Customer experience
The customer journey audit
Find conversion friction before you increase spend.
Read the articleSkip to contentGrowth marketing blog.
Improve the journey.
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Growth marketing blog / Ideas grounded in the work
Growth marketing blog.
Better questions. Better decisions.
A growth marketing blog by Avie Vu, with practical notes on CRM, customer journeys and building a marketing career.
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For businesses
Improve the journey.
Understand the outcome.
Retention
Duolingo growth strategy
Five lessons for business growth decisions.
Read the articleMeasurement
Build a Growth Room
One operating system for your growth tools.
Read the articleFor marketers
Build skills you can
put into practice.
Career
Your growth marketing roadmap
Move beyond channel execution with a practical learning path.
Read the articlePortfolio
Show the thinking behind your work
Build your first case with clear evidence and recommendations.
Read the articleRemote work
Working remotely in marketing
Practical lessons and research context for marketers.
Read the articleReading guide: choose your next growth question
Choose your next question
A reading guide to this growth marketing blog.
Start with the decision you need to make. The articles are grouped around customer journeys, measurement, lifecycle work and the skills marketers use to connect them.
1. Customer journeys and conversion.
If a business attracts attention but struggles to turn interest into meaningful action, begin with the journey. Look at the promise that brought someone to the product, the steps they must complete and the point at which they first receive value. Traffic and sign-ups only tell part of that story.
The customer journey articles in this growth marketing blog help you ask more precise questions. Is the audience a good fit? Does the next step match what the customer expected? Is important information missing? Treat each explanation as a hypothesis until the available evidence supports it.
Read the customer journey audit before adding more acquisition spend. Use it to organise observations and identify the next investigation. You may find that the first useful action is checking event definitions or reviewing customer feedback, rather than launching another campaign.
2. Retention and lifecycle marketing.
Retention asks whether customers continue to receive enough value to return. Lifecycle marketing considers how messages can support that relationship at relevant moments. A well-timed email or notification is useful when it helps the customer do something they actually need.
In this growth marketing blog, retention analysis connects behaviour, product value and business context. Read the Duolingo analysis as an example of questions to explore, rather than a universal playbook. A tactic that works for a daily learning habit may not fit a product used only occasionally.
When applying an idea, define the audience, the trigger and the intended action. Consider who should not receive the message and how you will recognise an unwanted effect. More sends or higher open rates are not enough to demonstrate a better customer experience.
3. Measurement and growth operations.
Good measurement starts with a clear question. A dashboard can show many numbers while leaving the team unsure what to do next. Before adding another metric, explain the decision it will support, how the underlying event is defined and which audience the number represents.
The operations articles in this growth marketing blog focus on connecting evidence to a regular decision-making rhythm. The Growth Room guide is a starting point for bringing priorities, experiments and learning together. Use the structure that fits your team rather than copying every tool.
For product analytics definitions, consult the official PostHog funnel documentation. Product documentation provides implementation context; editorial analysis provides questions and interpretation. Keeping that distinction clear helps you avoid treating an example as a technical specification.
4. Careers, portfolios and practical learning.
For marketers, the next challenge is often moving from completing channel tasks to explaining business choices. That requires understanding the wider journey, asking useful questions and showing how evidence changes your recommendation. It also means being honest about what you have not measured.
The career section of this growth marketing blog brings together a roadmap, portfolio guidance and remote work reflections. Choose one area to practise. You might map a funnel, write an experiment brief or turn a previous project into a clearer case study.
Use the free Growth Starter Kit when you want a structured exercise. Mark fictional data and practice cases clearly. A portfolio should show your judgment and contribution, without presenting a proposed result as something that actually happened.
Get more from each growth marketing blog article.
How should I read a case study?
Begin by identifying the business model, customer audience and period being discussed. Then separate the observed facts from the author's interpretation. Ask which parts of the explanation are supported by direct evidence and which remain plausible hypotheses.
Before borrowing a tactic, compare the case with your own context. Customer frequency, product maturity, acquisition costs and operational constraints can change what is useful. The most transferable part of a case is often the reasoning behind a decision, rather than the exact campaign or tool.
How do I turn reading into an action?
Write one sentence describing the question the article helped you ask. Then choose a small follow-up: inspect a journey, clarify a metric, review a customer message or draft a focused experiment. Give that action an owner and a review point if you are working with a team.
You do not need to apply every idea in this growth marketing blog. Choose the one that addresses a real uncertainty. If the article is interesting but unrelated to your current decision, save it for later and return to the problem that matters now.
What is the difference between the Blog and The Growth Audit?
This growth marketing blog is the broader reading library, including business analysis, practical frameworks and career development. The Growth Audit is a focused editorial route into diagnosing acquisition, activation, retention and lifecycle questions.
The paid Growth Audit service is separate from the editorial series. It is a scoped review of a particular business and customer journey. You can explore the services page if you need help applying the thinking to your own product and team.
Where should a beginner start?
Start with the growth marketing roadmap and learn the vocabulary of the customer journey. Then choose a familiar product and map one path from discovery to value. Write down what you can observe, what you assume and what data would help you understand the path better.
Return to this growth marketing blog with a specific question from that exercise. Reading becomes easier to evaluate when you know what you are trying to learn. The goal is not to memorise every framework, but to build a reliable way to reason about customer and business outcomes.
How should I use numbers and examples from an article?
Keep the original context attached to a number: the source, date, audience and definition all matter. Historical project outcomes are not predictions for another business. A percentage without a denominator or reporting period may be easy to quote and difficult to interpret.
When you share an idea from this growth marketing blog, link to the original article so the reader can inspect that context. If you build a practice example from it, label your changes and assumptions. This preserves the difference between reported evidence and your own interpretation.
Your collaborator
Meet Avie Vu.
I connect growth marketing, CRM and user experience to help teams understand where customers get stuck and decide what to improve next.
About Avie and her experienceKeep a useful reading note.
A simple note can turn a growth marketing blog article into something you can use later. Record the original question, the idea that changed your thinking and the context in which it might apply. Include the article link and a short description of the evidence, so you can revisit the source rather than rely on memory.
Add a separate line for your own interpretation. For example, an article may suggest reviewing the gap between registration and first value. Your product may define that value differently. Write down the relevant event and audience before translating the idea into a recommendation.
When you return to this growth marketing blog, compare new ideas with those notes. Look for a clearer explanation or a question you previously missed. You may decide that an earlier recommendation needs more evidence, or that a small operational constraint changes the order of work.
If you read with colleagues, discuss the decision the article could inform instead of asking whether everyone agrees with its conclusion. Different perspectives can reveal missing assumptions. That is the purpose of this growth marketing blog: to support better questions, thoughtful practice and more useful conversations about growth.
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