We’ve aggregated many of the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this growth report.
This is how you stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Our community consists of 1,000 startup founders and VPs of growth from later-stage companies. We have 400 YC founders, plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo and Ritual.
You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group or marketing training program.
Without further ado, on to our community’s advice.
Use behavioral psychology for more referrals
Insights from Kristen Berman of Irrational Labs.
How much would you want to be paid to give your friend a knowingly bad restaurant recommendation? Likely a lot, if you value the friendship. This is called a “social norm,” and it prevents us from selling out our friends.
Keep that in your head while you consider this next fact: When companies offer cash for referrals (“get $15 to refer a friend!”), they focus too much on “market norms.” A market norm is transactional and assumes money is the only thing that motivates us.
- Your customer in a social norm: I won’t refer unless it’s good for my friends.
- Your customer in a market norm: I won’t refer unless you pay me enough money!
Most companies are forgetting to play up the social norm.
When you ask customers to make a referral, make sure they are convinced this is good for their friends. Try words like “hook a friend up” or “do a favor.” Or, move fully into the social realm and let the referrer be a hero: Allow them to fully gift the payout to their friend.
Use accelerated retargeting to increase conversions
Insights from Demand Curve.
Often, retargeting campaigns trickle out ads to website visitors for a six-month period following a site visit. This is an overly broad approach that can be better segmented.
Consider accelerated retargeting, in which you take advantage of the fact that people are more likely to click on a retargeting ad if it’s seen in the seven days following a site visit. Therefore, you can segment retargeting ads into two time windows:
- Drastically increase the frequency of ads in the 4-7 days following a site visit.
- Afterward, scale back the frequency so visitors only see ads approximately once every three weeks. If you show ads more than this, people can get annoyed and hide all ads from you forever.
Accelerated retargeting has resulted in 1.5x-2x performance for most of the accounts we’ve worked on.
A great onboarding email
This automated email (click to view) from bidet-maker Omigo is a strong example of a post-purchase onboarding email.
Their email visualizes setup steps to remove any upfront apprehension or confusion. And each step includes an “out” link where you click for more context and options if you don’t understand or don’t have the ability to follow their advice.
This thoughtful approach solves two problems: (1) a quick visualization of how to remove onboarding friction and (2) one-click access to dive deeper when needed.