Growth Hacking b2b SaGrowth Hacking: 21 Actionable and Unique B2B SaaS Growth Hacks you can Test Today

7/30/2019 Growth Hacking b2b SaGrowth Hacking: 21 Actionable and Unique B2B SaaS Growth Hacks you can Test Today

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Growth Hacking: 21B2B SaaS Growth

Hacks to Test TodayA guide by SaaS Marketing expert and Growth Hacker

Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures


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What is Growth Hacking?

Growth Hacking is not tactics, techniques, or even strategies.More than anything, its a mindset of understandingcustomer and user behavior as well as market dynamics and

whats technically possible or should be and using yourimagination to make it happen.

Copyright 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved.


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Growth Hacking Tactics vs. Marketing Strategy

Whats included here are tactics and - while everyone loves

tactics - if they dont make sense within your very wellthought-out SaaS marketing strategy, you should probablynot implement them, right?

In fact, you should also probably make sure you have a wellthought-out SaaS marketing strategy, too.



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Do these hacks work? Got examples or results?

Some of these growth hacks Ive used and have seen a big impactothers are just ideas I havent implemented yet but might if the occasion

arises and some are just crazy ideas that I think would work if thesituation is right.

Im not gonna tell you which ones are which so use your imagination and

a good bit of caution.Im also not going to show you live examples of what Ive implemented orgive you results. You see, Ive helped my clients with these tactics andtheyd like a little bit more time out in front of you.



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The Goal of this Presentation on Growth Hacking

The goal is to get you thinking in the right direction, thats all.

Copyright 2013 Lincoln Murphy. All Rights Reserved. http://sixteenventures.com
http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks


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Growth Hacking Presentation Source


This presentation is based on my epic SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacksto Test Today post... you can find a lot more detail on the techniques andideas presented here:

http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks
http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks


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Growth Hack #1: Back Fill Data for Fun and Profit

This is 2013 and data is more pervasive and easier to get than everbefore.

Why not auto-fill as much as possible for your customers surprise themwith how easy things are for them to get going.

Auto-fill and then let them correct/update/etc. Not doing this in this dayand age is just lazy

Example: A SaaS CRM that automatically adds demographic informationto customers as theyre added.



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Growth Hack #2: Dedicated Widget Landing Pages

What if you thought real hard about how you could leverage that logicpayload as the truly viral marketing scheme that it is?

Well, first you might treat it like an actual marketing campaign, meaningyou would send people to a dedicated landing page from your widget.

Tons of SaaS companies have widgets that their customers embed on theirwebsites, and most of those have links back to their sites, right? Okay.

Well, the problem is most companies just link back to their mainmarketing site.



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Growth Hack #3: Powered By Ego!

Im sorry, but powered by is just stupid its time to get a real Call toAction (CTA).

Powered by is all about ego its all about you.. Make it about them.

Maybe in 2003 Powered by was fine because technology was allooh neato. but now its 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

http://www.dfj.com/news/article_26.shtmlhttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://www.dfj.com/news/article_26.shtmlhttp://www.dfj.com/news/article_26.shtml


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Growth Hack #4: Aggressive Widgets

IWhat if we really, really reallyused Widgets to our advantage!?!?What could we do.

Well, how about instead of sending people who click on Powered byto a landing page (you wont do that, right? See #3), get em to sign-upor learn more right there in the widget.

Maybe dont do this with your paying customers (or do I dunno), but ifthe idea behind all these people out there using your stuff for free isviral expansion and spreading the word, then its up to you to makethat happen.

http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#3http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#3http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#3


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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 infoscreen in the widget (see #2 and #4 above)

If they showed interest, dont let em go that easy!

http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#2http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#4http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#4http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#4http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#2http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#2


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Growth Hack #6: Thank You for Missing Opportunities

We know that businesses that have a mailing list and let folks opt-in tothat list often miss the opportunity presented by the thank you page.

They dont generally customize this or use it for up- or cross-sells or toengage further.

Unfortunately, the opportunity missing also happens with the Email

Marketing companies themselves.Are you being aggressive enough on default Please Confirm pages andemails to ensure that the person signing-up for the list knows they can and should sign-up for your Email Marketing app?



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Growth Hack #7: Tweetactional Messages?

Due to GMails recent changes, something to test is taking their EmailAddress, finding their Twitter Handle (several ways to do this), and then

tweeting transactional messages / reports to them as well as sendingthem an email.

Of course, you could also ask them for their Twitter handle or get them to

login via Twitter, too. Whatever.If youd like to be less aggressive, you could simply use Twitter to remindthem to check their email because you sent them their weekly activityreport!

http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-gmail-tabbed-inboxhttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-gmail-tabbed-inbox


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Growth Hack #8: Help Them Help You

If you push content to 3rd party sites lets say you make it super easy toshare videos from your app via YouTube optimize that output to sendtraffic 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 its a Google property, videos show up in Googlesearch engine result pages (SERPs).

So even if people arent searching directly on Youtube, they might besearching on Google, find the video, see your URL in the description orannotation, 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


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Growth Hack #9: Well Do it For You For a Fee

After your users do a few things by hand, show em an offer to do it forthem.

Take FriendOrFollow for example, I can either click individual followers tounfollow them or I can subscribe to their service and unfollow everyone inone fell swoop.

