A Beginner's Guide to Online Customer Acquisition: Whether you run a digital business or an offline one, to survive in today's internet-obsessed world, your business needs to have an online customer acquisition strategy. This deck goes over the core strategies for acquiring customers online.

1. Online Customer
Acquisition 101
Charu Jangid
Product Manager, LinkedIn
linkedin.com/charujangid
@levanche

2. 2 main ways to classify
customer acquisition
@levanche
🔥
❄️
Warm Signups
Cold Signups

3. 🔥Warm Signups: Invitations, WOM, Referrals
@levanche
Warm Signups are driven primarily by people inviting their friends and
family to use your product, word of mouth, and referral programs.
Why you join: Your friends are having
a party and you don’t want to miss out

4. ❄️Cold Signups: Content Marketing, Ads, SEO
@levanche
Cold Signups are driven by content marketing, paid advertising, search
engine optimization, and attract people who may have otherwise not heard
of your product.
Why you join: There might be
something in this for you

5. @levanche
Warm signups
That warm fuzzy feeling you get when a
friend invites you to join something.

6. 🔥Driving Warm Signups: Leveraging the Email &
Phone Graphs
@levanche
Your users’ email & phone
graphs are powerful tools to
leverage when encouraging
them to invite people they
know to your platform

7. 🔥Driving Warm Signups: Referral Bonuses
@levanche
Everyone loves a good deal,
especially when it comes from
a friend and that’s why referral
bonuses can be a great
mechanism to drive signups

8. 🔥Beyond Bonuses: Invest in Customer Advocacy
@levanche
Customer advocates will help you grow your business through word of
mouth referrals. Best way to build word of mouth, is to build something
people want to talk about.
1
2
3
Solve an acute problem for your user
Make customer satisfaction a focus area for your product (measure it with other KPIs)
Build relationships with your customers (ask for feedback, respond to complaints)

9. 🔥Driving Warm Signups: Build Utility Based
Invitation Flows
@levanche
Lyft lets users share their ETA
with others, regardless of whether
they have the app or not – this
gives prospective users a preview
of the app, creating incentive to
download it
Source:http://www.appvirality.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Build-Additional-Features-That-Evoke-Word-Of-Mouth.png

10. 🔥Driving Warm Signups: Creating Virality
@levanche
Building viral loops into your product can yield exponential returns
on investment in warm signups
Viral Growth Coefficient = N x C1 x C2
N = the average number of potential users who are invited by each
current user that invites people
C1 = the proportion of invited users who tend to actually sign up
C2 = the proportion of users who tend to invite other people
If VGC > 1, your signups will grow exponentially

11. @levanche
Beyond warm signups
Warm signups are great for products with
network effects. What if your product
does not fall into this category?

12. ❄️Driving Cold Signups: Social Media Marketing
@levanche
Use social media to drive
interest among potential
customers
Follows help with retention

13. ❄️Driving Cold Signups: Email Marketing
@levanche
Newsletters & email
campaigns can be great
for re-engaging your
customers & converting
new users

14. Nurturing Leads: Converting ❄️ to 🔥
@levanche
Warm and Cold signups don’t live in silos. You can convert cold signups into
warm signups by nurturing leads you gain from content marketing channels
such as email and social media.
Bloomberg for
Education is ultimately
trying to get more
people to sign up to be
Bloomberg Certified

15. ❄️Driving Cold Signups: Paid Advertising
@levanche
Facebook & Google ads serve
70% of online ad impressions
Google ads: User have made
the decision that they need a
product or service
FB ads: User may still be in
decision making phase

16. ❄️Driving Cold Signups: Search Engine Optimization
@levanche
The richer the data & links
on your website, the higher
it ranks in SEO
Shortcut: Create profiles
for your business on sites
that already have good
SEO (Facebook, Yelp,
Google Places, LinkedIn,
Eventbrite)
Top search results for the query “restaurants”

17. ❄️Driving Cold Signups: Manage Your Reputation
@levanche
Offline businesses should
carefully monitor ratings for
their business on Google,
Yelp, OpenTable
Neither of these profiles were created by Mission Beach Café

18. ❄️Remember: Your Customers Are Human
@levanche
Personalize your messages, keep it conversational and help your users feel someone’s got their back

19. @levanche
Measuring success
You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Tracking your acquisition funnel is as
important as acquiring customers.

20. Growth Funnel: Vanity vs. Meaningful Metrics
@levanche
Impressions from Warm & Cold
Initiatives
Signups
Retained
Customers
Vanity Metric: Impressions
Meaningful Metric: Retained Customers

21. Measuring Return on Investment
@levanche
When it comes to spending $ on on Warm & Cold Signups, knowing how
much your audience is worth over time is really important to calculate ROI.
Lyft offers $10 in referral bonus to the referrer and the referee for riders
(that’s $20 to acquire a new rider via referrals). However, for drivers Lyft
offers a $200 bonus if they complete 100 rides within the first month.
Who’s more valuable? Riders or Drivers?

22. ROI Case Study: Lyft Rider & Driver Lifetime Value
@levanche
DriversRiders
Cost to acquire via referral: $20
Churn: ~50% of riders churn in 12 months, which
is a monthly churn rate of ~5%
Average monthly $ spend: $75
Lyft commission: 25%
Annualized LTV: (75 * 0.25) / 0.05 = 375
Given the high churn rates in internet businesses lets look at annualized
lifetime value as projecting further out into the future can be hard
Cost to acquire via signup bonus: $200
Churn: 90% of drivers churn in 12 months, which is a
monthly churn rate of 17%
(driver churn is much higher than rider churn)
Monthly $ generated: 12 * 100 = 1200 (higher end)
Lyft commission: 25%
Annualized LTV: (1200 * 0.25) / 0.17 = 1764
Note: this is an oversimplified calculation as it doesn’t take into account overlap in the LTV of riders and drivers
Data sources: Time, Business Insider, Fortune

23. @levanche
Start-up Cheat Sheet
What can I do if I’m starting out today?

24. How to Acquire Your First 10 Customers
@levanche
“Do things that don’t scale” – Paul Graham, Co-founder @ YCombinator
Myth: You need a product before you can get customers
1
2
3
4
Create a ‘coming soon’ product landing page which collects email addresses /
other contact info (Wix / Squarespace offer great black box options)
Share your product idea with friends, family, past coworkers and other people you
know to see if anyone in your networks is a potential customer
Cross-post about the benefits of your product and link to the page on Twitter /
Facebook / LinkedIn / Craigslist / Reddit (ideally in forums and groups on these
sites where your target customers might be)
Consider investing $20-50 in a paid ad campaign on Facebook that links to your
product landing page

25. Questions?
cjangid@linkedin.com
@levanche
linkedin.com/in/charujangid