By Michael Zhou
Growing a startup involves passion, dedication, and the implementation of time and money saving tactics. For some startup founders, growth can be a challenging endeavor. However, by integrating a few powerful growth hacks, you can quickly facilitate growth and success with limited obstacles.
“Knowing where to focus your time and attention is key in the early stages of growing a business,” Ian Altman explained in a Forbes article. “If you develop the discipline to stay focused on what’s important right now, you will be successful.”
To move the growth needle for your startup, we compiled the top four growth hacks you can easily employ to stay focused, save time, and decrease spend.
Growth Hack #1: Increase ROI With Powerful Email Marketing Strategies
Those who have deep roots in marketing know the power of remarketing products and/or services. Remarketing is indeed one of the most valuable strategies a business can employ for increased revenue. This is even more essential for startups targeting growth.
What is one of the best ways to get remarketing right? Email marketing! In fact, 59 percent of B2B marketers agreed that email marketing is one of the most impactful ways to increase conversions (sales).
Email marketing can be easily implemented into your workflow too. Signing up to email platforms for businesses, like Mailchimp is the first step. From there you can upload your subscriber list and then begin creating email marketing assets to post weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
The one important factor to consider is the rate at which you send out email marketing newsletters, and the ability to add value to the emails. Always be sure to make value be a two way street. This could be offering a free piece of content in tandem with your sales pitch.
Growth Hack #2: Automate And Streamline Processes With CRM
Your startup can experience growth pains, making keeping up with client relationships, lead generation, conversions, and analytics difficult to track and manage. But once again, there are growth hacks that can help you ease the tracking and management spend, both for time and money.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms are the answer. CRM platforms can alleviate the workload and also keep you from needing to hire an employee to track and manage customer relations.
“Today, small businesses can leverage the great perks CRM offers through a cloud or ‘hosted’ software deployment,” Ryan Sweeney shared via an Inc. article. “This slick solution eliminates the necessity of having an extensive, in-house IT department.”
There are tons of CRM platforms to choose from. A good one for startups on a tight budget is Zoho. This platform allows you to integrate any number of CRM processes in an easy way. For startups with a bit of funding under the belt, HubSpot is a good CRM to checkout.
The most important thing to remember when choosing a CRM platform is to ensure it will meet the unique needs of your startup. Some CRMs are simply better at some things, while other aspects may be lackluster.
Growth Hack #3: Integrate Merchant Processing To Efficiently Power Payments
You can have the best remarketing strategy and CRM in the world, but if the payment process is too complicated, your customers will choose competitors that make payments easier. This also applies to the security in place for processing payment information, considering the rise of small business cyber attacks.
What does this mean? To ensure you convert every customer ready to purchase your product and/or service you need an efficiently powerful payment system. This is easier than one may think, since there are merchant processing tools available to startups at an affordable rate.
For instance, Vantiv merchant services serves up easy payment options optimized for mobile customers, transaction security, and the data needed to make the accounting process easier down the road.
Growth Hack #4: Automate Startup Accounting
While on the topic of payments and accounting, another growth hack for startups emerges as a priority. How much time do you currently spend on accounting tasks? Better yet, how much are you paying someone to ensure your accounting is getting done?
Probably a lot of time and money is going into this must-have business process. However, there is an easier way. By automating your accounting, you can decrease the money and time spent by either you or an employee.
To make accounting an easy process that you can do in one simple daily batch of time once a month, use accounting tools, such as QuickBooks or FreshBooks. These tools are perfect for small businesses and startups, providing tracking, invoicing, payroll, and other finance essentials.
Ready For Growth?
These startup growth hacks are essential to ensure your entrepreneurial endeavor continues to grow and be successful, both short and long-term. By planning strategically and automating process, you can save a lot of time, and most importantly money. What’s your favorite growth hack?
Michael Zhou is a Senior VP of Business Intelligence Development and has assisted the Fortune 1000 company with expertise in the web as a whole, including ground-zero marketing efforts that benefit both consumer and vendor. He is also contributor on Esprittoday.
Growth stock photo by yuttana Contributor Studio/Shutterstock
