5 Campaigns You Should Plan Now to Double Your Business in 2020

Want to double your business in 2020?It’s an ambitious goal, but one that many entrepreneurs achieve year-on-year as their business enters a growth period.However, there’s no “one thing” you can do which will exponentially grow your business in such a short period of time. Fast growth comes from the perfect combination of business mathematics, consistent activity, and an expert understanding of the levers you need to pull.It’s easy to get lost in a sea of new and shiny tactics, but at its core, business growth has been the same forever. There are 5 levers in your business you can pull to spark growth in 2020. By running a tailored campaign for each of these levers, you will be on track to double your business in the new year.

Fast growth comes from the perfect combination of business mathematics, consistent activity, and an expert understanding of the levers you need to pull.

Let’s dive in...

Lever #1: Traffic

The first business growth lever is traffic. Whether you are looking to attract foot traffic into a brick-and-mortar store or website traffic to your company’s online shop, more traffic typically means more sales.Of course, you need to attract the right kind of traffic if you want people to buy something. It’s no good enticing someone into your store with the promise of fresh fruit and then trying to sell them beauty products.There are any number of campaigns you can run in 2020 that will increase targeted traffic to your store or website, contributing to the growth of your business.Here are some examples:

• Paid advertising - Be it on Facebook, Google, YouTube, or another advertising platform, paid advertising is a measurable and predictable way of increasing traffic to your business.
• Partnerships - Another way to generate droves of targeted traffic to your business is to partner with complementary companies, influencers, or associations for a time-bound campaign. These campaigns usually look to leverage someone else’s audience via social media or email marketing. For example, loyalty app Hey You partnered with online fashion store The Iconic to drive more users from their email list to the app:

An example of complementary brands partnering together.

• Interactive marketing - Utilize technology to engage with prospects on a one-to-one basis at scale. Interactive marketing techniques such as contests, quizzes, interactive video, and widgets build rapport with prospects and have a tendency to go viral.
• Content marketing - Creating unique and valuable content for social media, YouTube, your website, and other relevant distribution channels is an excellent way to create top-of-the-funnel awareness for your brand. Unique eCommerce brand, Beardbrand, is well-known for using content such as videos and blog articles to attract massive traffic to their website:

Beardbrand's content marketing efforts.As you head into 2020, analyze your traffic performance from the year that’s been and identify a series of campaigns you can run to increase your numbers. If you get consistently more traffic, you will generate more revenue.

Lever #2: Leads

Yes, an increase in targeted traffic could help grow your business on its own. However, if you convert a portion of that traffic into leads, the return will be even more profitable. That way, if someone doesn’t buy on the first visit, you can re-engage them with email campaigns and remarketing offers.So, if you’re aspiring to double your business in 2020, look to plan a range of lead generation campaigns that will collect contact information and give you permission to market to these new prospects.Here are examples of high-performing lead generation campaigns:

• Contests - With the right prize and some smart social media marketing, contests can generate thousands and thousands of leads for your business.
• Quizzes - Marketing quizzes are not only highly engaging for your audience, but they also enable you to uncover strategic information about your leads with well-placed questions. For Valentine’s Day, the Festival Mall used an interactive quiz to help people discover the “type of romantic” they are. An enticing proposition for users and a great way to collect consumer data:

Interactive quiz example.View and Create Your Own

• Discounts - Coupons and discounts are especially effective in the eCommerce industry as an incentive for people to sign up for marketing communications prior to making a purchase.
• Resources - Premium content such as eBooks, white papers, and checklists are an enticing lead magnet for prospects, especially in the B2B space.
• Webinars - In the absence of face-to-face training, webinars establish a personal connection with your prospects and build trust and credibility for the business.
• Trials - Free demos or trials are a good low-barrier option for prospects who are interested in what you have to offer but not quite ready to buy. Gmail tracking and customization tool, Right Inbox, allows you to install their tool for free in order to “try before you buy”:

Free trial for lead generation.On top of getting more traffic to your business with the tactics discussed above, utilize these standalone lead generation campaigns to build your database of prospects.

