How to use the GROWS framework for marketing experiments

Here’s a useful framework on how to run marketing experiments by Corey Haines – ex-Head of Growth at Baremetrics & Advisor to SavvyCal, Evercast, Riverside.fm and more.

Marketing experiments can test and validate new ideas while identifying areas for improvement. Haines’ step-by-step framework helps businesses run effective experiments that meet their growth objectives. 

By following this framework, you can gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, leading to data-driven decisions that improve marketing strategies. Haines’ framework is a must-read for anyone seeking to enhance their marketing experiments.

What’s the GROWS framework?

GROWS stands for:

• Gather
• Rank
• Outline
• Work
• Study

Let’s go through every part one by one. 🔎

#1 Gather

Ideate like a madman.

Pro-tip: One way to do this is by researching and drawing inspiration from other industries. Once you have a good understanding of what’s out there, try locking yourself in a room, or any other quiet place, and dedicating some time to brainstorming. Don’t worry about whether or not the ideas are good at this point – just focus on generating as many ideas as possible. Remember, the more ideas you have, the more likely you are to come up with something truly innovative and unique.

#2 Rank

In the second step of the GROWS framework, you need to rank the ideas that you have generated based on three elements:

▶️ Ease: how easy it is to implement an idea

▶️ Impact: the potential impact of implementing an idea

▶️ Confidence: how confident you are in the idea’s potential success

After scoring, filter your list by the highest score and go through every idea from top to bottom. This will help you prioritize your ideas and focus on the ones that have the most potential impact while being easy to implement.

By the way: For ‘The SaaS Operator’ newsletter, we spent 40+ hours researching everything Corey Haines has ever published on SaaS marketing. Worth a read!

#3 Outline

Your experiment outline should include the following details:

▶️ What needs to be done

▶️ Who does what (and by when)

▶️ How much time and resources it’ll require.

By providing a comprehensive outline, you will give structure to your experiment and ensure that everyone involved understands their roles and responsibilities. This will help to ensure that your experiment is completed on time, within budget, and with the desired results. 💪

#4 Work

Self-explanatory – start working ASAP!

To ensure that you are making the most of your time, try to pick 1-3 different experiments and run them all together. This will enable you to test multiple ideas at once and see what works best. It will also help you to identify any patterns or trends that emerge across different experiments.

#5 Study

After conducting an experiment, analyze the data for valuable insights instead of simply discarding it.

Once you have analyzed the results, it is important to make decisions about how to proceed with future marketing experiments. This may involve identifying new strategies to try out, discontinuing ineffective approaches, or refining existing tactics to make them even more effective.

Decide on what you will:

⏭️ Start,

⏹️ Stop,

⏯️ Continue

in your future marketing experiments.

And there you have it – a simple 5-step system to run experiments for marketing your SaaS business! ✅