Growth Hacker’s Guide toDigital Marketing on a

Shoestring Budget

IntroductionIt’s an age-old question, but it’s still more relevant than ever. How can we maximise our marketing impact and ROI with a limited budget?

In a lot of ways, digital marketing has evened the playing field for smaller business or organisations without big marketing budgets. This has been helped by social media, SEO strategy and by the emergence of free tools to supercharge marketing on a shoestring.

We’re in an age of growth hacking, money-saving/time-saving tactics and savvy digital marketing, and there are so many ways to create a big impact with marketing without investing huge amounts of money.

This Growth Hacker’s guide to Digital Marketing on a Budget, will give you lots of great tactics for improving your marketing performance fast!

Philip StoreyFounder& CEO @ Enchant

Contents

• Analyse what’s working and what’s not

• Review your agencies

• Review your technology

• Map out your customer lifecycle

• Embrace automation

• Use segmentation & dynamic content

• Optimise, test and experiment

• Start a customer reactivation strategy

Analyse what’s working and what’s not

Philip’s tip:

“The companies that typically struggle at this stage, are those that micro-analyse. Don't be tempted to bring in lots of data – keep it lean. If you don't ensure that it's simple and high-level, you'll quickly end up in state of paralysis of analysis.”

First things first – you need to get a clear picture of what's working and what's not working. You need to do this quickly. The best way to do this, is to get this all onto one page.

Map out the following:

• The channels you currently have in play• Are they performing well?• Are they high/medium/low cost?• Are they managed in-house or externally?• What is the ROI of the channel (you might need to consider cutting channels that don't perform well)• How much of your internal time and resources does each channel take?

Doing this, enables you to start analysing things simply. Our Founder & CEO, Philip Storey suggests that you don't overcomplicate it.

KEY POINT: Don’t skip analysis and don’t wing it – it’s super important! If you don't know where you are now, there's no way for you to tell where you need to go and what needs to change in the future.

Review your marketing tech

KEY POINT: There's an array of solutions and platforms out there in the market , but it's important to have strategic reasoning to choose them. Don’t dilute your impact by being spread too thinly. Also, there are so many great free tools available, so spend time see where you can making savings.

Nowadays, we have so many marketing tools at our disposal. It’s an easy trap to fall into hoarding these tools like a magpie, especially when you're trying to keep up with your competitors! They’re all so shiny and fun, but are they all really necessary? Cut the stuff you don’t need or that’s not getting you results or direct return on investment.

Renegotiate any contracts for things such as email marketing platforms or look to switch. Sometimes you can save as much as 50% of your spend on platforms and tools, just by having a really good look at what you have, consolidating and reselecting tools that are costing you more than they should.

Put your strategy before your technology:

We see so many businesses running before they can walk and putting their technology before having a clearly defined strategy – this is a big no-no! You should always select your marketing technology according to its suitability to your business goals and customer needs, not chose what is fashionable or what your competitors are using. Here are some key consideration for assessing suitability of your tech or proposed tech and tools:

• Cost-effectiveness• Audience demographic• How many channels does your tech incorporate?• Use trials and demos to see how effective the tech or tools can be• CRMs – are your marketing and sales aligned?• Consider CRMs, channels and platforms that could consolidate processes and reporting

Review your agenciesThis is the right time to review agencies. Agencies are expensive and you'll need to think about whether they're really needed. Only retain those that are providing significant gains or carrying out tasks that are critical.

If there are things that you can bring back in-house without too much trouble, now is the time to carefully consider doing this. Consider the following things when assessing how important your agencies are:

Philip ‘s tip:

Don’t be hasty with making decision on agencies. Respect the relationships you’ve worked hard to build, but do be clear about what needs to change and what you want from the future. One thing you can do, is brief your existing agencies on the new direction you have and ask them to respond. Work with them to find a way forward together.

