Enriching Search Results Through Structured Data

For many years we have been recommending the use of structured data on websites to enable a richer search experience. When you add markup to your content, you help search engines understand the different components of a page. When Google's systems understand your page more clearly, Google Search can surface content through the cool features discussed in this post, which can enhance the user experience and get you more traffic.

We've worked hard to provide you with tools to understand how your websites are shown in Google Search results and whether there are issues you can fix. To help give a complete overview of structured data, we decided to do a series to explore it. This post provides a quick intro and discusses some best practices, future posts will focus on how to use Search Console to succeed with structured data.

What is structured data?

Structured data is a common way of providing information about a page and its content - we recommend using the schema.org vocabulary for doing so. Google supports three different formats of in-page markup: JSON-LD (recommended), Microdata, and RDFa. Different search features require different kinds of structured data - you can learn more about these in our search gallery. Our developer documentation has more details on the basics of structured data.

Structured data helps Google's systems understand your content more accurately, which means it’s better for users as they will get more relevant results. If you implement structured data your pages may become eligible to be shown with an enhanced appearance in Google search results.

Disclaimer: Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly. Using structured data enables a feature to be present, it does not guarantee that it will be present. Learn more about structured data guidelines.

Sites that use structured data see results

Over the years, we've seen a growing adoption of structured data in the ecosystem. In general, rich results help users to better understand how your pages are relevant to their searches, so they translate into success for websites. Here are some results that are showcased in our case studies gallery:

• Eventbrite leveraged event structured data and saw 100% increase in the typical YOY growth of traffic from search.
• Jobrapido integrated with the job experience on Google Search and saw 115% increase in organic traffic, 270% increase of new user registrations from organic traffic, and 15% lower bounce rate for Google visitors to job pages.
• Rakuten used the recipe search experience and saw a 2.7X increase in traffic from search engines and a 1.5X increase in session duration.

How to use structured data?

There are a few ways your site could benefit from structured data. Below we discuss some examples grouped by different types of goals: increase brand awareness, highlight content, and highlight product information.

1. Increase brand awareness

One thing you can do to promote your brand with structured data is to take advantage of features such as Logo, Local business, and Sitelinks searchbox. In addition to adding structured data, you should verify your site for the Knowledge Panel and claim your business on Google My Business. Here is an example of the knowledge panel with a Logo.

2. Highlight content

If you publish content on the web, there are a number of features that can help promote your content and attract more users, depending on your industry. For example: Article, Breadcrumb, Event, Job, Q&A, Recipe, Review and others. Here is an example of a recipe rich result.

3. Highlight product information

If you sell merchandise, you could add product structured data to your page, including price, availability, and review ratings. Here is how your product might show for a relevant search.

Try it and let us know

Now that you understand the importance of structured data, try our codelab to learn how to add it to your pages. Stay tuned to learn more about structured data, in the coming posts we’ll be discussing how to use Search Console to better analyze your efforts.

We would love to hear your thoughts and stories on how structured data works for you, send us any feedback either through Twitter or our forum.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate

Full article - http://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/enriching-search-results-structured-data.html

9 Tactics to Fix Your User Retention

Retention is the act of getting your members to use your product in such a way that it becomes habitual. That’s why we call them users at this stage. if you retain them then they are literally using your product often. If you are a SaaS company then this means lowering your churn. If you are an ecommerce site then this means helping people become repeat buyers. If you are a content company then this means getting people to consume your content on a regular basis. You get the point. Many growth hackers actually consider retention the most important aspect of the funnel. There are a number of reasons for this:

• If your retention is low then all of the ingenious growth hacks that you apply to your product are basically meaningless. Your members will leave your product at the 11th hour (the very end of your funnel). Leaky buckets don’t need more water. They need their holes fixed.
• By the time someone has become an activated member then they’ve shown themselves to be extremely interested in your product. They are the most qualified people you have to work with. If you don’t focus on retaining them then you are neglecting the most high quality leads that you have.
• Since all the stages of the funnel work together, sometimes retention can affect the bottom line more easily than getting new visitors.
• Increasing your retention by 20% is the same as increasing your overall traffic by 20%. A 20% increase in traffic might cost more in time and tangible resources than increasing retention by 20%.
• An increase in retention increases the lifetime value of the customer (LTV). This opens up the potential to try a number of push methods at the top of the funnel that might not have been possible before. Retention benefits the funnel as a whole more than we sometimes realize.
• People that have been retained for long periods of time are more likely to evangelize for your product. If your product is built into their weekly routine then they are going to talk to their friends about it, take it into the workplace, and generally be an advocate for you.

Retention, like anything, is a skill set that can be learned. Here are the tactics that we recommend trying as you focus on retention:

1. Staged Traffic

When you look at the growth hacker funnel it might seem as if you should focus on getting traffic first, then activating members, then retaining users. However, in reality this is not the smartest way to work through the funnel if you want to make the most of your efforts. It’s better if you put some effort into getting traffic, then use those visitors to test the rest of your funnel before you decide to put more of your resources into getting traffic.

Imagine that you have a growth budget of $4,000. Let’s say you spend all of it in a couple weeks. You spend some on the production of a whitepaper for inbound leads (1k), you spend some on Google ads (2k), and some on a contest (1k). You probably feel good about what you’ve done, but what if you realize after a month or so that even though you effectively got traffic that your activation and retention methods were totally broken. You spent your budget and have very little to show for it.

