Step by step guide to run growth experiments

It’s all about experiments

If you want to benefit as much as possible from your growth strategies, then the most important thing for you is having a defined process of carrying out growth experiments. The useful thing is to choose a scientific approach and try to estimate any test from a quantitative perspective. Many people usually are looking only for one hack or tip that will be the key to the success of their company. However, one important thing to remember is that any successful growth campaign needs defined tactics and a systematic, scientific approach.

Moreover, the most important thing is the process, but not only tactics. And there is a reasonable explanation for it. First, if something works for others, it does not mean that it will work for you. You have a different company, a different audience, and different products/services. When you listen to someone’s strategies or tactics, do not perceive them as strict instruction, but rather as inspiration.

In addition, growth is not about one huge thing that you did, but about a big amount of different small actions, that help to promote your business.

You don’t always know which of them had the greatest impact on your business because most of them work complexly.
That is why you need to build a strong framework. And the process is exactly the thing that lies in the heart of this system.

What does the process consist of?

The main aspect you should follow is rhythm. Find that one momentum that helps to fight all the failures and make your ideas successful. Learn. Learn about your customers and their preferences. Use this information to optimize your process. Your subordinates do not always have to be right. They have constantly to improve themselves in terms of their knowledge.

There is a simple algorithm, which you can have already been familiar with. The first step is to ask the question. When you do this, start background research. Then, based on what you found out, construct a hypothesis and test it with the experiment. There might be two possible outcomes: it either works or does not. If no, try to hold experiments until it works. So when it finally does, analyze all the data. If gathered information does not reflect your hypothesis, go back and change it. Then try to repeat all the next steps, and when you receive desirable results, you can confidently communicate them to others. We will base our guide on this information, adding some useful tips and insights, so that it will become more scalable.

G.R.O.W.S

There are many ways to check your experiments. The most popular one is the G.R.O.W.S. process.

Let’s see what is going on at each of these stages.

G — GATHER IDEAS

You and your business need ideas all the time. A handy way to gather them is just to make every individual of the team brainstorm and then ask all of them to express their thoughts. Depending on the size of your company, you can divide your colleagues into several groups for this practice.

R — RANK IDEAS

When you gather many different ideas, you do not usually know how to implement them all, or which one is the best for you, with the available amount of time, money and other resources. Then it is time to rank your ideas! You can use different techniques, depending on what aspects are the most important for you. The easiest way is to choose the most important factors and to rank every idea, referring to them. In the end, you will be able to see the best idea.

O — OUTLINE EXPERIMENTS

You have your best-ranked idea. To implement it, you have to see whether it works or not. In this case, start conducting your experiments. As we wrote above, first you create a hypothesis, do research and only then do this experiment. If the experiment reflects your theory, then the idea works. Therefore, at this stage, you create the plan for your experiment and think about how you are going to conduct it.

W — WORK WORK WORK

Start conducting your experiment! This stage is the most important one, and nothing can be wrong!

S — STUDY DATA

This is the final stage and the most important one. You analyze all the results and see whether your idea is a success or a failure. You have to be very careful about it, because wrong decisions may lead to bad consequences. The most important thing here is analyzing your consumers’ behavior. If it changed positively, then your project is successful. If not, then you may have made a wrong hypothesis at your first stages. If nothing changed, there would be no necessity to implement new practice into your company’s activity.

RINSE AND REPEAT

If your first experiment failed, don’t give up. Remember, we all are learning from our mistakes.

Benefit as much as possible from it. Use the data you received in this experiment to make the next one more successful. When you reach that point, try to take from its maximum advantages. Only through persistence, your growth strategy will become efficient.

There is also one more framework that is used by many large companies. It is called the OKR framework. OKR means ‘Objective and Key Results’. As in most other frameworks, we ask a question. In this case, the question is: ‘What is the one area that we can work on, or the one thing we can achieve that drives the biggest impact on our growth curve right now?’

When you find out that, set a period, it usually differs from 30 to 90 days. This is an optimal period to achieve good results. In the end, you define three key results and see whether they correspond to your initial goals. Set goals gradually, the first goal should be the easiest one, the last — the hardest to achieve. Find that reasonable point, to what extent you can work during the period set.
Therefore, the continual stages in the rotation that we go through after we set these OKRs:

– Idea
– Rank
– Design tests around the things that you rank
– Implement those tests
– Study those tests
– Take the successful ones and systemize them
– Take that analysis and those learnings
– Feed them back into the process

Backlog

This is just a place for us to gather all of the ideas that we have in the growth. Any member of the team can add ideas to the backlog, and the main purpose of the backlog is to provide us with an area and outlet. If someone gets the idea, he may just add it to the backlog so that it will not be lost. And it’s very simple and useful to it is create a new board in Trello.

Also try Notion — all-in-one workspace for note-taking, project management and task management.

Pipeline

This is the place, where we register our experiments and their results if they have already been finished. And a perfect place for it is RealtimeBoard. RealtimeBoard is an online collaboration and whiteboarding platform for teams and organizations of all sizes. You can use it with the whole team in real-time, add any attachments and scale your workspace almost endlessly. It is a very flexible and handy tool for any team.

5 tips to improve your activation rate.

Use gamification for user engagement.

Yes. This is true. Inside of every adult, there lives a 7-year-old kid. People do not like to feel like they are completing a task. Use incorporate games to make the process more interesting and funny. Use rewards, leaderboards to motivate users to participate in your project.

Use a self-service product demo.

Try to make your product as qualitative as possible. Then offer users a free trial of it, so that they can see the high level of your project and know what they pay for.

Build trust with a personalized welcome email.

It is an excellent way to establish communications with your new users. Design a warm e-mail for your user to stay with your company right after the first usage.

Try social proof.

Marketing theorists usually check which advertisements work best for a certain company. They may change headlines, content, background and many other things. They also add social proofs that persuade users to join your activity because of the good experience of their peers.

Distribute a video course.

Nowadays the popularity of online-courses becomes higher and higher. Give your users a chance to reach their Aha!

Conclusion

All in all, growth experiment is a very complicated, effort- and time-consuming thing. Nevertheless, it helps to promote your company and make it more successful. You have to hold onto defined tactics and process, develop new strategies that are unique and successful especially for your company. In this case, you will only benefit from contributing your resources in it!

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