Customers are essential to the survival of any business. That is why you need a plan to bring in new consumers constantly, yet according to ProfitWell, customer acquisition costs have increased by 50% in the last five years.
The issue is that many businesses do not have a well-defined customer acquisition strategy. It’s simple to keep doing what you believe is working; however, this frequently results in you investing too little money in high-performing channels or, on the other side, losing out on channels where potential consumers are hanging out.
The greatest method to increase customer acquisition is to develop a clear plan. This tutorial will teach you how to develop demand, keep track of your expenses, and convert leads into paying clients.
Before diving deep into the effective methods, let’s understand some basics first.
What Is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition, in its most basic form, refers to acquiring new clients. Every company, agency, and entrepreneur has to develop a customer acquisition plan. By learning how to customer acquisition, you can develop your business significantly. Referrals, loyalty programs, and other effective client acquisition tactics may be implemented by a firm.
The phrase ‘customer acquisition’ has a varied meaning for each organization. However, it is related to three growth factors. Get, Keep, and Grow
Get: When you get new clients for your company. This is the first step in the user acquisition process. You promote your goods or service through many methods, and finally, you acquire a customer.
Keep: How many of these clients can you keep? It is determined by the value you deliver to the consumer. Customer turnover varies by industry, but on average, it is between 5% and 7%. To maintain your consumers, you must present them with something fresh. Consider Facebook. Facebook introduces new ways to engage its users. More of it is connected to user-generated content, but the entire business model is designed to keep consumers returning for more.
Grow: How many of your customers genuinely contribute to the growth of your company? Or, how many consumers can you upsell or cross-sell your items to? Some may become your referrals or promote someone else to your firm, while others may not.
These elements are the foundation of the ‘customer acquisition idea.
When the startup reaches the growth stage, the client acquisition cycle is complete. To repeat the procedure, the startup must construct a loop. This means that existing customers/users of the firm can recommend new users, forming a growth cycle.
Why Is Customer Acquisition Important?
Helps Businesses In Increasing Sales
The primary goal of attracting new customers to a firm is to boost product sales. The drive for profits is the reason you see so many advertisements and promotional activities. Having a business without profits is similar to running a non-profit organization, which is not the primary goal of founding a business.
Acquiring new clients raises a company’s revenue, which increases profit margins. When you acquire new consumers, you also acquire their purchasing power. In this case, if you were making lower profits before their arrival, your margins would increase following the new acquisition.
Enhances Brand Awareness
One of the primary reasons people promote new clients is to raise brand recognition. For example, if your brand is only available in one location, you will work hard to expand it into another.
The efforts involved in advertising the product and marketing it to new clients make the brand known in numerous places, resulting in increased earnings. Brand awareness enables your company to expand into new markets, boost sales and market share, enhance brand perception within the target market, and collect audience data.
To make this brand awareness project a success, you must obtain more clients using various promotional methods.
It Supports The Maintenance Of A Business
Businesses lose customers at some point. They either switched to competitors, stopped using the items, or died. To be protected against such, a corporation must acquire new clients to balance the current and absent. When your company fails to find new consumers, it loses earnings and finally goes out of business.
The reason for this is that if no effort is made to attract new consumers and keep existing ones, the client base will continue to shrink. Constantly looking for new consumers helps your company stay in the market, even if some customers leave or pass on. Regardless of the scenario, your company will continue to generate profits and sales.
That is one of the primary reasons why we have big firms that have survived for so long. Those that did not pursue acquisition battled and failed along the road.
New Customers Help In The Growth Of Your Company
Aside from revenues and sales, new clients will help you build your firm. How so? Customers will, in one way or another, contribute to the success of your firm through purchases, recommendations, comments, and reviews.
Without them, your firm may grow or fail entirely. Customers will tell you how your business is performing; they will point out flaws and provide vital information from various competitors, all of which will enhance or make your firm function more smoothly.
Most businesses have developed new products after being recommended by customers who previously purchased similar items from other businesses. If your company can attract new customers, it may innovate and create new items based on its ideas.
New Customers Help In Business Expansion
What happens if you acquire more new clients than you need? Do you chase them away or grow your business? Of course, you expand your business. That is one of the advantages of acquisition.
It helps your company’s advancement to the next level. For example, if you were producing 100 pieces of a given product every day and subsequently had more consumers than you could create, your organization would research ways to boost output. This procedure will include purchasing new machinery, extending the premises, bringing in modern, high-capacity machines, and so on.