It would be smarter to try a single tactic and use only some of your resources just so that you can track the progress of your traffic through your funnel. Then you can fix the obvious holes that were uncovered using this test traffic. Now when you spend more of your resources on traffic your product will be better optimized to capitalize on it. In essence, you test your funnel, including retention, when the stakes are low, so that when it’s time to accelerate growth you’ve done the requisite work that will allow your product to handle it. Early on, stage your traffic in order to master retention.

2. Speed to Aha

People come to your product and give you a chance because of the promises you’ve made to them. You’re going to save them X, provide them Y, and make Z much more simple. The moment that a visitor or member actually feels the truth of your promise, and sees the obvious benefit of your product, that’s what we call the “aha moment”. If you want to retain users then part of your task is to get them to the aha moment as quick as humanly possible.

When someone is new to your product then they are open to your promises. They are excited about the possibility that you will deliver on them. If you waste time getting them to the aha moment then they will not stay around. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you know what the aha moment for your product is? What are the actions which a member can take on your product which are leading indicators of their retention rate?
• If it currently takes two days to get someone to the aha moment, can you make it two hours?
• If you currently ask them to create an account to see the benefit of your product, is there a way to show them a sandboxed version of your product that allows them to have an aha moment before signing up?
• Are there features which you promote in your product which don’t lead people to an aha moment, thereby cluttering your product and lowering the chances they will ever get to the aha moment?
• Is there an email you can send to a new user which outlines exactly what the aha moment is? Can you give them a clear call to action to have that kind of moment?

Twitter realized that after you followed a certain number of people that your retention rate would increase drastically. So guess what they did? Yep, now they help you follow people as a part of the signup process. Retention is built into their registration flow because they knew the speed to aha matters.

3. Don’t Fear Email

Engineers and product purists have a hard understanding email. They actually think email is universally unwanted, and that most of it is borderline spam. This is just patently false. People opt-in to receive emails, and they opt-out when they no longer want them. Let people make their own decisions about the email they want or don’t want, and don’t preemptively decide for them, handicapping your product in the process. Email is a massively useful tactic for retaining users, and those who ignore this are at an instant disadvantage. There are a number of different kinds of emails that your product should send, and they each have their own purpose.

Drip Campaigns

A drip campaign is when you send people prewritten emails at preselected intervals. A new member might get an email on day 1, day 3, day 7, day 14, and day 21. You can use a drip campaign to introduce them to your product, share testimonials, give them case studies or other inspirational reasons to use your product, and many other things. A drip campaign burns your product into people’s minds when they are most impressionable, right after they’ve signed up. Every email sent is a chance to bring them back into your product and retain them. Fools ignore drip campaigns.

Event Based Notifications

Another category of emails are those which are based on specific event triggers. We are all familiar with these because of Facebook. Every time someone does anything which is remotely related to us on their social network then we get an email notifying us about it. Facebook has become very clever with their event based emails, and one of the things they do is force you to click through to their website to get the most out of their emails. They tell me that someone liked a photo I was in, but I have to click a call to action to see the photo. This is smart because once I’m back on their site then I’m sucked into the Facebook world again. What actions are people already taking in your product that could also warrant an email?

General Updates

The third kind of email is a general update. These are emails that update people about new product features, new staff additions, and other kinds of things that wouldn’t make sense in a drip campaign, but aren’t tied to specific events either. People love to see how other people work (it’s a weird obsession, I know), so use these emails to also give people a behind the scenes view of your company. Show them photos of your new workspace. Show them an image of your team next to the company logo. If people feel like they know you then they will be more likely to be retained by you.

4. Alerts and Notifications

If you are building a mobile app then in addition to email you have another avenue available to get people back into your product. You can also use alerts and notifications to help retain users. Are you currently using push notifications within your mobile app? Are you currently using badges to alert people to new features, or new updates, or anything else? The same hangup that some people have with email also carries over into alerts and notifications. Remember, people can turn off alerts and notifications within their settings. Let people manage their own life, and send them relevant updates.

5. Exit Interviews

Talking directly to customers can be very difficult. People aren’t afraid to tell you the truth, and the truth can hurt your ego. Well, get over it, because one of the best ways to learn is by dialoguing with your members. Recently, we’ve heard a lot in the startup world about customer development (the process of talking to customers early), but there is another kind of communication with customers that can be very beneficial as well, and that’s an exit interview.

When people cancel your service, or go long periods of time being inactive, or generally show themselves to not be retained, then you have an opportunity to learn from them. I would recommend emailing them and asking them the worst thing about your product that made them cancel (or whatever the appropriate verbiage is for your situation). Just cut to the chase and ask them what sucks the most. Have thick skin. You can use the responses of this exit interview to inform the product roadmap, and thereby increase future retention.

If you want to ask people to fill out a full survey at this point you can try it, but think about the situation first. They’ve already walked away from you. They probably won’t give you 10 more minutes of their time. They might shoot you back a quick response if you send them a short, one sentence email. Be wise about how much you ask for at this point.

