How to Acquire Your First Million Customers: Scaling Your Online Business by Laying the Foundation for Growth
By Chris Newton (Engl'00) and Ken McDonald
(Amazon Digital, 100 pages; 2017)
How to Acquire Your First Million Customers is a book for anyone looking to gain a better understanding of growing an online business. In the book, Ken and Chris discuss several marketing strategies that have proven successful for them over the past 20+ years 鈥 and do it in a way that anyone can understand.
If you are interested in growing an online business through increased customer acquisition and improved marketing efficiency, then this book is for you. It doesn鈥檛 matter where you are in your career. Beginners and seasoned vets alike will gain knowledge and actionable tips to implement immediately. This book is applicable to all kinds of online businesses, including B2C, B2B, SaaS, Ecommerce, and ad driven businesses, to name a few.
鈥淲e wrote this book because we鈥檝e seen a lot of success in growing online businesses to 10 million users or more, and people kept asking us how to do it,鈥 state the authors.
The book begins by explaining (in layman鈥檚 terms) how to set yourself up for success, and how to define and measure growth. It then explores a variety of tactics and channels used for driving customer growth: marketing strategy, digital marketing, social media marketing, SEO, PPC, online partnerships, video and content strategies, influencer marketing, AB testing, offline marketing, and more. The back half of the book explains how to retain new customers, and how to scale a business for growth.
Readers are taken on a journey from marketing inception to implementation to completion, and are guided by an entertaining and practical narrative, courtesy of the authors. Along the way, dozens of visual graphics and diagrams, as well as sidebar sections that take deeper dives into various topics, help explain and demonstrate the concepts discussed throughout the book.
How to Acquire Your First Million Customers also references several common tools that many businesses will find helpful, including Facebook, Google Analytics, YouTube, Hootsuite, Moz, Crazy Egg, MouseStats, Optimizely, Buzzsumo, Mattermark, Alexa, Radian 6, Commission Junction, Share a Sale, AWIN, and others.