Growth Hacking acquire new users withbetter activation

What’s one of the biggest bottleneck’s startups face?

OH: The internet is so complicated #OMG”“

Remember first signing up for Twitter?

We dug in and tried to learn what the “aha” moment was for a new user and then rebuilt our entire new user experience to engineer that more quickly.

Josh Elman, Partner at GreyLock and Early Product Lead at Twitter

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While Josh was there, Twitter’s active user base grew 10X

It’s now one of the most influential products today..

Activation, isn’t just for social products.

Uber, Square and DropBox work hard to educate their first time user.

So what exactly is activation?

I’m Conrad Wadowski, a Partner at GrowHack which works with venture backed companies.

I also run an online school which brings together leading practitioners and resources to teach your team user growth.

Some background..

Activation is the process of getting a new user

to a must have experience.

Activation is the process of getting a new user

it’s a set of best practices to get them active.

it’s a set of best practices to get them active.

..and it’s that really common bottleneck.

Activation is similar to “onboarding” although onboarding suggests a process.

The best activation won’t involve too much process.

Instead it mixes selling, educating and using your product.

..without much friction.

When you get it right, what happens is the boundary between trying out a product and using it disappears.Ben Chow, Product Designer

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Good activation also helps protect current users from things like fake accounts and spam.

Why does it work?

Gets new users to understand your product’s value now, instead of later.

Isolates variables to help you understand what motivates or prevents someone from becoming active.

In an ideal world you already know which user to focus on, which is hard.

So how can we learn to do it well?

We actually have the tool chest available to us at all times..

The best way to learn is from other products.

So we went through and documented the best in the industry..over 70 activation flows from homepage to the “must-have”

Here are some tactics pulled out from the best..

Word of CautionMileage will vary by audience, product, stage and resources.

Your most powerful lever, will likely be

motivation.

The right motivation leads us to do crazy things.

Focus on testing these ideas out and actually talking to your end users.

But this will be a happy place to start.

you ready?

Front load your user experience

Minimalism

Simple, clear value proposition

A subheading for more detail

Visuals

Social Sign in, with an option for email

Quora

Say you won’t post on their wall

Embedded form on homepage

Prefilled forms

42%

completiontime

Inline form validation

Pop up navigation, but just because it’s easy to create.

Stick to simple, clear language

Relevant Faces (if not distracting)

Celeb

Customer

Friend

Smiling

Attractive

Female

William Shatner

..Or just an interesting waiting screen

At least tell them to expect a wait

Import contact address books, early on.

Facebook

You’ll reach a lot more people that way, so test it out.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

100%

20%

5%

1%

Homepage

Import

Select Category

Rate Books

UsersStep

..the main ones are gmail, yahoo, hotmail

Import phone contacts

Step 2Step 1

“skip this step”

Pre-populate with APIs

Link to confirm email

Use a progress bar

LinkedIn Groupon

Big, clear calls to action

And again scrolling down...

Large, relevant images

(They’re easier to design too)

Say “it’s free”

Consistent calls to action

768 - 800 Pixels

Consistent calls to action, above the fold

Social Proof: Quantity

Social Proof: People

Social Proof: Shares

Social Proof: Press

Social Proof: Customers

Arrow pointing to your call to action

Include nav links in the footer

No footer below the fold for direct URL

Nothing here

30%conversion

Localization

English Spanish

Tailored landing pages

AmazonWillCall

Call-to-action button in the same spot

Call-to-action button in the same spot

Call-to-action button in the same spot

CEO Email

Relevant Email

How about some worst practices?

Auto-carousels

See: shouldiuseacarousel.com

They introduce too many variables so you can’t figure

out what’s working.

IF they can get to it in time, people just click the first

image anyway..

“Carousels are effective at being able to tell

people in Marketing/Senior Management

that their latest idea is on the Home Page.”

-Lee Duddell

Unnecessary form fields. Do you really need all this?

To many, conflicting, calls to action

Horizontal navigation

As soon as we get on a computer, we all start acting like we have a

major case of A.D.D.

Each additional link takes focus away from your most

important call to action.

At a certain point this makes your site pretty much unusable.

Just think deep when you’d like to “cross-sell”

a feature or product.

If you really need to add a link, why not include it in the footer?

And split each into its own page.

When you use weak calls to action..

..like “Submit” you lose an opportunity to teach users

what happens when they click.

?

Who really wants to “submit” anything anyway?

Do as Unbounce.com says and..

Side note..anyone wanna do

a flower startup? :)

Too Strong on Design

Take 3 seconds to figure out what this page is about. ..

While it’s beautifully designed, there just isn’t much being

accomplished here.

Spending too much time on form over function can

cripple your iteration speed.

Explainer video for new product categories

Helps define the problem to a user

DropBox new users didn’t realize they had a problem.

Consider longer form copy for this or for high priced products where it’s difficult to immediately get trust

Let’s talk mobile for a bit

Asking for permission

This is what happens if someone says no

Preface permissions

Poker Friends

Preface permissions

If someone doesn’t FB Connect

Poker Friends

Make what you want someone to do really obvious

SnapChat

Initial Screen and Description

Tinder

Pre Onboarding

Tinder

Learn by doing

Tinder

Focused feature set

Tinder

Tuck away advanced features

SnapChat

click here to learn more about our online school

Thanks!

or find me @conradwa