Are social networks still the best way to promote your business?

We still need a bevy of Community Managers to promote our products online?

And the investments made to advertise our company on social networks are really justified?

 

According Custora investments for promoting us on social networks are totally unwarranted and would be more convenient to invest our money with a more classical mailing list.

 

These data published by Custora, with a sample of 72 million customers of 14 distinct business sectors. They are very clear: those who still talks about Facebook and Twitter as channels of customer acquisition tells of crazy crap!

 

 

The average gap with CPC search, email marketing, and affiliations is so large that it is meaningless to companies the use of social networks in these areas.

The trends, however, are even more merciless.

 

The last few years have spawned massive changes in the world of online marketing. With U.S. e-commerce sales now topping $200 billion annually, digital marketers are getting savvier than ever. 

Customer acquisition trends reflect this evolution. Organic search still leads as the largest channel for online customer acquisition. But as more retailers move towards a "free-to-paid" subscriber model and rely on third parties to help drive visitors to their sites, email and affiliate channels have seen an explosion in growth over the past few years.

 

 

The savviest marketers in the new era of e-commerce will be looking beyond just where customers are coming from. They'll be looking at the value of new customers acquired across channels, platforms, and geographies. And it turns out - not all customers are created equal.

 

The study is an effort to reflect on the rapidly changing landscape of customer acquisition and shed additional light on what's shaping the future of e-commerce growth.

 

Customer acquisition via email has quadrupled over the last 4 years. 

Email marketing has been a growing trend in e-commerce, with an increasing number of retailers building communities and collecting email addresses, then converting those "members" into customers. Organic search continues to grow as a reliable channel, (accounting for nearly 16% of customers acquired) reinforcing efforts to complement products with relevant and informative editorial content along with investing in search engine marketing. 

 

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The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) of customers acquired through Twitter is 23% lower than average.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) refers to the future profit a company expects to earn from a customer throughout his or her relationship with the business. Overall, the highest-value customers arrive through organic searches (54% higher than average). Surprisingly, customers acquired through Twitter tend to be worth about 23% less than average. This may be attributed to the frequency of discounts offered within tweets.