An exit interview like this can also be a chance to bring them back into your product. You could offer them an exclusive discount. You could give them the option of choosing a less expensive package that isn’t advertised during signup. You’ve already lost them, so you might as well try something to bring them back.

6. The Red Carpet

One way to keep people from leaving your product is to roll out the red carpet for your most engaged users. Exit interviews are about getting the most out of a bad situation, but the red carpet is about avoiding a bad situation. Here some ways that you can give the red carpet treatment to your best users:

• Send 100 shirts to your first 100 customers.
• Give your best users a shout out in an email newsletter.
• Keep a Twitter list of your best users and retweet them often.
• Give your VIP users access to exclusive content.
• Have a drawing for a free trip to a relevant conference, but only power users can enter.

Every product is different, but the point is to do something periodically that makes your primary users feel appreciated. Not only will this help prevent them from churning, but when someone feels like the center of attention, or unique, or important, then they will definitely share the experience on social networks and other places. Give your best users yet another reason to advertise for you by giving them a treat every once in awhile.

7. Increase Value

At the heart of any product is the value it provides. This means that keeping one eye on the value of your product is always going to help retention. Just because someone found value in your product on day 1 doesn’t mean they will necessarily find value in it on day 100. You have to always stay ahead of the value curve if you want to retain users. Here are a few generic ways to provide value:

Add Features
If your product is lacking important features then adding them might lead to better retention. If two out of every three people tell you the same thing during the exit interview, and it pertains to something that you don’t currently provide, then it might make sense to just give them what they want. This isn’t about feature creep, it’s about giving people what they actually need to hang around as retained users.

Subtract Features
It may seem odd to now discuss taking away features, but sometimes that’s also the way to increase value. Features that aren’t useful (or aren’t used), only serve one purpose. They keep people from finding out what actually is awesome about your product. People don’t stay around because of the number of features you have. They stay around because you have the right features that provide them value.

8. Community Building

A product is good, but a movement is better. A startup is good, but a family is better. Are there things you can do to actually make people feel like they are a part of something? This is community building. People who belong to something stay longer than people who subscribe to something. Here are some ways that you can build community around your product:

Customer Support

Great customer support can be the difference in a life long customer and someone who spreads the news of how horrible you are. We may not all be Zappos, but we can still up our game to the point that people feel like they belong to a community and they are not bothering us with their support requests.

Documentation

If your product needs documentation then providing it in the best possible way is actually a service to your community. Besides, if people don’t have the needed documentation to install or use your product then you’re not going to retain them.

Social Features

Is there a way that you can let your users interact with each other within your product. One of the best ways to retain users is by providing a way for them to connect to others. The other people may be the reason they stay around, even though they might have left if is was just about your product.

9. Make Them Happy

All retention comes down to one thing: happiness. If people are happy they will become habitual users. If people are unhappy then you won’t retain them. Don’t overthink retention. Just make people happy with your product.

http://www.quicksprout.com/user-retention/
Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/9-tactics-to-fix-your-user-retention.html

Viral Hacking to Get Hypergrowth

The ability to use the product itself to get new visitors is one of the most exciting aspects of growth hacking. Pulling visitors into the top of your funnel is good, and so is pushing them in, but there is something magical about using the product itself to drive traffic. When done well, it can have a compounding effect which cannot be replicated with push and pull methods alone.

For instance, if you utilize the pull method of creating an infographic then you can expect to get traffic, but the inbound visitors to that infographic will decrease each day and eventually level out at a relatively low number. Compare that with some of the product tactics listed in this chapter. It’s possible, using the product itself, that each time someone comes to your site they bring their own network of relationships into your funnel as well. This is where the idea of viral loops come into play. If you are able to use a product tactic in such a way that for every visitor that enters your product, they bring along more than one other person into your product, then you’ve created a viral coefficient of over 1 (sometimes referred to as K). You’ve achieved exponential growth. You’ve gone viral.

However, I need to caution you at this point. Most products don’t go viral. If you are trying to growth hack a B2B enterprise product then I highly doubt that you will have a viral coefficient anywhere near 1. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because it’s just hard to use these tactics in certain markets. Even if you have a consumer facing product virality is still extremely difficult.

So how should you view these tactics? If it really is that hard to get a K factor of 1+ then should you just scrap the product as a strategy for getting visitors? Absolutely not. Any K factor above 0 will positively impact all of your other marketing efforts, even if it never approaches the illustrious 1+. Let me explain.

If you have a K of .5, then this essentially means that for every one new visitor to your product they bring half a person into your funnel. 10 new visitors actually becomes 15. This isn’t virality because it doesn’t keep going up and to the right exponentially, but you’re still bringing new people in that wouldn’t have seen your product. Consider the pull method of creating an infographic in this light. If you bring 500 people into your product this month because of an infographic then this actually becomes 750 people with a K of .5. You’ve amplified a pull tactic by using a product tactic. That’s how to think about product tactics. They amplify anything that comes into your funnel.

A K factor of .5 also means that if you’re using the push tactic of purchasing ads then you can spend less to get a certain number of visitors because every 10 ad clicks becomes 15 visitors. Saving money is obviously a good thing, but this also allows you to pay more per click, and possibly outbid competitors. Remember what we said in the last chapter. Ads are just a business model competition and your product tactics, which amplify your product activity, strengthen the efficiency of your business model.

