Although we’re champions of digital everything, there’s no substitution for meeting your peers, clients, and industry leaders in person. For our latest Shopify Meetup in Hoboken, we again partnered with P3 Media to bring together a night of drinks, food, learning, and networking.
The central topic of this night was focused on customer acquisition. Our CEO Alex Markov hosted the event to about 100 attendees, and set the tone for the night by encouraging everyone to take advantage of the open bar. We had our custom green “Refersion Refresher” on hand to wash down the free food as well.
Once we settled in, Alex introduced the first speaker of the night, Monica Acevedo, Director of Customer Experience at BestSelf Co. BestSelf is a provider of productivity tools such as notebooks that help you get more done throughout the day. Monica’s presentation was enlightening and well-received, and not just because she treated the audience to Sidekick notebooks and awesome pens!
Monica spoke about BestSelf’s foray into acquiring more productivity-minded customers by launching their Ambassador program, a thought-out framework to encourage and support their current customers to share their productivity journey on social media, as well as with friends and family. BestSelf learned to always keep the customer journey in mind when creating new initiatives. With the right messaging, they saw a huge spike in both Ambassador signups as well as referral sales.
The more their customers were proud of the BestSelf brand, the more love they got, and this was a key takeaway for Monica’s team as they continue to grow their program out.
Next up was River Accorsi, the owner and creator of Vapor95, a Vaporwave (a type of art and music movement) and aesthetic clothing company. If it tells you anything about their quirky style, the Vapor95 logo is a play off the Windows 95 logo.
River’s company was faced with a big challenge when it came to customer acquisition: the youth culture that was the target audience was (like all younger audiences) wary of “corporatizing” their art. How do you sell to young people who embrace counterculture without turning them off with consumerism?
Vapor95 tackled the challenge in many ways, but one really stood out: immersing the entire company into the Vaporwave culture. This meant connecting personally with Influencers in this niche, as well as working with artists to create quality products that speak to their audience, along with social media posts that had their authenticity. River wanted Vapor95 to “experience their experience,” so anything they put out there couldn’t be misconstrued as an outsider trying to play the part.
The results? 100% customer satisfaction and a high return customer rate. Being authentic and working hard to stay that way has made Vapor95 grow organically through great word-of-mouth, and they have no plans of slowing down any time soon.
Our final speaker of the night was Chase Clymer, the owner of Electric Eye, an agency that helps other companies grow on Shopify via amazing e-commerce website design and intelligent marketing. Chase’s talk was a great overview of all the channels companies can push for more customer acquisition including print campaigns, SEO, and affiliate marketing.
Chase also stressed that Electric Eye is a data-driven company, that makes full use of Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel Tracking, and LittleData to give them the most data possible to make better customer acquisition decisions. And what metric mattered the most to them? Conversion rate first, then Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Focusing on these metrics have let Electric Eye to hone in on the marketing channels for their various clients that perform the best.
And that was the night! After the presentations, networking continued on (as well as more free food and drinks, of course) and many in attendance were found chatting with our presenters and gleaning more information from their experience. An amazing photographer, Philicia Montgomery from Philmont Photography was on hand to document the night, and you can see all the great pictures throughout this post. What a successful night!
If you’re itching to learn from our expert guests, as well as mingle with like-minded entrepreneurs, be sure to sign up for our next Meetup which will be at Birch on July 25. We’ll see you there!
