15 ways to quickly increase sales if you don't have money for advertising

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

What is growth hacking and how to use it to promote your business - we will tell you together with the service.

What is growth hacking and how it helps you sell

Growth hacking is a marketing trend focused on exploding traffic and product demand. It is used by startups and young companies when there is no money for promotion and advertising, but a quick result is needed - otherwise the business will burn out and potential investors will not invest in the startup.

This term was first used by Qualaroo CEO Sean Ellis in 2010. Later, this strategy was used by many American technology startups: Facebook, Airbnb, Evernote, Dropbox, Pinterest, Amazon. Nowadays, advanced startups - for example, those that are engaged in cryptocurrencies and blockchain - are very often looking not for marketers, but rather for growth-hackers.

The main goal of growth hacking is to grab the user's attention.

You only have 8 seconds to hit a person on the internet and social media.

Further, the concentration of attention decreases, and if you have not hooked a person, then he will leave the resource and will not remember anything about you.

What growth hackers do

1. They quickly bring ideas to life. Instead of a cumbersome site, it's better to make a simple one-page site without unnecessary details.
2. Use free or near-free promotion methods.
3. Emphasize experimentation and analytics. It makes no sense to wait a long time for the result: launched → checked how it works → abandoned or adopted and began to optimize.
4. Use automation. To save time and resources, you need to set up automatic mailing and autoresponders.
5. They have a creative approach to promotion. The idea should be unique - this way it will stand out from hundreds of other proposals and will hook the user.

If you want to learn growth hacking and promote your business without huge budgets, sign up for the international conference GetDigital 2019, which will be held on November 22 in Moscow. You will learn how to work in the most popular areas in digital, talk to market experts and learn how to increase revenues without spending on advertising. Register and watch the online broadcast.

Techniques that work anytime, anywhere

1. Constant experimentation

Facebook has never been afraid to experiment and make mistakes. For example, she came up with widgets for user profiles and made it possible to place them on third-party sites. People who were not familiar with the social network followed the links and also registered with Facebook. As a result, the social network received 12 million new users in 12 months without investing a cent in advertising.

By the way, YouTube went the same way, starting to offer the video code to embed it on the site, and also made the right decision.

2. Gift for a recommendation

Referral marketing is the most powerful one. People trust their friends and acquaintances and tend to follow advice. File hosting Dropbox invited users to invite friends. For this, Dropbox customers received 16 GB for free, and if a friend took advantage of the offer and started cloud storage, they both received another 500 MB. As a result, the number of Dropbox users grew from 100 thousand to 4 million in 15 months, with 2.8 million users coming from recommendations.

3. Love

We love to be loved. We love gifts. Hotmail played on this by adding a signature to their emails. It was just one line right after the logo: “P. S. I love you! Get your Hotmail inbox for free. I love you …”Who can resist such a thing? 12 million people could not resist, who became users of the service in 18 months. And then Microsoft bought Hotmail for $ 400 million.

4. Free money

You can invest huge sums of money on advertising and see little or no return. Instead, it’s better to just give them out to people. The PayPal payment system gave each user $ 10 to the account simply for the fact that he opened an account. If the user recommended the service to a friend, he received another 10 dollars. After the start of the campaign, the growth in the number of users ranged from 7% to 10% daily, and in 2002 the eBay corporation bought PayPal for $ 1.5 billion.

5. Free trial period

Offer to test your service for a couple of weeks or a month before buying. If the user likes it, he is ready to buy, if not, he will not regret the money spent. Internet-based growth hacker platform GetResponse used a free 30-day offer instead of a Buy Now call. In the first month, the growth in the number of registered users exceeded 200%.

GetResponse brings together the most popular growth hacking tools. They can help you quickly increase sales even if you don't have the money to spend on advertising: create and automate email campaigns, create one-page sites for advertising campaigns, and use the Perfect Timing feature to find out when your subscribers are opening emails most often.

Techniques for quickly creating a contact database

The success of the promotion largely depends on this stage. To reach out to people, you need to find a channel through which you can do this.

6. Landing pages

A landing page is a simple one-page website. It is suitable for new product launches, sales announcements and events. A landing page can bring in 2–4 times more sales than a regular website.

The first screen is very important - what you see immediately after switching to the landing page. Place a promotion sign-up form right here - for example, you can give a customer a discount on their first order.

You can make a landing page in half an hour, no special knowledge is needed for this. GetResponse has a handy builder with hundreds of landing page options: sales and promo sites, download pages and webinars, as well as blank templates that you can completely customize.

Choose a template that suits you, add free photos from iStock and post a data collection form on the page. All templates are adapted for mobile devices - right in the constructor, you can see how the landing page will look on a smartphone. If you don't have your own domain, you can publish your landing page on GetResponse's free subdomains.

GetResponse gives Lifehacker readers an exclusive 50% discount for the first two months.

7. Videos

Remember you only have 8 seconds! Grab the customer's attention on the site with a video - in it you can also invite viewers to leave their email address.

A good result for a landing page is considered if 10-11% of viewers have shared contacts with you. GetResponse Academy Landing Page Conversion - 17.31%.

