This list was originally posted on the growth marketing weekly digest that I share with my private email list. To get the full list of must-read articles every week click here.

Estimated reading time: 12mins

A good post for young marketers. This post offers insights from the recent Growth Marketing virtual conference, hosted by Neil Patel (and a link to the event session at the bottom of the post). This includes key takeaways from 20 sessions that were hosted during the event, new proven growth hacking tactics and more. If there’s one thing to take from this article is the importance of knowing and understanding your target audience.

Another important point shared in this article is the “give first ask later” strategy (see more about that on the “related reading” section), which also rely on understanding your audience first and knowing what they need.

This is Marketing 101, but you’ll be surprised by how many founders and marketers don’t understand or even know their target audience.

Favorite quote:

“Launch experiments before you launch full projects. For example: Rather than spending the time to build out a full 2–3 week or even 2–3 month follow-up series, test a 7-day email sequence to see if your audience is going to respond and if you’re using the right follow-up content.”

Related reading:

This article touches on a variety of topics, all of which we discussed in previous issues. Some of my favorite related articles include:

Estimated reading time: 9mins

Credit: InnerTrends Blog

As the title of this article implies, this article offers a series of tips for designing a highly converted onboarding flow. This includes getting the user to the ‘Aha’ moment of using your product in minimal amount of actions and using goal psychology to encourage users to complete key product actions.

Favorite quote:

“..the best onboarding flows tend to do the following things well: – Show the value of the product to a user as soon as possible

– Make the steps along the route to value easy (and ensure that they appear easy)

– Clearly identify the benefit of each step and the end result

– Be measurable and improvable”

Related reading:

“Strategies for onboarding new users”, “A Guide to Proven Customer Retention Strategies”, ”Intercom on Onboarding” (eBook) and “Onboarding With The IKEA Effect: How To Use UX Friction To Build Retention”, “From signed-up to satisfied” and the related reading suggested for this article in the “October’s Top 10 Must-Reads for every Growth Marketer- Part 2”, “How to Increase User Engagement Throughout the User Journey”, “The Growth Marketer’s Guide to Aha! Moments” and the related reading suggested for this article in the “October’s Top 10 Must-Reads for every Growth Marketer- Part 3”.

Estimated reading time: 7mins

Credit: Intercom Blog

This article offers some great tips for onboarding B2B companies. The common onboarding flow focuses on the individual user. However, for B2B companies the onboarding flow should provide a solution for teams or group of people to contribute and complete the onboarding flow.

Bottom line takeaway from this article is that when designing an onboarding flow for B2B product, onboarding should be dynamic and take into consideration the unexpected paths of which it’ll take to complete the onboarding for each person on the team.

Favorite quote:

“When it comes to onboarding, it’s easy to think everyone will follow the linear paths you’ve wireframed. But groups of people rarely follow such neat paths. Instead, you should assume at each step of your onboarding that the task at hand may be someone else’s job. That way, you can build a flexible onboarding that adapts to different kinds of people, and support larger companies too.”

Related reading:

See the recommended reading in the previously recommended article.

Estimated reading time: 6mins

Credit: Intercom Blog

A must-read article for everyone who creates and experiment with push notifications. Actually, its a must-read even if you’re just reading push notifications (so you know it doesn’t have to be as spammy as it is nowadays).

Push notifications use one of the most sensitive real-estate a mobile user have, yet most of the time they are impersonal, poorly timed and sent too often (all the ingredients for a good spam). This article offers guidelines for creating an effective and none-spammy push notifications.

Favorite quote:

“interactive notifications mean little if what you’re communicating is of no value to the user in the first place. [...] notifications work best when the notification is the message.”

Related reading:

“What You Must Know To Build Savvy Push Notifications” and “Can push notifications really help app retention? Find out” - which I shared with you on the recommended list two weeks ago.

Estimated reading time: 4mins

An interesting case-study that proves once again the importance of understanding your target users to the level of describing your product the way they would describe it. By running surveys and A/B testing the core product messages, ‘I done this’ were able to capture potential users and increase conversion to their premium product.

Favorite quote:

“..your survey results shouldn’t only be applied to one area of growth - look at how you can change your customer support, marketing, landing page, design, and interface based on the responses you get. Your solutions should be multi-faceted.”

Related reading:

“What can messaging do for businesses?” and “People Pay, Not Pageviews. Here’s Why People Are Leaving Your Website Without Converting”.

Estimated reading time: 4mins

Credit: Kissmetrics blog

Finally, an article that talks about the other side of A/B testing results. The ones that fail. The article offers a few interesting learnings from the results of a few failed A/B tests, including the original hypothesis, the way the conducted the test and the results. An interesting read for everyone who’s running experiments.

Favorite quote:

“If none of our tests fail, we know we’re not running enough tests or our ideas are too safe. In fact, the bigger the failures, the closer we are to an even bigger win.”

Related reading:

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve shared with you many articles discussing all sorts of topics related to A/B testing. A few notable ones include “12 Ways to Screw Up Your A/B Test”, “PXL: A Better Way to Prioritize Your A/B Tests”, ”How Many Variations Can You Have in an A/B/n Test?”, “A/B Testing vs Multiple Variant Testing: And the Winner Is…?”, “7 Reasons Your Site Isn’t Ready for A/B Testing” and the next article in this week’s recommended list.

Estimated reading time: 4mins

Credit: Kissmetrics Blog

This article offers a step-by-step guide for setting A/B tests in Google Analytics. A good post for beginners and A/B test newbies.

Related reading:

To get more out of Google Analytics read “How To Optimize Google Analytics To Help You Get More Actionable Insights”. To learn more about A/B testing, see the related reading for the previously recommended article.

Estimated reading time: 1mins

A short and to-the-point article that offers some interesting learnings from MailChimp’s unusual growth strategy in comparison to the growth strategy used by Hubspot and Marketo.

Related reading:

“Different Types of Viral Loops” and “The Five Types of Virality”. If you’re interested in discussions on virality and looking to get deeper into the science of making things go viral you should read Jonah Berger’s Contagious. For more content related to defining a growth strategy or building a sustainable growth engine, I recommend reading “Sean Ellis’ Secret Framework for Unlocking Organic Growth”, “Andrew Chen on building systems of growth”, “How To Build A Basic Mobile Growth Model?”, ‘Rational Growth’ (eBook) and ‘Minimum Desirable Product’.

Estimated reading time: 5mins

An interesting case-study on using content as a growth engine for a multi-million yearly revenue company, Thrive Market. The company’s growth loops include: “Direct response content loop” (using influencers to drive conversions), “Brand content loop” (using brand channels for driving awareness). The article introduces both and offers suggestions for using each type of content loop.

Favorite quote:

“In the early days, and with limited time and resources, founding teams should focus on acquisition-oriented content that has measurable and testable steps that you can set up and evaluate quickly.”

Estimated reading time: 10mins

Credit: Mixpanel blog

If you can ignore the very aggressive promotion for Mixpanel, you might enjoy this unique case-study. The article shares the story of the data-driven digital fundraising campaign for Bernie Sanders and offers an interesting resemblance between the growth of a political candidate campaign to a tech startup.

Related reading:

Keeping it in the presidential campaign realm, you might also enjoy reading last week’s recommended article “What Do A/B Testing & Presidential Polling Have in Common?”.