Increasing acquistion share from Online Channel

I bumped into a marketing professional and he mentioned that one of the objectives of his product was to increase online use of the tool on his website. My first question was - how are you driving traffic to the website i.e. display vs. search vs. others. His response was - "We are not driving traffic to the website via any online advertising". My jaw dropped....

I thought how is he planning to achieve his goal? By asking the current users who use the tool to use it more OR by asking them to sign-in with a differnet name everyday? None of these are going to help achieve his objective.

I drew a funnel and explained you need more people to enter the funnel, that is how your usage with increase i.e. new customers. Your current customers can help increase by word of mouth efforts but that might not be enough to reach your goal.

Thus, if you are trying to increase usage of online tools or increase sign-ups on you website - have a strong marketing program which drives users to the website that is easy to navigate.