Then it was time to figure out how to acquire customers. We knew we had to find a balance between taking great care of our existing customers and finding new ones.
So we reached out to get some PR.
We built our social media.
We did a few partnerships and tried to build word of mouth.
And while we were trying to acquire new customers, we were also investing heavily in customer service for our existing customers. We were doing this mostly with our time, because we didn't really have any money.
We put a handwritten message in each box.
We provide tasting notes for each wine, including foods to pair with each wine.
We attached a card to each shipment asking people to spread the word about CellarThief.
It was a labor of love and we gained amazing customer loyalty. We still call some of our first customers friends to this day.
We got some initial traction and got some initial sales. And then it was time to try to scale the business to the next level.
Like many small, established companies, we had little money and few big competitors. There were big online wine retailers and some new entrants to the market who were offering great wines on a daily basis. So we had to figure out how to stand out, and we had to quickly understand the math of our business.
Ultimately, no matter how passionate you are about your business idea, you have to figure out how to get customers . And with so much competition in almost every industry in the world, you have to discover a channel that you can win and own.
Source: Mamble
At the time, we simply couldn’t afford paid acquisition channels. These channels were much more accessible back then, but our margins were low… and did I mention we were screwed?! So we had to come up with a channel that would allow us to build relationships with our customers and drive regular, consistent sales.
We got some great media, even being named a “Hot 100” retailer by Internet Retailer (a big deal at the time). That media was great, but also fleeting.
We would have a media hit, see some customers come in, and then two weeks later the traffic would die overseas chinese in usa data down and we would have to get another media hit. That was tough and meant our sales were out of our control.
So we took a deep breath and looked at what was driving our sales. Most businesses just don't do that. They have their channels, they have their budgets, and they have their sales. And they simply don't do the work to understand where their best customers are coming from. We were the same.
We knew we were getting some sales through SEO. We knew we were getting some referral traffic. We also knew we were getting some affiliates to promote us. But we didn't know how much each of them contributed to our sales every day, week, and month.
What was more difficult was that we couldn't predict what kind of revenue we would make in a day, a week, or a month. This started to create problems with our purchasing. We simply didn't know how much wine to commit to our suppliers. Some days we would sell 5 cases, and some days we would sell 50.