Acquisition - Everybody Has A Program

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Remember what I call the "Great Eight"?

• Audience.
• Awareness.
• Acquisition.
• Welcome Program.
• Anniversary Program.
• Optimization Program.
• New Merchandise.
• Existing Merchandise.

We've talked about Audience and Awareness, with the latter being particularly important and frequently ignored.

Almost everybody has a credible Acquisition program. It's not like there are companies who don't know how to leverage Search, or Facebook. Most folks don't want to use TV or Radio or Billboards, but that's a personal preference thing. You've got the retargeting folks hounding you and watching your every more at every step, many folks do this of course.

In other words, Customer Acquisition isn't something that you do and other people don't do and therefore you have a competitive advantage.

What most people don't understand is the relationship between customer behavior and customer acquisition. Let's look at a couple of examples from the booklet. Check out this image, showing annual customer behavior.

First, look at the annual repurchase rate - it is 36.9%. This is where you are going to disagree with me (you always disagree with me on this topic, and I know this because I've received your feedback over a dozen years) ... but this company is NEVER going to have loyal customers, and is NEVER going to push the annual repurchase rate north of forty percent or forty-five percent. 

Given that this brand is never going to move the needle like a Starbucks might, the new Marketing Leader already knows what the #1 priority has to be ... it has to be Awareness + Acquisition. Period. Not Loyalty. Nope. No.

Stop arguing!

Next, you look at how many new customers are being acquired today and what impact it has on the business. You run your five-year forecasting simulations, right? RIGHT??

The new Marketing Leader should immediately make Customer Acquisition priority number one - no questions asked. She needs to teach ever Executive Team member why Customer Acquisition matters so much. In this case, Customer Acquisition matters so much because without a significant increase in new customers this business is going to slowly die.

The new Marketing Leader needs to run scenarios on DAY ONE - scenarios that show what must happen if the business is to grow at a healthy rate. A scenario like this one, for instance.

This company needs to increase new customers by 23.5% in the NEXT YEAR ALONE if the brand wants to grow by at least 5%.

That's a tall order.

And that's what the new Marketing Leader must get everybody in the company aligned to do.

Everybody has an Acquisition Program.

Not everybody knows what they need to do from an Acquisition standpoint. Show of hands - how many of you pair the five-year forecasts with your Acquisition strategy? I've been talking about this for twelve years, and yet it's much more common to not have the forecasts than it is to pair the forecast with strategy.

The booklet goes into details about Lifetime Value (hint - it wasn't sufficient for this brand to drive huge Acquisition gains, which really puts the new Marketing Leader in a dilly of a pickle).

Your Acquisition Program includes all the basic aspects of Acquisition that you already employ coupled with five year forecasts and Lifetime Value. Buy the booklet and learn more about the topic, ok?