Customer Acquisition is the act of acquiring new customers. Typically customers are defined as new customers when discussing acquisition and retention is the act of re-engaging, retaining, current customers.

There is a process involved with online customer acquisition both on-site and off-site. On-site customer acquisition is the process of converting a visitor, much like someone browsing a shop, into a customer. Off-site acquisition refers to driving individuals to your site and then ultimately converting them into customers.

Customer Acquisition from Start to Finish

Here are the basic steps of acquisition:

• First, online marketing campaigns are created whether from search engine marketing or from display advertising across a network or a specific site.




• Second, optimize the advertisements in an effort to obtain the highest click thru rates (CTR), and also conversion rates by tracking the advertisement through to a conversion. Some networks and search engine marketing interfaces will provide you with code to place on the page after a conversion has taken place. This will let you know which advertisement yielded a conversion.




• Third, landing pages are created in an effort to convert more visitors. Those individuals that respond to the advertisement land at your site. You can choose to have them land on any page within your site or a specific landing page created solely for acquisition.




• Fourth, a call to action on your site or landing pages is crucial. A definite call to action is needed such as signing up for a free trial or possibly taking them to a product page that corresponded to the advertisement. This targeting of the advertisement that obtained the visitor to the page they land on is an effort to better correspond the ad with the page. Relevancy helps to increase the conversion rate.




• Fifth, is to optimize your site and landing pages. You can test one page against another which is known as A/B testing or various parts of a page(s) which is known as multivariate testing. The end goal is to increase your customer acquisition rate.




• Sixth, correlate and test advertisements with landing pages to optimize conversions. It is common practice to run multiple banners or text advertisements while monitoring the click thru rate as a metric and turning off the low click thru rates while continuing the high click thru rates. However that only makes sense if your goal is simply the most traffic at the lowest cost. What you really need to do is test the advertisements with landing pages. If you have 5 advertisements and 5 landing pages you should have 25 tests watching the metric of conversions as opposed to click thru. Ultimately what you want is a conversion and it is not necessarily the highest CTR that yields the lowest cost of acquisition.




• Seven, customer lifetime value can be tracked and optimized for the greatest possible return on investment. While you can optimize for conversions you may really want to optimize your campaigns to run only those that yield the customers who generate the most profit for you over time. This is known as tracking and optimizing for lifetime value.

This is a process and life-cycle that never ends. You can continuously optimize to obtain customers who yield the highest return on investment, ROI, over time. Our services are found here for customer acquisition.

There are many things you can simply set and forget, while there are other tasks that are more methodical. As an example, public relations which is a continuous ongoing effort as is search engine marketing optimization. I am often asked many questions about search engine marketing and most do not realize their efforts need to be monitored continuously to obtain the highest benefit.

Factors Within Your Control
You could create advertising campaigns and check them once a month, however that would not be in your best interest. There are many variables to take into account with your search engine pay per click campaigns (PPC). You obviously have the advertisements themselves to compare against one another and keywords you are testing. These need to be watched closely so you can make the appropriate adjustments. While these variables are within your control, other variables are not.

Factors Beyond Your Control
There are other factors beyond your control that will effect your campaign. Keywords that you are using may have little competition today and more bidders the next day. Others, potentially your competitors, may have found these keywords as well and are increasing the competition. If you are not watching the words your ads may not obtain the amount of traffic they did prior to the competition.

Aside from your competitors you need to watch the trends of your customers, they can change their search habits and search terms as well. Particularly if a new product, service, or feature has hit the market in your industry then your customers may change their search terms which will dry up your flow of visitors. This is yet another category of search engine marketing optimization to be cognizant of.

Search Engine Marketing Optimization
There are multiple factors within your control such as changing keyword bids, targeting variables, the advertisements themselves, your corresponding landing pages and more, however all need to be watched continuously. Consistent search engine marketing optimization of your campaigns will lead to the best possible return on investment.

