A guide to growth hacking for exponential success

- When faced with a choice of spending hundreds of dollars to acquire one customer or spending zero dollars to acquire thousands, the choice is obvious. How can you increase market adoption without spending a lot on your market budget? Growth hacking. Growth hacking is the nontraditional, low-cost approach to marketing. Experimenting with different marketing ideas and focusing on the ones most scalable. To leverage growth hacking for your product launch, follow the AAARRR model. Let's walk through each phase of the model. The first phase is awareness, making your product visible to your target market. Founder, an entrepreneurship magazine, used growth hacking to raise awareness for their book launch. They created a competition where people could earn prizes for sharing news about their book on social media. To make it easy, they created a resources page with images and text for people to copy and paste. And their plan worked. They generated more exposure and exceeded their goal four times over. Beyond awareness, how many customers sign up or purchase your product? The acquisition stage is where a person becomes a customer. A legendary example of a user acquisition growth hack comes from Hotmail, one of the first webmail providers. In the early startup days, Hotmail needed a way to quickly get new users without making significant marketing spend. They created a campaign, adding a single line with a link at the end of each email sent via Hotmail that read "PS: I love you. "Get your free email at Hotmail." Hotmail then directed you to a page to set up your own account. Within hours, Hotmail's growth skyrocketed. They started averaging 3,000 users a day, compounding daily. Within seven months, they'd hit their 2,000,000 user mark. Moving to the last A, activation, or driving consumer action through brand interaction and experiences. Simply put, this is the phase that gets consumers to act. The language-learning application Duolingo created a brilliant new user experience to growth hack their activation phase. Duolingo flipped the model to provide value right away. New users dive right into the language-learning activity and are able to use the tool without signing up. This growth hack kept the users engaged throughout the experience. And with 300,000,000 active users a month, they're clearly doing something right. Next in the model is retention, or how many customers come back after their initial experience. A powerful growth hacking tool to encourage retention is a well-timed and personalized email. One company that's best in class when it comes to personalized emails is eCommerce giant Amazon. A year after I purchased my Apple iPhone, I received an email from Amazon that said, "Hi, Karen, congratulations "on the first anniversary of your iPhone purchase." Then, with a click of a button, I could leave a review or upgrade to a new phone. The customized timing, personalized around my purchase, was a great reminder and technique that successfully retains customers. Continuing on, the revenue stage is where you up the revenue made from your customers. For Dollar Shave Club, a company delivering razors and other products by mail, the revenue growth hack strategy started with their name. The name Dollar Shave makes a promise that's attractive to their target market, razors that show up at your door each month for a dollar each. But when you reach their site, they have a beautiful, highly optimized landing page that offers a pricier value added option in addition to the expected Dollar Shave option. The final stage is referral, promoting your product to new customers through referrals and word of mouth. Dropbox, the cloud-based file hosting service, gave their users free storage in exchange for recommending their product to friends and family. Just over a year into the campaign, Dropbox obtained 2.8 million users directly from referral invites. When it comes to a product launch, growth hacking is a solution for hypergrowth on a shoestring budget. The AAARRR model will help you come up with new ideas, test, measure and repeat until you land on the campaigns that bring you scale and growth.