F&I and Showroom, August 2013

Industry Trends Organic search continues to dominate when it comes to online customer acquisition and e mail marketing has quadrupled its presence in the past four years So far social media sites like Facebook and Twitter just cant keep up By Brittany Marie Swanson S ocial media may very well be dominating the digital marketing conversation but a study by N Y based marketing data company Custora shows it isnt quite living up to the hype In fact the customer acquisition power of Facebook and Twitter is greatly overshadowed by email marketing a channel that has quadrupled its infl uence in the past four years The study reviewed data spanning 72 million customers from 86 U S retailers across 14 industries And while it mainly focused on e commerce sales the study did offer insights into how marketers are getting creative with how they target online shoppers With U S e commerce sales now topping 200 billion annually digital marketers are getting savvier than ever read the study Customer acquisition trends refl ect this evolution Since the fi rst study in 2009 organic search has been the biggest driver of online customer acquisition accounting for 1581 percent of online customers acquired in 2013 The second largest channel is cost perclick advertising at 982 percent 12 F I and Showroom August 2013 But as retailers move toward a free to paid subscriber model and rely on third parties to help drive visitors to their websites channels such as e mail marketing have experienced an explosion in growth The percentage of customers acquired through e mail leapt from 088 percent in 2009 to 684 percent by the second quarter of 2013 the largest increase across all channels E mail marketing has been a growing trend in e commerce with an increasing number of retailers building communities and collecting e mail addresses then converting those members into customers the report said Facebook on the other hand stayed mostly fl at peaking at 022 percent of all online customers acquired in 2011 and dropping to 017 percent this year Twitter didnt register at all The value of customers acquired via social media was also lower than other channels The estimated customer lifetime value which refers to the future profi t a company expects to earn from a customer throughout his or her relationship with the business for Twitter was about 23 percent below average in the two years following an initial purchase The study claimed that this may be attributed to the frequency of discounts offered within tweets Facebook was at 131 percent above average Customers acquired through organic searches over those two years however tended to be worth 54 percent more than average Cost perclick advertising customers came in second at nearly 37 percent above average while e mail customers were at 12 percent With the growth of e mail marketing and ongoing reliability of organic search Custoras data reinforces the need for marketers to complement products with relevant and informative editorial content as well as invest in search engine marketing The savviest marketers in the new era of e commerce will be looking beyond just where customers are coming from the study concluded Theyll be looking at the value of new customers acquired across channels platforms and geographies And it turns out not all customers are created equal Traffi c Drivers