1. To prioritise growth of your business, establishing a growth team. A growth team is made up of members from different departments within your company, and it harnesses the power of collaboration to focus exclusively on finding ways to grow. The leader will identify the target area, set clear goals and establish a time frame for the accomplishment of these goals.
2. Even if you’re already sure that people love your product, you’ve got to get a grasp on your customers’ experiences and opinions by reaching out to them. Only then will you really know if your product is a must-have. The must-have survey is a simple and reliable method for figuring out how your customers feel about your product. Here’s the question: ‘How disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed tomorrow?’ And here are the three possible answers: A. Very disappointed. B. Somewhat disappointed C. Not disappointed

You can be confident that your product is a must-have if at least 40% of your customers choose ‘Very disappointed’. However, if the amount of customers answering, ‘Very disappointed’ is under 40%, you must continue to improve and develop your product.

3. A/B testing. A way tests the effectiveness of two different product variations. The project management tool Basecamp used this method to test potential marketing taglines, for example, and that’s how they discovered that the prompt ‘See Plans and Pricing’ attracted twice as many new customers as ‘Sign Up for Free Trial’.

4. Standard metrics for online businesses include web traffic, user acquisition and returning users, but your business is sure to have specific metrics that are uniquely relevant to your growth. To find out which specific metrics you need, ask yourself this question: Which customer actions can be measured to reveal how positive their experience with your product is? Facebook’s core metrics include how frequently users log in, how much time they spend on the site, how active they are in creating posts and comments and how many friend requests are being sent. Since Facebook’s revenue is based on selling ad space, these are all very important metrics. Each shows how many people looking at the site and how engaged they are. It’s important to find one key metric to serve as your North Star. Your North Star is the one metric that best measures the core value your product is delivering. At Facebook, the North Star is the number of daily active users. This is more important than the number of posts being made or friend requests being sent because it offers a simple and general indication of Facebook’s growth.

5. The four-stage growth hacking cycle. The first stage is the analyse stage. For this you can prepare a series of questions, such as, ‘How do our customers typically behave?’ ‘What are the characteristics of our best customers?’ ‘What events lead customers to stop using our product?’

For each question, you should prepare a list of probing sub-questions, like, ‘What time of the day are customers most actively purchasing the product?’

6. The second stage, the ideate stage, which is when every member of the growth team helps develop ideas based on their area of expertise. All proposals should go through the idea pipeline, which works by offering a structured format to log, track and evaluate all the incoming ideas. Briefly describing the proposal’s who, what, when,where, why and how. Note the action and the expected beneficial outcome e.g. ‘By rewarding customer loyalty, we’ll increase the number of returning customers by 30%’.

Note the metrics that can be used to track how well the idea is performing. In the case of a customer loyalty program, the effect could be tracked through the customer retention rate.

7. ‘The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.’

8. The third stage is to prioritise, which involves putting the ICE scoring system to use. Each member of the growth team rates their ideas based on three factors: impact, confidence and ease.

Impact is determined by quantifying expected growth- the greater the growth, the greater the impact. Confidence is determined by the team member’s conviction that the idea will succeed, which is something that should be backed up by hard data. Ease should be rated according to how much time and resources the idea will require during testing.

Each of these categories receives a score between one and ten. to arrive at the final ICE score, you must first add each rating and then average out the sum, Score should then be compared to other ideas’ scores.

9. The final stage: the testing stage. You work with a data analyst to come up with strict guidelines so that you produce a reliable set of results, e.g. always use a statistical confidence interval of 99% that indicates a 1% margin for error in the results. That way you can be sure that your tests are providing accurate insights.

The more you often can repeat the growth-hacking cycle, the more you’ll learn and the more growth you can achieve.

10. These days, the average attention span of someone online is a mere 8 seconds so that’s how long you have to explain why your product is beneficial to a potential customer’s life.——Short-and-sweet taglines are particularly useful e.g. the slogan for the original iPod: ‘1000 Songs in Your Pocket.’

11. When doing the test, consider: 1. How much testing will cost? 2. How much time the tests take to set up? 3. How much time it will take to collect the results? 4. How well the test targets your desired customers? 5. How flexible the test is to adjustments?

Give each of these categories a score between one and ten, add up the sum and then average out the score. Then test the channels with the highest score.

12. A great way to help bring customers is to create a funnel report, which allows you to pinpoint where customers tend to drop off. You can start a funnel report by making out all the main steps a customer takes, from first contact to making a purchase, and then note the conversion rate between each step- the percentage of customers who actually proceed from or step to the next.—- begin spot the problem and come up with solutions. Customer surveys are also a good way to do this, whether they’re emailed to customers or appear as pop-up surveys on your website.

13. The power of habit formation. Helping customers form habits by offering rewards through a process known as engagement loops. The company makes an offer, rewards customers for taking it and then provides an excellent service to keep the customer happy and coming back for more. Reassures customers that they made the right decision.

Two of the most successful types of reward programs: social recognition and user achievements. Social recognition is what Yelp uses by designating its most active users with ‘ Elite’ status, which includes invitations to special parties and events, and a badge to highlight their status on their online profile. Rewarding user achievements is another effective way to make customers feel good. For example,the fitness company Fitbit sends a congratulatory notification to its users when they take their ten thousandth step.

14. Identifying and understanding your customer segments. You can break down customer segments in a variety of ways, from age to location to membership type. Once you’ve segmented on a basic level, you can look for similarities between segments and the revenue they’re bringing in.

For example, those who accessed the app via Wi-Fi and those who accessed it using cellular data. And what percentage of revenue come from the cellular-data segment.

15. Launch a pricing optimisation survey: 1. At what price point would you no longer consider paying for the product? 2. What price point would you consider a great deal for the product?