Category Archives: Marketing

A mini case study – growth hacking within the enterprise

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‘Growth hacking’ is a fashionable subject with the rise of startups, but it’s not so easy to established marketers to know how to use some of the insights to help in improving performance in day to day business activity.

Part of this is down to the fact its as much about mindset, as it is using tools to achieve growth.

I therefore wanted to share a mini ‘hack’ I achieved at Shopping,com UK, improving our email subscriber rate by 360% at virtually no cost, which was down to taking a growth hacking approach to the problem.

The challenge: I needed to significantly added subscribers to our email newsletter. I did this by finding and then mining an existing SDC e-marketing database which contained a historic list of inactive fans.

The result: Coupled with the design input from a creative marketing executive leading to improvements in content and design of email achieved significant increase (360%) in site subscriber sign ups: from 4318 – (Aug 2010 newsletter with 12.5% open rate) – to 19,934 for July 2011 newsletter (with 57.9% open rate)

How to find early stage investors using LinkedIn

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LinkedIn_investors

Click the image to go to LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature, displaying results for keywords “angel investors” & for location “London, United Kingdom”

LinkedIn’s Advance Search is an effective way to find potential investors. Simply put the keywords “angel investor” or “seed investor” with UK as the location. Because of my network the search results in 509 entries for “seed investor” and over 1.4K for the keywords “angel investor”. These included 1st degree connections I can contact directly, 2nd degree connections which share a connection with me, and 3rd/Group connections.

The method that I have been trained in by Mike Clark at a recent Entrepreneurs in London meetup (click link for post-meetup discussion) says you then contact your ‘shared connection’ for 2nd degree connections (the link text appears in green below the entry) and ask them to email the target with the details you want them to receive. It works much better than LinkedIn’s ‘Get Introduced’ feature!

Next, wondering about what to send investor, in the way of a deck and intro text? See below for expert advice from Chance Barnett, CEO of crowdfunding.com:

When you ask for intros, give the person making the introduction a very short email ‘blurb’ of suggested language for them to use. Make sure that blurb includes a single link / call to action. By using a single link to your online profile on a site, you can allow people to pass along your pitch and all your core company info with a single URL. The moment that any potential investor clicks on that link, they experience the pitch and message you’ve crafted for them online, in a more dynamic and powerful environment than just a PPT attachment.

In my case, when I was fundraising for Crowdfunder in the past and people made intros to investors, that message and link went something like this:

“Hey,

I wanted you to meet Chance, the CEO of Crowdfunder.

He’s doing some interesting stuff with equity crowdfunding and the company has some great growth as a leader in the space. Thought you two might want to chat.

His deck and info on the company are here:

http://crowdfunder.com/crowdfunder

Hope you two connect,”