Shan-Lyn Ma from Zola presentation deck from Digiday Retail Summit, 7.28.14

1. CUSTOMER ACQUISITION BEST
PRACTICES IN E-COMMERCE
2014

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

9. Seed Social Accounts

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

13. My Top 7

14. 1. Facebook Targeting

15. 2. Content Marketing

16. 3. Referral Programs

17. 4. Sponsored Posts

18. 5. Notifications

19. 6. BD/Marketing partnerships once you
have something to offer partners

20. 7. Events give online brands a way to
connect to potential customers in the
real world

21. Thank you.
Shan-Lyn Ma
shan@zola.com
@shanlynm
@zolaregistry