Crazy Egg is a growth marketing platform that helps companies create data-driven advertising campaigns. It allows businesses to test which ad formats and placements generate the best results, helping them grow more efficiently than traditional methods qualify. The company has grown from its original 100 users five years ago to over 100,000 in 2018, with only $10K in marketing spent each year. When my co-founder and I founded Crazy Egg, we barely had enough money to keep the company afloat. We didn’t have many paying clients, and the company was losing around $30,000 each month. Although this may not seem to be a large sum of money, when you are self-employed and living with your parents, it all adds up. So, how did we get to a client base of over 100,000?
To begin with, we had a complimentary plan, which was quite beneficial. You’ve undoubtedly seen Crazy Egg ads all over the internet, although we’ve had over 100,000 clients for years. We didn’t have a large marketing budget before that moment. All we had was $10,000.
Process of growing Crazy Egg:
CSS-based galleries
We created our homepage a landing page before we launched Crazy Egg to capture your name and email address so you could be alerted when we went live. We also posted a snapshot of our beta product on that landing page so you could see what the app looked like. The only problem was that no one was visiting the site. Therefore no emails were being collected. We chose to stay in all of the CSS galleries and pay $10,000 on one-time ad purchases. These sites attracted tens of thousands, if not millions, of monthly visits from web designers who were our ideal clients. We acquired around 20,000 addresses via the CSS galleries, allowing us to send out a blast to everyone when the product was released.
Furthermore, we developed the site utilizing CSS standards when it was first published. We were able to submit our design to each gallery due to this. Many of them featured our strategy, which resulted in 23,294 traffic and new users. Be inventive if you want to increase visitors to your website. There are usually sites in your sector that get a lot of traffic but don’t make much money. Arrange with them to market your product or service for a reasonable fee.
Press
When you’re on a tight budget, you can’t afford to engage a public relations agency. Rather than employing a PR company, we compiled a list of the most prominent tech news blogs and offered the authors a free $99 Crazy Egg account. We then assisted them in installing Crazy Egg on their blog to see how it functioned. They naturally wanted to share the heatmaps and other statistics Crazy Egg supplied since the product was visually appealing. We could get TechCrunch, Mashable, and other big tech news sites to cover Crazy Egg using this method. Our success was because we not only provided them with a premium account to experiment with, but we also assisted them in analyzing the data and provided input on what they should improve about their overall design. If you stick to this technique, you’ll receive a lot of journalists who will ignore you, but if you keep following up with them, some of them will test your product eventually. If you have a good product, you may expect 5 to 10% of journalists to cover you utilizing this method.
Partnerships in business
Partnerships were our primary source of new customers. This alone accounted for more than 40% of our signups when we first began. So, what do I mean when I say “partnerships”? Many firms have a significant user base but do not produce a lot of money from each user. In other words, their profit margins are low. Those companies always seek new methods to generate more money from their customers. They can often create thousands of signups if you give them a special edition of your product for free or at a reduced price. All you have to do is offer them a 10% to 30% part of the money generated by their consumers. Hosting firms are a fantastic illustration of this. They usually have slim profit margins and seek new methods to monetize their user base. This is why GoDaddy is always trying to upsell you while you’re checking out. I met organizations like Lunar Pages by visiting hosting conferences like HostingCon. They have thousands of clients and, more crucially, hundreds, if not thousands, of new consumers every day, despite their modest size. As a result, we struck arrangements with firms like Lunar Pages, offering free Crazy Egg accounts to all of their new clients. Each partner we signed up for resulted in thousands of new users. A fraction of those users eventually became paying clients. We ended up retaining 70% of the money while paying 30% to our partners.
We began forming connections with SEO firms in addition to those with hosting providers. I met hundreds of agencies via networking at Pubcon, Search Engine Strategies, and SMX. I gave them a free “premium” subscription, which ordinarily costs $99 per month. I did this because each agency had a sizable client base, and I knew that if they began to use my product, they would ultimately promote it to some of their clients. We were also able to generate over 4,000 signups to Crazy Egg by collaborating with SEO services. Business development is the quickest approach to expand any company. Attending networking events and conferences, as well as just meeting new people, is a terrific method to broaden your network. It would be best always to strive to expand your network because it will allow potential partnerships.
Attend conferences and give presentations
It shows that someone has money if they can afford to attend a conference. You can afford software that costs less than $100 per month if you can afford a $500 conference ticket. To get Crazy Egg’s name out there, I’d apply to speak at conferences and talk about anything the conference organizers wanted me to talk about, even if it had nothing to do with analytics, Instead of asking the organizer to cover my travel costs or pay me a speaking fee. I’d like to request that Crazy Egg become a sponsor of their event. Sponsorships didn’t cost the conference anything, and they gave us publicity we wouldn’t have had otherwise. You’ll need to start speaking at events and build up your conference résumé before you can use this method. Once you’ve spoken at over fifteen events, you may approach them and ask if they’ll sponsor you for free. It’s unlikely to happen until you’ve given a couple of talks at a few conferences. Conferences do not provide unproven speakers free sponsorships.
Bloggers
Millions of blogs on the internet, many of which have a sizable audience. We developed a list of all the notable bloggers who used Technorati and gave them a free $99 Crazy Egg account to increase brand awareness. We didn’t put any limits on the account, and we didn’t make it mandatory for them to blog on Crazy Egg. All we wanted was for them to utilize our goods. Consequently, several of the bloggers displayed their heatmaps on their blogs, resulting in an increase in signups for us. In addition, we went after blog networks like 9rules and provided all of its members a free premium Crazy Egg account after we saw that bloggers liked our product. This resulted in more individuals blogging about Crazy Egg, which helped to increase signups. Even though many people use Twitter and Facebook these days, blogs remain an essential aspect of the social web. Please don’t take anything for granted with them. Consider providing a free version of your product or service to bloggers. The majority of bloggers are self-employed and like receiving freebies.
Make the most of your product
We decided to make the procedure simpler after learning that individuals like sharing off their heatmaps. We added an export function, which enabled users to grab their gorgeous heatmaps and show them off to their guests, as foolish as it may seem. We gave various export choices to make it simple for each user, regardless of the device they were using. As everyone began sharing their heatmaps on picture galleries like Flickr, this helped us increase our traffic from image sites like Google image search. Outside of your goods, marketing exists as well. Use your product to assist you in improving your registration rate. Dropbox is a fantastic illustration of this. You must invite friends and inform your Twitter followers about Dropbox if you want extra storage space. Make the most of your web app as a marketing tool.
SEO
Despite my knowledge in SEO, we didn’t use it in the traditional sense with Crazy Egg. Instead, we conducted keyword research to determine what people were searching for when looking for anything similar to our product or service. After that, we made a list of all the prospective keywords we wanted to target and built pages around them. For instance, we offer a whole help area dedicated to many of the topics you may Google while seeking answers regarding our product. If you don’t have the funds to employ an SEO professional or generate connections, there are several things you can do yourself. The Beginner’s Guide to SEO and the Advanced Guide to SEO are excellent resources for learning the ropes. When you begin your SEO efforts, avoid using the most common tactics, such as link building. Instead, consider using unorthodox approaches such as content marketing.
Conclusion
With very little money to spend on marketing, my co-founder and I expanded Crazy Egg to over 100,000 users. To make things even more complicated, we had to spend most of our time consulting to assist Crazy Egg. You don’t have an excuse to go out and attract more users. You don’t need a large budget or marketing expertise; all you need is a willingness to put in the effort and think outside the box. Great marketing efforts are built on creativity, not cash.