Growth Hacking has evolved from a popular approach for many successful startups to a mature discipline and offering of successful agencies and consultancies. This article by Ben Brubaker, Digital Marketing Analytics & Growth Hacking Consultant talks about how companies can use growth hacking to improve ROI and customer lifetime value.
“Growth Hacking,†“Growth Hacker,†and even the title “Chief Growth Officer†have recently become popular terms and titles that embody the approach many successful startups including Airbnb and DropBox have used to maintain customer and revenue growth as their true North. This scrappy, growth focused approach to innovation has been so successful that “Growth Hacking†is now a mature discipline and offering of successful agencies and consultancies. Â
Today, a properly constructed growth hacking discipline will answer the calls for rapid innovation in today’s Covid-19 altered landscape. This structured and disciplined approach uses analytical, inexpensive, creative, and innovative methods to uncover ways to grow a company’s customer base and improve return on investment and/or customer lifetime value.
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 Through rapid digital experimentation across the marketing and sales funnel, the most effective ways to scale customer acquisition, activation & retention can be quickly uncovered and acted upon.Â
The impetus for a successful growth hacking discipline is based on a surgical strike mentality that seeks to ensure that every prioritized activity or initiative focuses on driving customer or revenue growth and is evaluated for speed to launch and magnitude of impact.  Â
 While traditional marketing or product managers may focus on budgets, expenses, and campaigns, growth hacking maintains consideration of each of these strictly in the context of driving growth. This lens is applied across marketing, engineering, product and other disciplines.Â
 Our Approach to Growth Hacking
 At Slalom, our recommended growth hacking approach centers on rapid experimentation that uncovers and correctly prioritizes the most impactful growth initiatives to launch.
1. Reconnaissance
Through a focused immersion into the current data & analytics, investor analysis, 10K reports, and stakeholder interviews it is essential to establish a structural understanding of the business model, technology stack, and begin to understand areas where growth opportunities may exist & identify potential “bright spots†that can be built upon.
2. Growth Hypothesis Development
Workshops with key stakeholders and disciplines then identify a short list of immediate growth opportunities. The workshop leads stakeholders and leaders through a process that assesses the impact, feasibility & speed to launch of each potential growth initiative. Prioritization and the action steps required to launch a rapid-fire backlog of growth experiments are defined in detail.Â
3. Minimum Viable Analytics
Site, product, and/or customer analytics are implemented as strictly defined by each experiment’s growth hypothesis with a laser focus on growth centric KPI measurement. Product analytics tools are a great way to rapidly collect and interrogate data for growth hacking.Â
4. Growth Hacking Pods
Ownership of launching each prioritized growth experiment falls to a multidisciplinary pod that includes data analytics, engineering, and marketing expertise and a team that has been endowed with the needed level of decision making and mandate by leadership. The pod activates and reports out impact uncovered by each experiment. The pod then continues to rapidly fuel growth through a living backlog of growth hypotheses to implement.
The ability of an effective growth pod and team is often ensuring they have cross disciplinary decision-making power as well as a deep knowledge of the marketing, product and technology levers at their disposal. Additionally, the rapid experimentation generated through growth hacking is inherently dependent on each team member being proficient in key characteristics needed to deliver growth at surgical strike speed.Â
1. Inventiveness
Using any tools at immediate or near immediate disposal to create solutions that may have been overlooked. Paths to rapid growth are often not the most obvious, and must be uncovered and then rapidly activated.
2. Data obsession
Data is the key ingredient to an approach that uncovers opportunities for growth. Customer focused analytics will point the way to ‘bright spots’ that can be amplified or blockers that can be removed to unlock rapid growth.
3. Opportunistic investigation
Growth hacking identifies new gaps or whitespace that may have been overlooked that can be ‘exploited’ rapidly for growth.
Growth Hacking in Practice
With all this in mind, what does growth hacking look like in practice? Â
 Armed with a well-researched, well-formed hypothesis, a specific area of customer interaction is targeted with an experiment to determine if the suspected ready-to-unlock growth is able to be realized. As mentioned earlier, growth hacking target areas of the customer experience must choose to focus on customer acquisition, customer activation & onboarding or customer retention in constructing each hypothesis. Â
In today’s COVID-19 world there has been a massive shift in customer behavior and many companies have either lost customers or gained a lion’s share of them. Â
For example, let’s imagine that a grocery delivery company named AcmeCart has gained a tremendous number of customers recently, and as a result, decides to target customer retention as their growth hacking area of focus.
 Let’s suppose that data discovery showed that AcmeCart delivery orders without a large enough tip were not being accepted by Instacart delivery drivers. First time customers were often left with an order that was supposed to be delivered within an hour and instead was rescheduled several times and even to the next day, resulting in a very poor first experience.Â
 A growth hacking team would identify the issue in the data, understand that they couldn’t change the behavior of delivery drivers in the short term, and analyze where in their marketing technology and/or product stack they could most easily affect impactful change.
Growth hacking hypotheses are best set up when they follow a formula such as this:Â
                         Growth hacking hypothese formula
So in this case, the growth team might formulate a hypothesis such as:Â
Because we saw a high number of rescheduled first-time orders with relatively low tip amounts – 25% of all first-time orders…
 We expect that by communicating transparently to all first-time customers via SMS that gratuities above a certain % result in orders being accepted by drivers and expeditious deliveries in high demand time periods, these first time customers will have a much more positive experience and be more likely to become repeat customers in the near future.
We expect to see a 15% increase in the number of first-time customers that order again within two weeks of their initial order as a result of this change.
 The growth team might implement this change for a limited set of first-time customers to evaluate the impact on the customer experience and validate their growth hypotheses. Once enough data is collected to determine the new experience drives a significant increase in repeat orders, the new experience would be rolled out to the full population of first-time customers.  Future hypotheses and related growth hacking experiments might further improve this specific interaction point for first time customers.
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Other use cases for growth hacking:
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- A B2B SaaS company notices a significant drop-off in product engagement three days after new customers start their 30-day free trial. Is it a problem with the product? Or a lack of on-boarding material? A growth hacking team might hypothesize that an email drip campaign, triggered after signup, could provide enough helpful on-boarding content to increase conversion by 15%. If the experiment results in a lift, they may continue to refine the drip campaign to assess if personalized content increases conversion even further.
- A healthcare provider seeks to increase adoption of their mobile app to promote their new telehealth feature. Although a button has been added to the home screen of the app, they hypothesize that patients don’t return to the app frequently enough to see it. They run an experiment to test if a mobile push notification triggered by the call center platform when patients are on-hold, will reduce call center costs by 5% and increase usage of the telehealth feature by 20%.
- A quick-serve restaurant, forced to shift their business model during COVID-19, wants to confirm that the operational costs of curbside pickup yield enough customers to justify the additional expense. They believe that a paid media campaign, geo-targeted to a few curbside-enabled stores, will generate sufficient demand to justify the ROI. Given the newness of the offering, they also generate a series of messages, offers and channels to run in multiple sequential campaigns to exhaustively test their hypothesis.
 Conclusion
 Especially in these times of rapid change, customer behavior shifts, and an environment that demands rapid growth with limited resources, the discipline of Growth Hacking is all the more relevant to drive impactful change. With the right approach, team, and well formulated hypotheses, tremendous growth opportunities can be uncovered and implemented