As a result, you finish up with a larger firm than you started. Most of the companies you see around you started small. However, due to customer acquisition, they were forced to grow to meet demand.
15 Most Effective Methods For Customer Acquisition
Here are the methods for customer acquisition that you can use to improve your business.
1. Define Your Target Market
The first and most important methods for customer acquisition you must take is to discover the proper people or potential audience for your firm. Chances are, your product is the ideal answer to an issue that a certain group of customers is experiencing. It’s only an issue of figuring out who they are and concentrating your client acquisition efforts on them.
If you don’t have a target consumer in mind, you’re likely restricting your ability to advertise your business successfully. Unless your goods fit a universal need, you’re better off creating a specialized market for yourself.
So, how do you go about finding your target clients?
Conduct thorough market research to determine who and how you should sell your product to gain new clients. According to Invesp, SaaS firms may quadruple their paying consumers by just giving a free trial without asking for credit card information.
Such knowledge can only be obtained by doing thorough market research. It serves as the foundation for all of your other consumer acquisition efforts.
2. Communicate With Your Customers
It’s difficult to identify weaknesses in your client acquisition process without direct input from your consumers. You must request this vital information in order to obtain it.
Customer surveys, email contact forms, consumer interviews, social media posts, and blog entries are all wonderful methods to engage with your customer base. You may advertise a transaction, get comments, and make yourself accessible for interviews.
Make a communication strategy to keep dialogues with your consumers flowing on a frequent basis. This will assist you in identifying and capitalizing on the value clients anticipate from your products and services.
3. Utilize The Proper Acquisition Channel
Building on what we’ve just said, knowing who your target consumers are isn’t enough. It’s also critical to understand the best route to employ to attract those potential consumers.
There are now a variety of frameworks that may assist you in determining the optimal channel to employ for your client acquisition initiatives. But, for the most part, finding the correct channel requires a lot of trial and error.
Set specific goals for yourself and your campaign to make things easy for yourself. Even defining rough goals can help you understand if your approaches are working or not. After you’ve tried several channels, you’ll be able to compare individual accomplishments to one another.
Do you want a pro tip?
Suppose you’re in a highly competitive market, such as real estate, and use sponsored channels to boost your lead volume. A professional Google AdWords firm may help you generate more leads than organic channels such as Google Search.
4. Assess And Enhance Your Plan
Building an internet business without using analytics is comparable to driving with your eyes closed. If you don’t know what’s working (or not), where visitors are coming from, and how your pages are doing, you’re doomed.
Many factors might influence customer acquisition, which is why it’s critical to examine and assess your outcomes. Customer acquisition analytics can assist you in determining:
- Where clients hear about your offerings.
- Where they purchased their goods.
- Where they reside.
- Other distinguishing features
Determine the client acquisition metrics you will monitor before you begin tracking. The following are some examples of common metrics:
- Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Increase in new customers
- Customer life value (LTV)
- Rate of churn
- Lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio (LTV: CAC)
5. Utilize Video Content
Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular. It is now used by 81% of firms, up from 63% last year. This is because 97% of marketers have found video content effective in increasing client comprehension of their goods. Another 76% have found it useful in increasing online traffic and sales.
People are visual learners, and videos are one of the best methods to educate prospects about your business and goods. You should aim to strike a nice mix of educational and entertaining videos. Utilize influencers to make such videos, which you can then distribute on social media and on your website.
What’s more, you could ask?
Another effective method is to use explainer videos and client testimonials. They are not only entertaining, but they also give consumers the information they need to make that final purchasing choice.
Ways to customer acquisition such as video marketing have greatly benefited companies such as Okta.
6. Provide A Free Trial
Getting new clients is not an easy task. It is usually beneficial to have numerous choices for acquiring new clients and converting them into loyal customers.
A free trial offer is an excellent method to get potential buyers to try your goods.
It informs customers about your goods while also generating leads for your company. Even if they do not become a customer after their trial time, they will remember your brand since they have previously encountered it.
It’s usually a good idea to let them try a product before asking them to buy it. After all, that is the purpose of a free trial.
7. Offer Giveaways
Customers frequently want more than just words or promises to persuade them to pay for your products and services. Some of the most steadfast consumers will not be moved by influencer or word-of-mouth marketing.
Consider organizing giveaways to win these clients over as loyal customers. Giving customers the opportunity to see your products firsthand is a terrific approach to give them the extra push they need to genuinely consider you as an alternative.