Phase One Accelerators announces the launch of a social media affiliate co-op. Online advertising is changing with the times, these days trust and relationships of the messenger are more important than the message itself. Deliver your message through an untrusted source and it falls on deaf ears.

Millions of banner impressions or an email blast is no longer enough, your messaging needs to come from a source your customers trust.

The Global Media Gang is a co-op of social networking experts that use a high-touch marketing approach with direct audience involvement to ensure your brand is not only relevant to the context, but truly enhances the conversation.

We combine our niche community of sites with the power of web 2.0 applications to reach into the consumers world finding them where they live, work and play.

Contact us for information on how our online consulting team can help you.

We recently created a custom affiliate program for SmartyCard which launched July 27th, 2009. Chris created the entire program from the architecture to the design.

Third party affiliate programs exist but have a “one fits all” approach and can be quite costly as well as not have the unique features you may want. While programs like Commission Junction and LinkShare have been around for a while and work well, they may not fit your unique needs and can be expensive to set up.

SmartyCard Custom Affiliate Program
The SmartyCard custom affiliate program meets their unique needs and features as well as providing an in-house fully integrated solution tracking both cost per acquisition and lifetime value of customers.

Here is a little about SmartyCard:

SmartyCard is the world’s first learn, earn and play experience to provide real, online and virtual rewards to the tens-of-millions of families that believe learning at home can be fun and rewarding. Created by industry leaders in family entertainment, educational content and toys, SmartyCard.com features age-appropriate content from supplemental education leaders Learnstar, Ignite and Learning.com, as well as the most popular rewards from Club Penguin™, WebKinz, Star Doll, BellaSara and many other popular family sites. SmartyCard is backed by leading venture capitalists and is based in San Mateo, California.

Contact us for information on how our online consulting team can help you.

New application tracks lifetime value of customers, allowing businesses to shift their marketing spend to only the most profitable campaigns.

It’s a battle Marketing departments face every day. You have to keep abreast of customer acquisition (CPA) costs, lifetime value (LTV) of customers, and most importantly their return on investment (ROI). But currently there is no simple solution to tracking the lifetime value of a customer.

For the past year, POA llc. has been working with clients to perfect a system for optimizing online acquisition and tracking lifetime value to uncover the most valuable customers. They are now making their proprietary tracking system “Matchless Knowledge” available to all businesses.

“A company with 5 marketing campaigns spending $50,000 is happy if they make more than they spend. This is the old way of thinking” Says Brian Longest, CEO of POA llc, “with our system they can uncover facts such as 80% of their revenue over time came from a group of customers from the same marketing campaign, armed with this information they shift the marketing spend to the most profitable campaign and dramatically increase lifetime revenue of their customers”.

“Clients have had over 100 banner and landing page combinations tested in a single month, uncovering customer acquisition costs ranging from $25 to 17 cents.” says Longest, “ Armed with this knowledge we were able to shift their creative and greatly decrease overall customer acquisition costs. Each month thereafter they also optimized and modified campaign spend based on the value of each customer from each campaign.”

Matchless Knowledge is scheduled to launch in Q3 2009 as a software as a service solution. Matchless Knowledge works with any online advertising and marketing service such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, DoubleClick, and any advertising network whether banner or textual.

POA llc. will also continue to provide managed services along with the Matchless Knowledge system, from managing banner and search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns, to optimizing landing pages onto acquisition, to monthly reporting of each marketing campaigns lifetime value.

About Phase One Accelerators.
Phase One Accelerators is an “accelerator” providing launch phase consulting and online marketing services, as well as incubating and accelerating new startups. Founders are serial entrepreneurs with extensive start-up, online marketing, and venture capital experience. Phase One Accelerators is based in Northern Virginia and Boise Idaho.

Clients include: eBay (NasdaqGS: EBAY), Break.com, Smartycard.com, woome.com and utterli.com among others.

