22 growth hacks you may not know yet

Starting a business is anything but easy, and it can also be quite expensive. Our Hackabu Growth Consulting Team has therefore compiled a list of 22 Growth Hacks and growth factors that will give your company the necessary boost. While there is no magic universal recipe for success, applying these Growth Hacks is the best way to learn from the successes of other entrepreneurs.

Make use of our growth ideas to learn the science, know-how, and creativity behind Growth Hacking, get inspired, and develop your own ideas.

1. UTILIZE FOMO TO CREATE A SENSE OF EXCLUSIVITY

FOMO (English acronym for Fear Of Missing Out) is a real phenomenon and can positively influence the demand for a product, event, or person. When someone talks about a new product and benefits from it, others are often attracted simply out of fear of missing out.

Case Study: Crocs. When this clever blend of shoe and sandal appeared on the market, we, like many others, were aesthetically horrified. Before we knew it, half the people we knew were wearing Crocs every day and were almost obsessed with how comfortable these shoes are. Soon, we also understood the benefits and got our own pair of Crocs.

Use this psychological principle to your advantage by artificially limiting access to your own product. This creates a sense of exclusivity and a “must-have” feeling.

Case Study: Ello, an ad-free social network. They used this psychological hack to improve the user base. Ello is available to your friends and to those who already use the network. The trick is, you can only join Ello if you have received an invitation from someone. This generated curiosity and a strong sense of FOMO. The result? More users!

Many successful bars and clubs started with this concept by only inviting people who received an SMS from one of the promoters.

 

2. DOWN-SELLING VS. UP-SELLING (80% MORE REVENUE)

A good sales tactic starts by introducing customers to lower-priced products and then encouraging them to buy more expensive models, also known as the traditional Trading-Up approach.

The price anchoring technique, on the other hand, emphasizes the highest price in the portfolio first, followed by presenting a price that suddenly appears much cheaper and more convincing.

Case Study: Amazon sold various models of billiard tables with a price range of $329 – 3,000. In the first week, customers were shown the lower end of the price range, and gradually, more expensive models were displayed. Result: The average table sales revenue that week was $550.

During the second week, users were immediately shown a $3,000 table, regardless of what they wanted to see. All other products were displayed in descending order of price and quality. Result: an average sales value of over $1,000.

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3. TIME-LIMITED OFFERS FOR TARGETED USERS

Similar to the FOMO hack, you create a sense of urgency for a product by offering a deal with a countdown timer for the product to virtually “force” user action. The trick is to offer these special deals to specific users – preferably those who have viewed a specific product page three times or more but abandoned their shopping cart due to price, shipping costs, availability, etc. The strategy here is to put pressure on the user to complete the purchase. Imagine, for example, an Amazon “Lightning Deal” available only to selected users to make it appear more attractive.

Keyword: Urgency!

4. ONE-TIME DISCOUNTS IN THE SHOPPING CART

Dashboard with Add to Cart stats

Users often fill their online shopping carts but never complete the purchase. This can happen for various reasons: perhaps they didn’t have time to complete the transaction, had concerns and/or needed more time to think before making the purchase, or maybe the price just wasn’t right. If a user has “abandoned” a full online shopping cart and hasn’t revisited the page to complete the transaction, it makes sense to send them an email the next day stating that they have “forgotten” something in their cart. If the purchase is still not completed after two weeks, you could offer the user a discount of, for example, 35% on the purchase and/or a coupon code that is valid for only, say, three days. This gives an interested user a one-time purchasing opportunity that would be foolish to miss.

Case Study: The Honest Company was losing a lot of money due to abandoned online shopping. By implementing a suitable automated email sequence, they were able to increase their conversion rate by six times!

 

5. A SMALL CHANGE – 82% INCREASE IN REVENUE

Option 1: One cupcake and 2 cookies for $10
Option 2: One cupcake for $10 + 2 cookies free

A study by Santa Clara University shows that people were willing to pay up to 82% more for the 2nd option.

