Attracting new customers is critical to the success of any business. But with so many businesses vying for attention in today's market, it can be tough to stand out from the crowd. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your customer acquisition efforts and bring in more business. In this article, we'll explore some tips and strategies for improving your customer acquisition and growing your business.
Improve Customer Retention & Acquisition with Omni-channel Marketing & Advertising
👩 Stephanie: Whether it's advertising on Facebook, through email, SMS, television, or podcasts—no matter what the marketing or advertising channel is, the message and communications must be seamless & straightforward across all channels.
For Manly Bands, an omnichannel marketing & advertising approach, paying attention to what our customers think, picked up from all these channels, and listening to their feedback helped us improve and grow. So if our customers visiting our retail store wanted band upgrades, we made it easy for other customers across other channels to get it too.
Best Growth Channels For BFCM
👩 Stephanie: #DTC brands, once business growth plateaus slightly, ask yourself,
Is there a way of growing your audience more than where it is, or should you opt for a brand-focused marketing approach—building an audience on other channels (YouTube, podcasts, television) to bring in more traffic?
In our case, the focus was on discovering new audiences to sell to and thinking differently about the marketing strategy.
A great example of how we did it was that we discovered our audience also consisted of people who were already married (to who we could upsell.) It's here that a licensed partnership with other relevant brands exists, knowing there is a group of people there who may be already married. We know they'd love what we have, so we wanted to start working with them.
You could also think about branching out internationally to different parts of the world—the ultimate goal has to be that you are consistently and steadily growing as a company.
Stephanie's Checklist: 10 Strategies for BFCM 2022 Success
Start early ⏰
Focus on prospecting and getting as many people into the funnel as possible. Get your customers to sign off on your BFCM plan at the earliest. (We start planning as early as August!)
Develop BFCM strategies that take into account every department 🛎️
Marketing, product, operations, shipping, etc. Then work through the whole process of how it would come together and look during the BFCM period.
Gain consensus 🎉
Ensure that every team is on board with the strategies & plan, and everybody has given the thumbs up moving forward.
Stay aligned 🔖
Stay in sync with operations and shipping teams so you can meet the soaring demands of customers during BFCM
Consider your BFCM offers 💰
Incentivize all early-signing customers with special offers, like giving them early access to Black Friday specials, is crucial to create urgency.
"You must find ways to create that urgency because I guarantee your competitors will also be starting Black Friday very early. So you don't want to be just waiting for like the week or the D-day."
Website optimization is key🪅
Check your website loading speed, among other website details to ensure everything on-site (landing page, PDPs) is ready.
Have updated creative ready for your store 💎
It could be a banner or a landing page on your digital store that talks about Black Friday, Cyber Monday specials, or deals you’re running during that time. Make sure all your ads have a clear, concise message, are not jargon-heavy, and are similar to what customers see from an experience standpoint.
Keep your inventory BFCM ready 🎁
When you promise your customers something, ensure that you can follow through with enough stock, preferably something without sizing, because that makes it slightly more manageable as the inventory does not run out of specific sizes.
Personalization should be top of mind 💸
Collect meaningful customer data to personalize the customer's shopping experience further and improve customer retention rate.
Consider discount strategies 💵
Discounting is crucial during Black Friday. However, it's not the only option—you could be offering a free gift, offering free shipping, but having some significant offer is essential because your customers are expecting it, and your competitors are doing it, and if you're not, they will go to somebody else. More than the discount itself, it is about creating hype around Black Friday and getting people excited because it's typically the best offer we, as a company, will have all year long.
"Black Friday is one of the only times in the year where you can say you're offering the largest discount, and if you can't do that, then what other thing can you offer that does have value?"
Sales Prospecting for Acquiring Customers During BFCM
Stephanie: We do a lot of prospecting, whether it's through Google, Facebook, or lead generation. For example, we use our ring sizes and offer them for free so people can size themselves on our website.
That's a great way of building an audience. We also collect their wedding dates, so it allows us to see whether or not they've been married yet or not. So it gives us an idea to which group they belong, from the standpoint of how likely they are to buy, and when.
It's also essential to break out the campaigns for those prospecting channels.
So we'll have a pre-holiday drive where we push out the brand four or five weeks leading up to the Black Friday period, not to make sales but to prospect the customer and test our audience's anticipation level.
Then there's a pre-Black Friday drive which we usually do from November 1st until D-day.
Most people forget, but there's also Cyber Monday before Black Friday. But we are prepared well in advance with a post-Cyber Monday drive. After Cyber Monday wraps up, we'll ensure we have a period to help customers who feel like they missed that sale. They still want to get something. Can we offer them? It's like a last-chance deal for some other options to purchase.
Let's say that you're doing 80/20 prospecting / direct marketing.
We start seeing that we have started to shift slowly—where the prospecting starts to lower, the remarketing begins to heighten a little bit, whether through Google or Facebook.
We pull back on more prominent branding, whether television or podcast, and focus more on getting them through that funnel.
So we start to hit them much more heavily on the remarketing side, the email side, and the estimating side as we get closer to the Black Friday period. So that's typical. My suggestion with any DTC brand is to prepare with your ad buying team, in-house, or you, the creative agency, to think about what that transition looks like. How and how quickly should that happen based on what you've seen in the past?
And you can look at your return and ad spend and see when that increase kind of starts to happen and where you should start pushing. You can start doing that sooner than later.
But I try to follow trends that I see in our data.
The Winning BFCM Success Formula
Stephanie: So as long as you cover Black Friday in your ads, you have an organic social strategy and a solid creative strategy behind it, you’re good to go!
I always say if you feel excited about it, your customers will be excited about it.
Survey them, and ask them what they would like to see. You'll do well as long as you're prepared, and having the banner ads on site throughout the experience so keep it consistent.
This is one of those times when people want to buy, and you have to make it easy for them. Make it an easy experience, and you'll do well.
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