…the word “Growth”.
What exactly is growth marketing, and what does it mean for your business?
“Growth marketing” is not just the latest in a long line of marketing buzz words, it’s the strategy by which marketing and sales activities drive sustained and scalable long term business growth. Sounds exactly like traditional marketing right? Wrong.
Growth marketing is the process of testing different, and sometimes counter-intuitive customer acquisition (and retention) marketing tactics and channels, and putting the focus on evaluating the results based on cost, deliverables and expectation. This cultural marketing shift has been driven by the change in consumers’ behaviour – always-on, multichannel, multi-device – and the change in their expectations of how brands communicate with them. Brands need to evolve to meet these or expect to see business go elsewhere. And brands are already convinced, a quick job title search on LinkedIn returns 75,306 results for “Growth Marketer”!
Essentially, the goal posts have moved in pursuit of supercharging business growth through marketing spend. No tactics are off limits, and marketers must learn to rely less on their preconceptions of what’s going to work (although experience is still a valuable safety check), and adopt a more open-minded “test and learn” approach within a framework of key marketing metrics. In many ways, it’s a genuinely exciting time to be a marketer.
Growth marketing, however, is not about making a quick buck by burning through thousands of leads for a one-off purchase, it’s about driving a lead’s lifetime value (LTV) by seeking ways to maximise ROI at all stage of the funnel. To this end, businesses have a choice. Either invest in a customer acquisition team with a specialised skillset for growth marketing or call in the experts.
The benefits of outsourcing customer acquisition for growth
Outsourcing your customer acquisition growth strategy makes sense for a number of financial and operational reasons:
• Cost. The outlay required to hire third party experts pales in comparison to the cost of resourcing and training a team of similar size to generate the same number of leads in-house.
• Skills gap. As the growth marketing role is relatively new, tried and tested expert growth marketers (“growth hackers”), are still quite few and far between, and usually attracted to working with the biggest brands for the highest remuneration. Outsourcing offers a way to access top tier expertise without the hefty price tag or investment commitment.
• Transferable value. Outsourcing your customer acquisition requirement can never replace your in-house marketing function, which is embedded in the business on a much deeper level. But it can add value in many less obvious ways too. Your in-house marketers get exposure to a new skillset, new processes, and transferable expertise.
• Perspective. An outsourced expert understands your brand and offer in the context of hundreds of other companies they have worked with. They know what works and what doesn’t. This perspective helps you avoid focusing on messaging that is too much about you and not enough about the customer.
Why email is the perfect customer acquisition channel
One reason. Data.
You’re going to need to look outside of your existing customer base to find new customers. Not only do you need to access an active data pool of millions in order to scale up your acquisition, you’re also going to need expert help with data segmentation, personalisation, retargeting, and nurture, in order to generate viable leads.
Add new legislation into the mix, which will be unavoidable for every business, large or small, and you’re risking your business if you don’t take steps to acquire an expert understanding of how to handle consumer data. New European data privacy legislation coming into force in less than 12 months is a game changer, and any organisation breaching data privacy rules will be liable for fines totalling either €20 million, or 4% of total turnover, whichever is greater. The days of buying lists and blasting mass emails indiscriminately are long gone.
As well as outsourcing in order to access data scale and expertise, you need a channel that can perform, and that can deliver a single customer view.
Email has always held the top spot when it comes to performance, with email delivering an average of 70x more ROI than display, search or social (and esbconnect’s customer acquisition platform delivering significantly higher click through rates of between 5-7% compared to the average 0.07% of display, at the same budget level).
And in the digital landscape, email is increasingly taking centre stage as the consumer’s “persistent ID”, or digital fingerprint. The email address is still their most trusted online identifier, and as such, the most valuable to advertisers.
We have developed an outsourced customer acquisition platform which transforms the humble email address into a consumer’s digital fingerprint. An identifier that can be connected to a consumer’s cookies and mobile device IDs, to unlock a unique 360-degree single view of the customer’s journey across devices and channels – with no blind spots. And in real time.
By tying email, cookie and device data together, we have created a database of millions of individuals, understood at a microdata level. What’s more, we’ve done the heavy lifting already to ensure our database is fully opted-in to meet increasingly stricter data privacy regulation, and cleaned on an ongoing basis to make sure that only active data is mailed to. This means we increase conversions by an average of 22% per campaign for our clients.
So if you want to grow, you need to outsource your customer acquisition, and if you want to turbocharge customer acquisition, you need to drive it with email – done expertly.
About esbconnect:
We specialise in finding new customers for leading brands across multiple sectors using our unique customer acquisition platform; driven by email. For more insight on why email is enjoying a renaissance see http://bit.ly/2ruSmPT
esbconnect works with brands including Marks & Spencer, Clarks, British Airways, Vanquis, The British Heart Foundation, Citroen, Mini, Macmillan, River Island, Debenhams, Littlewoods, Ted Baker, and Boohoo, to deliver supercharged customer acquisition solutions, powered by email. Find out more about our customers’ results, and how our platform can generate more sales for you, at www.esbconnect.com
