What customer acquisition and growth marketers can learn from Ash Ketchum and Pokémon
If you were a child or young adolescent in the 90’s you likely remember the cartoon series Pokémon. The series told the story of a young Pokémon trainer, Ash Ketchum, who vows to catch all 151 Pokémon and become the Pokémon Master. Ash and today’s customer acquisition and growth marketers actually have a lot in common: they want to catch them all. It’s just that in the case of marketers, they want to catch as many customers as possible…and not so many pocket monsters.
There’s plenty that marketers can learn from Ash and how to drive an effective acquisition campaign. In this blog post, you’ll learn why and how:
- It’s crucial to diversify your customer acquisition channels
- You shouldn’t overlook email
- It’s critical that you know your audience
- LiveIntent’s Lookalike Audiences can help with customer acquisition
The importance of diversifying your acquisition channels
Ash left his home in Pallet Town to start his journey with his starter Pokémon, Pikachu. Pikachu would play an important role in helping Ash catch other pokémon. However, Ash would need to venture far away to find and secure different pokémon, like beach towns and deserts for water and fire pokés. In other words, Ash needed to switch up his acquisition channels or risk not achieving his goal. The same goes for you and your acquisition campaigns.
Perhaps you’ve found a channel or two where acquisition is simply bananas. You get good results, and so the idea of diversifying your acquisition channels seems unnecessary. Well, here’s why that’s not true. As you acquire more customers your customer acquisition costs will eventually increase within that channel, especially as other competitors crop up. Furthermore, consumer attention is divided across channels, platforms, and devices. You need to ensure a well-rounded marketing mix to reach your customers exactly where they are — on the right channels and at the right moment in their customer journey.
By focusing too heavily on one channel you run the risk of becoming overly reliant on it and like Ash, if you stay in place, you won’t catch them all.
When it comes to customer acquisition, don’t overlook email
Email is a powerful acquisition channel because of how people use it and engage with it. For starters, Americans spend an average of 352 minutes a day in email — that’s 208 minutes more than social media sites. By incorporating other channels like email into your marketing mix, you can increase your messaging frequency, reaching customers in all their preferred channels to decrease time to conversion/acquisition.
Now think about email newsletters and how people engage with them. When a person opens an email newsletter, they’re in a learn-more mindset. They’re actively looking for appealing content on which to click and learn more about. So, ads within an email are less intrusive and naturally blend in with the functionality of its environment driving greater engagement than other channels.
Futhermore, with email newsletters, marketers can leverage their first-party audience for precision targeting, supercharging their campaign efforts. Let’s take a closer look.
With LiveIntent, marketers can access the email newsletter inventory of more than 2000 premium publishers. And, with LiveIntent’s Lookalike Audiences, marketers can run high-performance customer acquisition campaigns in email with tremendous speed and efficiency.
Lookalike Audiences leverage LiveIntent’s machine-learning tech, which derives patterns and learnings from a group of known customers to predict the likelihood that a group of prospective customers will convert. Lookalike Audiences uses a marketer’s seed audience and scores it against hundreds of unique attributes to build a lookalike model of people similar to that seed.
Easily onboard your seed audience from a CRM, website, or mobile app to build your Lookalike Audience. LiveIntent’s modeling algorithm will find authenticated newsletter readers in the LiveIntent exchange who are not yet your customer but would likely be interested in your business.
Best practice: Look to your high-value customers
If you recall from the cartoon and video games, some pokémon were more effective at fighting their opponents than others. Electric pokés were more efficient when fighting water pokémon; water pokés were better at beating fire pokés, and so on. Ash learned to understand his Pokémon to leverage them successfully and drive results. The same goes for marketers and their audiences.
To drive high-performing acquisition campaigns with Lookalike Audiences, marketers need to know who their most valuable customers are, whether they are high-rollers, loyalty customers, or frequent purchasers. By using your high-value customers as your seed audience, you can ensure your advertising budget is spent driving impressions to those who are most likely to engage and convert!
Catch them all
There you have it, folks. Now that you know the importance of diversifying your acquisition channels and the power of Lookalike Audiences, go on and get started! To learn more about Lookalike Audiences and our advertiser solutions, contact us.
