Unlock Your Path To Exponential Growth
On day one, someone hands you 100 bucks. The next day, another person gives you 100 again. The day after, 200. Then 400, 800, 1,600, 3,200, 6,400… You keep getting double the amount of money you had, for an entire year. This is a simple breakdown for what exponential growth is. And as a mobile marketer, you should know that one of your top goals is to harness this power.
Exponential Growth Defined
The example above is hypothetical, and exponential growth can range from many different cases. It’s the rate of change measured over a given number of equal time intervals. And if you grow 100% (double growth) every year, you begin to experience hypergrowth.
You can look at some of the most well know apps that serve as excellent examples of exponential growth.
Facebook featured 1 Million monthly active users and $400,000 in revenue in 2004. Since then, Facebook’s monthly active users base has risen up to a 231,000% increase over a 14 year period. Now, Facebook has over 2.32 billion users as well as $55 billion in revenue as of 2018.
Other than more revenue, are there other benefits for why Facebook should be happy about their exponential growth in monthly active users?
When an app that relies on social networking undergoes a serious period of hypergrowth (thanks to exponential growth), they tap into another powerful force called “the network effect.”
This means that the app becomes more useful as other people use it. For example, photo sharing platforms like Instagram wouldn’t be valuable if only a few people were using it. But because there are a ton of users, that means there is more content for people to share and see.
The same could be said for Facebook. If there was an alternate reality where Facebook wasn’t one of the top social networking platforms, there would hardly be people on it. And without the network effect, Facebook would lose its value. Why would you join a social networking site where hardly anyone else goes on?
There wouldn’t be enough compelling reasons to stay on that site (or tell other people about it) for long.
Tips On How To Harness Exponential Business Growth
Achieving exponential growth is a lot like viral marketing— it’s not easy to pull off. But there are some strategies you can put in place to take steps closer to this impressive feat.
A Phenomenal User Experience
If you take serious time and effort to perfect your user experience, it makes it so much easier to retain your users. A high-quality product leads to other people sharing it with their family and friends. They do a large part of the marketing work for you—all from your fantastic user experience and overall product.
Onboarding
Making your app seamless to use is only the beginning. You also need to craft a solid onboarding system for your new users. It doesn’t matter if a bunch of your current users tell their friends and family to join. If they don’t understand how they can sign up as well, you won’t achieve exponential growth.
Bring your new users up to speed by eliminating confusion and quickly educating them on how to use your app. This will help optimize the first impression of your app on to your new users.
Incentivize Referrals and Social Sharing
Network effects rely on connecting the degrees of separation between current and prospective users. So let’s make it easy for users to share with their friends and remind them to tell people about your app.
A great way to encourage this is to create a mutually beneficial referral marketing program. If your users have something to gain from sharing your app with more people, they’re motivated to get out there and spread the word.
It’s also easy to implement visuals, or something users would want to share with their friends, so they can instantly post something about your app on their own social media accounts. Sometimes people don’t want to feel like they’re being asked to do something, so if you develop your app so that they want to do it themselves, that’s also an option.
Add Value Instead of Just Advertisements
You also want to make sure you’re not annoying your valued users with a bunch of annoying pop-up messages or promotion ads.
Instead of telling them to do something when they’re in the middle of enjoying your app, why not use your pop up messages to give them an unexpected bonus update, share relevant news, or deliver valuable insights instead? This will make it more likely that your users will choose to engage with you, and thus lead to more opportunities for referral growth.
Build To Scale
If your goal is to achieve exponential growth, you have to make sure your business model has the right variables so that it benefits! You don’t want to run into unexpected crashes or a decline in app quality if your app can’t keep up with the demand of new users.
Recap
Take the time to study these strategies from CleverTap closely, and see how they can fit into your career as a mobile marketer. But remember, it’s likely that these strategies won’t work if you already don’t have a special product to begin with. Incentivizing referrals won’t work if your app is no good. Don’t expect these tips to transform your product overnight.