Running social media giveaway campaigns is the simplest Ways to customer acquisition.
So, how do you go about launching giveaways?
You may use free website builder tools to create a giveaway. Its drag-and-drop page builder allows you to construct beautiful landing pages for your giveaways.
All you have to do is choose one of their templates and tweak it. When traffic begins to flow to the page, it displays all of the information entered in the forms. As a result, your lead-generating activities will be boosted.
8. Be Active On Social Media
If you’re not on social media, you’re missing out on a massive market that your competitors are most certainly already taking advantage of.
- In 2012, the typical internet user had three social media accounts; currently, the average has seven accounts.
- 97% of persons (aged 16-64) use at least one social network every month.
- One in every three minutes spent on the internet is spent on social media and texting.
- Over 3 million businesses advertise on Facebook.
Having a social media presence does not have to be expensive. Creating a business account on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn is free. Simply join discussions and groups that are relevant to your industry. To make oneself noticed, provide helpful solutions to inquiries and insight on various postings.
GreenPal, for example, has had great success attracting new consumers by monitoring local social media groups. Bryan Clayton, CEO of GreenPal, adds that when anyone in the group asks for a recommendation for a lawn care provider, they prefer GreenPal.
The company tracked its progress and discovered that 60% of referrals resulted in new sign-ups.
Gaining followers is more significant than group participation. The majority of internet users, across all generations, are more inclined to buy from companies they follow on social media:
9. Regularly Produce High-Quality Content
Content marketing is certainly one of the most powerful and long-lasting customer acquisition techniques available. Consider this: it assists you in establishing thought leadership in your industry or area. Getting people to trust your brand is half the battle, and content marketing may help you win that war.
Content marketing is three times more successful and 62% less expensive than traditional outbound marketing in terms of lead creation. Starting a company blog, posting material on social media, and releasing white papers are all excellent strategies to establish oneself as a reliable authority in your field.
Consumers are becoming more knowledgeable. You will acquire your prospects’ confidence and most likely convert them if you enable them to make educated purchasing decisions. Creating valuable, informative, insightful, and entertaining content can ultimately help boost your customer acquisition.
However, creating high-quality material on a regular basis, especially for social media, can be difficult.
So, what are your options?
You can hire a freelancer or use certain tools. These tools allow you to easily compose or rewrite your text. All you have to do is enter a few words that characterize your topic, and the program will generate the article for you. Alternatively, you may paste the words from your post, and the program will rewrite them for you.
10. Make Your Brand Noticed On Internet Forums
Being on question-and-answer websites like Quora is quite beneficial. You may establish yourself as an industry leader and attract new prospective clients by answering inquiries and talking about your product.
Because conversation topics include a wide range of issues, there are numerous possibilities to be visible simply by answering queries about your business. Jason Lemkin, CEO of SaaStr, has answered over 2,000 questions on Quora, which has resulted in over 1 million monthly views.
To determine the best questions to ask, consider the following:
- SEMrush may be used to do a search on Quora.com.
- Select the “Organic Research” tab from the “Domain Analytics” menu.
- Run a search for a term relating to your content in the list of top-ranking Quora questions.
- Sort the results by search volume in decreasing order.
If you just publish a link to your content in response to a question, it will most likely be deleted. That’s no way to build trust. It’s acceptable to incorporate links within your replies on occasion, but every answer should still give value without requiring the reader to visit another site.
11. Concentrate On SEO
After you’ve established your online presence by creating informative content, you should focus on SEO. This will help increase the ranks of that specific material on search engines. As a result, your material will be more accessible and discoverable to your target audience.
Improving search results and brand awareness has a lot to do with the initial methods for customer acquisition funnel. Some of the most fundamental SEO strategies include the use of industry-related keywords, backlinks from authority websites, and so on.
Another great SEO strategy for gaining more clients is to optimize your site for mobile devices. Mobile devices accounted for about half of all internet traffic last year.
Providing prospects with an outstanding mobile experience might be the deciding factor in converting clients, especially for social media platforms.
So, how do you control the SEO of your website?
You may use free or paid tools for this, such as semrush. Using a tool alone will not get you a top-ten Google ranking.Â
You must conduct your own research and target certain keywords. Make the site more user-friendly and load faster. Clients want sites that load quickly. Make your website’s user interface appealing to the eye. Avoid using too many colors. It will cause the reader to switch websites.
