💎 Growth Gems #61 - Best Of Growth Gems (2-year Anniversary)
Hi there,
Today marks Growth Gems’ 2-year anniversary!
Thanks for being part of the journey.
To celebrate, I put together a “Best of Growth Gems” presentation (slides + recording).
I am sharing the most valuable things I learned mining hundreds of podcasts, webinars and conferences:
🔥 💎 13 fundamental gems on topics like strategy, data, user acquisition, ASO, onboarding, monetization, retention, brand marketing, creatives and lifecycle
⛏️ 💎 Other gems, examples and resources to go deeper on each topic
That's a selection from 2000+ insights, distilled in one gem-packed 30 minute presentation.
If you’re interested and/or want to show support, I’m promoting the resource on LinkedIn
👇
Because of this, today’s edition is a little different.
Several of the gems 💎 I selected for the “best of” had only been shared with paid subscribers at the time (i.e. not in this free newsletter), so I decided I would share them here.
Enjoy!
Growth Strategy
💎 Your mobile growth stack and strategy depends on the stage you’re at:
Early stage: take big swings that bring big results and allow to reach product-market fit. You don’t need sophisticated measurement or sophisticated A/B testing.
Growth stage: explore. You don’t know where the big levers for scale are yet, and it’s about discovering them.
Mature/scaled stage: even incremental gains can be meaningful so you want to focus more on monetization and subscription optimization.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 27:02 in Growth Tactics from the Top Apps (Sub Club)
Paid UA
💎 Organics is never going to be the ultimate scale channel: it’s going to flatten out. At your app’s greatest potential, paid is probably 60-80% of daily new users. If you’ve only grown via organic traction and have optimized your product accordingly, then you have only optimized for the minority. The sooner you layer in paid traffic, the more efficient your paid traffic will be.
by Eric Seufert (Analyst and Strategy Consultant at Heracles Media)
at 45:45 in How to Thrive Despite Apple’s ATT (Sub Club)
💎 The uplift that you want to observe from “offline” efforts is not just consumer acquisition, it is also the behavior of your existing customers and people that are already in your funnel. The bigger your user base and your performance marketing spend, the bigger the impact you can make with brand marketing efforts.
by Adam Hadi (VP of Marketing at Current)
at 18:18 in How to Win with Offline Marketing for a Mobile App (The Mobile User Acquisition Show)
Creatives
💎 Look for high leverage, big incremental wins: often radical shifts in concepts/positioning combined with low production costs. Headlight often starts with static images and invest more effort if they see good results.
by Michael O’Brien (VP of Growth at Headlight)
at 14:18 in The 2021 Mobile Gaming Growth Playbook (MoPub/MDM)
💎 Be more hypothesis-driven for creative optimization. Creatives can feel like you're trying to see what sticks but training to form an hypothesis helps you look back at what you thought would work and rationalize things (vs. looking back in hindsights).
by Gabe Kwakyi (Phiture)
at 20:39 in How to Improve your Team’s Creative Hit Rate (The Mobile User Acquisition Show)
💎 You want to bring the motivation to play the game, to the creative. If there is a mismatch, it means you are casting a net in the wrong pool and driving the wrong users.
by Alice Guillaume (VP/Head of SparkLabs at AppLovin)
at 07:11 in How to Build High-performance Creative Teams (The Mobile User Acquisition Show)
Product
💎 First-time user experience will become the place where you need to have the triage of your users: you need to retrieve the intent and motivation of users. Example: through adding an activity that is flexible, segmented to eventually serve users the content that they want.
by Alexandre Noirot-Cosson
at 14:56 in How to Use Contextual Marketing to Boost CVR? (That’s the tea on mobile growth by Storemaven & AppTweak)
Monetization
💎 There is a ton of value in being able to price-discriminate in a way that allows you to touch as many points of the price sensitivity curve as possible so you can drive more revenue. This can be done through personalizing prices and/or breaking down the purchase experience into smaller bits.
by Yavuz Acikalin (Data & Insights Lead at N3TWORK)
at 11:28 in Building Offers your Customers Can’t Refuse (Mobile Growth Summit)
💎 When you’re at a huge scale (Headspace, VSCO, etc.), even incremental gains can be meaningful and especially on monetization. So at this stage you want to focus more on monetization and subscription optimization: increasing your average subscription lifetime by a month or increasing your conversion rate by .1% might be meaningful.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 38:20 in Growth Tactics from the Top Apps (Sub Club)
Lifecycle
💎 Lifecycle marketing starts with understanding the user journey and understanding users better than you currently do. This starts with asking questions to users, not by diving into analytics and looking at funnels.
When we have a lot of data available, we tend to dive directly into the analytics.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 05:40 in Growth Tactics from the Top Apps (Sub Club)
💎 A common concern is that sending another push notification will make users opt-out of push, or even uninstall the app. This is often overblown, and there is usually a lot of untapped upside especially if you have relevant messaging.
by Andy Carvell (Partner at Phiture)
at 26:06 in Optimization Through Strategic Lifecycle Marketing (Tech in Asia)
💎 You have to change your approach over the lifecycle of your app. Initially, most users are new users and that’s who you’re optimizing for. But later on, for a really good app, due to retention you will actually have older users. This means you now have to optimize mostly for these retained users.
by Eric Seufert (Analyst and Strategy Consultant at Heracles Media)
at 51:59 in How to Thrive Despite Apple’s ATT (Sub Club)
💎 If you get to any point where your distribution between organics and paid or between new users and older users gets to either extreme, you probably have a problem. If you’re all organic, you’re leaving money on the table. If you’re all old timers, you’re not growing anymore. If you’re all new users, you’re not retaining enough.
by Eric Seufert (Analyst and Strategy Consultant at Heracles Media)
at 53:23 in How to Thrive Despite Apple’s ATT (Sub Club)
And before I leave, a slightly different quote from usual as I reflect on the consistency Growth Gems has been requiring:
“Boring progress compounds into exceptional results” - Shane Parrish
See you next time. Stay savvy!
⛏️ Sylvain