Key considerations:

• What key purpose do they serve?• What return am I getting for the investment?• How much time are they saving me/my team?• How well could I/my team operate without their

support?• Can you retain their work/support, but in more

cost-efficient structure/capacity• Could you work with your agencies on a project

basis?

Map out your customer lifecycleIt’s crucial for any business to map a customer lifecycle. It will help you see the big picture and highlight the key touchpoints at which you should be communicating and interacting with your customers.

Pinpoint the communication gaps where you're not actively marketing to prospects and customers, when you could be –these will be small segments, which means they will be low cost for you to reach and highly relevant to the customer. This means they have a greater chance of success!

The customer lifecycle can be plotted to marketing channels with which you can target customers, such as email or paid social. See which works best and keep optimising, then move onto the next most lucrative one, then the next and so on.

Here’s one way of looking at what’s happening in your customer lifecycle:

Acquisition ConsiderationGetting

excited &experience

Retention&

advocacyWin-back

1

2

Sign-up on-site

Welcome email

1

2

Campaign emails

Basket abandonment

1

2

Order confirmation

Shipped email

Philip’s tip:

“Start by just looking at one channel. Get your team together and do this as a communal workshop. Ask people from other parts of the business to come – a good department to get some help with, is your call centre of customer services. They always know what’s missing, because they talk to your customers every single day.”

Then look to see where you can fill the gapsWhat we’ve done here, is look for all of the opportunities to add value to the customer experience, but also where there are significant gains to be had for the brand. It’s a simple exercise that can inform your lifecycle strategy:

Acquisition ConsiderationGetting

excited &experience

Retention&

advocacyWin-back

1

2

Sign-up on-site

Welcome email

1

2

Campaign emails

Basket abandonment

1

2

Order confirmation

Shipped email2Welcome series

3 Sign-up offline

4Nurture series

5 Ask for preferences

3 Product browse series

4Category browse series

3 Getting excited series

4How is <product>?

5 Anything else? series

1 Trialist > 2nd purchase

2Loyalty email program

3 Advocacy – tell friends

1 Non-engager program

2Customer win-back

3 Product replenishment

Philip’s tip:

“You can’t force people to do things, as it makes people distance themselves. Sending lots of broad email campaigns to your database will have the same effect. Target subscribers with relevant content throughout their customer journeys.”

Embrace automation

Philip’s tip:

Most retailers are only automating the basics, especially with email marketing, such as a welcome emails for subscribers to email newsletters or product purchases and cart abandonment emails for browsers who leave a basket online.

So companies are really missing the trick here. Very few companies seriously throwing themselves into marketing automation, but this is where the most successful marketers are making their money. You can automate so many emails and paid social activities. Embrace automation – it’s very effective and will free up your time to work on other things.”

Automation doesn’t have to be expensive

Automation is not just a tool for email marketing, you can automate an array of areas of your marketing to save time and resources. Here are the key areas to set up automated processes for:

• Social scheduling – Buffer, Sprout Social, Meet Edgar, Smarter Queue (to name a few)• Lead generation workflows/autoresponders – MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, HubSpot• Social listening/monitoring – often available within your scheduling tools or CRM• Content marketing ideation – Feedly, Buzzsumo, etc• Personalisation/cross-sells/upsells – Fresh Relevance, Nosto, Peerius (scalable according to budget)

Use segmentation & dynamic content

Philip’s tip:

“It's simple – only your imagination is the limit to what you can do (and perhaps your tools), but there's always something really interesting and impactful that you can do. Always.”

If you're taking a broad-brush approach to campaigns, this is the perfect time to start trying to be more relevant. Segment your campaigns to recipients, based on interest, RFM or any other segmentation model that feels useful for you to consider.

Look at what tools you might already have that can help you to get dynamic, personalised content into email. A great example of this is including products from the same category that someone has recently purchased from you, or even just including products that are based on each customer's average order value.

