CUSTOMER ACQUISITION BEST PRACTICES IN E-COMMERCE

2014

About Me• CEO and Founder, Zola

• Chief Product Officer, Chloe + Isabel

• Founder + GM, Gilt Taste | Member of Gilt Groupe executive team

• Product + business leader, Gilt mobile

• Product management leader for new Gilt business launches: Gilt City, Gilt Man, Gilt Home

• First Product Marketer/Dir at Gilt Groupe

• Product marketing for Yahoo! mobile and Yahoo! search marketing

• MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business

NO AMOUNT OF ACQUISITION MARKETING CAN SAVE A BAD PRODUCT-MARKET FIT.

(BUT IT CAN ACCELERATE THE SUCCESS OF A GOOD ONE)

Why customer acquisition matters

• A realistic plan is the most important thing after Product-Market fit

• It forces you to think deeply about the business you are in – Are you acquiring consumers or businesses? Or both (e.g.

Dropbox)?– Who exactly is your target customer? It cannot be every customer.

• It may be the difference between you wanting to pursue or not pursue a business – depending on the cost vs. benefit of acquiring a customer

Customer Acquisition Lingo 101

• CPC = Cost Per Click

• CPM = Cost Per 1000 impressions

• CPA = Cost Per Acquisition / CAC = Cost of Acquiring a Customer

• LTV = Lifetime Value

• Payback = the time it takes for a customer to pay back your CPA (spend that money back with you)

• Margin = If you are in the business of selling things, the difference between your retail price and your wholesale price

• Subscribers = people you acquire for your email list

• Customers = people on your list who have bought something from you

From Day 1, virality HAS to be built into the product

Acquisitions Lifecycle depends on the stage of the business

PRE-LAUNCH

GROWTH OPTIMIZATION

LAUNCH

Acceleration

Example Tactics

• Paid

• Referral Programs

• Events

• Engagement email/push

• Pre-launch awareness

Example Tactics

• PR

• Social

• Add emails to the “launch announcement” list

• Awareness Building

• Benchmarking

Example Tactics

• PR

• Social

• Paid experiments

• Industry blogger outreach

Focus on key channels

Example Tactics

• Paid

• Engagement email/push

Naming for easier acquisitions

Objectives:• Be spell-able• Be searchable• Be easy to remember• No existing associations• .co vs. .com

Seed Social Accounts

Seed first batch of customers or users any way you can to get the flywheel turning

Pre-Launch: It’s never to early to think about customer acquisition!

Objectives:• Drive awareness of launch • Drive collection of emails, or other outreach

LaunchObjectives:• Drive awareness and traffic to site or app• Once people get to your site or app, what is your primary goal?

• Zola’s primary goal = engaged couples registering on Zola • Channel experiments – category sites, Google, FB, blogs• Find benchmark CPAs for your site - > conversion rates, start to

get some sense of forecasting LTV

My Top 7

1. Facebook Targeting

2. Content Marketing

3. Referral Programs

4. Sponsored Posts

5. Notifications

6. BD/Marketing partnerships once you have something to offer

partners

7. Events give online brands a way to connect to potential customers

in the real world

Thank you.

Shan-Lyn Ma

shan@zola.com@shanlynm

@zolaregistry