Most marketers focus on acquisition, yet on average 60-80% of the customers they acquire never even use the product. Not once.
Do you know your activation rate?
I’m Will Egan, a Melbourne based growth marketer who specialises in user activation and retention. These two areas are often overlooked by most growth marketers. In fact, the vast majority of companies I speak with have never worked on these two metrics. Why? Because activation and retention are hard (and relatively unknown).
If acquiring new users is the fuel for your growth strategy, activation and retention is the engine. True long-term, sustainable and scalable growth will only come once you’ve solved these two facets of your marketing strategy. The good news is that they can both be engineered, skilfully and deliberately designed through data-driven and research-based decision making. Even better, they can be built into your product or business and drive value over the life of the product.
This is exactly what I help companies do. I help them build a sustainable and repeatable growth process in their business by focussing on the cost per activated and retained user. Then, and only then, I help them scale acquisition.
My background in software development, strategy, pricing and product-market fit/positioning combined with my 10+ years of marketing and sales experience allows me to pursue a highly engineered approach to growth.
By focussing on activation, I have helped companies rapidly increase the performance of their marketing programs by 100% to 500% in as little as three months.
Contact me on: me@willegan.com.
Testimonials
“David and I asked Will to help us unlock product-led growth. Some of the most discerning companies in the world were already using our product, but getting them to the point of no return wasn’t easy enough, nor were we getting enough companies to that point.
Will stripped everything back to first principles and helped us reimagine our acquisition and onboarding flows using the jobs-to-be-done framework. Everything was rebuilt with a view to help customers – whose specific problem we solve – achieve their goals. And quickly.
Will’s structured thinking and evidence-based approach helped us move beyond “contests of opinions” and focus on the growth levers that were most aligned with the success of our customers. In addition to the tangible outcomes, we were also left with a new way of thinking about data and customer-centricity.”
Omer Molad, Vervoe
“I had the pleasure of working with Will over a 6-month period. I can say with full confidence that Will’s work with Preezie was by far some of the most important we have ever done; I count Will in a special league of marketing “geniuses”. During our time together Will solidified Preezie’s sales process, go to market strategy, messaging, value proposition and lead the charge on a complete rebrand which has resulted in us to doubling our revenue over the past 6 months.”
Michael Tutek, Preezie
“Will is not only a brilliantly critical thinker and talented technical marketer, but he is also wonderful to work with and be tutored by. Will’s skills in and understanding of event-based marketing have helped fundamentally shape our understanding of engagement marketing at Drawboard, and our philosophy towards marketing in general. I cannot recommend Will highly enough, and cannot thank him enough.”
Nathan Field, Drawboard
“Will is one of the most passionate marketers I have ever come across. I don’t say that lightly. His passion for event-based marketing to provide a truly personalized experience to his customers is an example many other marketers should probably follow (and his smile is contagious!)”
Louis Grenier, Hotjar
“The growth prior to Will’s involvement was fairly consistent and tracked in many ways (including Google Analytics) but as I have subsequently learnt from Will, it was really only touching the surface in terms of what we should have been focused on.
Will approaches his craft very scientifically which from my perspective as a programmer is exactly what I was after. I had never worked with a good marketer before and so when I was initially looking around for some help, I was hopeful but a little skeptical about what sort of outcomes might be achieved. Will immediately quashed any skepticism from day one and really re-invigorated my sense of purpose with his positive attitude and logical and industrious approach.
When Will explained the aspects of growth (Acquisition > Activation > Retention > Referral > Revenue), it was very enlightening for me as I hadn’t previously read about it being broken down in that way. Then he introduced tracking for the various components of StockLight’s growth and I was very surprised to learn that our activation rate was so low. Will followed up by designing a superb onboarding flow which I was very happy with and hooked it in with very sophisticated email marketing behavioural campaigns.
All of this happened so quickly that I am confident that with Will’s help, the sky is the limit for what we can do next. My only regret in engaging Will is that I don’t have ten more of him, he is not only a terrific person to work with but he’s also a savant marketer.”
Jason Kotchoff, StockLight
“I have had the pleasure to work with Will in a few different capacities now, both as a customer of Vero and directly in helping us with our SEO and content strategy. Having worked with marketing leads from around the world, Will is second-to-none and on par with the very best I’ve met. He gets the big picture and has empathy for others that ensures he gets things done. I couldn’t recommend working with Will highly enough!”
Chris Hexton, Vero
“I attended a Growth Hacking workshop that Will hosted which was quite possibly one of the best workshops I have attended to date. Will had me hanging on every word as he explained growth marketing in the simplest yet effective way. His teaching approach connected so many dots and really empowered me to make smarter business decisions. Will had quite a knack for questioning and challenging my assumptions about how my website was performing, and of course, he was right.
Some of the strategies that Will suggested I focused on are still to this day some of the most effective tools in growing my business.”
Hayley Worley
“If you want to know what’s the hottest development when it comes to digital marketing and how your business can benefit from it, you should hit Will up.”
Shahin Hoda, Appster
“I spent only a handful of hours with Will, but he provided insight, clarity into our marketing and user acquisition problems. He then gave us clear and actionable tactics to put into play the following day!”
Andre Selton, Plattar
“In the time it took to drink one coffee, Will was able to hone in on the biggest challenges I was puzzling over and arm me with a month’s worth of ideas, tactics and areas for further exploration.”
Grace O’Hara, Code for Australia
“Will delivered a website in lightening speed that is intuitive and a great representation of our organisation. He’s always very responsive whenever we have a query about using the CMS or making updates that are beyond our technical abilities.”
Merrin Morrison, Monash University
“Action-packed day with a tremendous amount of value. Will gives a great overview but also drills down into detail. Bringing a scientific method and calculus into your business like never before. Marketing is no longer a dark art, but an exact science to be practiced -ignore at your peril.”
Max Middleweek, Zero Impact