Once the user has unfollowed 25 people by hand, for example, remindthem that they can easily and quickly unfollow everyone that doesntfollow them back with just ONE click for only $9.99!

http://friendorfollow.com/http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://friendorfollow.com/http://friendorfollow.com/


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Growth Hack #10: Break Stuff!

If you figure out that most people that become paying customers have atleast 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 oryou can use that to reach outproactively and fix the problem.

It might help to do this after theyve reached a certain milestone orCommon Conversion Activity (CCA) during the Free Trial.

http://sixteenventures.com/free-trial-metricshttp://sixteenventures.com/free-trial-metricshttp://sixteenventures.com/free-trial-metricshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/free-trial-metricshttp://sixteenventures.com/free-trial-metricshttp://sixteenventures.com/free-trial-metricshttp://sixteenventures.com/free-trial-metrics


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Growth Hack #11: Orchestrated Virality

If you think viral expansion has no place in B2B SaaS apps and they cantgo viral thats fine. Disagreeing with me in this case doesnt hurt me, ithurts you.

Need I point to super-successful companies like Box and Yammer thathave proven that internal, highly-orchestrated virality is not just possiblebut 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


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Growth Hack #12: Turn Negatives into Positives

Tell your users and customers something in a positive way rather thanyour 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.



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Growth Hack #13: Eliminate Dead Ends

But dont just tell people something, though.

Tell them what to do next. Tell them why this information youre givingthem matters.

You had 82% subscriber retention on this campaign. Click here to findout 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 its not obvious oreasy fix that.



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Growth Hack #14: Personal Follow-up

This is simple when someone signs-up for your app, send em an emailand say that you saw they signed-up and ask them an open-endedquestion to start a conversation.

You can do this by hand or it can be automagical but it can result in ahuge boost in engagement and conversions.

Some people dont like to do this with automation, but I say automationisnt meant to replace human interaction, it just allows you to do whatyoud do by hand if you had unlimited time and resources.



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Growth Hack #15: Reactivation Nation!

In addition to simply sending an email to try to get customers to comeback and try your stuff again, you can reactivate Free Trials that didntconvert 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 aswell as more traditional ad retargeting by using their email address.



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Growth Hack #16: Capitalize on Understanding Social Capital

The reality is most apps ask people to share the app with their friendsway too early in their relationship.

People dont know, like, and trust you yet, and youre asking them onstep 3 of your Free Trial sign-up to share your app with their colleagues.

Lets talk about Social Capital and youll understand why that doesntwork.

One of the simplest things you can do is remove the invite a colleaguething from the initial engagement process in your Free Trial.



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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 delightfuland unexpected. A reward is a quid pro quo like sign-up and activate

your account and well send you a t-shirt rewards have their place, butgifts mean more.

Physical Welcome Packet, a book, a t-shirt, etc.



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Growth Hack #18: Stop Wasting Real Estate

Theres an epidemic of wasted real estate in SaaS apps that could beused 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.



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Growth Hack #19: Help Page Offer

If you have a survey at the end of your help page, when someone saysyes, this was helpful have a CTA for a One Time Offer (OTO) or tospread the word.

If you power (remember dont do that, see #3 above) help pages/systems for SaaS vendors, consider helping them make this happen. Youinstantly become MUCH more valuable in the process.

http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#3http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#3


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Growth Hack #20: Project-Thinking is Hurting your LTV

LTV is Customer Lifetime Value and it is the amount of revenue yourcustomer will pay you while theyre 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 notstay that long, giving you a low LTV.

So, if you have a project-oriented customer-base maybe you have aProject Management system you have to educate them on *other* waysto use your SaaS so theyll continue to beyond the project they came infor.



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Growth Hack #21: Dynamic Entry Points

Web Apps havent 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 thesame process

They have the same experience, even though they came in with differentintent, 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
http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#1http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks#1


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Growth Hack #21: Dynamic Entry Points



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Growth Hack #22: (Bonus!)Use your imagination!

What we call Growth Hacking today, and what its been forever and what

itll be later Marketing isnt just about tactics. Tactics change. Tacticsare different for every situation.

No, its about a mindset of understanding customer and user behavior as

well as market dynamics and whats 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.



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Growth Hack #23: LetsOptimize your SaaS Sales Funnel

Get your SaaS Sales Funnel Optimization Review and Ill help you startconverting more customers fast!

http://sixteenventures.com/saas-sales-funnel-optimization-reviewhttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-sales-funnel-optimization-reviewhttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-sales-funnel-optimization-review


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Growth Hacking Presentation Source

This presentation is based on my epic SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacksto Test Today post... you can find a lot more detail on the techniques andideas presented here:

http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks

http://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hackshttp://sixteenventures.com/saas-marketing-growth-hacks


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Thank You!

Lincoln Murphy

Sixteen Ventures

[email protected]

http://sixteenventures.com

@lincolnmurphy
http://twitter.com/lincolnmurphyhttp://sixteenventures.com/mailto:[email protected]://sixteenventures.com/http://twitter.com/lincolnmurphyhttp://twitter.com/lincolnmurphyhttp://sixteenventures.com/http://sixteenventures.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://sixteenventures.com/http://sixteenventures.com/

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Growth Hacking b2b SaGrowth Hacking: 21 Actionable and Unique B2B SaaS Growth Hacks you can Test Today