Network Invitations

We now live in a world where many people have already compiled their social networks in various places. We have a group of friends on Facebook. We follow people on Twitter. We are connected to business relationships on LinkedIn. We have a list of email addresses in Gmail. We have the phone numbers of friends and family in our mobile phones. The first product tactic that we’ll discuss for getting visitors hinges on our ability to use pre-existing, pre-defined, networks of relationships to our advantage.

Phone Contacts

If you are building a mobile app then you are basically a few clicks away from permission to message their entire phone book about your app. We don’t usually think of a phone book as a social network, but it might be our most intimate network of relationships. Umano, a new service that provides the ability to listen to popular online articles, utilizes this tactic. They prompt you to share with friends after using their service a couple of times, or you can do so from the settings menu (below). Notice how they preselect everyone for you, and you have to either manually deselect people or “unselect all.” This is a common practice for many of the network invitation tactics. It is also worth noting that you can call or text with access to a phone number, so this gives you a few options on how to message people once you’ve gained permission. There might also be email addresses associated with a phone number that you can also access.

Email Contacts

Another network which people have already developed, that we can use to our advantage, is their email contacts. This was much more popular a few years ago, but variations of it are still possible. LinkedIn allowed you to import your email addresses, which they would subsequently message, and this jump started their initial traffic.

Social Contracts

Besides phone books and email contacts, the third kind of network that we can leverage is social contacts. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and more, are all networks where we’ve created a social graph. We have existing relationships which can be invited to a new product. It’s difficult to target every social network because people probably won’t give you access to all of them, but one can be enough. Focus also helps you make technical decisions about your own product. If you know that you are going to use Facebook as the primary social network for inviting new users into your product then this might cause you to use Facebook Connect as your product login. This means that it will be fewer clicks on the end user, and less friction, when you ask them to invite their Facebook friends later. Below is the example from the Facebook developer documentation of what a friend invitation screen looks like.

Social Sharing

Social sharing, as defined here, is not about explicitly inviting people into your product via their established connections or friends. This tactic is more about allowing anyone to talk about your product on their social network for whoever may be reading it. For instance, instead of asking someone to invite their Facebook friends to use your product, you instead allow them to easily post something to their Facebook feed about your product. If they have a public profile then this can be seen by anyone, not only their friends. The most prevalent example of this is seen in popular blogs. The Next Web prominently displays the ability to share each and every post with your social connections in various places.

Most social networks have code snippets that you can copy and paste into your product to make this kind of social sharing extremely easy. There are also solutions that combine all the popular social sharing options into a single interface.

Although it may not be obvious at first, another thing to keep in mind when implementing a social sharing strategy is to consider where your traffic naturally comes from. If you get most of your inbound traffic from Twitter, but you only allow people to share your product on Facebook then you are missing an easy opportunity. Make sure that people can share your product in the places that are most likely to bring you back more inbound visitors. This will have a compounding effect.

API Integrations

The next step, beyond social sharing, is to actually integrate your product with an existing social network at the API level. Instead of just asking them to share, you can actually bake sharing into the experience and make it happen in the background without forcing the user to give you permission each time. A great example of this is Spotify. It’s no secret that Spotify heavily used Facebook to grow their product, and they did so through an API integration. Once you login to Spotify using Facebook Connect and give Spotify the needed access, then your activity on their service is automatically published to your Facebook feed, and it’s also published inside of the Spotify app to anyone that you are connected with on Facebook. Below is a screenshot of the Spotify app, notifying me of new users who are also connected to me on Facebook, and another screenshot showing notifications within Facebook itself of my friend’s listening habits. These are done completely in the background, which creates frictionless sharing that can only really happen through an API integration.

Another example of this tactic is the Nike+ API integration with Path and Facebook. Everytime I go for a run and track it using the Nike+ app on my phone, then the data about my run is pushed to Path and Facebook, so that my friends can see my activity. Friends can even cheer me on from within Path or Facebook which will trigger an applause sound as I run. This is borderline genius. Below you can see my Nike+ app asking me to share on Path, and on the right you can see the results being published to my Path friends. Again, this it totally seamless. Once I set it up initially it does this automatically.

API integrations, despite their incredible upside, are not 100% stable. As certain products become extremely popular, and gain momentum on existing social network, then it is not entirely uncommon for exposure to be throttled. Facebook, for instance, has the incentive to give you access to their platform. This keeps them in a dominant position if many developers use them. However, Facebook does not have incentive to give you the complete social graph of their billion users. If you start to have too much success with an API integration then you can’t count on the rules staying the same for you.

On a similar note, API integrations are great as a way to growth hack your product, but the more you intertwine your product with a 3rd party service, the more at risk you are. Twitter is a great example of this. Many companies were built on the Twitter API, but then Twitter changed the number of API calls allowed. This left many Twitter clients without a backup plan. Use APIs to grow your product, but be wary that the API doesn’t become your product.

Powered By Links

One of the first examples of product growth hacking actually used the powered by link tactic. When Hotmail first came out they did something that was simple, but which would drastically change their trajectory. They included a link at the bottom of emails that were sent using their service that said “Get your free email at Hotmail.” A viral loop was born.

