If you want to achieve stellar growth for your business, SaaS growth hacking strategies have been tried and tested by countless developers, marketers, and creative founders. If you’re not sure what this term means you’re not alone. It’s become very trendy in marketing and entrepreneurial circles.
In the following post, the veil is going to be pulled back and you’ll find out how you can make growth hacking work for your business. Leverage what you learn and you’ll be able to achieve quick, measurable, and hopefully sustainable growth for your own SaaS brand. Let’s face it, there are over 10,000 private SaaS companies, so you’ve got to do everything you can to stand out from the crowd.
Here you can check out effective growth hacking tips I got from both experts & starters.
Kashyap Trivedi
Growth Marketer at Salesmate
Twitter: @harf13594
LinkedIn: Kashyap Trivedi
Create a truly useful onboarding sequence
Companies constantly experiment with the way they communicate with their customers or future customers. In marketing experiments, companies usually found that the onboarding sequence has an amazing impact on trial to paid conversion rates.
The logic is quite simple. If prospects hit on the “Try Now” button, somehow your copywriting or targeting is working. Cheers to that.
But you have to impress them with your product now. No matter how experienced users are, they are new to your platform. You’ll miss out on an amazing opportunity to impress trial users with your product if you don’t provide them with all the things they “might” need.
They might not need your support articles, videos, or resources. That simply doesn’t mean you shouldn’t provide.
Usually, at Salesmate we send over 4-6 emails to new users over the period of 15 days to show how Salesmate is useful for their business, and this strategy works for us. You can check out our drip email templates in the reference.
Learn more: [FREE] 19 Drip email campaign templates you can steal right now!
Jae Jun
Founder of Gorilla ROI
Twitter: @jae_jun
LinkedIn: Jae Jun
Create a page of stats relevant to your industry
People love reading data-driven posts and bigger news outlets are also inclined to link to a data dedicated page. If your industry is related to social media, a page could be created showing the number of social media users per platform, the engagement rate of each platform, the growth of each platform, the strengths and weaknesses of each social platform, and so on. If your SaaS is in the real estate industry, a page describing the growth of the current market, and the number of homes sold, pending, open per market will bring a high level of links, interest and traffic which can be converted into sales.
Below you can learn more about our approach to growth hack links, traffic and sales.
Learn more: Giving Away Free Amazon Seller Templates
Rakesh Sharma
Product Marketer of Scalefusion MDM
Twitter: @rrakesharmaa
LinkedIn: Rakesh Sharma
Upscale Your Customer Service with Chat-based Support
The SaaS industry is no more just about products and services, it is also about exceptional customer support. Scalefusion offers live chat support on the product dashboard and on the website and has experienced over 60% improvement in sales ever since.
Here’s how you can extend customer support simply & effectively:
- Live chat-based support made available on the dashboard: Extend an option for your users to get in touch with your support team straight from the dashboard. Enabling chat-based live customer support from the product dashboard is a great way to resolve queries faster and help your customers in real-time.
- Intercom-based customer engagement on the website: Integrate intercom-based chat support on your website to help your potential customers find what they need. You can easily assist your website visitors with any particular features that they are looking for in your product.
Learn more: Top-5 Tactics That Can Guide You in Your Remote Transition
Anton Liaskovskyi
CEO of AdPlayer.Pro
LinkedIn: Anton Liaskovskyi
Unlock incremental revenue by launching a Reseller Program
Many SaaS businesses, particularly those working in the B2B segment, may find it rewarding to explore incremental revenue opportunities by offering their technology as a white label solution for enterprise partners.
More importantly, launching a SaaS Reseller Program can become yet another valuable revenue source for digital companies, e.g. in the advertising tech niche. Namely, the acquisition of reputable reseller partners can potentially help scale their business without excessive spending of their operational and financial resources.
Max Benz
Co-Founder of BankingGeek
LinkedIn: Max Benz
Send a lot of cold emails
One of the most effective growth hacking tools in your toolbox is cold email outreach.
Cold email outreach is the process of contacting potential customers who have had no previous interaction with your brand. It’s a great way to generate leads and build relationships with people who might be interested in your product or service.
Here are a few tips to crush it:
- Do your research. Before you start reaching out to people, take some time to research your target audience.
- Keep it short and sweet. When you’re writing cold emails, less is more. Get to the point quickly.
- Personalize your messages. Generic emails are more likely to be ignored, so take the time to personalize each message you send. Include the recipient’s name and address them by their title (e.g., “Dear Mr. Smith”).
- Use a strong call to action. Make it clear what you want the recipient to do after reading your email (e.g., “Click here to learn more about our product”).
- Test, test, test! Try different subject lines, formats, and strategies to see what works best for your audience. A/B testing can be extremely helpful in this process.
Learn more: Cold Email Outreach Guide (incl. Tools, Templates & Strategy)
Omer Usanmaz
CEO and Co-Founder of Qooper Mentoring & Learning Software
Twitter: @qooperio
LinkedIn: Qooper
- Offer free trials or discounts. Offer free trials or discounts to entice people to try out your product. This is a great way to get more people interested in what you have to offer. In addition, you can offer discounts for users who sign up for a longer period of time.
