Best growth strategies used by successful products
Strategies to boost your product’s user base and revenue.
Growth is a continuous process wherein you need to keep optimizing your product to generate more and more revenue. But, where to start?
Sharing some useful growth marketing strategies which will help you grow your product.
1. User acquisition strategies
For consistent growth, you need to keep adding new users to your platform.
a) Convert web visitors into mobile users
Add a popup/on-site messaging on your website to prompt users to download the app. It could be only text-based or you could try adding an image to it and see which one is performing better. You could even capture the user’s mobile number and send them an app download link.
b) Launch a referral program
Your users are your biggest advocates! Users who already like your product and recommend it to their personal network should be rewarded. Launching a referral program can help you expand your reach.
c) App Store Optimization(ASO)
Focus on your keywords, add your app’s primary features and offerings in the description along with eye-catching screenshots of the app.
Provide regular app update details, which tells users that the app is being actively maintained and constantly adding new features to improve the user experience. Creating better visibility is the key to more downloads.
2. User activation strategies
Once users have downloaded the app, they also need to launch it and explore it. Activation rates lower than 85% calls for deeper analysis to identify and fix activation issues.
a) Upgrade your onboarding process
Highlight the top features/benefits of your product to spike activation numbers. Also, reach new users through different channels — send catchy welcome emails, app push, etc.
b) Incentivize activation
Provide monetary benefits to motivate users to spend time on your app.
c) In-app exclusive offers
Offer app-exclusive offers/early access to new features/products etc. through in-app messaging. In-apps are useful because they capture the user’s attention when they are using your product and the most active.
3. User retention strategies
After the user has successfully downloaded and launched your app, focus now on how to keep users coming back.
When retention is strong, so is the revenue.
a) Run contests
Create challenges for users to complete and engage them on the app. Try to create it around a popular topic/theme to get a good number of participants.
b) User activity-based rewarding
Provide reward points/coins on performing certain actions on the app such as winning quizzes/trivia, providing feedback/reviews of products, etc. This will add a touch of Gamification to your product and will increase the user’s interaction with your product.
c) Adding content regularly
You need to engage users by adding new content on a regular basis otherwise you tend to lose user’s attention over time and eventually lead to an increasing churn rate.
4. User engagement strategies
Focussing on engagement is a no-brainer when it comes to increasing your DAU and MAU.
a) Friendly push notification
Sending a minimum one or two push notifications/day is a good way to remind the user of your product. One of the most common use cases is of ‘Cart abandonment’ — send a friendly ‘Your cart misses you/You left something in your cart’ push reminder to bring the user back to the product.
b) Retrace your steps
Analyze the user journey and check wherein the journey users are dropping off. Evaluate the drop-off points and work towards retaining customers through that step of the user journey.
5. Conversion strategies
If you have successfully retained and engaged your users, then half of the battle is won. Now, you need to focus on understanding the user needs and behavior to pitch the right products to them and increase the conversion% in the process.
a) Product Marketing
Analyze user cohorts and funnels, gather user’s data through different sources, and then pitch products to different user segments based on their preferences, demographics, educational background, age, gender, etc.
b) Re-marketing
Retargeting ads should be run to entice lost users through various discounts.
Capture users at every possible drop off point in the pre-purchase funnel — product viewed but not added to cart, add to cart but not purchased, etc and send them re-marketing messages with a discount coupon.
Create urgency by adding — ‘offer valid for a limited period only’ text in your messaging.
c) Purchase failure
Keep a track of purchase failures occurring due to incorrect coupon code applied or payment gateway issues and help these users convert by offering them an alternative coupon code/payment method.
6. Churn reduction strategies
Churn is unavoidable. But you can try to reduce it by following some basic steps:
a) Keep a regular check
Compare daily uninstalls with daily installs and activations, if there is a big gap then you need to seriously deep dive and analyze where are you going wrong with your product.
b) Surveys
Asking for feedback from users can help you identify the issues that are being faced by them and then work towards solving those problems so that other users don’t face the same issues and leave.
c) Analyze performance issues
Latency, bugs, and battery drain are some of the common performance issues that lead to users abandoning the app after 1-3 times of use. Avoid these at all costs.
Product Growth process takes time and doesn’t deliver quick results. You need to perform a lot of experiments to identify what is working and what’s not working and accordingly course correct.
