An interview with Anand Kansal- Marketing lead of Outgrow

Today we have with us, Anand Kansal, Marketing lead of Outgrow, Outgrow provides variety of tools like business calculators, Quizzes and recommendations for lead generation, customer engagement & conversions. Let's start

• Hi Anand, It’s great pleasure to interview you, Please introduce yourself & Outgrow to our audience

I am working as Marketing Lead at Outgrow, a growth marketing platform which helps marketers generate leads, increase sales and increase their presence on social media by using interactive and exciting content formats like quizzes, calculators, polls, assessments, product recommendation engines etc.

Prior to this, I’ve worked in various marketing capacities for other SaaS products like VWO, PushCrew and ReferralCandy. All in all, I have 4+ years of experience in online marketing and growth. I also hold an MBA in Marketing from Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon.

• We believe that every organization has story to tell. Can you please tell us why outgrow was started, what’s one thing that initiated the urge to start outgrow

Outgrow was born from a thought by Pratham Mittal and Randy Rayess, the co-founders of Outgrow. The duo, who were already running a highly successful software development company, created a calculator to augment lead generation for their company. The calculator ended up outperforming every other marketing campaign they had ever created and got them more than 11k qualified leads in a very short span of time. In addition, it also went viral on social media, giving their brand a big boost. This led to them creating Outgrow as a way to help other marketers create interactive tools like this without any coding.

• I found outgrow in Producthunt Top list and was inspired by the product, can you explain us  different features of outgrow and how it is useful to Marketers, Business people and Bloggers

Certainly! Inside Outgrow, customers will find a variety of interactive content options which they can create. They can create outcome quizzes (eg. Which HubSpot plan is right for you), calculators (eg. Calculate the ROI of your Marketing), graded quizzes (eg. How much do you know about Inbound Marketing), polls (eg. Vote for your favourite marketing expert), or ecommerce product recommendations (eg. Which sunglasses suit your face the best).

We have a host of design templates which are fully optimized for mobile, desktop and tablet so customers don’t need to worry about the design. In addition, we also have more than 80 pre-made experiences so customers can just pick any pre-made experience, change the questions and have an interactive experience ready in a matter of minutes.

For each interactive experience, our customers can customize the questions, the options, the formula and the results page. They can also generate leads with a fully-customizable lead generation form.

They can use the responses filled in by the end user to gather more information about their audience and personalize the follow up communications. We currently integrate with more than 1000 other tools, either natively or via Zapier, so you can push the information to any CRM or marketing automation platform that you want.

Lastly, our support team is available all the time to help you with anything you want. We even help you create interactive experiences if you get stuck at any stage.

• Most of Website owners have a notion that including more features like quiz, Interactive forms and calculators decreases site speed and will negatively influence SEO, How outgrow users can overcome this issue

We have a wide range of embedding options so you don’t have to have the interactive content load with the page. Also you can customize our calculators and quizzes so you don’t have large heavy videos and images so the calc is more likely to load quickly. We have also done a lot of optimization on our end - our templates are optimized for conversion and our interactive experiences load quickly.

Regarding SEO, it’s a myth that interactive experiences negatively affect SEO. On the contrary, they actually help your SEO. Our users who create interactive experiences inside Outgrow can specify the title of the experience and the meta description. Our templates are highly-optimized for SEO as well.

• We have 3 Prime Questions

1. The bounces usually increases with number of questions in the interactive form- what’s the trend in outgrow
2. Usually leads collected through medium intent do not convert well unless they’re nurtured, how good is the average conversion ratio using outgrow
3. How is Outgrow different and better than its competitors

• It’s true that if you have a lot of questions, the bounce rate increases. However, in my personal experience, interactive content with upto 10-11 questions doesn’t result in increased bounce rate. These experiences are so engaging and immersive that most users end up completing the entire thing. This is why the conversion rate for these interactive tools are much better than ebook and whitepaper forms, generic landing pages etc. We’ve generally seen our customers getting a conversion rate of more than 50% with some of them even going beyond 70%!
• The best thing about using interactive experiences is that you also get a lot of info about your users which you wouldn’t get with a standard lead generation form. For example, if I have a calculator like “Calculate the ROI of using my product” and I ask questions about the user’s current business, then in addition to having the lead info, I know a lot about the user’s business like his current traffic level, how many sales he is making currently etc. I can pass this info to my marketing automation system and build a much richer profile of each user. And this will help my marketing and sales team segment each user better and create create hyper-targeted campaigns, which will help boost eventual conversion. In fact, we’ve heard back from some clients whose final conversion rate have doubled or even tripled once they started using Outgrow to generate leads.
• Outgrow scores over its competitors in terms of the following points
• Easier to Use - our WYSIWYG builder helps users create experiences without any coding
• We have a bunch of design templates and well as pre-made experiences that makes the experience creating job very easy for the customers
• Our tool helps marketers build highly complex calculators with advanced math
• The ability to segment your leads and integrate with 1000+ tools helps you follow up with your leads in a much more effective way. You can also send follow up emails from within the Outgrow builder
• The ability to build recommendation engines, especially for ecommerce, and sync all products from shopify automatically

• “Landing pages and content represents brand”- what’s your opinion about the statement?

I agree with this completely. Anything which your targeting audience sees on your site affects their perception of you. And this especially true of landing pages and content since these are usually the entry points of most people to your brand i.e. the first thing they usually see of you. And the first impression is always the most powerful.

• What more can we expect from outgrow in coming days?

At Outgrow, you can expect a continued focus on building new features and optimizing existing features to give clients the best experience. We have recently launched our ecommerce feature and we are going to continue building new features that address the interactive content needs of our audience.

• If you would like to give one piece of advice to youngsters who have a dream of becoming an entrepreneur what would it be?

Well, firstly, I am not an entrepreneur myself so don’t know if my advice carries much value. But to give me two cents on this after observing the entrepreneurs I’ve worked with, I would advice anyone to avoid romanticizing the concept of entrepreneurship. It takes a lot of guts of do something of your own and you’d be doing grunt work for the majority of your journey. So take the plunge only if you have a product or service you’re really excited about and want to use that to solve a problem you deeply care about.

• What’s your opinion about Boost Bloggers.

I think you guys have a really amazing blog which is chock-full of insightful articles on all aspects of online marketing. It’s a great resource for any budding marketer out there!