3 Growth 'Hacks' for Online Businesses
Use these tactics to get ahead of your competition.
Welcome to Above The Fold! Your weekly dose of business development for SMEs.
Let's face it. Every business is trying to grow their numbers. From Mom & Pop's, to startups, to Forture 500.
Their success is varied.
That's just how it is.
But what I have to say in today's edition of Above The Fold will give you an edge over the others in your growth operations.
I've brought you 3 ‘hacks’ that you can use for your online business to grow into something bigger and better.
Let's get into it.
Figure out a way to publish a chrome extension with your service.
Google Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers with over 60% of internet users using it as their browser of choice. For a lot of people, Chrome is indispensable.
Within Chrome is the Chrome Web Store, which is the native app marketplace allowing you to publish apps and extensions. These are shortcuts to your application placed on a user’s browser for just $5 one-time fee.
When a user adds your web application to chrome, he will constantly see a link to your service in the browser's bookmarks bar, leading to a greater chance to revisit.
Just make sure that the extension is actually useful, otherwise you'd have wasted the time, resources and opportunity.
Incorporate "random acts of kindness" by giving back to your least engaged users.
Who doesn't like free gifts?
Giving away something free without asking - a random act of kindness - is an established loyalty generating tactic, especially in retail businesses.
Identify dis-engaged users (such as users who haven't logged in for X weeks), and/or most engaged ones.
Offer a personalized discount or coupon code - just as a gesture of thanks.
This creates a "surprise and delight" reaction, something even HBR calls the "most powerful marketing tool".
For example, HostelWorld used to give out its least engaged users discount coupons as a gesture of thanks. To further the impact, it personalizes the discout coupon message ("Hey Joshua") and hints at its use ("for your next trip").
Incorporate a larger business’ product, service, or API into your own to leverage their user base, and gain instant credibility.
Imagine this situation; you sell an email outreach tool designed for salespeople. You're a small company with just 100 users.
You notice that a lot of your customers use Salesforce to manage customer relationships. They get email data from their Salesforce CRM and plug it into your outreach tool.
If you can create an integration that automates this process, you would:
A. Make your users' jobs easier.
B. Gain visibility among Salesforce's much larger audience.
C. Give Salesforce's users a faster way to manage a small task
This is the logic behind integrating your product with larger businesses' products or APIs.
Incorporaing these tactics into your business the right way, will definitely help you gain more loyal customers, which will snowball into something bigger and better.
Always be on the lookout for a way to improve your brand or business even by a little bit. Subscribing to Above The Fold is one way.
Till next week.
-Jay.
Reply to this email or hit me up on abov@post.com, if you have any questions.