Remember when you could just push a ton of traffic through your funnel which was just a 2D maze of randomness? Well, now that we’re in the 21st century, it doesn’t always work that way. More than ever, it’s important to focus on and optimize every lever and conversion point if you’re going to build out a growth model. When you can master each stage of the life cycle, from acquisition to expansion, you’ll find yourself in the driver’s seat of sustaining growth and pushing for better ROI. Today, we’ll run through a quick guide to developing the right growth model for your business.
Acquisition: Generating Demand at Profitable CAC Levels
We’ve spoken about the Customer Acquisition Cost being such an important metric before. Just as a recap, it’s the metric that helps determine how much you’re spending to acquire a new customer while also remaining profitable. Building the right model for this would include:
- Targeted Marketing: Identify your ICP, or multiple ICPs, and use targeted strategies to reach them. This could be search engine marketing, social media, or even cold emails.
- Data-Driven Campaigns: When you take advantage of the data tracking you have in place, you’ll effectively track performance and optimize for better outcomes. If you were to run an A/B test to refine messaging and creatives, you’ll have a better chance in the future with pushing resources to the best-performing channel.
- Efficient Spend: Acquisition costs have to be capped in order to align with your customer lifetime value (CLTV). The goal is to generate demand at a CAC which allows you to remain profitable.
Activation: Onboarding the Right Prospects
Now that we’ve planned out the acquisition stage, we can now focus on activation which is turning those acquired into active users… Well, I guess that’s how they’d be acquired… Whatever. On to the important part – how to build the right activation framework:
- Streamlined Onboarding: The onboarding process should be something which is oiled up so there’s reduced friction. Clear instructions, tutorials, content for support, and anything else needed to help new users to get started quickly.
- Personalized Experiences: Just like content should be set up to align with a prospects pain points, the onboarding process should also be personalized to fit the needs of all user segments.
- Engagement Tactics: Email sequences, notifications, progress tracking, and what else? All of these are user engagement tactics that encourage users to complete the onboarding process.
Adoption: Embedding Your Solution in the Customer’s Environment
Customers now have to integrate with your solution so they can use it into daily operations. That’s what the adoption stage is about! In order to build a solid infrastructure for adoption means:
- Comprehensive Training: Offer some webinars, one-on-one training sessions (or add the whole team), and offer resources to enable customers to understand and get the most out of your product, offer, or service.
- Stakeholder Involvement: All stakeholders should be engaged. Not yours, but the customer’s organization. This allows for broad adoption and then an even broader support in the long-term.
- Continuous Support: Providing support beyond your webinars, resources, and training involves customer success teams, help centers, and community forums to assist with any issues and promote deeper adoption.
Retention: Driving Towards Customer Success
We built it, and they came – just like the field of dreams. Now we have to keep the customers here. Retention is about ensuring your customers keep finding value in your product and stay loyal over time. This can be done with:
- Customer Success Focus: Marketing, sales, product, and UI/UX efforts should be aligned toward the customer success team. When you have a customer-centric approach to helping build a longer relationship.
- Regular Check-Ins: Check in more than once a quarter… Simple as that.
- Value Delivery: Continuously give value through updates, new features, and the best customer experience you can give.
Expansion: Growing Customer Relationships
With everything going well, we can plan for expansion. This includes identifying opportunities to grow your relationship with existing customers. This could be done by increasing usage or adding additional offers. In order to drive expansion, try:
- Usage Analysis: Monitor customer usage patterns to identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling additional products or services.
- Customer Feedback: Use customer feedback to inform your product roadmap and introduce features that meet their evolving needs.
- Loyalty Programs: Implement loyalty programs and incentives to encourage customers to expand their usage and stay committed to your brand.
The Power of Understanding and Pulling Growth Levers
Take a seat and take some time to study these growth levers and how to pull them effectively. Why? Because now the more budget you can allocate toward acquiring new customers. When driving efficiencies across acquisition, activation, adoption, retention, and expansion, you’ll increase lifetime value, and allow you to get stronger profits.
Takeaways
In order to build the right growth model you have to have a clear understanding of all the levers and conversion points in the customer lifecycle. By optimizing each stage you can achieve sustainable growth and outpace your competition. Invest time in the studying you do for each stage and continuously refine the strategy you’re using to build a growth model that grows when you do.