Something missing in your AARRR ? Here are 35 ideas to fix it.

Optimizing your AARRR funnel can be challenging. Some startups are experts in acquisition but lose their customers for lack of retention. Others will struggle to generate organic growth because they didn’t set up a referral program.
Fortunately, solutions exist to help you fix these holes in your AARRR funnel. To help you get started, here is a list of 35 ideas collected from my favorite growth lectures and personal experiences that you can implement to improve each steps of your AARRR.
Don’t need to read the full list, just pick 2–3 ideas from the area you need improvement and start testing them !
Acquisition :
- Need a list of qualified B2B contacts for your cold-emailing campaign ? Scrap websites like Linkedin with Webscraper.io or DataMiner. Then use the information collected to find their emails using Hunter, Getemail.io or Lusha.
- 48 hours days after sending your email campaign, send it again to your subscribers who haven’t opened your email the first time. Noah Kagan was the first to use this technique and saw an 11% increase of his open rate thanks to the second sending.
- When you share content on social media, use Sniply to create a CTA button displayed in the content shared to redirect people to your website.
- Instead of a boring CTA “Click Here”, offer your visitors to participate to an enticing quiz and send them a personalized answer in exchange for their email. See the example below of Tony Robbins website with his “Wheel of Life” quiz.
- Answer questions on Quora related to your industry and include a link directing to your content. You can also use your bio to promote your business. (Note : links on Quora are no-follow links, so it won’t help getting backlinks.)
- Promote a discount code with Facebook Ads Messenger connected to a chatbot. Once FB users click on your ad, it will open a conversation with your chatbot that you can create with Chatfuel. You can program your bot to share the discount code but also to answer inquiries, give product recommendations and upsell.
- Create Direct Response Landing Pages. What are they ? Landing pages tailored to a specific set of keywords. They display different content according the keywords the visitors used to land on that page. Intercom has been testing Direct Response Landing Pages. Their visitors won’t read the same page if they searched for “live chat for user onboarding” or “live chat for customer support”.
Activation :
- Include a welcome video in your user’s dashboard when they connect for the first time. Present your product, explain the platform navigation, indicate where they can contact support and invite them to perform their first action. Test several videos to find the best one for your onboarding.
- Onboard your subscribers with an email drip campaign. In Asana’s drip campaign, it explains with short videos common pain points that their users encountered before they started using Asana.
- After they register, send your users an invitation for a scheduled welcome phone call. Use this call to create a special bond with your customers, explain how your product works, how it can help and answer their eventual questions. You can use a Calendly link in your email to schedule the call.
- Direct the onboarding of your users based on their intent. After you signed up, Canva asks you if you need Canva for personal, professional or educational use, the onboarding will depend of your answer. If you want to design cards, the onboarding flow will ask you what kind of cards (birthday, wedding invitation…) and make suggestions.
- Install a live chat on your pricing page to answer potential questions or apprehensions your users might have. Pricing page is usually the page that generates the most friction on visitors, by automatically opening a live chat dialogue with a general question you make your visitors feel more comfortable and you reduce bouncing.
- After a signup, your confirmation page as a potential you might not be exploiting yet. Why ? Because you know exactly what your visitor did to arrive on that page so you can display content on the confirmation page which tells your visitors what to do next. Don’t underestimate that page.
- Automate an onboarding webinar. Record a live webinar and send the recording to every new signups. See below the first email SimilarWeb sent me after I registered :
Retention :
- For your subscription based model, offer different price-tiers to reward longer membership period. Your customer gets a better price and in return you are guaranteed to keep that customer for a longer period of time.
- A second idea for subscription based business, offer to your users an alternative to cancelling their subscription. Suggest them to downgrade to a lower-tier plan instead or to receive a free consulting session with your customer success team to learn how to optimize their use of your product. At lesbonsprofs.com, we offer online tutoring to French high school students. We know that during summer when school is over they won’t need our product. So as an alternative to cancel their subscription during summer, we offered them to suspend their subscription and not pay anything before the time they get back to school.
