2. 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
3. NO AMOUNT OF ACQUISITION MARKETING
CAN SAVE A BAD PRODUCT-MARKET FIT.
(BUT IT CAN ACCELERATE THE SUCCESS OF
A GOOD ONE)
4. 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
5. 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
6. From Day 1, virality HAS to be built into the product
7. Acquisitions Lifecycle depends on
the stage of the business
PRE-
LAUNCH
GROWTH OPTIMIZATIONLAUNC
H
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
8. Naming for easier acquisitions
Objectives:
• Be spell-able
• Be searchable
• Be easy to remember
• No existing associations
• .co vs. .com
10. Seed first batch of customers or users any way
you can to get the flywheel turning
11. Pre-Launch: It’s never to early to think about
customer acquisition!
Objectives:
• Drive awareness of launch
• Drive collection of emails, or other outreach
12. Launch
Objectives:
• 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
About Zola
Zola is re-inventing the wedding registry
We work with brands to showcase them to engaged couples.
Give Zola example – over 200 surveys
Incorrect use or assumptions around the acronyms can have the business making fatal decisions
Explain inherent viral nature of a wedding registry – what is the reward the user gets for sharing with their friends?
Cost and challenges of producing high quality content
Distribution challenges: where else can it live. Who is hungry for the content and wants to share it.
Adding an extra step is more helpful and may be higher converting. Already taking existing content E.g. http://blog.grandst.com/five-emergency-preparedness-products-for-any-sticky-situation/
have transitioned from innovative to standard must-haves