Great ways to add relevancy to your content:

• Segment your email database according to user data and behavioural insights

• Use geolocation to target customers with relevant content based on location

• Use other customer profile details to weave personalisation in you’re your marketing copy and emails

• Retarget website visitors and customers according to browsing behaviours and purchase history

• Insert dynamic content into emails, such as live content linked to your website, showing latest and relevant deals

• Leverage customer emotions and utilisation persuasion tactics, such as countdown clocks to ramp up the FOMO

Optimise, test and experiment

Philip’s tip:

“Testing is essentially free optimisation. If you're not doing it, you're missing out on the opportunity to make your role a lot more effective and easier. It's free gains – testing and experimentation is a culture – you either have it or you don't. Most don't, and this is where 10 or so small gains across a month can amount to a big shift in results."

If you're a bit slack on testing, experiments and you're not really doing conversion rate optimisation (CRO) anywhere other than on your website check out, then things are about to change.

Make a plan of what to test and get your team to share results from one channel to the other – whatever you learn in direct mail for example, can directly benefit PPC or email or paid social.

Some of the things that you can test, are:

• Frequency• Dynamic versus static content• Segmentation effectiveness• Personalisation• Long/medium/short-form content• Subject lines• Calls to action copy• Call to action colour (this one can be super effective!)

Just make sure you log all your tests in a spreadsheet!

Start a customer reactivation strategyIf you've not got an email marketing reactivation strategy in place, then you're really missing the trick.

Genuinely, up to 75% of your subscriber list could be inactive.

Why? Because unless you're specifically targeting your least active subscribers, you'll be wasting time and resources sending regular emails to lapsed subscribers who are not engaging with your campaigns. This means your email performance metrics will be skewed and you won't know the true value of your subscriber list.

Here are 8 tips for creating an email marketing reactivation strategy:

1. Analyse the key reasons why your least active subscribers are not engaging2. Clean up your list health (getting rid of inactive and obsolete accounts)3. Review your customer lifecycle and see if you are nurturing your customers effectively4. Review you content – could it be more engaging, more or less frequent, more relevant?5. Wake up your sleepy subscribers with optimised, click-worthy subject lines 6. Focus more on customer retention that gaining need subscribers7. Segment your least active subscribers and create dedicated campaigns to reactivate them8. Don’t be afraid of unsubscribes – a direct approach can reengage customers or remove those no longer interested

Key takeawaysThe purpose of this guide is to try to give you a strategic framework to start from, when budgets get cut or you start a new role where you’ve got a lot less to spend than you perhaps had in your last position.

Here’s a recap on the key takeaways from this guide:

• You should now be comfortable in analysing what’s working and what’s not, in simple form• You will now be able to review your agencies and how to have a dialogue with them about your situation• You’re armed to review your technology stacks• You know how to map your customer lifecycle and make quick gains• You are brought into the culture of marketing automation and how it can make your life much easier and create revenue• You’re aware of the benefits of segmentation & dynamic content• You have some ideas and framework for testing and optimising marketing campaigns• You can get a reactivation or win-back strategy in place easily, even if you start with manual campaigns for this

If you get stuck or just want to talk through what’s happening in your organisation right now and how you might adapt, ping an email to philip@enchantagency.com and we’ll be happy to chat!

Enchant Agency is a customer lifecycle marketing agency based in London. We enable businesses of all sizes to create and implement marketing

strategies that drive a high return on investment.

Formed in 2015, we’ve created impact for numerous top brands with marketing campaigns across various channels, such as email marketing,

marketing automation, social media, inbound and content marketing. We put your prospects and customers at the heart of your campaigns. We believe in

this customer-centric approach and the results speak for themselves.

Talk to one of our marketing specialists and grab some tips and advice to maximise your marketing potential. For a free session, get in touch: enchantagency.com/contact

the customer lifecycle marketing agency

hello@enchantagency.com @thisisenchantenchantagency.com