– Personalization, retention, and LTV (lifetime value) in ecommerce are not scalable and have a low likelihood of long-term success.
– Acquiring the right customers and building a quality audience is more important than focusing on personalization and retention.
– Building reusable assets and playing the long game with a focus on 1-many strategies will lead to outsized success in ecommerce.Focus on acquiring a quality audience with a quality product at the right time, rather than relying on personalization, retention, and LTV strategies. Build a reusable asset and invest in long-term success rather than short-term reactionary moves.In e-commerce, personalization, retention, and LTV are traps. The problem isn’t how they are being promoted, but how the execution plays out. In short, it’s not scalable. I’ve seen no fewer than 20 companies in the e-commerce space focused on these things, but they are all one-to-one, which brings in a whole host of issues. Much like attribution and a whole bunch of other reactionary moves people are making across e-commerce in general, the long-term balance and success of these isn’t likely to be high. I’m not being a pessimist either; I’m a realist. For any of these things to exist, you need to acquire a customer. For them to exist at scale, you need to acquire the right customer. For them to exist consistently, you need the best timing. You can try to work towards things like LTV, but you’d be better off just focusing on finding your ideal clients that love your product and building that into evangelization. You’re not going to really be able to do that through personalization and retention as they are currently being done. It all comes down to acquiring a quality audience with a quality good, at the right time. The other things all require a sale to have occurred for the most part, and we know that traditionally that’s less than 2% of any one person that comes to your website on a given day. Those odds are far too low to base predictions on. Business fundamentals will win out over all this bandwagoning over KPIs. Build things that unlock one-to-many and you’ll see outsized success instead of focusing on one-to-one. Own the narrative, build a reusable asset, spend money to play the long game. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you’re not alone; pretty much everyone is missing this part of the equation. #ecommerce #marketing #strategyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco