Hi guys. Um, I'm Maria, the county and I'm a chief growth officer at a company called Mine Valley. So Mine Valley is an tech company when I first joined it. Um We were doing 30 million and now we're doing 100 and 50 million in the annual subscription.So, um so it's been a really amazing growth journey. And uh what I wanted to talk to you about is like, what is the most efficient way to scale an organization, right? Um Because a lot of times I speak to companies and they kind of get it wrong by spreading themselves so thin. Um and then trying to do everything at the same time, but at the end of the year when they look at the numbers, they're like, it didn't work the way I thought it was going to work, right? Um So in this session, I'm actually gonna cover the strategies you can implement today to see growth today. Ok. Um So the, so as I, I was talking about my job, right? So my job is mainly to grow the company uh 40 to 50% year on year. Now, when you're doing this, it's really important to understand like growth and revenue is not the only thing uh what is more important than that is to grow it in a way that's efficient and sustainable, right? Growth has to be sustainable and optimized.

And that means you have to do the right thing at the right time all the time. And it can be very, very hard because as marketers were meant to measure thousands of metrics like every day. And we have to go through like metric of the metric, of the metric of the metric. And it creates like this information overload and like co cognition, like um like uh it it just creates this overload, right? Um So it's important to, to know what can you, what do you need to focus on? What is the the core things you need to focus on so that you can actually move the needle in the right way and you're not trying to do everything all the time, right? Um And this brings me brings me to like the most important principle in marketing 8020 rule. So what is the 80 80 20 rule? All about the 8020 rule suggests that there's actually 20% of your efforts that are going to bring in 80% of your results. All effort is not the same, right? And when you break this 2020 8020 rule down to marketing, it comes down to two metrics, just two metrics that you need to pay attention to and optimize to exponentially grow your business. OK. And what are these two metrics?

These two metrics are your cost of acquiring a customer and your lifetime value of a customer? And when you optimize these two metrics, you can actually exponentially grow your business in the most sustainable way. Now, as a rule of thumb, the ratio has to be 123. That means if your lifetime value is $3000 then you should, your willingness to acquire customers should be around $1000 right? So that's a healthy rule. 123. Now, I just want to tell you a little bit about myself, right? So at mine valley, I'm Chief Court Officer. So I got promoted, I got promoted every year until I became Chief grow Officer. Um And we've grown the company to 17 million students who are wide. Um These students are located in 100 and 92 countries. Uh We even localized. So we even grew uh our, our, our content in local markets like we we we we dump all our content in Spanish and French and German. Um And this is last year's 100 and 20 million and this year it's gonna be 100 and 50 million. So all of this was done without any investment by self funding by making the revenue and pumping it back into the right things. But how is this possible? This was possible because we didn't try to do everything all at once, we tried to focus on what was the right levers to move, right?

So this is why when I talk about the two most important things you need to focus on, it's going to be your cost of acquiring a customer and your lifetime value of a customer. Now, what is your cost of acquiring a customer? Right. So this is your total marketing cost divided by the number of customers you acquired during that period? Ok. So that's your, that's your cost of acquiring a customer. Now, you should go one step deeper and think about the C per channel. So for example, my biggest channel is advertising. So I obviously want to look at what is my advertising cap, what is the cost? I'm acquiring a customer on all these advertising channels. So you should do that per channel because then you know which channel to focus on and which channel not to focus on or which channel to invest more in. Um But why this is important is because over the last five years, your c has grown 60% and it's going to double in the next coming years. So if you are not actively thinking of ways to bring this number down, you might find it hard to stay in business in the long run. So this is why this number is so important and it varies, right?

So your cat can vary based on your industry, your cat can vary based on your business model. Ideally, the longer the sales cycle, the lot, the higher the c So if you have a sale cycle where you're jumping on a call with a customer, there's multiple follow ups, you got to speak to three different people in the organization. Your c is going to be high, right? But if you just have a sales page, it's like the ecom, someone sees your product, they just buy right away and there's not much touch points. Um then your c will be a much lower, right? So it varies, but again, your rule of thumb is 123. Um Now, here are some really amazing ways that you can drop your c almost immediately, right? So I'll tell you how, right? So number one is organic revenue. OK? So a lot of companies that I speak to, they don't focus on organic, they're so focused on paid that they are completely neglecting organic and that's not healthy. So a healthy business has 70% of its revenue coming from organic and only 30% coming from paid or advertising, right?

