An article in today’s Times cites the high cost of acquiring customers, which ranges from $100 to $800. Excerpt:
“Estimates of an often-cited retail metric known as customer acquisition costs range from $100 to more than $800 per customer, said Daniel McCarthy, a professor at Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business, who has done extensive research in the field.”
Physical retail is one of the most expensive ways to acquire customers. An online acquisition can also be very expensive. Bridge helps its 1,000 retail clients, which often have a physical location, avoid these costs online.
Bridge helps retailers reduce their customer acquisition costs using five approaches:
Bringing in customers via a gift registry service. We help the store offer an online gift registry service. Gift registries are one of the highest return / lowest cost services to offer online. The services help boost online and in-store sales. By offering a registry service, the registrant becomes a de factor, free marketing arm of the store and promotes it to their friends and family.
Bringing in customers via massive product selection. We can fill the store’s website with up to 63,000 synced products from 110 brand partners. Using our Product Syncing service, a store can offer a bounty of products online in minutes. For example, we sync 41,000 products to the retailer The Ivy House in Dallas, TX, and 37,000 products to the retailer Babcock Gifts in Memphis, TN. More products equal more customer purchases.
Bringing in customers via Google. We help the store increase its Google ranking. We have a few routes to achieve this:
Google crawls the massive product selection created by the Product Syncing service. On The Ivy House Bridge Store, Google has 41,000 products to crawl.
We design each Bridge page to be friendly for Google to crawl and index.
While gift registry is in itself a profitable feature, offering a registry service also boosts one's Google ranking.
Bringing in customers via our network of 'backlinks.' We have a network of verified sites with links pointing at the store’s site. For example, if a store sells 20 partner brands and is connected with 20 sales reps, then Bridge will have 40 Bridge sites that link back to the store. Customers can click on and follow these 40 links. In addition, on each store’s Bridge home page, we display up to two links pointing to a Shop Local store directory. (The directory lists indie stores using Bridge.) in essence, we have converted each indie from being a siloed, isolated island to being part of a network that promotes each other. Notably, Google sees these backlinks and uses them in its algorithm, so this network helps the store in Google, too.
Bringing in customers via additional features. We include by default with our service features that increase a customer’s time on the site and increase click-through. Other software providers charge for these features. We include features such as review software, a news-sharing tool, and the ability to offer gift cards on a complimentary basis since we know they will perform and increase sales. Bridge receives a small commission on orders, so the store and Bridge benefit in the end.