CEO@Webvine Designs | Profit-Driven Strategic Marketing Advisor | Web Development & Marketing Strategy Expert
So much of the marketing advice on LinkedIn is about short-term conversions. People are telling you to focus on tactics for that quick sell and "fast revenue". I don't blame you, its hard to do anything else when you have shareholders breathing down your neck for that fast revenue. But-what are you giving up in return? Recurring revenue and long-term profitability. Like Sam's experience, we find when we focus on LTV, the companies we work with become more profitable in the long term. Why? Because they offer an exceptional user experience, its less spend, and overall generates more profit. I find this to be true in both the B2B, B2C, and DTC space (yes, with over 22 years of experience, we've worked in all three spaces and yes, what works in DTC can translate to B2B when you focus on the customer experience).
When I worked Airbnb, our CEO Brian Chesky taught us a CRO lesson directly applicable to DTC. Back then, Booking(.)com was a main competitor of ours. If you aren’t familiar with it, their site was (and still is) optimized to convert paid traffic. They we’re the #1 spending advertiser on Google (>$1B/yr) and dedicated 20+ engineers just to optimizing their Google Ad landing page. See, Booking(.)com’s “game” is: → Get a click via Google ads → Convert the customer on the spot with aggressive tactics → Repeat every time the customer wants to travel It’s a great company that proved the model, but Brian was adamant we couldn’t follow suit. If we did, we’d become a commodity instead of a staple in travel. So, he guided the company in a different direction. His thesis was to get customers searching directly for Airbnb instead of paying Google to get visitors to the site every time. While it sounds great on paper, achieving this goal meant prioritizing brand and UX, even if it meant knowingly hurting conversion rate. For the record, Airbnb has done (and still does) this effectively. If you’ve used both sites, you know Airbnb is objectively “cleaner” and easier to use. It has more of an established “brand” than Booking(.)com and other competitors. And that only comes by risking short-term conversion rate in favor of a more holistic commitment to the long-term brand. Later on, while scaling my ecommerce companies, the lesson returned to me. I was researching other, more established brands to determine how to increase LTV. It wasn’t long before something stuck out to me like a sore thumb: The long-term players in DTC aren’t trying to win every site visit with countless “spin the wheel” pop-ups, countdown timers, or other CRO hacks. They’re committing to photography, copy, and overall site feel. They may not win every customer on their first visit, but they’ll, without a doubt, have an easier time getting them back long-term. Conversely, it seemed like brands and marketplaces generally regarded as “cheap” were using every CRO hack imaginable to convert users on their first visit. I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to my time at Airbnb. Brands who intentionally prioritized a delightful experience over short-term conversion tactics were winning long-term (especially with LTV), while competitors who did the opposite struggled over the long term. My big takeaway from this is that too much CRO can lead to optimizing for a local maximum instead of your global maximum. You must actively evaluate the tactics you use to convert customers both today and in the future. Have you run into something similar?
