You’re working out your strategy, product and organization but don’t forget: you need customers! WebFWD mentor Eva Ho draws off her for- and non-profit experience to walk us through key psychological obstacles to getting customers (including perceived need, desire, urgency, trust, and cost).
Eva cites industry examples including Zappos, Apple, Salesforce.com, and some cautionary tales from Color and others to overcome these obstacles. She also presents some very practical and powerful psychological studies and tools such as reciprocity, social proof and scarcity that you can employe to entice customers to not only try, but continue using, your products & services.
In addition to the “how” is the “how much”: Eva finishes us off with some hard economics of calculating both the cost of acquiring a customer, and the lifetime value of a customer - two very important metrics to help you prioritize and assess your strategies.
Assignment
- Calculate the rough cost to acquire your customers (CAC).
- Determine the current (or potential) customer lifetime value (CLV) for your users.
- Describe one aspect of your product or service that will delight / pleasantly surprise your target customer.
- “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Dr. Robert Cialdini
- “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions” by Guy Kawasaki
- “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely
- How to calculate CLTV
- Estimating startup user acquisition costs.
- Estimating cost of customer acquisitions by verticals.
- Eva’s presentation can be found here.
