Business - @stuartgh

‘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)

Spotlight on B2C: Attracting revenue through your social media activities from Stuart G. Hall

In case (like me) you didn’t get along to the GrowthHacking Conference 2014 in London today, the good news is there’s a set of group notes available.

And I’ll create the top ideas below, from individual presenters, where each top tip appeals to me/my own experience, using the #ghc14 on twitter to source the quotes:

Sean Ellis Testing is the only way to know if the idea is great. Test all growth levers – e.g. Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral
Lesley Eccles Investment adds pressure – you HAVE to make it work.
Zack Onisko Product Hunt has grown quickly because they only let influencers submit products in the early days.
Alex Depledge Apparently when you raise millions of dollars in investment you have to give yourself a C-level title.
Nilan Peiris Every app on your iPhone has an insanely high NPS
Karl Banks Find out what is deeply stopping visitors and accept that fixing it is the only way to grow.
Rand Fishkin In 2007 there were 1 billion Google searches a day. There are now over 6 billion a day & free keyword tool http://keywordtool.io/ (plus check out semrush and buzzsumo) and slide deck below…
Marie Steinthaler Use all the tools and build a growth stack (image below)
Simon Dance We’ve seen a direct correlation between pages that get crawled regularly & their number of visits
Jamie Quint Spend 25% of your engineering time on getting your metrics and dashboards right & focus on longer term usage rather than the number of new users: sustainable growth
Sofia Quintero Sustainable business is building a community around your product and transactions.
Saul Klein #Technologists need to put structure & discipline around marketing’ & It’s important to balance your growth with your ability to grow & If you’re seeing hockey stick engagement but not downloads or signups, that’s a time to invest in growth & in early stage startups, growth hacking should be around the product and customer acquisition not awareness
Peep Laja If you torture data long enough, you can get it to say anything & you don’t need data, you need insights & Leave A/B tests running for longer, not statistically significant until you have 350 conversions; slide deck below
Ian Hogarth There’s no framework for growth-hacking, what works for a company may not work for another
Morgan Brown Growth is a team sport
Neil Patel Just tell ‘em you want to give them free tea AND money (talking about about Instagram influencers promoting brands) & Find sites who have similar audience to you & cut a CPA advertising deal to capture email addresses & grow your userbase