enter their payment details and complete the purchase. Make sure this part is front and center of your page, with a highlighted ‘Pay Securely’ button, while the rest of the elements are off to the side.

SOURCE Graham Charlton is Editor in Chief of the Econsultancy blog. He has worked in the digital industry for more than ten years.

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The Trust Factor DESCRIPTION Every sale has five basic obstacles - no need, no money, no hurry, no desire and no trust. Most eCommerce stores have figured out how to get around the first four, but not many pay attention to the trust factor. By doing something as simple as adding a trust seal to your checkout you can increase sales and add thousands of dollars to your revenue. In fact, it was found that 94% of shoppers are likely to complete a purchase when a Norton Secured Seal is displayed in checkout. Let’s look at what you need.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Norton, McAfee, TrustE, BBB, Comodo the list goes on. There are numerous trust seals around and you can test them all if you want to. After you sign up for your trial, you’ll receive the code for your trust seal. 2. It’s prudent to test different seals to see which one results in the highest conversion rate. Use an A/B testing software like Convert.com and test different type of seals and different locations in your checkout. Simply create an account and follow the instructions to add the A/B testing tracking script to your store. 3. With the Convert tracking script in place, you should be able to start creating experiments. You’ll notice that Convert has a point and click interface, which means you can navigate to your checkout page and click on any section to dynamically modify it. Simply select the area where you want to add your trust seal code (remember step 1) and drop the code into the pop-up box that appears. 4. You’ll need to let the test run for at least a month to get some meaningful results. Hopefully, by the end of it, you’ll know which trust seal to use and how much it increases conversion rates by. When the experiment is done, you’ll need to embed the trust seal in your checkout page.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. For more details about this growth hack, see the full post on the LemonStand blog.

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The Infidelity Prevention DESCRIPTION Your eCommerce business has a loyalty problem. That means your customers don’t have any strong feelings about purchasing from you as opposed to your competitors. Typically your customers fall into two buckets - loyal but infrequent, or frequent but not loyal. Figuring out which bucket they are in is key to creating a loyalty program. If they are loyal but infrequent, you need to make them visit your store more often. If they are frequent but not loyal, you need to get them to switch from your competitors. Here are some specific strategies.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. You can’t expect your users to change their behavior until you understand why their behavior is the way it is. The only way to do that is to talk to them. Take random people in the segment you’re trying to change and arrange a phone call. Ask them why they don’t buy your products or why they buy from competitors. 2. Now that you have your reasons, you can survey the broader email list, asking them, “When you visit a product page and don’t purchase, which reason best describes why?” With a good enough response, you can now stack rank the reasons why people aren’t loyal to you. 3. Now, you’re ready to build a program. Invent a bunch of a programs that might incentive these users, narrow down the ones that are most likely to incentivize users and be profitable, and test. 4. One other dirty little secret about loyalty programs is that they tend to ebb in effectiveness over time. Humans are motivated by variable rewards, and if your program is static, your users may become used to it, and it may not create long-term behavior change. You should strive to think of your program as constantly evolving to stay interesting to your users.

SOURCE Casey Winters is a PM for Growth at Pinterest, and was previously the first marketer at GrubHub. He wrote about this growth hack on his blog, Casey Accidental.

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The Long Term Relationship DESCRIPTION There are too many eCommerce companies asking, “How do we acquire more customers?” that should instead be asking “How do we get better at keeping the customers we already have?”. Strong retention of customers over time is a good indicator of productmarket fit, something you’re hopefully looking to achieve anyway. At a high level, retention is more important than virality because if your customers don’t stick around they won’t invite others to your store and products. This is especially important for subscription eCommerce businesses which depend on recurring revenue. This hack is more like a general strategy for balancing virality and retention, so buckle up because it gets a little technical.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Virality is often quantified by something called the k factor, which is the product of the number of invites sent out by your current customers and the conversion rate of those invites. Use the referral hacks we’ve discussed in this book to set that up. Retention is calculated by the percentage of customers who come back to your store the next day, week or month. If you use a subscription business model, this is very easy to calculate. 2. For stores that focus heavily on virality at the cost of retention, they might see a lot of growth early on. However, it quickly becomes unsustainable as the viral factor inevitably decreases and churn starts taking over. 3. The key takeaway is to focus on achieving stable retention first before shifting focus to virality. The compound effects of retention are much higher than virality, resulting in more sustainable growth, as opposed to a quick initial spurt followed by a decrease. 4. It’s worth modeling your growth based on your retention and virality rates to see what might happen down the road. Use this growth model to visualize your numbers and play with the values to see what you need to change to improve your growth.

