At the helm of a so-far successful startup? Congratulations! You’ve created something people want, but how do you keep it going and growing? To get real business-specific: How do you scale?
Scaling up, one of the most essential and difficult moves for any successful startup to pull off, is much-discussed. What’s not talked about a lot, however, is how an early-stage startup should employ a growth strategy that won’t land them so far in the red that they forget what it looks like and feels like to be in the black.
That’s where we come in. From cutting inefficiencies and optimizing campaigns to implementing smart tools and processes like email validation, here are some cost-efficient growth hacks that startups can use to scale, as well as some pitfalls to look out for on your way to the top.
Core Principle: Efficiency is the Foundation of Cost-Effective Scaling
It goes without saying that scaling will involve spending and that you’ll need adequate cash flow to pull that off. What’s not said as often is how that spending can be, and should be, smart. Spend smarter, not harder? You bet.
By removing common inefficiencies like bad data, poor workflows, inadequate tools, not leaning into marketing processes with excellent ROI, and the like, scaling up can be done without running off the cash runway.
Cost-Efficient Growth Hacks Every Startup Should Leverage
Regardless of your industry, growth stage, business strategy, or customer base, scaling is your future, if you’re going to survive, and these cost-efficient growth hacks can help you do it.
Build and Optimize Your Email Marketing Strategy
One extremely cost-effective tool that can help you scale is email marketing. When done well, an email marketing channel with excellent ROI can offer significant assistance on a wide range of other needs, including gathering customer feedback, generating actionable data, getting new customers, marketing new products, and more.
Regardless of how good your product or service is, you won’t be able to sell it for long or scale it at all without leveraging excellent data, so make sure you’re getting great data, analyzing it, and using it in all your decision-making.
You’ll need access to a good email marketing automation tool. But before you even do that, you’ll want to make sure that the email addresses you have and the ones you plan to gather through various lead capture processes (e.g., forms, onboarding, landing pages, social media giveaways, product demos, etc.) are valid and verified. To that end, enlisting an email cleaning and verification service is efficient and a huge savings.
Finally, you need the right people — people who understand your product-market fit and how to talk about it. Messaging, words, fonts, colors, graphics, CTA buttons, the art of the email is real, and it’s vital to employ people who either already get it or who have the aptitude to learn. You need people who love to test whether or not their strategy is working, too. Your email marketing strategy should be a lab that’s aiming to continually test, analyze, and improve.
Leverage Organic Growth Channels
We’ve already discussed email, but leveraging these other organic growth channels can lower customer acquisition costs and assist in your startup’s long-term success, including:
- SEO/Content Marketing
- Social Media
- Affiliate Programs
- Brand Partnerships
- Referral Programs
- SMS Marketing
- Online and Offline Events
Of course, you’ll need good tools and smart, skilled people to leverage and optimize each and every one of these, but because they don’t cost anything to run, once you develop methodologies that work and staff people who can employ them, the sky is pretty much the limit.
Use Paid Ads Wisely
Paid ads can be a part of rapid growth, but they must be utilized with wisdom and restraint. If you’re still in the early-growth stage and haven’t yet settled into product-market fit, spending any money on ads is likely to be a total waste of money.
One way to test the waters is to start small. Develop a really good paid ad campaign and spend $1,000 or less. Why? If your campaign doesn’t lead to new customers or new markets at $1,000, then spending 100 times that isn’t going to work either.
You also need to make sure you have the infrastructure you need to make that paid ad pay for itself and lead to greater profitability. How’s your landing page? How’s your email marketing strategy for following up? How’s your sales team at closing?
One other way to use paid ads with wisdom is to let them teach you, while generating insight and data. What audience actually responds? What messaging works? What photos of the product, value propositions, etc., seem to appeal? Paid ads can be a vital help in scaling, just not always in the ways originally intended.
Automate Where It Makes Sense
Using the right tools for the right job has already been mentioned, and for good reason. Successful startups scale at the pace their employees can move. While you might be able to make add-on hires as you grow (and you likely should), the right tools can handle a lot of scaling for you. Some examples are:
- Automated email list cleaning service. You’ve got a strong email marketing team, and your lead capture efforts are going well. By integrating automatic email list validation and verification into your CRM or email marketing tool, you’ll be able to keep your list free of errors, which will keep bounce rates low and sender reputation high.
- Analyze workflows and find where automation can help. Map out work processes with flowcharts or diagrams with the goal of identifying those repetitive tasks that can be automated. Don’t skip steps, and don’t give tech too much credit. There’s a lot of work that, even inside an automating system, needs the attention of a living, breathing, thinking, feeling human. Task management is a great place to use automation, and tools like Asana, Monday, and Trello can save your team a lot of time and energy.
Successful scaling should free up your team members to do more of the collaborative, creative work that drives product and marketing innovation.
Double Down on Retention Marketing
Existing customers are your most important customers. Regardless of your business model, you need to invest in retention marketing, or scaling up is never going to happen.
Imagine you’re an entrepreneur with a great idea, who launches her great idea with 2,000 people who already love her product and can’t wait to keep buying new iterations of it. Now imagine another entrepreneur with a great idea and no one who loves the product yet. That’s the difference between a company that’s invested in retention and one scrambling to grow without a plan. You want to keep the customers you have.
But how do you do that? Here are some ideas, none of which cost much of anything:
- Offer great customer service
- Offer loyalty programs
- Collect customer feedback via email and share insights with your target audience
- Try and get to know your customers via social media, online events, etc.
- Offer personalized, one-of-a-kind experiences
- Offer referral incentives
- Surprise your customers with coupons, giveaways, etc.
- Offer special pricing
- Offer first looks at new products and content
Why Email Validation Is a Must-Have, Cost-Saving Tool for Startups
Whether you’re a SaaS or shipping hardware, your startup needs an email validation and verification tool. As you gather email addresses and develop a strong email marketing game, the quality of those email addresses will deteriorate; also, some of them might not have been valid to begin with.
Email validation and verification is a process that identifies typos and syntax errors in email address lists. It also identifies any bot-generated emails that may have made it through your forms, any catch-all email addresses, any spam traps, and any temporary or disposable emails that technically exist but do not have an engaged human at the other end of them.
In addition to improved deliverability, a clean email list will also boost your audience quality and protect you from being labelled a spammer, something that could hamper your email marketing efforts significantly.
The Risks of Ignoring Invalid Email Addresses
Invalid or disengaged email contacts can do real harm to startups looking to scale, and the problems go far beyond wasted spend. Just some of the risks include:
- High bounce rates
- Damaged sender reputation
- Inaccurate data that will skew metrics
- Creates inefficiencies inside the email marketing teams that then spill over into other marketing channels
- Can make you a target for spam traps, which can result in blacklisting
- Loss of leads
Beyond Email: How Clean Data Enhances All Marketing Channels
The good news is that validating and verifying your email list will have a positive ripple effect across your entire marketing ecosystem. In addition to keeping your CRM quality high, clean data from email marketing will enable you to really get to know your customers and drill down into what does, and doesn’t, make them tick.
This data-driven insight has a plethora of applications for the rest of your marketing team and its scaling efforts, too, including:
- More effective ad retargeting
- Better personalization
- More precise targeting
- Better audience segmentation
- Optimized content creation
