How to Build Organic Customer Acquisition Channels

Everyone obsesses over Meta ads and TikTok Shop But here's what actually matters: Your owned channels. At Obvi, we've built a 100,000+ member community and found a clear hierarchy in what drives consistent revenue. Here's exactly how it breaks down: 1. SMS Highest revenue driver, but most brands use it wrong. Yes, you're paying for every message, but the reach is unmatched - you hit your entire customer base instantly. The key is to reserve it for major launches and your best offers. If you blast too often, you'll burn your list. 2. Community (100,000+ members) Our Facebook group isn't just another dead forum. It's a living ecosystem →  - Give us Instant product feedback - Creates user-generated content naturally - Drives organic sales - Costs nothing to reach - Builds real brand loyalty Pro tip: We found our best moderators by watching who was already helping others in comments. They were customers first, advocates second. Now they run it better than we ever could. 3. Email Still valuable, but open rates aren't quite what they used to be. The real power is in integration. Here's exactly how we structure major product launches: 1. Tease in community first 2. Go live in group to announce 3. SMS blast with exclusive link 4. Email sequence 5. Community engagement The result? Consistent sold-out launches. Here's what most brands get wrong: They treat each channel as a separate silo. Your customers don't live in one channel - they move between them. When you integrate your channels properly, each one makes the others stronger: - Community creates content for emails - Emails drive group membership - Group engagement justifies SMS messages - SMS drives immediate action This isn't theory - it's exactly how we've built Obvi to where it is today. Stop thinking in channels. Start thinking in ecosystems.

Community-led growth is emerging as perhaps the most powerful, flexible and accessible growth lever right now. The CLG flywheel helps you turn customers into champions, and champions into growth. My next guest, mallory contois (Mercury, Cameo, Pinterest) harnessed this flywheel to turn a passion project -- a community called The Old Girls Club -- into a $300k ARR side hustle with a $0 CAC. Here's how she did it & how you can, too. Don't miss the full story in today's Growth Unhinged newsletter: https://lnkd.in/e3zhVdDm 1️⃣ Hone your unique POV Your community needs to be interesting in format, function or fashion. Nobody needs yet another Slack or WhatsApp group that they immediately mute. At The Old Girls Club, Mallory's insight was that as you become more senior, you have fewer peers, and even fewer of those peers are women. That's the problem she set out to address. 2️⃣ Attract early champions Don't focus on scale, focus on alignment. You need your first believers. There are future collaborators and super users. At The Old Girls Club, Mallory started with ~75 women who'd expressed interest in the space. This quickly ballooned to ~1,000 members in 60 days. The tactics: Private beta invites, 1:1 outreach, thought leader meetups, landing pages & waitlists 3️⃣ Enable contribution Once you've built trust and rapport, open the door to participation. Invite early champions to co-create the product, the culture and the behaviors. Mallory curated her Slack space with 6 specific threads, all with a purpose. The most unconventional: yell-in-caps-here (😂). This was a last minute follow-her-gut add, but would turn out to become one of OGC’s pillars of success. The tactics: Creator tools, content prompts & templates, feature voting, focus groups 4️⃣ Repeat to create the new wave The visible and in-public momentum pulls in the next wave of superusers. Each cycle gets easier as your champion base grows & self-sustains. Mallory was nervous about being the only one with eyes on potential joiners, so she spun up member-referrals, adding a public element and additional accountability to referrals that were made. The tactics: Product-led shareables, social loops, invite & onboarding rituals, referral processes & programs 5️⃣ Reward & amplify Shine a light on those who contribute, adopt, advocate and amplify. Social recognition fuels retention, loyalty, sharing and viral growth. At The Old Girls Club, Mallory uses Memberful for subscription management, Disco for new member onboarding, MeetWaves to archive chats, Trova to create rich member profiles, and Curated Connections to help members match with others. The tactics: Community badges or titles, leaderboards & streaks, shoutouts and rewards & loyalty programs --- Hope y'all enjoy this framework (& story) as much as I did 🙏

Founder: Our organic traffic is strong, but where are the conversions? Me: Exactly. You're getting clicks, but there's a missing link—organic traffic isn't translating into revenue. Imagine you're pouring time and money into SEO, driving thousands of visitors to your site every month, but when it comes to converting that traffic into revenue, you're not seeing the results. It's like having a packed store but no one checking out. Here’s the Real Problem: 1. No Ownership - No one in the company truly owns the goal of organic revenue. The focus is always on paid campaigns, and this massive source of traffic gets neglected 2. SEO Team Focuses Only on Traffic - SEO teams aim for rankings and clicks, not conversions. And that’s a problem. Traffic alone doesn't pay the bills 3. No Effective Measurement - Unlike paid campaigns, tracking non-brand organic revenue isn’t possible. You’re missing the opportunity to understand which traffic is bringing value. What Happens If You Don’t Fix This? You're letting potential revenue slip through the cracks every day. That organic traffic you’ve worked so hard to build? It’s not optimized to turn into sales, and your competitors—who may have less traffic—are converting better than you. But here’s the good news: You can start fixing it in 30 days. Here is how. 1. Assign an owner. Give the goal of increasing organic revenue to someone in the team 2. Involve the SEO team in boosting conversions, not just clicks. 3. Start by looking at your Google Ads data. Which keywords are converting the best? Use those insights to guide your SEO efforts 4. Build a list of your top 100 keywords. Organize them into ranking buckets (1-5, 6-10, 11-20, 21-50, etc.) 5. Market share report - Create a report to show where your biggest keyword opportunities lie. Focus on moving keywords up the ranking buckets. Set up a market share report to track your and competition progress better. 6. Track organic revenue in analytics. This will be total organic revenue (non-brand + brand). It is impossible to track keyword wise revenue accurately. Track page wise revenue. This can help in understanding the impact of improving keyword ranking and increasing revenue on the page. 7. Dive deep into the top pages driving organic traffic. Use heatmaps and session recordings to understand friction points. Where are visitors dropping off? What’s stopping them from converting? 8. Run a heuristic UX analysis to identify points of friction. Survey your customers and find out where they lose motivation to buy. 9. Ensure that your website has targeted pages for your brand keywords—these are low-hanging fruit that often get overlooked. What’s one extra conversion worth? Now multiply that across hundreds of missed opportunities—this is the kind of growth you could be looking at.