Customer Acquisition Tips Just in Time for the Holidays

Acquisition is a key step in the cyclical process of long-term engagement with your customers. Here are some customer acquisition tips that are aimed to help brands increase success for the upcoming holiday season.

An always-on acquisition strategy kickstarts consumers through all the relevant touchpoints that influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. It also allows marketers to focus on retention strategies that can increase customer lifetime value.

It’s imperative that the first message or interaction a new consumer sees makes sense, speaks clearly about your brand, and is tailored to the ideal customer in the right way at the right time. Sounds easy, right?

What are the Challenges of Customer Acquisition?

The fact is, many advertisers still face significant challenges with their acquisition strategies and often wait too long to create an effective long-term strategy that supports the holiday shopping purchase period.

Brands constantly battle to stand out against competitors in the digital space. Some of the more common mistakes that they make include:

• Using ineffective methods to measure acquisition impact
• Relying too much on discounting products
• and not leveraging first-party data effectively in order to confidently know who they need to target to build their cookie pools prior to holiday

Having a sound acquisition strategy enables marketers to address these challenges by better understanding their ideal customers’ behaviors and the costs of acquiring and retaining them. Without this in place, marketers run the risk of losing these customers to competitors during these key holiday moments.

How to Address these Challenges: Obtain the Right Tools

To get started, make sure you have the right tools to cut through the clutter. Rakuten Marketing knows the most effective and efficient strategy is done prior to the overstimulated, chaotic holiday shopping season. Marrying the best of both human and machine, Rakuten Marketing leverages sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI), proprietary data, and an award-winning service team to execute. Our acquisition solution identifies, scores, and extends the right message to the right audiences through a demand side platform that is constantly learning from ad interaction signals. This unique data allows an increased number of consumers to get acquainted with brands early on and allows them to standout against competitors. It also provides the opportunity to personalize messaging and content and extends the time period to measure the impact of these investments.

Rakuten Marketing’s dedication to transparent measurement gives brands a look beyond traditional last-click attribution models.  Acquiring new customers doesn’t happen with one click. There is a chain of events prior to the conversion that multi-touch attribution helps advertisers understand and optimize. The ability to see the impact of acquisition efforts prior to the last touch informs brands of new customer conversion journey length (the ‘decision cycle’) and the influence these touchpoints have on other paid and non-paid channels. Additionally, through multi-touch attribution, you’re able to follow initial acquisitions throughout their lifetime, helping justify the early costs used to acquire customers and turn them into repeat purchasers. These investments support the strategy of turning prospecting on prior to the busier shopping periods. This ensures advertising costs are being spent effectively and your message is reaching the right audiences during these critical sales periods

Rakuten Marketing executes with a consumer-centric strategy, focusing our efforts to reach the right consumers at the right time across several platforms and channels through machine learning technology. Engaging with consumers early on means more time to turn new audiences into customers who will then return to purchase during the holiday period. Early investments protect brands from spending the majority of marketing dollars during inflated inventory time frames and allows for more time to reach and build relevant audience pools. Rakuten Marketing’s proprietary audience data helps expedite this process and continues to engage with your consumers after they are acquired. It keeps your brand’s message clear from beginning to end, creating ideal champion consumers that serve as the standard for whom your always-on acquisition strategy will target in the future.

Caroline Cathey is a Director at Rakuten Marketing, specializing in cross-channel marketing strategy for brands and publishers with a focus on attribution, programmatic display, and affiliate marketing. She has been with Rakuten for over 6 years, working in the Salt Lake City office. She spends her free time exploring Park City, hiking with her dog, and getting as many ski turns as possible in the winter.

Ready to rev up your holiday 2019 customer acquisition strategy? Contact us today.