Customer Acquisition: Why BustedTees’ Acquisition Strategy is No Laughing Matter

The customer acquisition strategy put in place last year by BustedTees, an online retailer of T-shirts that was started by the founders of CollegeHumor.com in 2004, is no joke. The strategy involves placing display ads across the web on targeted sites. When prospects click on the ads, a box pops up that asks for their email address in exchange for a 20 percent discount on their first order.

BustedTees is using software from Bounce Exchange to execute this strategy. Since implementing its retargeting campaign, BustedTees has "increased our email acquisition rates each month by five times over last year's rate for those same months," says Adam Schwartz, general manger of BustedTees.

Facebook has also proven to be great for email address acquisition, Schwartz adds. "We run ads on the right rail of Facebook pages that offer 20 percent off BustedTees' merchandise. When consumers click on the Facebook ads, they're taken to a landing page where they're asked to register with their email address." BustedTees began using Facebook for email address acquisition in April. As of press time, 8 percent of BustedTees' customers gave the brand their email address on Facebook.

Bounce Exchange's BounceX software also helps BustedTees decrease its shopping cart abandonment rate. The software tracks the cursor movements of every site visitor in real time. Then it detects actions that indicate users are going to abandon the site — e.g., scrolling their mouse to the top URL bar, clicking on the back button, moving from the checkout page to BustedTees' homepage or a product page — and overlays a box at those points, which BustedTees uses to offer an incentive to the abandoning visitor to stay and complete their transaction.

"We set up a program where if people abandon their carts, we hit them with a light box that tells them that if they check out in the next 15 minutes, they'll get a discount," Schwartz says. "This sense of urgency has a huge impact on sales. Since using BounceX in this way, we've improved conversions by 20 percent for this group."