I stumbled upon an interesting Twitter thread yesterday that brought up a couple concepts worth sharing.
I highly recommend you read the entire thread, but I’ll share my main takeaways below as well.
1 – A marketer said to me “you realize we’re trying to improve customer loyalty because it costs too much to acquire a new customer and costs to acquire customers are increasing, causing problems.”
— Kevin Hillstrom (@minethatdata) December 17, 2021
Here are the highlights of my takeaways:
- There are two primary kinds of marketing: loyalty and acquisition
- Loyalty marketing is all about focusing your efforts on repeat purchases (i.e. frequency, transaction value, etc.)
- Acquisition marketing is all about acquiring new customers to survive.
- He argues companies who have 40% or less of their customers repurchase in the next year should focus their strategy on acquisition, not loyalty. Makes sense.
- He argues in a subsequent thread that you usually cant fix those repurchase rates without a shift in what you sell (think a gift shop). So that’s not really a viable solution in most cases.
- The second big ideas were his view that there are two core ways to approach marketing: campaigns and programs.
- “A program is a comprehensive strategy to find new customers across all aspects of the business.”
- “When I worked at Eddie Bauer, we flushed $15,000,000 of television advertising during a few months to generate $15,000,000 in sales (hint – that’s a profit loss of about $9,000,000 … oh my goodness). That was a campaign. But it wasn’t a program.”
- “Well, “commerce television” is a customer acquisition program … a TV program, sure, but a program. That’s what a program is. All day. Every day. Relentless.”
- “So I’m beggin’ y’all to give customer acquisition efforts another look. Please. Build a program. Dedicate real resources to the effort. You’re smart enough, talented enough, resourceful enough to be successful!”
Not sure why these ideas clicked with me, but thinking in terms of whether you should be helping your clients with loyalty, acquisition (or both)—and when to do each—was a lightbulb for me. Especially the 40% or less idea.
And then thinking in terms of a program, being an ongoing, ever-present, relentless system that is always working for you—it’s a foundation of what I do with my clients but I never thought of it as distinct from campaigns per se.
But distinguishing that from a campaign, which is more like an event or finite series of events, really shaped how I mentally organize the initiatives we marketers undertake.
Go back and read the full thread. This is the stuff strategy is made of. How you organize and name ideas also matters.
Hope this clicks for you, too.