‘Growth hacking’ is a fashionable subject with the rise of startups, but it’s not so easy to established marketers to know how to use some of the insights to help in improving performance in day to day business activity.

Part of this is down to the fact its as much about mindset, as it is using tools to achieve growth.

I therefore wanted to share a mini ‘hack’ I achieved at Shopping,com UK, improving our email subscriber rate by 360% at virtually no cost, which was down to taking a growth hacking approach to the problem.

The challenge: I needed to significantly added subscribers to our email newsletter. I did this by finding and then mining an existing SDC e-marketing database which contained a historic list of inactive fans.

The result: Coupled with the design input from a creative marketing executive leading to improvements in content and design of email achieved significant increase (360%) in site subscriber sign ups: from 4318 – (Aug 2010 newsletter with 12.5% open rate) – to 19,934 for July 2011 newsletter (with 57.9% open rate)