For more information or to schedule an interview contact:
Brian Longest
571-291-5234
Phase One Accelerators
brian@poallc.com

Release on PR Web Here
Release in PDF Here

Raise for Future has the school systems of three counties added, all of the elementary, middle and high schools in each of:

• Fairfax County, VA
• Loudoun County, VA
• Ada County, ID

While we proactively added these entire school districts, any school can register for free. Parents and others may also register for free and send us a note to add their child’s school as well.

Raise for Future does not sell anything, we merely provide links to top stores such as OfficeDepot, Disney, Macy’s, Starbucks, and currently over 400 other online stores.

It is available to use 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You can read more about why it was started here.

SmartyCard launched today at Demo 2009. They have an incredible product and an amazing team. One of the quotes of the Demo presentation by their GM Chris Carvalho was “give your kids what they want and get what you want”. As a parent of three boys I love this service and we are proud to be working with them.

Phase One Accelerators, of Northern, VA and Boise, ID, launched Raise for Future today (RaiseForFuture.com).   Raise For Future is a site that makes fund raising for organizations easy. Users can shop at any of the partner stores in the directory, many that they would shop at anyway, and a percentage of the sale is provided to the organization.

Fundraising for organizations can be a difficult task, particularly schools.  Therefore Raise For Future was created by Brian Longest and Chris Breshears of Phase One Accelerators after having an interesting fund raising experience.

Brian’s first grade twins were selling items to raise money for their brand new school. The company the school partnered with had an online site. Brian set up a web page for his son’s school fundraising event, and sent the link to family and friends to purchase online to benefit the school. Brian decided that it would be safer to allow his kids to sell online, and it would also be a great lesson to explain to his children the power of online e-commerce.

Chris made a purchase to help the twins out. Looking at the catalog of available items from the school’s fundraiser, Chris could not find anything he wanted. (Who needs a way to store a single doughnut, or bowl with a built in spoon?) He ended up purchasing the cheapest item he could, a half pound bag of chocolate covered cashews for $9.00 and $17.00 in shipping.

When the fundraiser ended the twins won a limo ride to a pizza lunch for out selling their classmates. A great success for the twins; however, not so much for the people that bought the items.

Brian and Chris decided there had to be a better way, a place where organizations could easily raise money… and users could buy items they actually wanted. The ideal fund raising platform would allow organizations to raise money year round and those that wished to help out would not have to change their day to day behavior or purchase something they did not want.

As a user you simply shop online clicking through on the links in the directory and choosing the Organization to receive the proceeds.  Membership is not required, but is provided free for individuals and free for organizations.

Allowing contributors to shop online 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at the same stores they shop at today, paying the same prices every one else pays, without having to change their behavior at all – was the ultimate goal.

That goal was achieved and with it Raise For Future was born.

About Raise for Future.
Raise For Future is a site that makes fund raising for organizations, such as schools, easy. Users, such as parents, can shop at any of the partner stores, and a percentage of the sale is provided to the organization.  Partner stores in the directory are some of the top online merchants.  Users shop at the same online stores they shop at today, pay the same prices every one else pays, and their organization receives a percentage of the final purchase from the merchant through Raise for Future.  www.RaiseforFuture.com

About Phase One Accelerators.
Phase One Accelerators is an “accelerator” providing launch phase consulting and online marketing services, as well as incubating and accelerating new startups.  Founders are serial entrepreneurs with extensive start-up, online marketing, and venture capital experience.  Phase One Accelerators is based in Northern Virginia an Boise Idaho.  Raise for Future is a wholly owned and operated by Phase One Accelerators.  www.PhaseOneAccelerators.com

Contact:
Phase One Accelerators
Brian Longest
brian@poallc.com

Permalink: http://www.poallc.com/2009/01/raise-for-future-fundraising-site-launched/

We started a news blog entitled Beltway Startups to focus on start-ups and online businesses in the Virginia, Maryland and District of Columbia region. Online startups and events within this region are covered. Keep up to date with the regional online companies and local events, in and around Washington DC.