We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. By continuing your visit on the website, you consent to the use of the cookies. If you want to find out more about the cookies we use, you can access our Privacy Policy.
It’s been just over a year since I published my original Mobile Growth Stack post on Medium. I’m continually humbled and delighted to see how growth marketers, CMOs, VCs and entrepreneurs building companies around mobile products have adopted the stack as a framework for their strategic thinking around growth.
Highlights included Greylock Partners using the stack as a basis for a growth tools workshop and being approached by the CMO of Gram Games at a conference, who showed me how he was putting the stack into action. They have a huge printout of the stack on the wall next to the Kanban board at Gram, which released the hugely successful 1010 game last year:
Gram Games putting the Mobile Growth Stack to work (photo credit: Gram Games)
Breaking Down the Wins of 2015
Mobile moves fast. In the past 12 months, I’ve had the benefit of working on multiple mobile growth projects and learning from many experts along the way. I’ve received valuable feedback on the stack and input from many growth professionals and online marketers. Finally, I’ve taken into account the big developments in the mobile space over the past year. In this post, I’ll explain how the stack has been updated to increase relevance and keep pace with the industry.
Here’s the newest edition of the Mobile Growth Stack:
Deciding what not to work on at each stage of growing a business is as critical as choosing what to do; the stack is a framework to aid this strategic planning. The framework encourages consideration of all the included elements when devising a growth strategy, but it does not follow that all elements are necessary or equally valid for every business at every stage; quite the opposite.
De-Coupling Channels from Tactics
At its core, Growth is driven through measurement and iterative experimentation, with an obsessive focus on impact. Whilst the mobile space is replete with technological complexity, all too often core growth activities are conflated with the channels or enabling technology used to implement a specific initiative. This can lead to poor organizational understanding of the initiatives in question and resource misallocation.
Take Push Notifications: Whilst Push as a channel can be very effective in reaching existing users, so can email. A phone call, SMS or even direct mail may also be effective in some scenarios. The growth lead should be clear in his/her own mind what metrics they expect to influence with a particular initiative; choice of channels/tech is secondary (if important), and may evolve with iteration.
For this reason — and the fact that tech evolves faster than core growth practice — the revised stack draws a clear distinction by unbundling channels from the activities in the three main layers.
Although certainly not exhaustive, the above list includes the channels that the majority of growth practitioners are using today. As with all elements of the stack, some channels will prove more or less effective in reaching a particular target audience for a particular business.
Ever fans of experimentation and optimization, growth marketers tend towards channels that are highly measurable and support multivariate testing, but others may be effective nonetheless and should not be discounted (see the Retrica example further down).
It’s often worth experimenting with the channel mix itself; a reactivation campaign might yield poor results when delivered over email, yet drive high impact when the message is refactored for push, or vice-versa. More likely still, greater impact could be gained when lapsed users are reached via a multi-channel campaign, possibly including re-targeting them in other apps.
Really smart CRM implementations employ machine learning to develop a better understanding which channels are most effective for different user segments. The channel mix can then be adjusted to better drive impact, possibly even down to individual user level, on a programmatic basis. Even without such an automated system in place, manual experimentation and adjustment can deliver significant gains.
Channels and tools are secondary to the core activity; they can — and often should — be swapped out or augmented over time.
Television advertising has seen a remarkable resurgence over the past year, as CPIs from popular channels such as Facebook have risen sharply due to saturation and marketers hunt for more economical acquisition sources. New TV attribution partners have sprung up to help mobile advertisers match app installs with TV campaigns and — despite the inherently noisy data — many marketers are reporting strong results and favorable CPIs (i.e. actual performance, rather than a brand boost) from this traditional media channel.
Partnerships as a new column in the stack
Partnerships are a new vertical column in the 2015 stack: BD and partnership activities can drive impact for acquisition, engagement & retention, or monetization, depending on the nature of the deal.
Sometimes partnerships deliver value across multiple layers of the stack at once, as is the case with Uber’s integration with Google Maps, which delivers both new user acquisition and existing user re-engagement for Uber, plus of course revenue from rides booked.
About the Author
Andy Carvell
I'm currently leading the Retention Team at SoundCloud in Berlin, the world’s leading audio platform. SoundCloud enables anyone, anywhere to create and share their original music & audio.
In 2014, I published the Mobile Growth Stack, a strategic framework which has been widely adopted within the industry as a key tool for growth marketers, CMOs and strategists. I put the stack into action at SoundCloud, applying the framework to tackle growth growth challenges. I also advise startups, mentor growth professionals and regularly speak about growth topics at conferences.
Prior to joining SoundCloud, I developed and published mobile games, including the original ‘Space Impact’ game, embedded on over 150 million handsets worldwide.
I studied Computer Science for my bachelors and got my MBA from Warwick Business School. I have 15 years professional experience working in Mobile, but started out much younger, making videogames for UK home computer systems from the age of 5 (although they weren't very good ones at that age).