SOURCE Jamie Quint is the founder of Interstate Analytics. Previously, he was the PM of Growth at Swipely and a Y Combinator alum. He wrote about this growth hack on his blog.

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The Regular Affair DESCRIPTION Recurring customers are way more profitable than new ones. That’s the reason why the subscription business model has become so popular amongst eCommerce retailers recently. By offering subscriptions, rather than regular eCommerce, brands can lower costs and increase their customer lifetime value. You’d be surprised at how many products we consume on a regular basis. Food, clothes, toiletries, accessories, the list goes on. Instead of making the customer order the product every month, and risk losing them to another brand, capture that repeat business with subscriptions.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. Implementing subscriptions on your eCommerce store requires you to be able to collect credit card information once and then repeatedly charge it for every box. You also need a new order automatically generated each time the box is supposed to go out, and you need to allow customers to cancel a box or their subscription entirely. 2. If you’re on a platform like LemonStand, there’s already a built-in subscriptions feature that you can simply toggle on. Before you add the subscription option to your store, you need to create some billing plans. This determines how often your customers get billed for the box. Head to the Settings > Billing Plans page to set this up. 3. Next, you need to add the subscription option to your site. You can either create a ‘Pricing page’ style design, like Dollar Shave Club, or you can do what Amazon does and add it to your product pages. You can also allow customers to subscribe on your cart page if they’ve added multiple products and want them all regularly. 4. Finally, you’ll need to add an area where your customers can manage their subscriptions. To do that, you’ll need to follow the instructions here. As before, it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting code but you can modify as much as you want.

SOURCE Sid is the marketing manager at LemonStand. He writes about more eCommerce growth hacks like this one on the LemonStand blog.

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Come Back To Me DESCRIPTION If you sell products that need to be replenished, then this hack is for you. The replenishment email is simple, but something most retailers don’t do. All it is is an email reminding past customers to replenish items they brought previously. The reason this works is because it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one. If someone already bought your product, they’re more likely to buy again, even if they need a little nudge, assuming they liked it. Let’s see what this is all about.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT 1. This hack won’t work on products that don’t need to be replenished. You’ll need to be selling something like food, coffee or other items that people consume on a regular basis. 2. For each product you sell, you should know how much time it takes to be consumed. For example, if a bag of dog food usually takes a month to go through, then your customer’s purchase cycle is one month. 3. With an email service provider like Vero, you can then automatically schedule emails to go out just before the customer is due to buy the next bag of dog food. For example, you might want it to go out 20 days after their first purchase, and then send a follow up email a few days later to remind them again. 4. You also want to make it extremely easy for customers to replenish the products. When you send out the replenishment email, keep it simple and then use a button to send customers straight to a cart prefilled with the product. 5. Think of replenishment emails as a precursor to subscription business models, which we’ve already covered in this book. Subscriptions are a more automated version of this, but they’re also a different business model. If you don’t want to get into that business but you don’t want to leave money on the table, try out replenishment emails instead.

SOURCE Jimmy Daly runs marketing at Vero and curates the Swipe File newsletter. He wrote about this hack on the Vero blog.

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What Comes Next? We hope you’ve enjoyed this book! The truth about growth hacking is that it may not work for you, but it’s worth a shot. You see, it’s all about finding new ways to attract customers through regular experimentation. In fact, growth hacking should really be called growth experimentation. With this book, we’ve given you a list of ideas that you can pick and implement on a regular basis. Hopefully, this should last you a year or more. If you ever need more ideas, have a look at our blog where we regularly talk about new growth hacks for your store. Feel free to reach out to us for any feedback on this book, our website, our product or even if you just want to say hi! You can always just send us a mail if you have any questions about growth hacking or eCommerce in general, and we’ll be more than happy to help you out.

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