21 Actionable and Unique B2B SaaS Growth Hacks you can Test Today

This is a guide to Growth Hacking for B2B SaaS and Web App companies. Created by noted SaaS Marketing expert and Growth Hacker Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures, this guide is full of actionable, unique, and thought-provoking Growth Hacks designed to get your brain moving in the right direction.

Transcript

1. Growth Hacking: 21 B2B SaaS Growth Hacks to Test Today A guide by SaaS Marketing expert and Growth Hacker Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures
2. What is Growth Hacking? Growth Hacking is not tactics, techniques, or even strategies. More than anything, it’s a mindset of understanding customer and user behavior as well as market dynamics and what’s technically possible – or should be – and using your imagination to make it happen. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved.
3. Growth Hacking Tactics vs. Marketing Strategy What’s included here are tactics and - while everyone loves tactics - if they don’t make sense within your very well thought-out SaaS marketing strategy, you should probably not implement them, right? In fact, you should also probably make sure you have a well thought-out SaaS marketing strategy, too. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved.
4. Do these ‘hacks’ work? Got examples or results? Some of these “growth hacks” I’ve used and have seen a big impact… others are just ideas I haven’t implemented yet but might if the occasion arises… and some are just crazy ideas that I think would work if the situation is right. I’m not gonna tell you which ones are which so use your imagination and a good bit of caution. I’m also not going to show you live examples of what I’ve implemented or give you results. You see, I’ve helped my clients with these tactics and they’d like a little bit more time out in front of you. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved.
5. The Goal of this Presentation on Growth Hacking The goal is to get you thinking in the right direction, that’s all. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
6. Growth Hacking Presentation Source Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com This presentation is based on my epic “SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacks to Test Today” post... you can find a lot more detail on the techniques and ideas presented here: http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks
7. Growth Hack #1: Back Fill Data for Fun and Profit This is 2013 and data is more pervasive and easier to get than ever before. Why not auto-fill as much as possible for your customers – surprise them with how easy things are for them to get going. Auto-fill and then let them correct/update/etc. Not doing this in this day and age is just lazy… Example: A SaaS CRM that automatically adds demographic information to customers as they’re added. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
8. Growth Hack #2: Dedicated Widget Landing Pages What if you thought real hard about how you could leverage that logic payload as the truly viral marketing scheme that it is? Well, first you might treat it like an actual marketing campaign, meaning you would send people to a dedicated landing page from your widget. Tons of SaaS companies have widgets that their customers embed on their websites, and most of those have links back to their sites, right? Okay…. Well, the problem is most companies just link back to their main marketing site. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
9. Growth Hack #3: Powered By… Ego! I’m sorry, but “powered by” is just stupid… it’s time to get a real Call to Action (CTA). “Powered by” is all about ego… it’s all about you.. Make it about them. Maybe in 2003 “Powered by” was fine because technology was all “ooh… neato….” but now it’s like “WTF is in it for me?” Seriously, even the grand-daddy of ‘em all Hotmail, way back in 1996, had an actual CTA: “Get your free email at Hotmail” Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
10. Growth Hack #4: Aggressive Widgets IWhat if we really, really… really used Widgets to our advantage!?!? What could we do. Well, how about instead of sending people who click on “Powered by…” to a landing page (you won’t do that, right? See #3), get ‘em to sign-up or learn more right there in the widget. Maybe don’t do this with your paying customers (or do… I dunno), but if the idea behind all these people out there using your stuff for free is “viral expansion” and “spreading the word,” then it’s up to you to make that happen. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
11. Growth Hack #5: Retargeting Widget? Maybe put a retargeting pixel in the widget. Too much? Okay, put it on the landing page or in the sign-up/more info screen in the widget (see #2 and #4 above)… If they showed interest, don’t let ‘em go that easy! Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
12. Growth Hack #6: Thank You for Missing Opportunities We know that businesses that have a mailing list and let folks opt-in to that list often miss the opportunity presented by the “thank you” page. They don’t generally customize this or use it for up- or cross-sells or to engage further. Unfortunately, the opportunity missing also happens with the Email Marketing companies themselves. Are you being aggressive enough on default “Please Confirm” pages and emails to ensure that the person signing-up for the list knows they can – and should – sign-up for your Email Marketing app? Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
13. Growth Hack #7: Tweetactional Messages? Due to GMail’s recent changes, something to test is taking their Email Address, finding their Twitter Handle (several ways to do this), and then tweeting transactional messages / reports to them as well as sending them an email. Of course, you could also ask them for their Twitter handle or get them to login via Twitter, too. Whatever. If you’d like to be less aggressive, you could simply use Twitter to remind them to check their email because you sent them their weekly activity report! Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
14. Growth Hack #8: Help Them Help You If you push content to 3rd party sites – let’s say you make it super easy to share videos from your app via YouTube – optimize that output to send traffic back to your site and to be found via search. Remember, Youtube is basically the 2nd largest search engine out there, but even more, since it’s a Google property, videos show up in Google search engine result pages (SERPs). So even if people aren’t searching directly on Youtube, they might be searching on Google, find the video, see your URL in the description or annotation, click the link to hit your landing page, sign-up for your app, and pay you. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
15. Growth Hack #9: We’ll Do it For You… For a Fee After your users do a few things by hand, show ‘em an offer to do it for them. Take FriendOrFollow for example, I can either click individual followers to unfollow them or I can subscribe to their service and unfollow everyone in one fell swoop. Once the user has unfollowed 25 people by hand, for example, remind them that they can easily and quickly unfollow everyone that doesn’t follow them back with just ONE click for only $9.99! Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
