Growth hacking is a branch of marketing (and therefore webmarketing) whose objective is to grow its service by relying on “hacks”. The challenges may be to acquire more users, improve its conversion rate, limit the loss of customers, increase the frequency of use, etc.
The originality of growth hacking is to rely on unconventional methods, diversions of use or sometimes even practices worthy of piracy (hence the flag in the introduction to this article).
TOP 5 BEST GROWTH HACKING IDEAS
To put it simply, growth hacking is neither natural referencing , nor paid referencing, nor advertising on social networks, but rather a new marketing channel. Note that growth hacking has nothing to do with buzz either.
A look back at 5 examples that have been the ingredients for the success of major platforms.
The stroke of genius that propelled Hotmail: relying on its users to develop word of mouth
Hotmail is a free email service famous for having conquered 12 million subscribers in 18 months when the Internet had less than 70 million users. An exceptional performance which is largely based on a simple idea: include an advertising mention in each of the emails sent via its platform.
Specifically, Hotmail has added the phrase “PS I love you – get your free e-mail at hotmail” at the end of each email sent from a hotmail address.
How to get 20% PDM by paying 0 euros? Do like Hotmail!
Only 6 months after implementing this trick, Hotmail had 1 million more users , all for a zero acquisition cost, making this anecdote the first textbook case of growth hacking!
The strength of this method: divert use to make each use a vector of communication, passively for the user and with a little humorous touch that encourages curiosity.
The Dropbox Referral Strategy: Rewarding Customers Who Bring You New Customers
Dropbox is an online file storage service that has quickly become popular thanks to a hack consisting of offering a better service to all users who recommend its service to new people.
For this to work, Dropbox relies on the limitations put in place on its service, in this case the maximum storage capacity. In the free version, the user quickly reaches the storage limit and is therefore tempted to find ways to have more space… The answer offered by Dropbox is simple: recommend us and win 250Mb of storage for free.
With this method, the user base of Dropbox exploded. Each new user in turn inviting his contacts on a pattern similar to the expansion of an epidemic! The platform has even gone further by "gamifying" its program through different stages to gain space: follow the Dropbox Twitter account, install the desktop version, invite contacts, etc.
The strength of this method: creating frustration by deliberately limiting your product and offering a “gradual” reward to encourage these users to recommend the service many times.
AirBnB's piracy stunt: tapping into competitors' user base
The AirBnb housing rental platform had to face a double challenge when it was created: finding owners ready to rent their house on one side AND finding tenants willing to rent this house on the other side.
After testing (with relatively little success) conventional methods of publicizing its service, the creators of AirBnB became convinced that it would be more effective to target users of a competing site to lure them to their service and s are attacking Craiglist, the number 1 classifieds site in the United States with a section on short-term real estate rentals.
Just like its acquisition problem, the AirBnB hack is twofold: contact the renters present on the Craigslist site to offer them to put their ad on AirBnB and offer the renters present on AirBnB to publish their ad on Craigslist to benefit from the established audience of the competitor.
By developing robots to identify owners registered on Craigslist or by automating ad submissions by hijacking the API of the classifieds site, AirBnB was able to “suck up” the base of subscribers and the audience of Craigslist. When Craigslist blocked the contentious practices of its new competitor, it was too late: owners and tenants had tested AirBnB and were won over!
The strength of this method: identifying the services used by its target audience and grafting onto them (or even diverting their uses) to reach this audience directly.
Mastery of Twitter onboarding: identify the point of "no return" to lock your user
Growth hacking is not just about acquiring new customers and can also be useful in retaining them! This is the case of Twitter, which analyzed that users following at least 30 accounts were less likely to abandon the social network than others...
The Twitter teams have therefore thought of a solution so that each user reaches this “magic number” as quickly as possible by offering, upon registration, to indicate their areas of interest and to follow the most influential or popular accounts.
This trick of a successful “onboarding” allows Twitter to easily discover its platform, to be relevant in the tweets presented to the new user and to very quickly become indispensable for him!
The strength of this method: relying on the data of its users to understand where the point of no return is from which they are locked, and put everything in place to reach it as quickly as possible.
The expectation and scarcity created by Fortnite: forcing its users to come back regularly
One of the main challenges for a video game publisher is to constantly keep players coming back. One of them particularly stands out with a trick that relies on a psychological bias: FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out, or the fear of missing something). Fortnite divides its game into "seasons" which are revealed regularly, pushing players to discover new features (maps, characters, weapons, etc.) and adds to this short-lived modes to trigger urgency among players.
This clever mix of waiting and rarity is the ideal combination that pushes players to "be afraid of missing out" on new features, and therefore to come back as regularly as possible, or even to be totally dependent on the pace imposed by Fortnite!
The strength of this method: to make its users addicted to the service by the simple fact of introducing the risk that they may miss something, then imposing on them the recurrence of use according to its own schedule.
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