The true art of growth hacking is learning how to combine web applications into our workflows, products, and systems, in a way that helps your organisation sprint toward a working-business-model.

By working, I mean profitable or at least sustainable. That’s where automation comes in… and it’s never been easier thanks to tools like Zapier. Zapier lets you connect different web applications to perform certain actions without the need of a human.

My name is Rhys Fisher, and I’ve learned the key to helping startups and corporates at staying ahead during these digital times, is to help them apply technology creatively. The idea being that technology can grant your team superpowers. With each new power, you can save costs, explore new value propositions, and boost your Northstar metric sooner 📈.

1. Get Your Team Focused On Customer Insights

Trigger Analytics Events on Customer Feedback Loops

We’re living in an era of continuous innovation, and the only way to ensure you continue building what customers want is to make it a priority to engage with them. To get your team focused on improving feedback loops, try making feedback a metric… then include it into your dashboards!

To build this with Zapier, you could trigger a Google Analytics event when a customer submits a Typeform.

Tip: Call the event “user gave feedback”, make it visible to your team through data studio, and reward your team leaders when this number tracks North. Get help.

2. Boost Website Conversion & Retention

Trigger Segmented Email Flows on Form Inputs

Not all your visitors will convert on their first session, so try re-engaging leads with lifecycle messaging. Email is a great channel for this strategy, however, sending something irrelevant will likely result in more unsubscribes or get you reported for spam 😞. To send perfect emails, implement a segmentation strategy! 😌

To build this with Zapier, you could trigger a MailerLite flow from a Typeform submission.

Tip: Try formulating questions to segment your leads by their ‘needs’, ‘jobs to be done’, or ‘favorite taco’, and then build custom email content for the user. Get help.

3. Manage & Curate Content Like A Pro

Trigger Content Lists on New Publications & Social Scheduling on New Lists

Content is still king when it comes to creating campaigns that win awareness! But good content takes time and time is a scarce resource. Learning how to shave hours from your content marketing efforts means + ROI and extra bandwidth for removing the next bottleneck. Try automating your idea generation and social media aggregation!

To build these with Zapier, you can trigger new notes in Evernote when a new article appears in your Feedly feed, or curate your buffer queue with Evernote notes.

Tip: Name your Evernote list “Content Marketing Ideas”, review it at the end of the day for inspiration, and when there’s something worthy of your social accounts, simply copy and paste the link, so that it gets scheduled to all channels automatically. Get help.

4. Super Charge Your Influencer Marketing In RealTime

Trigger Notifications On Mentions, New Followers Or Relevant Posts

Not all followers are created equally. Some have more social influence than others, presenting an opportunity to offer an [incentive] in exchange for some extra reach. But better be quick about it, otherwise, you’ll risk reaching out when you aren’t “top of mind”, and your request might get ignored. That’s why you’ll want to build bridges between the fun stuff that’s happening outside your company and your internal communications so that your team can jump on referral opportunities faster!

To build these with Zapier, you could trigger slack notifications when you get mentioned on Reddit, when you get a new Twitter follower with over 5,000 followers, or when new photos and videos are posted to Instagram with a certain tag.

Tip: Have a team member monitor this channel, and try gifting influencers with free product, get them setup with a referral code, or simply ask for some ❤ on social. Get help.

5. Know Thy Twitter Audience

Trigger Sheet Inputs On New Follows, Add People To Lists on Sheet Inputs, and Tweet To New Followers

Are you getting follows by crypto fanboys talking about bitcoin, business folk exploring growth marketing, or crowd funders who want you to pay for their next bottle of Henrys? The key to upgrading your Twitter insights is to start organising and analysing your engagements. Then use these insights to boost your reach when publishing new updates or design auto-reply-flows to people who Tweet about a topic in a target geographical area. Huge!

To build these with Zapier, you could record new twitter followers into a Google sheet, then add them to a Twitter list of “brand evangelists”, tweet to new followers with a link to a questionnaire… everything automated. From here you’ll be able to trigger all sorts of onboarding campaigns.