This tactic is still being used to this day. A modern example is found in services that allow you to embed a popup on your website for various reasons. Widgets of any kind are good candidates for these powered by links.

Incentives

Certain products lend themselves easily to creating incentives for users to bring new people into the product. The classic example of this is Dropbox. They have a number of incentives that they offer users for various actions that they can take. This tactic works especially well if you have something which is of low cost to you, but of high value to users. In Dropbox’s case, they use storage space like a currency because the exchange rate is in their favor. Storage is not that expensive, but getting new users is very valuable to them. The user is in the opposite situation. Storage space is valuable to them, and their contacts don’t seem that valuable. This makes for a perfect storm.

It’s worth cautioning that many startups, in an attempt to imitate Dropbox, have been frustrated with their inability to pull off the incentive tactic. Their product might not have much intrinsically to offer their users as incentives. Also, notice that Dropbox goes beyond just giving away storage for friend invitations, but they also give away storage for actions that will help you understand their product. Educated users churn less.

Organic Viral Growth

As much as technology within the product can spread the product, there is something that can be even more effective, organic word of mouth. Organic word of mouth is when someone shares your product, online or offline, in ways that you didn’t orchestrate. They are compelled to tell people whether you incentivized them or not. Organic communication can’t be measured, and it can’t be controlled, but it can be a force that propels your product forward. You can’t make someone share your product organically with their coworkers or friends and family, but you can do certain things to make it more probable. These types of products all tend to spread organically:

• Simple
• Beautiful
• Pain relieving
• Products that make people look cool
• Emotional
• Fun
• Unique
• Surprising

You can’t be all these things, but you must be one of these things, or you probably don’t have a chance of spreading organically.

http://www.quicksprout.com/viral-hacking/
Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/viral-hacking-to-get-hypergrowth.html

The Growth Hacking Process to Supercharge Your Revenue

Every world-class growth hacker relies on a series of steps in their growth process.

We’ve broken down the six core steps below.

Define Actionable Goals

Everything begins by focusing on a narrow, actionable goal. This is important because a growth hacker can easily have a focus that is so broad it becomes meaningless. Yes, the overall goal is growth, but you don’t attain that kind of end-result without breaking it into smaller, achievable, tasks.

Let’s say you have a product and you want your DAU (daily active users) to increase, but that’s too broad of a goal. Then you decide to focus just on the retention of existing users since this will increase the DAU, but retention is still too broad. Then you decide to focus on helping current users create content because your numbers show that when someone becomes a content creator (and not just a consumer) within your product then their activity on the site is far greater. Content creation leads to retention which leads to increased DAU. Therefore, you decide to make the goal to increase content creation by 2x.

Too Broad: Increase daily active users
Appropriate: Increase content creation by 2x

Many people have a hard time knowing when they’ve narrowed their goal enough. Here is a rule of thumb that I use. Think about your goals as nested hierarchies, and until you reach the “nest” where things can actually be marked off as individual tasks which can be completed once and for all, then you’re not narrow enough. In this case our hierarchy might look something like this:

Will there ever conceivably be a day when you can mark off “grow my startup” from a to-do list? No. The goal is too broad. Is there ever going to be a time when you can say that you’ve finished “increasing DAU.” No. Too broad. However, you can mark off that you’ve “educated members about content creation through an email.” When you find yourself at the part of the hierarchy that can be checked off as done, then you’ve narrowed your goal appropriately.

Implement Analytics to Track Your Goals

Now that you’ve decided to increase content creation by 2x, the next question is, are you in a position to know if you actually attain this goal? Are the appropriate analytics in place? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you currently track content creation metrics at all?
• Do you track content creation by cohorts or just in aggregate?
• Do you track metrics around the content itself (file size, length, views, shares, etc.)
• Do you track the devices that are used to create and consume the content?
• Do you track the referring URL’s which are most responsible for content creation?

Without analytics, goals are empty. If you can’t definitively say when a goal has been reached then you have not completed the requisite requirements before moving ahead. Furthermore, analytics will give you valuable data which can change your goals. Your analytics and your goals create a reflexive equilibrium, where they actual inform, refine, and shape each other.

As an example of a reflexive equilibrium, consider this. If your goal began as “increase content creation by 2x,” but then you realize that there is something more important than just content creation in general as it relates to retention, then you might restate your goal. If content over three minutes is the only kind of content which improves the retention of the creator and the consumer then your goal might need to be refined.

One of the great things about implementing specific analytics to track goal progress is the effect this has over time on your overall analytics. Once you’ve spent a few years on a startup, attacking one goal after the other, you’ll realize that the amount of historical data you have to work with has become very powerful. Eventually, when you create a new goal you might already have the relevant metrics being tracked, and now you have past data to look at which predates even the goal creation.

All growth hackers begin with a dull axe, but the edge gets sharper as a function of time. Just don’t give up.

Leverage Your Existing Strengths

Every startup has inherent strengths or assets that can be used as leverage. When there is something at your disposal which requires little energy, but can produce big results, then you’ve found a lever.

Continuing our example from above, you may be trying to decide if you should send out the educational email first, or if you should add a “what’s new” category first. If you have 200,000 emails on file, and you have a system of email distribution that is rock solid, and you can probably create the email in question within a day, then this looks like a promising lever.