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6. A SIMPLE TRICK TO IMPROVE YOUR GOOGLE RANKING

Wikipedia is known to have very good online rankings. All you have to do to benefit from it is to place your website link on Wikipedia.

1. Visit a page on Wikipedia related to your business subject.
2. Click on “Edit” on that page.
3. Add an interesting fact and a link to your website article or blog. Don’t try to promote yourself. All you need is a link.

Two minutes of your time, and it can be so easy to improve your Google rankings.

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7. SEO HACK TO INCREASE TRAFFIC BY 66%

Google loves new or updated content. Two guys, Ross Hudgens and Anthony Nelson, conducted a test. The only thing they did was update their old blog posts to update the last modified date. Ross’s traffic increased by 79%, and Anthony’s by 66%. Not only did Google’s algorithm respond to this, but in general, newer posts receive a higher ranking and seemingly more users. A simple trick to increase traffic, this time in the long term!

8. USE IMAGES FOR TEXT

People often respond more to images than pure text. Logically, photos and images have a stronger appeal to many people than the written word. Social media clearly demonstrates this – for example, through memes, quizzes, statistics, etc. Harness the inherent power of imagery by strategically building your written content on images and sharing them on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social networks.

For example, use beautiful landscapes for quotes, different designs for reviews, or funny pictures for funny facts or random tweets. Statistics show that content is most frequently shared when it creates “wow” moments. In second place was “laughter.” Find what suits your business and experiment with your own ideas.

Case Study: OverFacts started pairing posts with creative images and achieved an increase in users.‍

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9. EMAIL DRIP SEQUENCE TO INCREASE REVENUE

A so-called drip campaign is a series of automated emails sent to defined user groups. The theory is to increase communication and improve results. According to Vero, the average open rate of an email workflow is up to 80% higher than that of a single email campaign. By sending a series of emails, users can feel that you are there for them and available at any time. It also almost always works well to send targeted learning content to users via a workflow, but don’t overdo it. In other words, don’t send emails every day! Constant emails are annoying for all of us, and many users will quickly unsubscribe. Instead, try sending two to three emails per week.

Case Study: A provider of financial modeling courses called ‘Breaking Into Wall Street’ offers users a free trial of the course and access to some content. Subsequently, email users are provided with tips on how to make the most of the trial, along with other useful information. With this campaign, ‘Breaking Into Wall Street’ managed to significantly increase the email open rate and generate a higher number of paying users than with any previous campaign.

10. ADD-EVENT-TOOL

On Facebook, the automatic integration of events into the user’s email account, along with reminders, updates, location services, and more, works very well. Thanks to addevent.com, you can now add a “Add Event to Calendar” button to emails you send to users. With this button, custom events are automatically added to the calendar of your choice, and reminders are sent based on the regular email settings. You can even navigate directly to the location from the email later. One more tip: Include a link to the event or company page in the description by clicking “Click here for more information.” This yields excellent results when inviting users to events via email.

Try creating your own link through this link!

11. HOW TO CHOOSE TOPICS FOR BLOG POSTS

Content creators of all stripes will be excited. If you feel like your flow of ideas is running dry or you’re not getting the engagement you desire:

Go to Quora.com  and find questions related to your topic.
Plan links to a series of Quora posts on Buffer with your questions as the text body of your tweets.

Wait for 24 hours.

If a tweet achieves 3x above-average interaction rates, write the post.

12. PUT SOCIAL MEDIA ON AUTOPILOT

It’s important for users to stay in touch with you through frequent and timely interaction, but it’s neither healthy nor possible to be online around the clock. So, it’s time to schedule your online posts!

Use these tools: Buffer or Hootsuite 

Create visual templates in Canva 

Thank us later.

