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

Growth Hacking: 21
B2B SaaS Growth
Hacks to Test Today
A guide by SaaS Marketing expert and Growth Hacker
Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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”

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.

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!

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?

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Growth Hack #21: Dynamic Entry Points

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.

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!

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

Thank You!
Lincoln Murphy
Sixteen Ventures
lincoln@sixteenventures.com
http://sixteenventures.com
@lincolnmurphy

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

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