- Create valuable content. Make sure that the content you’re creating for your website is valuable and interesting. This will help attract more visitors to your site and help them learn more about what you have to offer. In addition, this can also help convert visitors into paying customers.
- Make your product easy to use. If people can’t figure out how to use your product, they’re not going to want to continue using it. Make sure that your user interface is intuitive and easy to use. In addition, make sure that your product provides value that people will want to use.
Narek Vardanyan
CEO at The Crowdfunding Formula
Twitter: @narekvar
LinkedIn: Narek Vardanyan
- Hacks to Advertise on Snapchat, Pinterest and Twitter. Google and Facebook offer great targeting options, but you can’t do cold targeting on other platforms like Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter. They don’t collect that much information from their audiences but it doesn’t mean that you should ignore them. You can work with them with this retargeting growth hack: embed the pixels of other social media sites on your landing page. Drive cold/relevant traffic from Facebook and retarget them on Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, and even Reddit. Create custom ads tailored to the platform’s preferences and target it to your very relevant custom audience.
- Include the Most Important Info of Your Email in the P.S. This is a very useful growth hack that you can use in cold emailing: if you have an important sentence that should be read, add it as a P.S. Journalists and other people, having crowded inboxes, 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.
Rod Austin
Marketing Director at Localize
Twitter: @Localize
LinkedIn: Localize
Adapt your product or service to a new market
As your SaaS business grows, you may find that you need to expand your audience and increase revenue through localization. This means adapting your product or service to appeal to a new market, often with a different language and culture. For example, native Chinese speakers comprise 15% of internet users, but only 2% of online content is in Chinese. What an opportunity to capitalize on!
Localization can be a great way to reach new customers and grow your business. It can also be expensive and time-consuming without the right tools, so you’ll need to make sure that it’s worth the investment. Before you start with localization, do some research to determine whether there is a viable market for your product or service in the target region.
Once you’ve decided to move forward with localization, you’ll need to decide how best to adapt your product or service. The most important thing is to make sure that the translation is accurate and culturally appropriate. You may also need to adjust your marketing materials and website to reflect the new market.
If you do it correctly, localization can be a great way to grow your brand, increase your revenue and reach new customers. Just make sure you do your homework first!
Learn more: What is Localization?
Shubham Agarwal
SEO Specialist and Freelance Link Builder at Nifty
Twitter: @shubh88818
LinkedIn: Shubham Agarwal
Building quality backlinks is more important than quantity
Quality backlinks provide more benefits to organic growth. Always check whether the backlink is adding value to your site or not. If you keep building too many irrelevant links, your site traffic and SERP ranking will not grow effectively. Every backlink should be placed on related articles to add value to the article on which the link is set and it helps you to acquire more target audience.
Key Strategies to Use for Quality Backlink:
- Gain links from sites with high DR/DA
- Find competitor’s high-value links
- Acquire more do-follow links
- Place links in articles where they add value to readers.
- The number of inbound links should be more than outbound links
Pratik Dholakiya
Founder of Growfusely
Twitter: @DholakiyaPratik
LinkedIn: Pratik Dholakiya
Focus on Funnel to Develop and Distribute Content
In the ecosystem where information is in abundance, it’s vital today to growth-hack your way into the noise by researching, developing, publishing, and distributing your content as per the funnel.
Awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention are the four stages of the conversion funnel to educate, entertain, pursue and win your prospects and make them your brand ambassadors by having them for word-of-mouth marketing.
For your SaaS business, determine as per the conversion stage, that a blog post would work; or if your prospect has time-constraint and loves listening to podcast episodes en-route office.
Actionable steps:
- Find the channel where your customers spend time online
- See what content format works in that channel (podcast, video, blog post, infographic, etc.)
- Have a content calendar filled with content pieces for each stage of the funnel
- Publish regularly
- Distribute aggressively
- Repurpose smartly
Learn more: Content Marketing For SaaS: The Definitive Guide
Kevin Joubin
VP of Growth Marketing at Branded Surveys
Twitter: @BrandedSurveys
LinkedIn: BrandedSurveys
Utilize Market Research Effectively
One of the best growth marketing strategies is utilizing market research. When it comes to market research, surveys are one of the most commonly used methods. This is because they are a cost-effective way to gather data from a large number of people in a short amount of time. Additionally, surveys can be used to collect information on a variety of topics, including customer demographics, purchasing habits, and brand awareness. You can also get feedback on your products to help improve them.
However, it is important to keep in mind that not all surveys are created equal. In order to get the most accurate and useful data, it is important to create a well-designed survey that asks the right questions. Additionally, you will need to have a plan for how you will reach your target audience and collect their responses.
Teemu Raitaluoto
Founder and CEO at Markettailor
LinkedIn: Teemu Raitaluoto
Name your company same as your website
To achieve extra organic growth and gain passive backlinks from other sites, you can name your business as “yourcompany.com.” When your company is mentioned in the media and elsewhere on the internet, some writing platforms and websites automatically detect your company name as a link and convert it to a link. We used this hack in the early days of Markettailor (we used to be “markettailor.io”) to get a few extra backlinks.