So if you don't have those ratios, you need to really rethink your strategies. Um And why this is super important also is because of these two statistics, right? So the first statistic is that your customers are spending 100 and 47 minutes of their day on social media, OK? 100 and 47 minutes of their day. That means literally, they're away 12 hours, they're spending more than two hours of the 12 hours on social media. So if you're not on social media connecting with them, you're missing out. Ok. The second thing is that there's been countless studies on this and 75% of customers before they actually make a purchase, go to your social media to check if you have the trust, the credibility, the authority, the social proof, they go and validate you before they make that purchase.

So social media is not just a vanity metric, it's not just a nice to have, it's not just putting content out there. It's actually a trust badge. And if you are not thinking about the trust that you're putting out to your customers on social media, you're playing the game wrong. So this is why if you have any social media team and they tell you follow accounts is a vanity metric, all that stuff, ask them to check again because your customers are checking you out before they're even buying anything with you. Now, the good news is that there's a lot of social media channels, right? You don't have to focus on everything you need to figure out which one resonates with your customers the most and focus on mastering that channel and then just using that content to cross pollinate the other channels, but you need to master one channel, right? The second strategy is growth loops. So I, I love growth loops because growth loops are basically a sustainable way for your existing customers to bring another customer into the ecosystem. OK? So what this does is it basically creates like a self sustaining cycle of growth.

Now, the best example of this is Trello, right? So imagine if you go and create a Trello board now for your work and you share it with your team because you're not gonna work on it by yourself. You're gonna share it with your team. You're basically getting five or six people or 20 people to join Trello with you. So this creates a growth loop and then the company can just scale organically, right? Um So think about how you can build a growth loop within your product with your organization because this is, this creates a very healthy self sustaining cycle of growth and it drops your cap down. Next is referral. So, referrals are an incentivized way for your customers to refer other customers. So it's kind of like a growth loop, but this is incentivized. OK? So you know, referral programs like the most iconic one is probably dropbox. Um where if you share a dropbox with someone, a friend, you get extra space, they get extra space. But then with the referrals, there's three things you can get wrong with it. So these are three things I want you to pay attention to when you're building your referral program. The first thing is that it has to feel organic. It has to feel like it's part of the user journey. It shouldn't feel like it's an afterthought.

Like suddenly you have a referral program, but I wasn't ready to refer because I didn't even like your product, right? So it needs to feel like very organic. The second is that it needs to provide two people incentives, right? So it's the person that the referer and then the referred person. So both people need to feel incentivized for it to work really well. And the third thing is it needs to be easy. So it shouldn't be 10 steps to where I have to paste the link and I have to write a copy and then the copy has to go and what click on whatsapp and then share it somewhere else and copy it. It cannot, it has to be one or two clicks like super simple like I did you click a button now the copy is done for me and I can literally share it with my friend and, and they know what to do, right? So it has to be easy and a lot of people get that wrong. Uh Number number, sorry, this is number four, number four is A B testing. So A B testing is like probably one of the best ways you can drop your cap, right? Um And if you look at big companies like Airbnb Netflix, all of these big companies are running between 500 to 1000 tests a week? Ok. So the question is, how many tests are you running? Are you running one? Are you running? None?

Uh, because if you're not running tests you're missing out. Um, but when, even when you're running tests, there are mistakes people make. Ok. And sometimes you might run a test and you see like, oh, I, I pushed it live and it said it was gonna do 30% more revenue. But then when I ran it put it live, there was not that much impact on my business. That's because you're running tests wrong. And the way to run tests correctly seem to pay attention to these two things. Right. First is what is the duration of your test? Because some businesses there are massive peak cycles or their massive sale cycles all Monday, Monday is like seasonality, right? Or Friday or it's between 12 and 1 p.m. You know, so there's gonna be parts of the, the your, your, the time or, or parts of the week where there's optimum sales or, or less optimum sales, right? So you need to run your test over a significant amount of time so that you can actually capture these, these different periods, right? You can't just run on a Monday, you need to run it for at least like a full week or two, full two weeks, right?

So making sure that you've, you've nailed down that duration. Second is that you need to also prec calculate the sample size. You can't run a test on five people and then decide which if it the winner or not, right, you have to run it on a, on a significant sample size. So there's actually calculators online that you could use to kind of pre calculate and preplan your test. So you make sure that you whatever results you get are gonna be are gonna hold true every single time you run this test and it's not gonna be a false positive, it's not gonna be a false negative. Um Number five is partnerships and affiliates. OK? So basically partnerships and affiliates are a way for you to tap into other people's lists. Now you can do that in two ways. You can do that by building a partnership with the brand that's complimentary or you can do that by building an affiliate where you pay some pay for sale that is made. So anyone sends traffic to you and if the sales are made, you pay them a commission for the sales that are made. So there's two are doing this, a really great brand that is really has massive strategies around affiliate and partnerships is gopro.