A simple and effective approach: video right on the first screen, a subscription form and a "Learn for free" call.

Tricks for quick sales

When the customer is almost ready to purchase, take another step forward - tell them about your product to allay any last doubts.

8. Free trial offers

For example, a free online course will help you both collect contacts and increase sales. GetResponse Academy has launched a free video course, Email Marketing for Newbies. Two weeks after the launch, it gathered 1,100 students, while the promotion did not cost a dime - the viral effect worked. In a year and a half, more than 4,000 people have completed the course, and it still generates monthly sales through mailing out lessons. The return on investment in its creation has already exceeded 400%.

Sign up for an email marketing course for free →

9. Message automation

Often people are not ready to make a purchase right away. You must inspire their trust and desire to purchase your product or service.

Marketing automation will help to build communication with the client in such a way that he receives the right message at the right time and performs the action that you expect from him. A simple scheme works: if (client action) → then (your response to his action) → when (response time). Combined with email newsletters, you ensure continuous and timely communication with potential buyers. In GetResponse's experience, email automation can increase paying customers by 228%.

10. Welcome letters

This is a kind of familiarity with the user. You greet him, inform him that the subscription was successful, and tell him what will be in the mailing list. You don't need to force a person to buy something with the help of welcome letters, their task is to establish a relationship between your company and a potential client. These emails should be sent immediately after receiving the email address, while the client is still "hot".

Professional cosmetics brand Janssen Cosmetics has partnered with GetResponse to launch a welcome email of five emails, each sent every three days. At the first stage, the client was told about the benefits of the brand and was offered a personal promotional code.

The next three letters were devoted to issues that are relevant to potential clients: age-related skin changes, care for the area around the eyes, care for the complexion. In the last letter, the company offered to sign up for a consultation with a beautician for free and receive a set of cosmetics as a gift.

The conversion to sales was 6.48%, and the turnover increased by 2%. Just five welcome emails contributed up to 15% to the annual growth of the business.

11. Neuromarketing

It is an approach that studies the influence on customer behavior using knowledge in the field of psychology and neurophysiology. The man himself did not understand why he made this or that choice, but he had already made it. Neuromarketing studies human behavior and reactions to marketing techniques. Here are the most effective ones:

1. First a gift - then a sale. If you first offer a customer a free and useful product or service, then it is harder for them to refuse the offer to make a purchase.
2. Not a discount, but a gift. Instead of “Buy with a discount,” tell the client that you have a gift for him - that very discount. A simple change in wording can increase the response rate.
3. The Restorff effect. Its essence is that an object that stands out from a number of similar elements is better remembered. Add a bright call-to-action button to the beginning of your email to make sure the user will notice it.
4. Correct colors. For example, it is better to make the button orange - this color stimulates action, but not as aggressive as red.
5. The magic of numbers. If you support words with research results, make them look natural and believable. The phrase “99, 41% of buyers choose our products” is more credible than the same information with the mention of 99% of buyers.

12. Product video reviews

Reviews from real customers work best. Use case analysis: what problem the client had, what solutions he found and why he chose you, what tools he used and what he got in the end.

Users would rather watch the video than read the text. This is especially important for millennials: when making a purchase decision, they are guided by videos in four cases out of five. Video on the site significantly increases sales: according to GetResponse's experience, conversions can grow up to 34%.

13. Selling webinars

Communication with a real person builds trust, and the interactive format helps to get answers to all your questions. To create all the conditions for sales, give viewers a link to the landing page where the product is sold and present a promotional code.

On the GetResponse platform, you can host a webinar, launch a time-reminder mailing list, chat with viewers, record a broadcast and send it to those who missed it.

After the webinar, you will receive a detailed report on where the participants came from, how long they watched the broadcast, and how many of them made a purchase.

14. Cross-promo

Cross-promo is a joint promotion of several companies. You will gather more viewers and increase the effect of the webinar if you attract partners. These may be companies that you work with in the same industry but are not in competition. You have similar target audiences, similar problems, which means that you can solve them together.

In October 2017, GetResponse, end-to-end analytics service Roistat and PPC management platform Origami hosted a webinar-based online conference “How to Increase Sales Without Increasing Your Advertising Budget”. The conference was prepared using GetResponse tools: a landing page, two emails and an online broadcast.

The conference attracted 1,116 participants, with 673 people coming from GetResponse partners. Conversion from the landing page was 67, 31%, 32 new clients came.

15. Email newsletters

Despite the development of new communication channels, email marketing is still profitable. According to the SalesForce CRM platform, you can invest $ 1 in email and get $ 44.25 back. Build your email marketing system right from the start: save your time and automate your mailings.

GetResponse has a Perfect Timing feature: the smart service analyzes itself when your subscribers open emails most often, and sends the message at that time. During testing of this feature, the email open rate increased by 23%, and the number of clicks increased to 20%.

A gift for Lifehacker readers - a video of the #GRDigitalTalks project with growth hacking guru Roman Kumar Vias, who talks about the brightest tips of low-budget marketing for startups.