E-commerce Management: How to Create Lists and Audiences for More Pers

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Continuing the series on E-commerce Management, we are going to talk about Acquisition, or rather, what tactics you can apply in your online store to create lists (emails, phone numbers, addresses, etc.) and audiences (custom, interest, similar audiences, etc.) to maintain closer communication with your customers and potential customers. But that's not all, acquisition helps you better understand your ideal customer, map out consumption profiles and, for the more advanced, consolidate the data in a CDP (customer data platform).
In the first article of this series, we talked about How to manage your online store to sell more and better, explaining what Check Commerce's E-commerce Management methodology is like and how the E-commerce Management Canvas works in practice. In the second article, we talked about How to generate qualified traffic for your store. Now, following the order of the methodology, the next topic is acquisition:

Defining Acquisition

Acquisition is the action where the user agrees to be contacted through a channel. It does not mean that they are agreeing to read, respond, interact, just be contacted. The user can provide contact information by filling out a form or can accept the terms of a website that asks if it can track them.
To build an email list, for example, you need to acquire your users. You don't build a legitimate list of 500,000 emails overnight.

Popups are widely used to acquire visitor contact information

Content Acquisition

When your brand generates content, it is solving problems, entertaining or informing your target audience and becoming an authority on the subject. The advantages of content generation are:

Increase visibility on the internet, because when the content is indexed by Google, it will start to be displayed to users who are actively searching for the content you generated
Contributes to Free Activation, because the content will increase your organic traffic in addition to helping capture users' emails and data
Increase interaction with your brand, since the content is distributed through communication channels and social networks
Nurture your lead base, delivering information, messages, and preparing your potential customers for the ideal time to buy
Reduce the cost of acquisition (CAC or CPA), since you can reach an organic and recurring audience, as content generates medium/long-term results
Generate trust and authority, through good frequency and quality of published content

You can start generating content on your social networks, but remember a very old term in marketing: Branded Content. To be more specific, branded content consists of creating interesting, qualified content aligned with your brand's values. In this sense, it is essential that this content be about topics or subjects that your business masters or is associated with. An example is Apple generating content about iPhone photography or about professionals who use Mac to sell its products.
Rich materials are also a great alternative, they can be boosted through Paid Traffic as digital leads. Users fill out a form with their data in exchange for the rich material being offered. It can be delivered in various formats: e-books, videos, guides, infographics, spreadsheets, etc. The great advantage of this tactic is the possibility of segmenting your leads based on the downloaded content and the answers provided in the form.
Browser or app notifications, WhatsApp messages, and SMS are great channels to contact your customers.

Tracking Acquisition

When a user creates an account on Facebook or Google, they agree (no one reads the privacy policy) to receive ads and have their browsing tracked. Without discussing the details of the LGPD at this moment, when this user accesses your online store and browses it, they are accepting the privacy policy and authorizing Google, Facebook, and any ad network scripts present in the accessed e-commerce to track them. All tracking can be used in the context of marketing messages, such as retargeting or specific offers for users who visited a specific page or spent more than 5 min browsing the e-commerce.
You can install ad network scripts (tags) such as:

Google Remarketing Tag (now incorporated into Universal Analytics), which creates lists for you to advertise through the Google Network
Facebook Pixel, which populates user lists for advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and other placements in Facebook Ads
First-party cookie, from your email system or other systems you use (notifications, email, pop-ups, recommendation, personalization)
Cookie pool, an abusive practice consisting of a pile of cookies sharing browsing data across multiple online stores

Remember to update the Privacy Policy according to the 10 principles of the LGPD (General Data Protection Law), providing transparency about the processing of personal data. What you should include in your online store's Privacy Policy:

Purpose of Cookie collection and the processing the Store will give them;
Purpose of Store Registration collection and the processing the Store will give them;
Purpose of Store Wishlist collection and the processing the Store will give them;
Purpose of data collection via form (contact, newsletter, material download, etc.) and the processing the Store will give them;
Show the customer how they can request and access any information the Store has about them;
Talk about the actions that prevent data from being misused, by both internal and external people.

Benefit Acquisition

The name says it all! In benefit acquisition, you will offer your users benefits so that they provide personal information and contact data. Benefit acquisition is very common for cold users, who need a stronger promotional appeal to provide their information, which is why many brands offer:

Early access to promotions (Ex.: Receive promotions first-hand)
Access to an exclusive area (Ex.: Get early access to Black Friday)
Percentage discounts (Ex.: Get 10% OFF on your first purchase)
Absolute discounts (Ex.: Get 10% OFF on your first purchase)
Free shipping (Ex.: Get free shipping throughout Brazil)
Shipping upgrade (Ex.: Pay for PAC and get SEDEX)
Sweepstakes (Ex.: Enter to win a trip to Miami)

Importance of Acquisition

Where do the 98.4% of users who don't buy go?

If you ran a paid search ad and many users browsed your site for 5 min, this is a clear demonstration of interest. If you don't have acquisition mechanisms, these users will abandon browsing (98.4% on average) and you will have no way to contact them to make a sale at a more opportune time.

My customer base is too small to invest in email marketing

The size of your customer base is proportional to the size of your audience and your acquisition effort. If your online store is not actively and constantly seeking to build an email list, you will hardly see any growth in the size of your base. You need to encourage acquisition.

I need to invest in traffic to sell more

The lists you build, whether Facebook remarketing lists, email lists, or push notification subscribers, will be composed of users who actively agreed to receive marketing content from you; they have a higher chance of buying than a stranger. Get the most out of these users before thinking about investing money to attract new ones.

Final considerations

Acquisition is the connection point between Activation and Engagement, which are the only ways to generate traffic for your store. Through Acquisition, your store can create lists to develop automated actions, generating recurring sales and allowing your store to grow over time.
Without Acquisition actions, your entire Engagement strategy loses strength, because it is for these lists, bases, and audiences that you should direct your marketing efforts.
Good luck until the next article about Engagement.