If the “what’s new” category will require at least a few days of planning, a few days of design mockup revisions, a few days of programming, and your engineers are already completely stressed out about their to-do list, then this doesn’t look like a promising route. Especially, if you’re looking for low hanging fruit.

The law of leverage essentially makes the decision for you at this point. Send out the email. Your startup’s unique leverage comes from the size of your email list and your email distribution system, not the amount of engineering horsepower that you can throw at problems. A different startup might choose a different option, but only if their leverage takes a different form.

Plans, goals, and tasks, that are stack-ranked in a vacuum, without concern for leverage, are usually misordered. Plan your attack based on strengths. I would recommend reading chapters 3-6 of this book and then give each tactic that is mentioned a score based on your company’s specific leverage.

Execute the Experiment

You’ve already completed step 1, and you defined your goal as increasing content creation by 2x. You’ve already completed step 2, and now you are tracking the necessary data that will tell you if you’re successful in your goal. You’ve already completed step 3, and now you are going to focus on educating your members through an email blast, since this is where you possess leverage. Now it’s time to execute the experiment, which means actually sending an email in this case. Here are some things to keep in mind as you execute the experiment:

1. Write Down Your Hypothesis Before You Execute an Experiment

Before you actually run the experiment you should write down your best guesses at to what will happen. Do you think this email will have a higher or lower click through rate than the emails you already send? Why do you think this? How much do you think the email will increase content creation over the next month? Will it single handedly give you the 2x content creation goal you’re shooting for, or do you think it will get you part of the way there?

It may seem silly to write these kinds of things down when you can just send the email and find out what’s going to happen. If that’s your attitude then you’re missing the point. Hypotheses are accurate reflections of your assumption before you are given the chance to rewrite the past to make yourself look like a genius.

For instance, imagine that you write down the hypothesis that the click through rate will be lower because you already send users one email a week, and you think the second email will annoy them. Then you run the experiment and it has a higher click through rate. If there wasn’t proof of your wrong hypothesis you would be tempted to rewrite history, and you would tell the team members that this is what you expected to happen because you’re such a godsend to the startup world. Hypothesis keep you honest. Now, instead of trying to prove to everyone how smart you are, the discussion is about why your assumptions were wrong. You might come to realize that you underestimate the amount your users want to be in contact with you, and this insight has benefits which stretch far beyond email.

If the idea of forming a hypothesis makes this feel too much like science and less like the traditional culture of startups, that’s probably a good thing.

2.Do Not be Naive About the Resources Needed to Run the Experiment

Anytime you run experiments it is going to disrupt the normal flow of events in your startup. First, the entire team needs to be notified about upcoming experiments so that they can be ready for any mishaps that might occur. Second, know when your startup is already resource constrained, and be mindful of this when planning your experiments. If Tuesdays are when the server is already on the brink of failure, then don’t do something that will send 30% more traffic on that day if you can avoid it. Third, if you need a certain amount of time to finish the components of the experiment before it can be ran, then don’t overlook the time requirements needed. You would do well to remember Hofstadter’s Law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

3.Do Not Get Discouraged by the Initial Results

There is a phenomenon which I have experienced countless times, and that is the ever-present belief that whatever experiment I’m working on right now is the one that will change everything for the better. The experiment that I’m currently devoted to seems to be the obvious answer to my company’s problems. If it’s worthy of my time then it must be the thing that will allow us to reach escape velocity. Oh, the joys of the entrepreneur’s disease.

Like we mentioned in the last chapter, most things fail. It’s ok to be optimistic (hey, it keeps me going too), but then you can’t be devastated every time an experiment produces mediocre results. That’s why a defined goal should be attacked from multiple angles. Most of the attacks simply won’t work.

4. Learn from Success and Failure from Success and Failure

Data is like publicity. There is no such thing as bad publicity and there is no such thing as bad data. Even if an experiment fails you will have undoubtedly gathered a lot of information about your product and your users that can be used in future experiments. Thomas Edison failed more than 1,000 times when trying to create his light bulb. When asked about it, Edison allegedly said, “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb.” You can learn from successes, and you can learn from failures. You only stop learning when you give up.

Optimize the Experiment

Experiments are meant to be optimized. Experiments are fluid. They are not things you do one time and then move on. You tweak experiments. You re-run experiments. You only give up on experiments when it’s appropriate to do so, not when you’ve grown tired of them.

Have a Control Group

You should always have a control group when you are able to because this will account for environmental changes that are hard to track. If you send out the email to only 80% of your users then you can track how much content creation goes up in that group as opposed to the control group. There might be an unforeseen reason, outside of your company’s control or knowledge, that has actually led to a widespread decrease in content creation on your site. Without a control group you might be led to think that the email actually decreased content creation, which would be far from the truth.

Utilize an A/B Test

A/B tests are championed by growth hackers for a reason. They’re magical! You may think you know what the subject line of an email should be to ensure it’s opened, but an A/B test will tell you the truth. You may think you know what landing page the email should send them to, so that they will start creating content, but an A/B will tell you the truth. There are very few tools that create such large gains overall.

Remember, if you are going to run A/B tests then you must decide this before you start running an experiment. Otherwise, in our example, you would have emailed everyone on your list and then there would be no one left to benefit from what you are learning.

