Aside from all being very successful companies within their own right, Convert Kit, Drift and Click Funnels have all used this growth tactic to help scale their business. In this video, we’re going to break down exactly what the tactic is, why it might work, and whether or not it actually works for these three businesses.
The Tactic: A Powered By Badge
The tactic that ConvertKit, Drift, and ClickFunnels all use as essentially, including a powered by badge. This is a tactic that I see all of their customers will incorporate onto their websites when they’re using these tools, unless they’ve either paid extra to remove that banner or they’ve toggled that setting off in their account settings.
Let’s go ahead and take a look at how that might look on a few different sites. For this first instance, what you might see in a ConvertKit size you’d see some sort of pop-up where people would be opting in followed by the text of built with ConvertKit, or even if you were to go into Drift in the bottom right corner and interact with the Drift bot, what you would see is this link to chat by Drift. And then essentially from there, if you were to click that Chat by Drift, what you would be led to is a landing page that is trying to convert you to becoming a free user of Drift.
And then if you were to take a look at ClickFunnels, what you’d see in the bottom right corner is a made with ClickFunnels link in which, if you were to click that it would lead you to ClickFunnels, and then from there, you would again be encouraged to create a free account. So these are all pretty similar applications of this particular growth tactic. But as you can imagine, the reason why this growth tactic works is because of network effects.
Why this growth tactic works?
If each of these companies, which essentially serve different businesses, acquiring new business, and then that business has customers that also might be interested in this particular solution, then they’re essentially reducing the cost of acquisition for their next user. And in most cases, users are actually incredibly lazy, and so they don’t actually care about removing this particular banner from the widget that they’re using on their site. So they’ll just leave that there and it becomes free advertising space for Drift, ConvertKit, or ClickFunnels.
And even in the case where people do mind, the people that will mind are going to also be the ones that are likely to upgrade. And so all three of these businesses win by using this sort of tactic because it not only helps them in acquiring new users, but it also helps them in terms of converting existing free users to becoming paid users of their tool.
Now, this is obviously not the only growth tactic for any of these three businesses I’ve actually used, but I’m sure it makes a meaningful effect on their businesses. If, for example, we were just to take on the hypothetical example of each of these businesses, having about a thousand people at a time that are looking at this every single day. And assuming that 2% of those people convert into creating free accounts, that would mean that from those 1000 impressions, 20 new free accounts have been created.
And then maybe from those 20 free accounts, you have a 25% conversion rate. And in that situation, you’ve got five new paying customers that you really didn’t have to pay all that much for. But to really prove out whether or not this has worked, I think there’s a great website called builtwith.com where we can take a look at how all three of these businesses have grown over the years.
Builtwith.com essentially scours the web for different web applications and different tools that sites will use to see what tools different sites are using the most frequently and then to track that over time. So if we actually dig into that side of things, what you can see is that ConvertKit stats over the year, since 2015 to 2021, they have grown in terms of their overall usage.
So they’ve grown as a business, and that makes sense. But what I really want you to think about is how in their early days, that powered by ConvertKit chart may have played a huge role in terms of the exponential growth they experience on the left side of this table. Or for example, even in Drift’s case, in the first few years of Drift, you can see that there was exponential growth across the board as well in their first few years on the market.
And I know for a fact that it was using these powered by Drift tactics that were very effective for them in these early days, because I actually was a Drift customer around these days when they were spiking up the curve. And I heard about it because of another site I had visited where there was that Drift chat.
And then on the last example for ClickFunnels, you can also see how since 2013, they have had an exponential graph all the way to the right. So hopefully what they should tell you is that in your early days, you want to take any of the wins you possibly can get. And thinking about creative ways that you can introduce yourself to new potential users can be a great way for you to lower your cost of acquisition while also allowing your existing customers and free users to help you reach the next free user or paying customer.
If you found this growth tactic breakdown, helpful, you definitely want to check out my article about Venngage and how they went from 5k monthly organic visits to over 500K monthly organic visits in under five years. When you couple growth tactics like this powered by badge along with organic SEO, you’re sure to grow your traffic as well as your potential customers for your business, startup or whatever side hustle you’re working on.
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning this startup growth tactic from ConvertKit, Drift, and ClickFunnels.