13. USE DISADVANTAGES AND COMPETITION TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

Your prospects will be looking for competing solutions. A fun thing to do is to mention them yourself, thus preventing it from happening. Your readers will feel like the homework has already been done, increasing the likelihood that customers will stick with your product. Therefore, describe your disadvantages openly and honestly, but give them a positive twist. Explain that your product excludes a certain feature because you focus on more important areas and emphasize your importance to the target market. Just like Eminem insulted himself before his opponent in the rap battle in 8 Mile.

 

14. “HACK” WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING

Word of mouth is probably the most effective form of marketing. According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family regarding product recommendations. MarketShare explains that word of mouth improves marketing effectiveness by up to 54%. There are many examples of brands like Dropbox and LinkedIn harnessing the power of positive word of mouth, but have you heard the story of Diamond Candles? To encourage customers to talk about their product, this company began including a free piece of jewelry with every candle they sold: a ring. Some lucky customers even received a ring with a real diamond worth up to $5,000!

The result? $1 million in revenue in just 12 months.

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15. RECOMMENDATIONS = 300% INCREASE IN REVENUE

Some interesting facts about product recommendations:

Personalized recommendations increase revenue by up to 300%.
100% of the top 10 websites in the Internet Retailer 500 directory use product recommendations.
70% of Amazon’s website is dedicated to product recommendations.

Get ready!

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16. THIRTEEN TIMES MORE REVIEWS

Reviews are hard to get, but they are powerful when it comes to generating revenue for your business. In other words, this is one of the most effective growth hacks.
Yotpo implemented a little trick for this.
They sent their customers an offer via email: “Leave a review to get 20% off your next visit!”

The result: thirteen times more reviews!

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17. UTILIZE OFFLINE WORD OF MOUTH

We’ve already established how important and effective word of mouth is, but here are some suggestions on how to hack the offline game.

Shazam users use their phones to discover the name of good songs, automatically getting a lot of attention. Another app developed to generate buzz is Urbanspoon. This app requires users to shake their devices conspicuously. The huge pink mustaches painted on every Lyft car have probably not escaped your notice.

All of these are examples of brands “hacking” human curiosity to generate word of mouth.

Now it’s your turn to get creative!

 

18. SELF-INTEREST OR ALTRUISM?

Airbnb conducted an interesting A/B test by communicating different value propositions for the same product.

In one email, they offered users the opportunity to earn $25 by inviting a friend (self-interest). In the other email, users were informed that they could share $25 with their friend (altruistic).

What do you think performed better?
Caution for pessimists! The altruistic email performed better overall.
Perhaps it’s time to explore a selfless referral scheme.

19. ACCELERATE VIRAL GROWTH

Instead of asking your customers to invite many friends to get something valuable, start with a simple task: ask them to invite just one friend.
The result can be an increase of 250% or more!

For details, check Adelyn Zhou of Nextdoor.

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20. INCREASE LIFETIME VALUE UP TO 20 TIMES

Lowering prices to prevent user churn should generally be a last resort. Because if customers don’t see value in your product, they generally won’t use it anymore, even if it only costs 50 cents per month.
Slidebean took the opposite approach: they started charging four times more for their product.

What was the result?

Churn rate decreased from 25% to 6.53%.
Lifetime value increased from 22 to $444 (20x!)

21. INCREASE VALUE WITHOUT CHANGING YOUR PRODUCT

This approach is based on a combination of psychology and behavioral economics.

In an experiment, participants started tasting a wine worth $5 per bottle and continued tasting more expensive wines up to a price of $90 per bottle (at least that’s what they were told). The result: the more expensive the wine, the better it tasted. In addition, CAT scans showed an increase in activity in areas of the brain associated with pleasure.

In reality, all the wines used in the experiment were of the same quality.

Cheers!

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22. ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS!

Probably the easiest of all growth hacks and the most overlooked.

Ask your customers what they like about your product, what they don’t like, and what could be improved. This can improve customer retention and the perception of your customer service, as well as provide valuable insights for the growth of your brand. This is a win-win for everyone involved!

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