So if you look at gopro, you, the most iconic partnership is GoPro and Red Bull and you'll be noticed they're both chasing the same audience, the adrenaline junkie, the the audience is the same. But what they're doing is trying to leverage each other's list and use, utilize both their brands to cross pollinate and help one another out, right? So think about your industry, think about your brand, think about who's complementary in your space and who can you partner with that has a significant list size where you can cross ball in it and share traffic and and you know, work together on certain projects or sponsorships.

So you don't have to fork out to buy customers. Um The next important metric that you guys need to pay attention to is your lifetime value of a customer. So how is this calculated? So this is basically calculated by how much and how frequently a customer spends with you in their lifetime? Ok. So this is about a little bit about retention as well, right? So you need to think about how many times can I get them to buy other things and how long can I hold their attention and keep them engaged in my business? Now, there's multiple ways you can grow your lifetime value of a customer and I'm just gonna cover these um 10 in in today's session. So number one is subscription, ok. So subscription is basically a great way to do this because you're creating recurring revenue. So it's not like it's more than a one time purchase. Now, you are getting them to come back every month or every year and there's repeat business, right? And a business that really went booming with this is, is Adobe. So in 2012, um Adobe was transactional. They moved to subscription in 2013 and they became this whole like cloud subscription uh software. And uh before the, the, the pivoted to subscription, their lifetime value was 1000 $400 1004 $100. After they pivoted, they grew their lifetime value to $10,000 from the same customers.

So there's massive potential in subscription, right? But you gotta see does your business model fit it and how can you fit, how can they make, you can, how can you make it work for your customers by giving this, giving them this consistent value? Next is Upsell. So up sells, down sells, cross sells, these are like traditional terms in marketing um and stuff and like the one of the best examples for brands that a brand that does this really well is Amazon, right? So if you go to Amazon, you're gonna notice that Amazon actually has this section where it says uh people who bought this also bought this. Ok. That's a great example of an Upsell. It's like if you bought this, you also gonna, you're also gonna like this, right? And Amazon also has downs sells, right? So if you go to like buy a book, you'll also see a section that says, oh, you can buy, you, you knew or you can buy used and used as a downs sell because it's to cater to people that don't want to pay full price but they want the product, you know. So Amazon has built a really great um downs sell system uh by doing that. Amazon also does really amazing cross sale.

So if you go to their, their Yeah, yeah, there were any product page you're gonna notice they always have these like all of these other items that they recommend you. They're like, oh increase your gig. Oh, you know, add this other stuff at this like bag add this this case, add another battery, add all these things. So they keep recommending products that you can add because what they're trying to do is cross sell you other products, right? Um So this is again a great way of of doing cross sales. So if you look at Amazon study Amazon, they do amazing Upsell cross sales sales. Next is autobam. So auto bombs are basically like a one click add on to your checkout. Ok. So what this does is it helps someone to add on another item that's just very complementary to their existing purchase, right? Without having to go through multiple screens and making it super invasive. Um Now an example of this would be if someone is buying a yoga mat. Ok, someone's buying a yoga mat. What is the next problem that they have? It's like how do I carry my yoga mat when I'm traveling? So your auto bump could be yoga straps, right? And it can be 10 $20 so like no brainer offer that you can just add on and say would you like yoga straps, click here to add on yoga straps to your, to your your your checkout, right?

So this is a great way to get your customers to spend more with you. So just making sure you're just adding a s just simple products that you can add on that solves another need. Um Next is email flows. So email flows. These, I'm talking about like our auto generated mails, right? So autogenerated emails actually have the highest open rates than any other emails because usually it's about a purchase about transaction. It's about, it's about something that is of value to the customer. So they tend to open it because they know they're not really being sold to in those emails, right? So now if they now that they have the highest open rates when utilized correctly, they can generate 320% more revenue than traditional launch emails. The thing is a lot of brands don't utilize their auto generated emails. So auto generate emails are emails like your car, emails, your product, your category, your category abandonment. You can do back in stock low in stock. Uh You can do your welcome email like you know, a price drop like, oh you know, uh this is what you do next, like new things added, like all of these kind of things that this is traditional auto generated emails, right? But if you use them correctly, you can use them. It can be a great way for you to generate extra revenue from your clients by making up sales, cross sales, down sales, product recommendations. Um you know, different, different kind of promotions and offers um nexus campaigns.