When to Give Up on an Experiment

I usually will not give up on an experiment until my leverage has proven to be weaker than I initially thought, or I can’t logically conceive of the experiment yielding better results without an inordinate amount of resources dedicated to it.

Repeat

Now it’s time to select a new experiment, or an optimized version of a previous experiment, and move through these steps all over again. If you work the system that I’ve enumerated here, then success is more a byproduct of tenacity, and less a child of luck.

http://www.quicksprout.com/growth-process/
Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-growth-hacking-process-to.html

How to Activate Users

Now you have visitors to your product, but that’s the problem. They are just visitors. You’ve found a way to get them to come to your product, but if this is all you do then they will bounce at an incredibly high rate. Your goal is to activate them. Activation is the act of getting them to take an action in your product that you are guiding them toward. Activation is not just the act of them clicking around randomly and not bouncing. Activation is when they do something that you’ve decided beforehand that they should do, something which furthers your goals. Here are some possible activation goals:

• Email address
• Create an account
• Read something
• Comment on something
• Share something
• Buy something
• Fill out something
• Watch something
• Interact with someone
• Friend request someone

Some of these activation goals may seem silly, while others seem relevant, but your particular goals will depend entirely upon your product. If your product is a blog that makes money from advertising then you may want to focus on numbers 1, 3, 4, or 5. If you have an email address then you can message them in the future about new articles. If they read what is already on your site they will see the quality of your journalism and want to read more. If they comment on an article then they will be more apt to come back, especially if others respond to them. If they share your article on Twitter then it will get you more readers. All of these goals lead to eyeballs that will make you more money with advertisers. A different product will have completely different goals.

It is also important to recognize that the fewer goals you have, the more likely you are to achieve them. If you have 5 activation goals then it’s difficult to use the tactics in this chapter to achieve any of them effectively. At a minimum, for a given section of your product you should have one primary activation goal.

Landing Pages

When someone visits your website the use of a landing page can greatly increase your chances of activating them. A landing page is different than your homepage. It might have some of the same elements, but not all. A landing page is a page you create within your product that you can direct people toward for certain campaigns. For instance, if you are always tweeting about certain kinds of things from the company Twitter account then you might make your Twitter bio URL send them to a landing page that highlights those same topics. Here are some of the distinct characteristics of a landing page and why you would use one:

Limited Navigation
If someone comes to a landing page from a specific campaign then this means that you can hide many of the navigational elements, since this will just distract people from completing the goal you have decided on. They’ve already shown interest by being on a landing page in the first place, so you can focus their attention.

Single Call To Action
A landing page only needs one call to action for the same reason that you don’t need many navigational elements. If you give them options then you will lose them, and no one can end up on a landing page unless they came through a specific campaign, which means they are ripe for activation.

Congruous Language
Since you know the source of a person that ends up on a particular landing page then you can tailor the experience for them. You should use language which will appeal to them, even if it doesn’t appeal to your visitors at large. The language, and even imagery, of your landing page should be congruous with their expectations based on the source they came from.

There is a specific kind of landing page which is becoming very popular, and it has some distinct characteristics, and that is the launch page, or coming soon page. A launch page is a landing page that you put up before your product is even public, and the goal is to collect email addresses of visitors so that you can inform them about your product when you do go live. Here are some things to understand about this kind of landing page:

Use it to Get Traffic, Not Just Activations

Before you actually launch is one of the best times to get traffic. You can tell people that they will be let into your product first if they share your launch page with others, or you can only let them sign up on your beta list if they tweet about you first. Get creative.

The Headline and Subhead is Everything

Since you haven’t launched yet you probably won’t have much detail to add to the launch page. This means that the headline and subhead become very important. If those few words don’t get someone’s attention then they will bounce.

Emotional Imagery is a Must

Besides the headline and subhead, you also need a very emotional image. A fullscreen background image is the common practice. Make them feel emotion, despite your lack of content.

Don’t Let the List Grow Cold

As you build a list of people that are interested in the launch of your product you must not let the list get cold. If you don’t email them for months, then suddenly tell them about your launch, your click through rate will be very low. Stay in touch with them through the process of building your product to keep them warm, or don’t even take email addresses until you are within a month (or less) of launch.

If you are trying to create landing pages quickly then you can use a service like unbounce.com, and if you are creating a launch page then you can use a service like Launchrock.

Copywriting

If you want people to take a certain action, and not bounce, then the words you use are more important than you realize. We spend so much time obsessing over visuals that copywriting sometimes takes a back seat. As important as visuals are, if you want someone to know something, or understand something, or do something, then you probably have to use words. Here are some insights around copywriting:

The Headline Should Mention Your Unique Value Proposition

Why is your product unique? What do you do that competitors don’t do, or can’t do. If you don’t tell people that you’re unique then visitors will assume you’re not.

The Subhead Should Further Explain Your Unique Value Proposition

The subhead is smaller text below your headline that further illustrates your unique value. It might give reasons why the headline is true. Use this to take away doubts or clarify the headline.

Long Copywriting is Good for Expensive Items

If you are selling something that costs $500 then you need lengthier copywriting. This will give you a chance to inform, answer objections, and just generally convince them to become activated members.