Tip: Don’t forget to ping these evangelists when you have news to share... since these people might have already retweeted you in the past. Or you could make a “retweeted us in the past” list …and know they did. 😎 Get help.

6. Become An Email Marketing Ninja

Trigger Subscribers On Facebook Leads and Trigger Segmented Email Campaigns On New Blog Posts

Wouldn't it be cool if your Facebook PPC leads became subscribers? You’re in luck because that’s a basic zap. If you really want to go email marketing ninja, you can even automate the creation of weekly segmented email updates, which get sent to your subscribers! That’s right, all you have to do is continue posting new blogs! Keep reading. This one is 🔥!

To build these with Zapier, you could trigger a new subscriber to MailChimp when a lead comes in through your Facebook ads or you could do the same using Automate.io! For automated email campaigns, get a zap created so that when a new post appears on Wordpress with a certain tag, you add that to a digest list scheduled to release each week to a specific subscriber list. Filter out the blogs that don’t use the tag which you’re using as your segmentation. Then create the campaign format.

Tip: Keep reading because combining growth hack #6 & #7 is 💯🚀. Get help.

7. Get Unique Content Created Automatically

Trigger New Blog Posts From User Stories

Your users are your marketing secret weapon. Get them sharing stories and you’ll unlock new content marketing opportunities. By designing a story format for your users, you could tweet to newly added evangelists (see growth hack #5), linking them to a form which when completed, triggers the creation of a new draft blog post.

To build this with Zapier, you could use a form submission to trigger the creation of a draft WordPress post including HTML formatting, a title, and featured image.

Tip: Once a user has submitted a story, you could then get Zapier sending a message to Slack, informing your team that a draft is waiting for quality control before it can be published. Get help.

8. Motivate Your Growth Team With Sprint Digests

Trigger Social Following, Email Subscriber, and Sales Performance Digests to Slack

Some of these growth hacks have involved opening new communication between what happens outside of your company and your internal communication channels, but your team is too swamped to stay on top of it all, right? That’s why you should create digests when speed-to-action isn't important like it was in growth hack #4. This way your team will be able to schedule their digest audits to keep better track of everything!

To build this with Zapier, you could trigger a digest of your Twitter followers, new subscribers, or beta testers, sent to you in Slack or via email on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Tip: Have your data experts and marketing managers add to the slack thread with updates on the things they’ve observed during the date frame in question. Get help.

9. Growth Team Management Made Easy!

Trigger Growth Process Management Systems on New Form Entries

If you're offering something that people actually want, and you’ve built a business model around it–sprinting towards your next OKR–managing growth can become a challenge! Project management software is a must but can set you back a lot of money. To stay on top of all of your growth experiments, you could automate a slack reminder to say “share your learnings! 📊=😊 [link to form]”. Or send this notification by email. Your growth engineers fill out the form, attach any relevant reports, then Zapier forwards these to the growth manager as a digest, perhaps in a slack message as well as to a sheet or database to keep a historical record.

To build this with Zapier, you could trigger a digest (see growth hack #8) on new Google Sheets updates, form submission, chatbot engagement, or email… really the opportunities are endless!

Tip: Kickstart your growth management with the template below. 👇 Get help.

Hi 👋, weekly growth update from [name]

I focused on…[enter golden tickets]

I worked on… [enter experiment], and learned [enter learnings]

See my report here…[enter report URL here]

I had challenges with… [enter challenges]

I plan to… [enter next steps]

I’d like your input here [enter support request here]

Need help with the growth of your company?

I’m a growth hacker based in Europe. I bring a full stack marketing skill set to the table, developed over years of battle-testing business models and marketing my own adventures. I’ve also got a team of talented designers and developers behind me. I grow startups, boost reach, help launch products into optimized channels. If you want to accelerate growth today… email me directly at 👉rhys@unvanity!