So campaigns are like auto generated emails but they're slightly different and not auto generated. So these are seasonal. So an example of this would be like your Black Friday, your Valentine's Day, new product launches, uh Any special offers discounts for seasonal, for Mother's Day, Father's Day, things like that, right? Um So these are also great way to, to generate extra revenue from your your list or your your customers, right? By, by giving them new offers, something to something to, to engage with. Um But when you're running these campaigns, there's two things that can really skyrocket the performance of your campaigns, right? Two things. First thing scarcity. So what is scarcity? Scarcity is like limited time only? So this offer is only valid for 24 hours. This offer is only valid for 48 hours. So limited time only, right? The second is, is like a low stock. So I only have this, this last three pieces left, last five pieces left, you see Ecom, they do this really well. It's like only 10 spots available, you know, last five pieces left. All of this creates scarcity, which is, which is really, really good for, for businesses right or, or for your performance of your campaigns.

So whenever you're running your next campaign, make sure you have these like scarcity and urgency triggers in your emails because they're gonna help increase the performance of your campaigns. Number eight is upgrades and downgrades. So upgrades and downgrades are basically a way for you to give ownership to your customer. So that instead of churning leaving you, they have control over their purchase and they can upgrade and downgrade based on the flexibility. So a really good example of this is class pass.

So class pass actually did a study and they were like, ok, let me introduce upgrades and downgrades. And let's see if I was able to retain more users and over the long run and they said it actually worked really well for them because before what people were doing is that they would just cancel their class pass when they were traveling or when they were tied to cash or when they were not using classes.

But by upgrading and downgrading, they can just upgrade when they're in when they are freer and want to consume more classes and they can downgrade to less, a lot less classes when they felt like they were traveling or they didn't really have much time or they had a lot on their plate.

So by giving that ownership to a customer, you can keep them longer term in, in the ecosystem as a customer because you're giving them the flexibility to decide how they want to use or consume your product. So think about your, your, your program, it really works well with subscriptions, but think about how you can offer them upgrades and downgrade option. Um or even like various plans that they can, they can, they can participate in based on their needs. Um Next is loyalty. So loyalty and retention is huge. Um It's, it's, it can drive your, your, your revenue of like 50%. It's, it's insane. Uh But the thing is how can you do a loyalty and retention program, right? Uh And this is really about rewarding again, like 8020 rule, rewarding the customers that are driving the 20% that are driving 80% of the revenue, right? So if you keep them oil, they can generate most of the revenue that you need for you right through that repeat business. So think about how if you don't have a loyalty program already, think about how you can implement one for your existing clients, you can even do this for B to B, you can do this for, for Ecom, you can do for any type of business. There's literally no right and wrong way to do it, but it's really about rewarding the 20% that are powering that are, that are your power users. Um Next is bundles.

So bundles are basically a way for you to put together complimentary products and get customers to try out various product offerings, right? So I put this example of um of Harry's, that's a men's skin, uh men's care products. And the reason why I did this is because they just did it perfectly. Right. So what men's men's care, men's skincare products. Like what do men really care about convenience? Right. So who would appreciate bundles better than men? No, because so if you think about what who they were targeting, they were trying to provide convenience to men that didn't want to go through different different brands and figure out which products to use and like do I need three step? Do I need five step? Like what do I need to do? I just want to clean my face, right? So um so what they did is they just offer these simple bundles. Like you have a two, you have like a three step, you have a travel kit, just simple convenient offers where men can just go in and be like, ok, this is it. Let me just get this and I solve my problem, right? So bundles are a great way for instead of just getting to buy one product, but to get them to buy the full suite and try out all the products, you can build long term loyalty over these various product offerings. So think about your business.

Can you offer a bundle for your products? You most probably can, right? I've seen so many different brands do this like bundles of three t-shirts, you know. Um, but really, it's just to, to get for people to try multiple things at the same time and as a recap, uh, scaling a business is not very hard, it's actually very easy to do. And the reason why we sometimes struggle is because we are spreading ourselves too thin, trying to focus on too many things at the same time, but not doing enough of the things that matter, right? And the two things that matter the most are your cost of acquiring a customer and your lifetime value of a customer. And when you just double down on these two things, you can scale your business exponentially. Um and uh to leave you with, I actually write a newsletter about this every single week uh and these different strategies and stuff like that. So if you want to follow me and follow my newsletter, you can scan the QR code now and you can learn with me every week. Thank you.