Short Copywriting is Good for Less Expensive Items

If you are selling something for $20 then long copywriting will bring up more objections than it answers. It will confuse people more than it helps people. For low cost products, short, precise, copy is better.

Different Audiences Will Respond to Different Kinds of Words

Don’t just imitate someone else’s copywriting style. Your words need to fit your audience. You should use jargon if you’re talking to doctors, but not if you’re talking to laymen. You can use slang if you’re targeting kids, but not if your audience is filled with grandmothers.

Use Customer Development to Inform Copywriting

By researching your audience online (message boards, surveys, etc.) you will start to see which words they already use. If you use their own words in your copywriting then you’ll be able to activate them much easier.

Social Proof is Copywriting

It would be wise to use testimonials within your product because humans behave with a herd mentality. If everyone else is doing something then so will I. Social proof is a form of copywriting that will help you activate visitors.

Don’t Forget the Microcopy

Microcopy is the short tooltips, hover boxes, or other text that helps a visitor navigate the interface. Little clues, at the right place, can help people navigate your UI. Confused visitors don’t usually do what you want.

Calls to Actions

We’ve already mentioned it a few times, but calls to action deserve their own section. The best way to get someone to do what you want is by giving them a clear call to action. Leave nothing to their imagination. Tell them where to click and make the button obvious. Tell them who to call and make the phone number prominent. Activate visitors by telling people, in the most explicit way you can, what you want them to do. Below are some examples of great call to actions.

Onboarding

When people arrive on your site it’s like they’ve been dumped in the middle of New York City without a map and no sense of direction. Your job is to give them orientation, and lead them to the places where you want them to go. One of the best ways to guide visitors is through onboarding. Onboarding can take the form of visual directions placed on top the screen, or a series of pages that lead visitors from one place to another. Think of onboarding like a digital tour guide for your product. An explanatory video could even be a part of your onboarding strategy.

Twitter has one of the most talked about onboarding experiences because they carefully guide people from creating an account to using an account, and it’s all through the onboarding. They know that an account that doesn’t follow anyone is kind of useless, so they make following others a part of the signup process.

Another great example of onboarding is InVision. They give you large, obvious, pop ups throughout their product that guide you and tell you what you need to know.

People are not patient, and they don’t care about your product enough to find out how to use it. If you want to activate visitors, making them take certain actions, then you must carefully craft your onboarding experience.

Gamification

There is something about gameplay that is hardwired into the human brain. We love progressing, getting awards, ranking on leaderboards, finishing tasks, leveling up, and having fun while we do it. Gamification is when you use game mechanics within your product, and this can be used to activate members. Gamification can cause someone to complete actions they normally wouldn’t complete. Here are some examples:

Progress

It is common within products to tell people that their profile is only a certain percentage complete. This prompts us to get to 100% because we hate not finishing something. Just by adding a progress bar with a percentage then we have gamified our product.

Awards

We are all still in little league baseball. Trophies matter, even if they are meaningless. If you can award something within your product then you will create a gamified incentive for people to take certain actions. Just think about Foursquare. It’s one big baseball game for adults with mayorships and badges instead of cheap trophies.

Leaderboards

Just by showing someone their rank you can prompt them to compete. If you let someone know that they are in 3rd place for most comments on your message board there is a good chance they’ll take actions to get in 2nd place. Leaderboards can activate people to take certain actions.

There are countless ways to gamify your product, but you have to think about your product as a game (even if it is a B2B app).

Pricing Strategies

Getting someone to make a purchase is really just a unique kind of activation. You are getting a visitor to take a certain action, that action just happens to be making a purchase. There are a number of best practices around activating people to make a purchase. They may not all apply to your situation, but some of them probably will.

Perfect Price Discrimination

Pricing is an important aspect of activating people to make a purchase. There is something called perfect price discrimination which is the act of creating a pricing structure that charges based on the consumer’s purchasing power. Ecquire does this well by making their lowest tier only support basic integrations. This is everything except Salesforce. They know if you are using Salesforce then you can afford to pay for an expensive plan.

Multiple Tiers

Another popular strategy to activate purchases is to have three pricing tiers. Just the fact that there is a more expensive option makes you feel like you’re not wasting money, and you are getting a good deal. Having a pricing tier below you can make you feel like you’re not a cheap person. Options give people confidence to buy.

Suggestive Tier Naming

If you name your pricing tiers something vague like gold, silver, and bronze, then you don’t really help people discover which tier is good for them. By naming the tiers things like “Starter,” “Professional,” or “Team,” you are giving people the confidence that they are in the correct tier.

Free Trials

People are afraid to make an irreversible mistake with their money. If you give them a money back guarantee, or a free trial of some kind, then you are taking the risk away from them and placing it on yourself.

Discount Codes

One of the most powerful forces, in terms of getting someone to make a purchase, is a discount code. But there is a trick that makes discount codes even more effective. If you include a time limit on the discount then you force people to make a decision. Udemy is a great example of this kind of activation tactic. They send out emails on a regular basis which include discount codes that are only valid for a limited time.

Bundling

Another way to get people to make a purchase is through bundling your product with other products. If you can overwhelm people with value then they are more willing to make a buying decision. Hacker Bundle is a good example of a service that uses this activation tactic.

http://www.quicksprout.com/user-activation/
Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-activate-users.html