Technology

We&ve aggregated the worldbest growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you&re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can&t get elsewhere.

Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VPof growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual.

You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curvemarketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program.

Without further ado, onto the advice.

Editornote: This is the first of a new series of articles on startup growth tactics in 2019 for Extra Crunch. This first article has been unlocked for all TechCrunch readers.

Don&t abandon email unsubscribers. They&re still useful.

Based on insights from Matt Sornson of Clearbit.

You&ve launched a new feature and want to tell your audience about it. You can send an email to your newsletter subscribers, but how do you reach the 20%+ who unsubscribed? Most people mistakenly consider this audience to be a lost cause.

• Create a custom audience of all newsletter unsubscribers on Facebook.
• Run ads announcing the new feature to that audience.
• Now you&ve reactivated people who at one point had an interest in your product — instead of forever ignoring them.

Tips for effectively working with influencers

Based on insights from Barron Caster of Rev.

• Create a referral system for influencers: Influencers who sign up others get a % of their sales or signups. This makes a mini-pyramid structure and turns your influencers into a salesforce. Why is this important? Some influencers don&t actually sell products, but just sign up tons of other influencers. Find these people.
• Get everything you can out of an engagement (e.g. permission to use them as a testimonial for emails, social proof, etc.).
• Working with influencers is a relationship-building game:
  • Actually go to conferences to meet influencers.
  • Treat influencers like royalty. Surprise them with gifts like flowers/donuts. $100 to send a gift can pay hefty dividends if they like your brand more and share that with their followers.
  • Give influencers a tangible benefit to share with their followers. They care about their followers and want to beneficially incentivize them to click on their link and buy with them.

More tips for working with influencers

Based on insights from Cezar Grigore of Tremo Books.

• Geo rollouts: Your ROI increases when a bunch of influencers in the same category / region share your product within an interval of 2-4 weeks. It gives the impression that everyone is talking about your product.
• Initially focus on influencers with 10-150k audiences. They&re smaller and more willing to accept bartered deals. There are enough influencers in this range willing to work in exchange for a free product. Most may not be producing results, but some work well, bringing in 50-200 customers within 24 hours. As you build up your following and reputation for your brand, it becomes much easier to work with more influential people.
• Itharder to cut deals with bigger influencers (100k-2M). Only about 5-10% of bigger influencers are willing to work on an affiliate basis (e.g. $10/customer).

Overcoming ad blockers that screw up your conversion data

• Ad blockers can block FBtracking libraries and underreport ad conversions (even by 50%). The trick? Consider using the static IMG FB pixel — not the JavaScript one — which ad blockers don&t appear to block. — C.
• Hereanother ad block workaround: You can extract UTM tags from the URL then save them into LocalStorage using JavaScript. Next, send that stored data plus the useron-site conversion behavior to a custom backend that, inherently, will circumvent ad blockers. Just be diligent about ensuring your marketing links all have UTM tags. —Neal O&Grady of Demand Curve
• Remember that the use of ad blockers varies heavily by audience and device type. Depending on who your audience is, ad blockers can either be a huge problem or a non-problem. —Neal O&Grady of Demand Curve
  • So, for example, few people on mobile have ad blockers. Not much of a problem there.
  • However, on desktop, up to ~75% of millennial gamers and techies may have it installed.
  • In contrast, on desktop, maybe only 25% of middle-aged Americans outside of tech hub cities may have it installed.
  • These are hand-wavy numbers. Google for specifics.

Amazon is testing an easier way for people to leave product feedback with the launch of one-tap ratings. The change is meant to encourage those who don&t have the time, energy or interest in writing reviews to still share their opinion about the product, which benefits the larger Amazon community of shoppers who are reliant on ratings and reviews to make better purchasing decisions.

If you have access to the new experiment, you&ll be able to just tap once to leave your star rating on any item, without having to fill out additional fields like a review title and written review, as previously required.

You&ll also be able to access these one-tap ratings from a number of places, including the &Your Orders& page on Amazon where you can tap the &Write a Review& button; by going to a product page directly; or by responding to solicitations sent to you from Amazon or those that appear on the homepage when you log in.

The process of leaving a one-tap review is extremely simple — you just select the star rating and you&ll then see a green checkmark confirming the submission.

Only those one-tap ratings from Verified Purchases will contribute to the productoverall star rating. You&re also able to expand on your feedback later on, if you choose, by adding a review, photos or video.

The new feature could go a long way toward being able to collect feedback from a larger number of online consumers, as many don&t bother with writing reviews. It also could help balance out the ratings with feedback from real shoppers, as opposed to those who may have been incentivized or paid to leave reviews.

Thatagainst Amazon policy, of course, and is a practice the retailer has been cracking down on for years — including by outright banning incentivized reviews, by way of multiple lawsuits, fines and through suspensions of seller accounts. But there are still services out there offering to boost a productAmazon reviews through less-than-official tactics. And there are products on Amazon that continue to have suspiciously positive reviews, ranging from weight loss pills to Bluetooth headphones.

Flooding those products with legit reviews from real customers could bring about a more accurate rating, even if Amazon isn&t able to fully flush the scammers from its review community.

The new ratings test is showing both online and in the mobile app worldwide. Not everyone will see the feature at this time, as some customers will be in a control group.

Amazon confirmed the new feature is an experiment, not a public launch.

&We are testing a feature that allows customers to leave feedback easily while also helping shoppers get authentic customer ratings on products from a broader set of shoppers,& an Amazon spokesperson said.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunchroundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you&d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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