16. Growth Hack #10: Break Stuff! If you figure out that most people that become paying customers have at least one interaction with your Customer Support team, it might make sense to get more people to interact with your support team, right? You could cause a “problem” that requires them to contact support. You can either let them contact support or you can use that to reach out proactively and fix the problem. It might help to do this after they’ve reached a certain milestone or Common Conversion Activity (CCA) during the Free Trial. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
17. Growth Hack #11: Orchestrated Virality If you think viral expansion has no place in B2B SaaS apps and they can’t “go viral” that’s fine. Disagreeing with me in this case doesn’t hurt me, it hurts you. Need I point to super-successful companies like Box and Yammer that have proven that internal, highly-orchestrated virality is not just possible but the key to infiltrating and locking-down Fortune 500 – very B2B – customers? Consider internal virality that can be orchestrated inside of companies (peer to peer, up and down the chain of command, etc.), between trading partners, from customer to vendor and vice versa, etc. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
18. Growth Hack #12: Turn Negatives into Positives Tell your users and customers something in a positive way rather than your typical negative speak. Instead of “18 people unsubscribed from this campaign” maybe say something like “You had 82% subscriber retention on this campaign.” Be nice to people. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
19. Growth Hack #13: Eliminate Dead Ends But don’t just tell people something, though. Tell them what to do next. Tell them why this information you’re giving them matters. “You had 82% subscriber retention on this campaign. Click here to find out how to keep even more subscribers next time!” Ask this about everything you send to your users / customers right now: “what can they easily do with this information?” If it’s not obvious – or easy – fix that. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
20. Growth Hack #14: Personal Follow-up This is simple… when someone signs-up for your app, send ‘em an email and say that you saw they signed-up and ask them an open-ended question to start a conversation. You can do this by hand or it can be automagical… but it can result in a huge boost in engagement and conversions. Some people don’t like to do this with automation, but I say automation isn’t meant to replace human interaction, it just allows you to do what you’d do by hand if you had unlimited time and resources. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
21. Growth Hack #15: Reactivation Nation! In addition to simply sending an email to try to get customers to come back and try your stuff again, you can reactivate Free Trials that didn’t convert – as well as former / deactivated users – another way. Leverage email pre-targeting and retargeting There are ways to use an email address to target social media users as well as more “traditional” ad retargeting by using their email address. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
22. Growth Hack #16: Capitalize on Understanding Social Capital The reality is… most apps ask people to share the app with their friends way too early in their relationship. People don’t know, like, and trust you yet, and you’re asking them on step 3 of your Free Trial sign-up to share your app with their colleagues. Let’s talk about Social Capital and you’ll understand why that doesn’t work. One of the simplest things you can do is remove the “invite a colleague” thing from the initial engagement process in your Free Trial. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
23. Growth Hack #17: IRL Gifts Send ‘em something in real life… a gift; ideally something that helps them do more with your product, faster. But know the difference between a gift and a reward. A gift is delightful and unexpected. A reward is a quid pro quo like “sign-up and activate your account and we’ll send you a t-shirt”… rewards have their place, but gifts mean more. Physical Welcome Packet, a book, a t-shirt, etc. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
24. Growth Hack #18: Stop Wasting Real Estate There’s an epidemic of “wasted” real estate in SaaS apps that could be used to drive conversions, viral expansion, etc. Think about post-signup / login pages, introducing interstitials into the mix, various screens in-app, forgot your password pages… even the post- Logout Page. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
25. Growth Hack #19: Help Page Offer If you have a survey at the end of your help page, when someone says “yes, this was helpful” have a CTA for a One Time Offer (OTO) or to spread the word. If you “power” (remember… don’t do that, see #3 above) help pages/ systems for SaaS vendors, consider helping them make this happen. You instantly become MUCH more valuable in the process. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
26. Growth Hack #20: Project-Thinking is Hurting your LTV LTV is Customer Lifetime Value and it is the amount of revenue your customer will pay you while they’re a customer. The longer the customer lifetime, the higher the LTV. Makes sense, right? Well… if your customers come in for short-term projects, they might not stay that long, giving you a low LTV. So, if you have a project-oriented customer-base – maybe you have a Project Management system – you have to educate them on *other* ways to use your SaaS so they’ll continue to beyond the project they came in for. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
27. Growth Hack #21: Dynamic Entry Points Web Apps haven’t changed much (see #1 above) since they were created, and few are truly taking advantage of what that web-centricity (network effect) really means. Everyone who enters your app for the first time comes in through the same process They have the same experience, even though they came in with different intent, from different sources, etc. Your “dynamic” web app is doing nothing to serve the dynamic nature of your audience. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
28. Growth Hack #21: Dynamic Entry Points Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
29. Growth Hack #22: (Bonus!) Use your imagination! What we call Growth Hacking today, and what it’s been forever and what it’ll be later – Marketing – isn’t just about tactics. Tactics change. Tactics are different for every situation. No, it’s about a mindset of understanding customer and user behavior as well as market dynamics and what’s technically possible – or should be – and using your imagination to make it happen. There are no rules here… just a way of thinking about stuff. Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
30. Growth Hack #23: Let’s Optimize your SaaS Sales Funnel Get your SaaS Sales Funnel Optimization Review and I’ll help you start converting more customers… fast! Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
31. Growth Hacking Presentation Source This presentation is based on my epic “SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacks to Test Today” post... you can find a lot more detail on the techniques and ideas presented here: http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
32. Thank You! Lincoln Murphy Sixteen Ventures lincoln@sixteenventures.com http://sixteenventures.com @lincolnmurphy Copyright© 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com