10 Practical Growth Hacking Strategies That You Probably Didn’t Know

What is growth hacking?

You see, we love shortcuts at TCF.

In crowdfunding, you don’t have much time to relax and wait patiently for growth.

Time is ticking and in growth hacker marketing you need to come up with as many experiments as possible in a short period of time. Getting acquainted with the rules of the game and trying to find the shortest path to the biggest results is what we do on a daily basis.

And it all comes down to using the best growth hacking strategies and techniques.

So, here are 10 cool hacks that will save you time and get you significantly more results.

1. Email Subscribers are Not Only for Email Marketing

Everybody knows that email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing channels.

However, everybody also knows that the open rates typically suck.

At best you can get a 30–40% open rate, which means that the vast majority of your subscribers won’t learn about you.

In order to mitigate that risk, let’s have a look at our first growth hacking strategies.

We use 5 additional channels to deliver info to the same subscribers.

We send them a link in the first email asking them to join our chatbot.

In the second email we direct them towards our VIP Facebook group, and in the third, to our Facebook page.

In addition to that, our ads team came up with the creative marketing idea of using their emails to create a custom audience in Facebook with ads targeted specifically to them.

And the Bonus Growth Hack: We send them calendar invites one hour before the launch, embedding the link of our campaign within the invite.

With these five channels we are able to deliver information to about 90% of our subscribers and get twice as much results.

2.How to Advertise on Snapchat, Pinterest and Twitter

Facebook and Google have the greatest targeting options.

Thanks to their wide reach and ubiquitous integration on other sites, they have the ability to track and narrow down your audience’s demographics and interests across a wide range of categories.

Cold targeting on other social media — like Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter — sucks.

They just don’t collect that much information from their audiences. And while this might be a good thing for users, it’s not so good for us advertisers.

But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t advertise on other social media channels.

You can. With this retargeting growth hack.

Embed the pixels of other social media sites in your landing page.

Drive cold and relevant traffic from Facebook and retarget them in Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, and even Reddit. Create custom ads tailored to the platform’s preferences and target it to your very relevant custom audience.

3. Facebook Page Directory You Probably Didn’t Know About

Facebook influencers are one of the biggest channels for traffic and results.

We always spend a lot of time researching and finding them, as Facebook search will never show you them all.

Although there are some advanced tricks on how to search Facebook, it still takes a lot of time to find the right categories and relevant pages you need for your product.

Well until we found THIS growth hacking technique!

Yes, it’s the directory of all facebook pages sorted by names. And it’s not visible anywhere in Facebook’s menu.

We just saved you weeks of research with this growth hack if you were planning an outreach campaign to big Facebook pages to post about your product. If not — you should.

4. Facebook’s 20% Text Rule Hack

All Facebook advertisers know that you shouldn’t have more than 20% text on your banner.

Previously, Facebook banned it. Now, it just decreases the reach if you have more than 20% text.

So what happens in those cases where you want to use more text, but can’t?

Or can you?

Here’s a growth hacking tip on how to use as much text as you want.

In reality, the Facebook algorithm reads the text based on the background tone, and the contrast between it and the text’s color. If you have a white background and your text is black Facebook will catch you. But if your text is grey — it won’t be recognized as a text, like the one in this banner:

Ad banner from our recruitment campaign

Here, Facebook reads only the “COOL” as a text.

So you just need to adjust the color of the text and bring it close to the background color.

Give this growth hack a try and check with this text overlay tool to see whether Facebook sees it as text or not.

5. Targeting Your Competitor’s Engaged Shoppers

If you know about lookalike audiences, you know how cool they are.

With it, you can create a bigger audience of people who are similar to your customers, visitors, even those who spend the most on your website.

Facebook has a lot of data and it knows how to combine alike people.

Usually people create audiences from their customers or backers. And this gives a signal to Facebook to find other people who bought similar products.

But what if you want to take it one step further and find those people who are actively searching — not for you — but checking out your competitors?

You can do that with this creative marketing strategy. By creating an audience with people who reached the “Add to Cart” section of your website and building a lookalike from it.

Facebook will then use its algorithm to show your ads to lookalike audiences who have added similar products to their carts.

As a result, people who were just about to buy a competitor product will see your ad popping up in their Facebook walls.

6. Creating Urgency

I have talked about this growth hack before, but it’s worth mentioning again.

Instead of decreasing the price to attract visitors with discounts, we did the opposite.

In one of our campaigns, we announced that prices will go up every single day at 11:59. And then we started to increase the prices in small increments.

This makes every day the best day to preorder it. Especially as your visitors can see the price going up is really happening.

People typically wait for a couple of days to see if this is a marketing trick or not.

When they see that it’s not, they speed up their buying decisions.

7. Use Your Links in Influencer Marketing

There are many growth hacking tips on how to get the best results from influencer marketing.

It’s one of our favorite channels, but it comes with challenges.

When big influencers post about you or your product, you will receive massive traffic.

But if you have a campaign on Kickstarter, they may just visit the page and leave. And you’ll never be able to retain them with Facebook’s pixel.

This is why we give influencers redirect links to use in their posts, where we embed not only Facebook’s but other social media’s pixels (see hack 2).

When a person clicks on the link, he will be directed to an intermediate page, where the pixels will be fired and then redirected to the destination page.

This way we are able to retain all the traffic from influencers.

We use our own branded links but there are many shortening services that allow you to embed your pixels.

And if you want to get better at influencer marketing, subscribe to our new experts’ blog Viral Mango for more influencer growth hacking examples.

8. Add the Most Important Info of Your Email in the P.S.

This is a short but useful growth hack which you can use in cold emailing.

If you have one important sentence that definitely should be read, add it as a P.S.

Journalists, editors and other people who have crowded inboxes, typically quickly scan the email before reading it all.

And guess what?

They all pay attention to the sentence starting with P.S.

P.S. So, write your strongest CTA or most important benefit here.

9. Discounts and Gifts to Incentivise Subscribers

Here’s a cool thing you can do to get more ecstatic subscribers.

If you have been preparing for your campaign for a long time — which you should be — this is the best growth hacking idea for you. Give additional small discounts to people from your subscriber list who have birthdays that month.

People love presents and gains.

Even a small gain, like 3% more discount, makes them more engaged with the product and increases the likelihood of them being the first to pre-order it when it’s live.

And if you are like us and prepare for your campaign for about 2–5 months, there will be many people who will have birthdays in those months.

Just send an email, telling that those subscribers who have birthdays this month will get presents.

Another example of gifts that we do in giveaways offering subscribers add ons, like “free engraving”.

The cool thing about these gifts is that they still have to back your campaign to get it.

You get guaranteed backers, early success and build momentum.

10. Get Advertiser Access to Promote Influencer Posts

And our last hack is also about influencer marketing.

Despite their big audiences, influencers don’t typically reach a significant amount of their audiences.

If 2–3% can be considered a good reach for an influencer with millions of followers, can you imagine what would happen if you reached 20–30% instead.

It comes with additional costs, but it’s totally worth it.

Ask influencers to give you advertising access to their page for an additional payment or using referral commissions from the sales coming from the links of their post.

Boosting it with a small budget across the influencers’ audiences gives the post credibility and very high engagement. It’s one thing that they see your ads (whom they don’t know and trust) and totally another when they see something from influencers they love, follow and trust.

There you have it.

Short, but actionable growth hacks to take your campaign to the next level.

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Originally published at https://blog.thecrowdfundingformula.com.