Grow your business

1. Calculate your churn to find your baseline.

Check if churn rate (percentage of customers lost or percentage of recurring value lost) is below 2% per month for subscription software products. If so, you have an excellent product and are ready to go. Do this for each level of subscription plan. Calculate the length of your product’s average usefulness & determine when you’d like your customer to return.

2. Use a tool like survey.io to check if at least 40% of your customers consider your product or service a must have.

If not, shift your focus to achieve product or market fit. Alternatively, check if at least 40% of surveyed customers indicate they would be very disappointed if they no longer had access to it.

3. Increase the average order size.

For a software company, this would mean either increasing your existing rates or repackaging your offer to make it available to different segments of the market. For an ecommerce company, increase the order size either by up-selling – think extended warranties, enhanced service, or newer models – or by cross-selling (You got the TV, how about the DVD player?).

4. Build an email list for each buyer type - ecommerce, SaaS, mobile - to increase the number of repeat purchases.

If you are an ecommerce site, email follow-ups, flash sales, and subscriber exclusives. For example, Zappos automatically follows up at certain intervals after purchase; Case-Mate increased revenue by 236% by emailing a series of flash sales; and Men’s Wearhouse offers 40% off everything in the store. If you are a subscription software company, email your existing customers repeatedly with reasons for engagement. For example, Tumblr emails you to notify you of activity on your profile.

5. Capture emails from your traffic with lead magnets and capture forms to increase the number of customers.

Send PDFs and webinars for free to your email lists. For example: Follow-up offers Product guides Education materials or material around their business model.  On the webinar registration form, you might ask if they are interested in a demo. If you’re an ecommerce founder, the steps are very similar: Take traffic from your site. Turn traffic into emails. Analyze individual customer behavior – KISS metrics is useful for this. Email follow-up offers, product guides, or education materials. Reinvest a percentage of revenue into traffic building.

6. Use job boards or LinkedIn to build up your content team and increase your site’s visibility and customer base.

Use targeted job boards like jobs.problogger.net. Search LinkedIn for content marketer and similar terms, being sure to vet people’s work. Contact guest bloggers about contributing quality content on industry blogs.