Customer Acquisition, Seamless Experiences and Scaling with DTC expert Nik Sharma
The challenges of customer acquisition and why scaling a DTC brand requires constant experimentation
Brands large and small are all fighting the same battle of customer acquisition. How you reach customers, and how much that effort costs, is in constant flux, which is why Nik Sharma is a big fan of constantly running micro experiments.
Sharma is the CEO of Sharma Brands, a company that reamins one of the best-kept secrets among the DTC community and which helps brands scale into the tens of millions. In order to get those brands into a new stratosphere, Sharma explains that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of tests that should be done in order to understand what content you should be putting forward to make sure you’re getting in front of the right people for the long-haul.
“We might test UGC, we might test influencers, we might test studio stuff, we might test just a whole variety of different types of content,” Sharma said. “We do the same thing when it comes to page experiences, so whether they’re landing pages, whether they’re listicles, articles, partnerships with companies like Morning Brew. And then of course, the last piece of it is the merchandising — everything from offers and pricing to products, to what gets people in the door, what’s the best product to sell them after that. And subsequent to that, how do we optimize for brands that are high consumption? How do we focus on subscription? How do we keep customer lifetime value high? How do we bring back repeat purchase rate without having to spend money to reacquire that customer? The goal is to figure an overwhelming majority of those types of things out so that by the time we’re done, there’s a very clear playbook that they can operate on for the next few months or a few years.”
Operating a successful company long-term is all about how reliably you can bring in and retain customers. And the reality is that the customer acquisition problem is an issue that never goes away, no matter how big your business gets.
“A company that’s doing 800 million versus a company that’s just launched, both are going to be focused on how do we acquire customers smarter, better, faster, cheaper with higher lifetime value?” Sharma said.
In terms of finding content that converts, Sharma advises that brands try to find organic ways to reach potential customers. Don’t sell to them in obvious ways or try to make something that works in one channel fit into a different channel.
“The best ads in ecommerce are ones that do not look like billboards on the street,” Sharma said. “That’s where a lot of brands go wrong is that when it comes to ads, they try to create this unique experience, or this look that doesn’t resonate with the common person. All your ads have to feel like they’re not ads. They have to feel like content that somebody maybe not wants to watch or needs to watch, but something that’s intriguing enough where they’re going to watch the first little bit, and then it’s your job as the brand to hook them to watch the rest of it.”
Once you’ve got a customer hooked, the pivotal part of the process is making sure they don’t slip away due to friction on your website. To test ease of site use, Sharma has a secret weapon in his arsenal.
“I always send landing pages or websites to my mom. She’ll look through it and be like, ‘This is confusing,’ or she’ll be like, ‘This is perfect. It was one click and I was in the cart.’”
If his mom gets stuck somewhere along the way, Sharma knows what that brand needs to work on.
“One thing I always say is you got to treat your customers like Kim Kardashian on the red carpet and you’re her assistant,” shared Sharma. “You can’t expect your customer to go browse around your site and learn about your brand and learn why they need your brand, or how your brand is going to make their life better, or the deal that they might be able to get, or the coupon….you want to put everything in one simple experience so that somebody who has no time, somebody who has no patience, somebody you could assume they don’t have the knowledge of how to navigate a site can basically come to your site and get what they need and they know why they’re getting it and just create something really easy to use.”
For more tips, listen to Sharma’s full episode of Up Next in Commerce, here.
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