The Three Principles
of Marketing that
Made Over 3,000
Brands Soar

As you know, the biggest driver of awareness is word-of-mouth, and the user’s experience directly after their initial purchase will drive word-of-mouth more than anything else. When your customer experiences your product for the first time, they make a judgment call.

If you impress them, they’ll want to share your product with their friends, so engaging with your customer post-purchase is critical.

In this scenario, you are nurturing your customer not only to affect their future purchase behavior, but to leverage them as a word- of-mouth foot soldier. As this marketing machine runs and more people enter your funnel, you can leverage various tools to continue nurturing your audience, including public content, email, SMS, social channels, events, and more.

Remember, time kills all deals. If you keep the audience engaged, you get more time with them. If you continue to nurture them, you can likely get a bigger share of their wallet over time, maximizing their LTV.

Our partner, LTVplus, specializes in scaling e-commerce businesses, so they know the ins and outs of nurturing customers. LTVplus co-founder and CEO, GQ Fu, said:

“We see an increase in conversion rates and customer retention when businesses adopt a proactive approach to customer service. By anticipating your customers’ needs and reaching out to help them in advance, you create more pleasant experiences.”

Dollar Shave Club entered the men’s razor market as a nobody. They had zero market share and were up against blue-chip incumbents like Gillette, a company founded in 1901. How were they supposed to compete against trusted brands that had been around for over a century?

Dollar Shave Club had an innovative business model. They touted the fact that you need to change your razor every week. Nobody had ever said that. People were not doing that. If you watch commercials prior to Dollar Shave Club coming to market, all the advertising for men’s razors focused on quality. It was always about how the razor would last forever, or how it had eight blades, or a vibrating handle. No one was thinking about convenience.

When Dollar Shave Club sold for over a billion dollars, they accounted for 10% of the razor market.34 Here’s the funny thing about that stat: They didn’t actually steal that much market share from the other companies. They created it. Instead of someone buying a razor every two months, they got their customers to buy every week. That’s an 8x higher purchase frequency than their competitors’ customers. So even if they only grabbed a few percent of the existing market, they were getting a much bigger share of those customers’ wallets, and a much higher LTV.

Selling razors as a subscription service meant Dollar Shave Club could interact with customers on a regular basis, too. They could create content about how current razors are too expensive, and how guys should be replacing their dirty razors more often for a better shave. They ran an incredible ad on YouTube and did some effective television campaigns to build awareness, but the true success and longevity of Dollar Shave Club is in their nurturing machine.

• Nurturing is the marketing that happens after a prospect demonstrates awareness of your brand.
• The average purchase cycle for a $50-order value in e-commerce is about three weeks. For a $100 order, the average cycle is five weeks. For $200, it’s an average of six weeks.
• Time kills all deals. Get to the sale as quickly as possible.
• Acquiring customers is often the hardest task for a business and one of the top expenses. Maximizing the return on every customer comes through nurturing.
• Through positive nurturing, you can sustain your business when awareness becomes too expensive or hard to scale.
• It is critical to nurture your prospects and customers from day one.