- Send monthly rewards to your most loyal customers. On their first month, Audible users receive $5 credits to spend on the website and every following month Audible send them a new free book to download.
- Send a post-purchase email adding value to the purchase made. Instead of just sending a confirmation email, you can send information about how to best use their purchase, additional products that could be paired with it or the making-of the product.
- Did you know remarketing with Facebook ads not only help your acquisition but can also be useful for your retention ? Do a retargeting Facebook campaign targeting your inactive users and use the ads to remind them what your product can do for them or instead communicate about recent features addition they might have missed due to their inactivity.
- Create a special connection between your brand and your users by sharing special “behind the scenes” moments in your company. Buffer is a great example of ‘behind the scenes” content and transparency. They share how they work, who are their employees and even the strategies they used to grow the company.
- Invite your subscribers or users to a special member’s only club. It could be as easy as creating a private Facebook group. Inviting them to a club make them feel more special and keep them engaged.
Referral :
- Give stickers or other visual perks to your users who could use them to promote they use your product. For example, Couchsurfing which is a service that let people host travelers for free give Couchsurfing stickerts to the hosts. The hosts would stick it on their door or mailbox so the traveler knew they reached their destination. Lyft used the same technique with sending a pink moustache to their drivers.
- If you promote a B2B SaaS, ask your users to invite their colleagues so they can use your SaaS as a team. For example, to help you user Customer.io at its best capacity, it suggests you to invite your developper to join Customer.io as well so you can set it up together.
- Limit the number of invites your users can send. Why ? So your customers are more selective with the people they invite. If you offer unlimited invites, your users might send invitation to people who doesn’t match your target or will never use your product. Limitation is a natural selection for the best leads.
- Send small rewards to customers who wrote you a testimonial. Do not pay them for their reviews but you can, for example, unlock a special exclusive content such as a video to thank them for the review.
- Design your referral program like a contest with milestones to unlock. During the last “International Growth Marketing Summit”, organized by Growth Tribe, the more people I invited the bigger was the prize. I received something after inviting 5, 10, 15… people. Each time I had reached a milestone, Vira Loops (the product used by Growth Tribe) announced me how many invites I should send to unlock the next milestone. They gamified the invitation experience.
- Identify or create a piece of high quality content and require people to share it on social media in order to access this special content. You can use a tool such as Pay with a Tweet.
- Remind the invitee that they received a referral invitation. Either give your users the functionality to send a reminder to their friends themselves or automate the reminder for them.
Revenue :
- Send an email to users who have abandoned an item in their car with a reminder of the product left. Use FOMO copywriting to entice them to come back and complete their purchase.
- Another idea using FOMO copywriting is to create a time based scarcity on your offers. Make your customers think it’s now or never to enjoy your best deal.
- Does your website require a login ? I bet your login and logout page are your most visited pages but you don’t look at them as marketing assets. Why don’t you use these pages to promote some upsells such as an upgrade or an additional product.
- External approval of a brand is proven to increase sales. On your pricing pages and/or on your sales funnel’s pages, display a selection of your best reviews or grades received from your customers to increase sales.
- To generate extra revenues in the long term, show to your customers that their happiness is superior to your profits. If after the purchase, they find the same product cheaper elsewhere, offer them the price difference. The “Wow” effect is even better if it’s you who found it cheaper elsewhere and offer the part-refund without them asking for it.
- If your free trial didn’t convert, send an email and ask them if they need more time to try your product. Once I received an email signed by the CEO of the product I was on free trial. The email started with “Hey, I know you have been too busy to fully explore our free trial that’s why we are expanding your free trial to 10 more days.” I have been indeed too busy to use the free trial, so the extended time helped me a lot and I converted after the new trial expired.
- If you have a subscription based model, don’t lose a paying customer over an issue so trivial such as an expired credit card. Send an email reminder when your subscriber’s credit card is about to expire. I bet your churn will decrease thanks to this simple reminder.
Now it’s up to you !
Sources : Growthhackers.com / Neilpatel.com / https://blog.bufferapp.com/ http://okdork.com/ https://www.referralsaasquatch.com