This hack works especially well if you use your domain as your company name on social media platforms because there are a lot of services that automatically scrape that data and save your name as your domain name in their database.
Learn more: What Is Website Personalization
Victor Hsi
Growth Strategist & Freelance SEO at vctr.co
Twitter: @vctr_co
LinkedIn: Victor Hsi
Exact domain name advantage + SEO
As a SaaS, there are only a few things that can drastically improve your MRR, organic traffic being one of them. As someone who had the struggle of getting traffic after developing an entire product, I find solving the traffic issue at the start of it makes the rest of the business much easier.
All you need is to pick a brand name/domain name that works in your favor.
Most SaaS businesses solve a specific problem that can be narrowed down to 1 keyword seed phrase.
Having that exact keyword seed phrase that your customers are searching for as your domain name, in addition to leveraging the universal practice of using brand names as anchor text i.e brand mentions & owning brandmentions(.)com
We now have an accurate measure of what keywords we can rank for easily on the homepage without additional cost in organic traffic.
As the business grows, more people will link to it organically – securing a moat for your SaaS in terms of free SEO traffic & brand type-ins.
This strategy works well for 1 word domain name too, which often has better search volume, part-keyword/brand matches – meaning your website will be prioritized as it’s included in the keyword people are searching for.
Learn more: Growth Hacking Strategy
Dustin Porreca
SEO & Growth Manager at Elevate Demand
Twitter: @DPCodeMan1
LinkedIn: Dustin Porreca
Implement a Buyer-Led Growth Model
Marketing is no longer about raising awareness and capturing customers under the new Buyer-Led Growth marketing strategy. It’s all about changing people’s minds with your brand story, building urgency, and creating a compelling offer.
Customer-Led Growth centers your brand’s identity, value proposition, marketing strategy, and more around the buyer. You’re primarily concerned with the buyer’s needs and where they are on their journey.
If you give buyers the knowledge they need, they are more inclined to trust you and, as a result, buy from you. This is when users are more likely to contact sales on their own, resulting in a more efficient and productive sales process.
Learn more: Effective B2B SaaS Marketing for Growing Brands
Karol Andruszków
CEO & Co-founder of BOWWE
Twitter: @karolAndruszkow
LinkedIn: Karol Andruszków
Build Community with Digital Marketplaces
If you’re trying to break through with a product in a hyper-competitive market, you need to find a place/community where your competitors are not so popular or liked.
You can use a web builder that offers such powerful features. If your marketing opportunities are quite small try to find people looking for a better product.
AppSumo, ProductHunt, StackSocial, etc. gather “early-adopters” – people who love innovative products and are willing to pay for them, even if they aren’t error-free yet. They’re professionals who used a huge number of tools and have enormous experience.
We shared the details about our successful campaign on our blog below.
Learn more: How BOWWE Became the Best Website Builder on AppSumo? [Case study + Infographic]
Santiago Safdie
Marketing Growth Analyst at Invgate
LinkedIn: Santiago Safdie
Linkbuild & Create Content
Thanks to our large amount of content generated through our blog, we are able to offer reliable sources of information, related to different sites that talk about our content (ITSM).
This is a Win-Win collaboration since the site can generate more interest in its readers by inserting new referral links and it helps us from the Link Building side.
That is why from the Growth team we always focus on generating quality content and having the ability to distribute it.
Learn more: ITSM: The Definite Guide
Ilija Sekulov
Marketing & SEO at Mailbutler
Twitter: @sekulovile
LinkedIn: Ilija Sekulov
VIP mailing list for the Start-Up Phase of a New Service or Product
- Create a VIP mailing list before the launch of your new offer;
- Offer Internet users to join this list via a message published on your social networks;
- Build a solid base of potential customers to create excitement around your new product/service. Registrants will be the first to know about its launch!
- Send Product-specific Emails to Browsing Customers
- Bonus: offer an interesting discount to subscribers (up to -20%) to encourage them to subscribe to your service or buy your product.
Learn more: Best Email Marketing Tips to Boost Open & Clickthrough Rates
Aaron Gray
Managing Partner at NO-BS
LinkedIn: Aaron Gray
Hire a professional outreach manager
Nowadays, the question “Is cold outreach dead?” causes a great deal of disputes and controversies among marketing professionals. Unfortunately, there is a tendency for companies not to like ”going cold”, despite the efficiency of this strategy.
It is fair enough to say that the results of a cold outreach campaign are often mediocre, and for the time invested in building a cold email campaign, the juice really isn’t worth the squeeze. However, outsourcing an expert might totally change the perspective.
While email experts understand how to build lists and design campaigns, they can warm even the coldest leads to accelerate growth. Furthermore, as could outreach is a low investment strategy it provides you with a more profound control and opportunities to scale making it a natural fit for growth hacking.
Learn more: Blogger Outreach Best Practices
Conclusion
Now you appreciate there are many ways you can make your service or product stand out it’s time to focus on setting up a growth hacking strategy of your own. Get the recipe right and you’ll be able to tap into new audiences continually and have plenty of opportunities to attract, acquire, and convert them into users.