Lever #3: Conversion

The concept of conversion is most often spoken about as a way to optimize your marketing funnel. From the traffic you receive, how many become leads? How many of those leads then become customers?These are two critical points of conversion which you should be readily analyzing and optimizing to improve the return on your effort. You could, for example, simply improve the conversion rate from traffic to customer without increasing your traffic numbers, and it would result in more revenue for the business.For the most part, conversion optimization comes down to a series of small tests and tweaks to your customer interactions. However, you can also strategize conversion-based campaigns. Here are some examples:

• Re-engagement email sequences - For leads in your database that haven’t converted into customers, create a re-engagement email sequence anchored to a compelling offer as a means of acquiring customers that you may have considered lost.
• Cart abandonment marketing - Cart abandonment is a penetrable issue in the eCommerce industry. Even if you recover a small fraction of abandoned carts with remarketing ads and segmented email campaigns, your revenue will grow. Below is an example of a cart abandonment email from Dyson:

Abandoned cart email from Dyson.

• Targeted remarketing offers - Both Google and Facebook ad platforms have granular methods of delivering ads to segments of your audience based on their behavior. Look to personalize offers based on pages they visit or the actions they take on your website.
• Personalized email campaigns - By segmenting your email database you can provide personalized offers to small clusters of your prospects that are more likely to convert than generalized email campaigns. Check out this email from Zillow that is personalized based on the properties a user has liked on their website:

Personalized email campaign from Zillow.These are just four examples of conversion campaigns you can use to generate unexpected revenue spikes in 2020.

Lever #4: Customer Retention and Lifetime Value

Over 80% of businesses agree that retaining a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one. If your business is always looking for new customers rather than retaining or increasing the value of the ones you already have, eventually the cost will outweigh the benefit. Resulting in failure.Simply put, if you can retain more of your current customers by reducing the churn rate, while simultaneously increasing the lifetime value of those customers, your business will grow in 2020.Here are a few strategies for doing so:

• Rewards or perks program - Customer rewards programs provide a great way of engaging with your customers and keeping them loyal to your brand. Things like exclusive perks, discounts, and partner offers are all well received.
• Email nurture sequences - Something as simple as a nurture email with helpful or value-adding content on a regular cadence can be enough to stay top-of-mind and relevant to your customers.
• Giving back to the community - Donating a portion of your profit to charities or volunteering for communities that are close to your customer base will strengthen the bond your customers have with your brand and increase the chance of them sticking around.
• Up-sells and cross-sells - Personalizing product recommendations based on your customers’ purchase history and other behavior will aid in increasing their lifetime value to the business. Here’s a great example of smart up-selling by Dollar Shave Club, allowing customers to add new products to their subscription box straight from an email:

Up-sell from Dollar Shave Club.

• New product releases - Much like the product recommendations above, new product releases that are specifically designed to solve problems based on customer feedback will not only increase revenue but also sustain loyalty.

Each of these customer retention and lifetime value strategies can be turned into campaigns spread throughout the new year.

Lever #5: Referral

The purpose of customer retention is to create brand advocates. Once you have a group of individuals who are ready and willing to advocate for your brand, it’s time to utilize that loyalty by increasing referrals. Referral marketing is a very cost-effective way of growing business via word-of-mouth. In fact, 84% of people trust recommendations from people they know.When designing your referral program, consider the following best practices:

• Incentivize referrals with a gamified points system, coupons, or monetary benefits.
• Make it as easy as possible for customers to participate in the referral program.
• Give exclusive perks and experiences to customers that actively participate in your referral program.
• Reward referred customers with a discount or benefit so that your referrers are encouraged to send the offer to their friends.

This iBotta email uses Thanksgiving to engage with customers and offer them incentives for referring friends:

An example of incentivised referral marketing.Of course, a referral program should be ongoing and leverage marketing automation so that it can scale effectively. However, that doesn’t stop you from running standalone referral-based campaigns that incentivize and reward your brand advocates throughout the year.

Conclusion

The concept of doubling your business in 12-months is more of a guiding vision rather than a statistical reality.

If you get too obsessed with the end outcome and big thinking, your daily, weekly, and monthly activity will run off track.To actually achieve rapid business growth in 2020, the principles are the same as they have been for decades.

It’s about understanding where you are now, and recognizing the levers you need to pull in order to get to that new destination.

For any business, growth comes from traffic, leads, conversion, retention, and referrals.

Improving any or all of these elements, even by a small amount, will push your business in the right direction.

So, what do you need to focus on in 2020 to double your business? Which campaigns will you run and when will they be most effective?

Think about it, document your answers, and map out a strategy for the year ahead.

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