A "Customer Acquisition Chain" (CAC) is a series of events that take place from the time a consumer sees your DRTV infomercial or short-form and responds online. Imagine a chain with these four links:
The reason why CACs are so important is that when a consumer sees or hears an advertising message and responds, he or she expects to see a relevant web page that is related to the original ad, one that meets his or her expectations.
As he goes from a marketing message to your web site, he has additional expectations that must be met with successive relevant messages and web pages. Since we're talking about offline commercials that result in consumers going to websites, hence the middle two links:
· Website Landing: where the consumer goes based on the URL in the commercial
· Website Copy (and Graphics): what the consumer sees after landing online
The last link, conversion path, is the link plus successive page(s) that gets the consumer to checkout, whether it is for a sale or a lead.
Typically, we've found that in-house staffs and/or outside agencies are very good at one or two of the four links. But customer acquisition success requires that all four links be strong and work together. If any of them is weak or broken, your entire campaign can be compromised.
You have to look at the strategy behind each link in your acquisition programs to determine if you have the right link strategy (and we don't mean SEO link strategy here!). Specifically:
n When a consumer arrives at your landing page after seeing the DRTV commercial, he expects to see the same offer, same product, same price, product features and related information. Having the same look and feel, graphics and the actual commercial are a big help.
n When the consumer reads the copy on your landing page(s), she needs to be converted from a prospect to a customer. Your copy needs to restate the major benefits and offer, and encourage her to click to place an order.
n When the consumer hits the shopping cart or what we call the "conversion path," he should face a simple and easy checkout process, and not be confronted with any obstacles, such as excessive S&H costs (see next section).
You can download the entire ebook at any time at:http://DD111.acquirgy.net
Irv Brechner has written over 100 published direct marketing articles and 13 books on a variety of topics. He's been a pioneer in online customer acquisition since 1996 and offline for his 35-year career. He has developed Acquirgy.com's "Customer Acquisition Intel Center" (acquirgy.com/intel ) he evangelizes best-of-breed tactics to help companies acquire customers in the digital age. He can be reached at: irv@acquirgy.com .
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