Remember those stakeholder meetings where someone comes and asks you, can we send more to get more? If only growth marketing hacks were this simple. The most commonly heard requests from business and sales for growth marketers are:
- Can we send more push notifications?
- How about sending more emails?
- Would sending more SMSes help?
- Let’s run “only x hours left before the irresistible offer will end” every day?
This perspective seems to be etched into the minds of most of us, that “more” can give you better results. More Sales. More Revenue.
But then it is also known that you will end up in a death cycle of rapid churn if you end up troubling your users. This results in poor brand equity. Poor Perception. Lower Referrals. Higher Unsubscribes.
Unfortunately, the problem here is that this whole thought process around ‘more is merrier revolves around revenue and not users.
To make this centered around the user, core logic has to align with user behavior and response to your brand communications.
We saw earlier why saying no to blanket aggression is a great idea to ensure you can maintain healthy deliverability for all your channels. Well, but how do you balance the business needs keeping the process user-centric?
This is what we will be focussing on here in the article. Well, here are three growth marketing hacks you can do today to start building a deeper segmentation logic in context to your own business:
#1 Stop sending communications to users who are not responding
To keep it simple, let’s think of this problem as an analogy to the real-world dating issue.
Say you got right-swiped (yes a lead). There are two extreme types of people you might have encountered here. The soulmate-searchers (Yes or a No on first sight) V/S The Chasers: (You are mine forever). So which one do you want to be as a brand? Should you give up on the first try? Maybe tweak and try a different approach? Or do you really want to just keep chasing forever even if there is no real chemistry between you two?
Recommended Solution
You need to kickstart setting up your pruning lists. Have a simple logic to find the right benchmark for your brand.
Typically these three segments go hand in hand:
- New Users: Should be given a chance to participate in the communication.
- Active Responders: They are the users who are responding frequently. You can keep going on and on with them, building a deeper engagement and more aggressive communication pipelines.
- Non-Responders: Users who have ignored you more than x times? Better let them be because you have failed to build chemistry. So it is for the best of both brand and the user to take a break from the relationship.
So, find out the non-responders and start pruning them out of the communication. But then also have a reactivation mechanism for them to enter back communication legs when seasonality kicks in or the users come back by themselves to opt-in again.
#2 Stop sending conflicting campaigns at the same time
Hello, here is your x% coupon to make a purchase.
Hi, here is your Rs y discount to make a purchase.
Hey, we heard you need us. How about this offer z to make you happy?
There is nothing worse than confusing the user with multiple irrelevant offers, especially when they are not ignoring you. This was your chance, and ending up making conflicted pitches will just break the trust your brand went miles and miles to build.
Recommended Solution
Negative Segment: Users who are participating in a promotion X need to be excluded from all other ongoing promotions!
Power up your segmentation models so they can start excluding users from one campaign when another is already running. To solve this, you might need to deep dive into your marketing infrastructure or work for your CRM on how to power real-time segment exclusions.
#3 Stop sending “Never Before” offers repeatedly
Out of everything else, nothing can anger the user as much as the creation of an unjustified urgency.
Everything from the special flash sales to the end of month sales to big million-billion days is becoming the norm of the day. And users do not like participating in them if the deals just keep coming and hitting them too often. By doing this you are just inviting hatred and uninstalls from the user. Once a value proposition is put forth and heard by the user, creating pressure and urgency might not be the best way forward.
Recommended Solution
Negative Segment: Users who have participated in an urgency campaign leg should be excluded from any other such leg for some time.
Again taking the advantage of segmentation systems, exclude users who have already been a part of urgent or ‘never before’ communication. Do not carry the bias that users will keep converting if you start doing ‘flash sales’ daily for them. They will permanently abandon you for sure.
Final Thoughts
It’s all about segmentation.
You can start building the solutions right within your Martech infrastructure. While creating segments and targeting users with an omnichannel strategy (push, email, calls), the pruning logic sits right on top of the warehouse powering the promotions.
This pre-filters and powers up the promo architecture to filter out users who are not interested and grow onto the base of users who are responding to your brand. Currently, almost all segmentation systems that power up user promotions have these capabilities, so go out and explore these for yourselves.
Would love to hear your thoughts on the growth marketing hacks shared above. Also, what all you have been trying in this context? Feel free to drop in a note, feedback, and queries you have in the comments.
*This post was originally published by the author on LinkedIn.
Vanhishikha Bhargava
Kasturi Patra