12. Provide Special Offers And Promotions
People enjoy discounts because they save money while also feeling like they have access to something special and limited. Here are some options for giving specials and promotions:
- Using your social channels to promote coupons
- Creating an email drip campaign that rewards subscribers for allowing access to their inboxes with a special offer
- Offering low-stock or discontinued products as freebies on orders of a specific size
The most successful advertising programs also encourage sharing. When consumers share offers with their relatives and friends, they are more likely to be interested since it comes from someone they know and trust rather than an ad from an unfamiliar business. It increases their likelihood of redeeming the offer and continuing to share it with others.
13. Start A Referral Program
Referral programs are frequently used as the foundation of many acquisition methods to acquire new clients, particularly when your company is new. You may give current customers incentives such as extra features or discounts to encourage them to suggest your services to others. You may also provide these new consumers comparable discounts to entice them to use your services.
So, how do you get your referral program started?
You may use whichever tool you like to develop and manage a referral program. We will not recommend any tools because this is not an affiliate blog. Using an easy-to-use tool, you can easily build a referral program for your website, app, and social media platforms and track its development.
Tools give precise information that can assist you in filtering your visitors depending on different channels. These programs can track anything from shares to sales.
Dropbox has a great referral program that gives customers an extra 500MB of storage when they encourage a friend to sign up. The price is enhanced by the fact that your buddies will also receive an additional 500MB of storage. They increase the value of the recommendation by giving something to both parties.
14. Create Landing Pages That Are Optimized
Among various client acquisition tactics, improving your landing pages is undoubtedly one of the most successful. Landing pages link customers to your product or service. A good landing page not only provides useful information but also has a compelling call-to-action that encourages conversions.
What’s more, you could ask?
Running an A/B test can help you optimize and improve your landing pages. It all comes back to understanding what your clients want from you. You must be able to foresee their wants and then meet them.
To construct and test your landing page designs, you may utilize easy drag-and-drop website builders. Again, no tools will be recommended. Conduct your own research. You may easily develop your landing page using their simple drag-and-drop page builder without knowing how to code. It also allows you to easily construct sticky bars and popups that can help you convert visitors.
Try pages without navigation bars, pages with navigation bars, and pages with varied fonts, CTAs, and components. This is an iterative process, and you should keep experimenting to see what is helping you in gaining more clients.
15. Increase Web And Email Engagement
While this is an old approach, it is still one of the most effective client acquisition tactics available. It allows you to stay in front of your target audience and advertise your content, promotions, and product information. It’s also the most convenient approach to communicating with and attracting new consumers.
A smart approach to do this is to send personalized emails to customers based on where they are in the client acquisition process. As a result, someone in the first two phases is usually more suited for material that may spark that consumer engagement.
What about the remainder?
Those that have you in their consideration pool would be more interested in mailings containing product details. This helps customers to make better-educated purchasing decisions. Similarly, consumers in the closing phases of a transaction might be persuaded to make the purchase by receiving a promotional email with a discount.
Amazon, for example, does an excellent job doing this. They are constantly sending out personalized emails to their target demographic. It may be to remind them of things on their wish list or an abandoned cart. Or something similar if you’ve recently made a buy.
How Can Customer Acquisition Be Measured?
It is critical to track and assess your customer acquisition activities in order to determine their efficacy and expenses. The best KPIs to use to determine how to improve your customer acquisition efforts may change depending on your sector. However, there are a few that are widely utilized by firms to help in the modification of approaches in order to enhance results. These are excellent beginning points.
Conversion rate is a frequent growth metric. It calculates the proportion of persons who finished a process after starting it. To get the most out of this measurement, define what you mean by the “start” and “end” of a procedure. What two events, for example, will define your “start” and “finish” for measuring the conversion rate for e-newsletter registration? Are you measuring the proportion of website visitors who completed a registration form or the percentage of those who arrived at the registration page and completed it? These would clearly result in two different rates.
Brands aim to fit people’s requirements, wants, and expectations in order to grab their attention and encourage them to become consumers. Companies collect vast quantities of data about their prospects both online and offline using digital technology, and they use a variety of strategies to get their attention. As a consequence, companies win their affection and confidence, as well as a larger number of loyal consumers.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is a standard statistic for measuring how effective your customer acquisition initiatives are. It may be used to calculate the marketing cost per client acquired over time or for a specific marketing method. This data may be utilized to analyze the overall performance of your acquisition efforts. It can also help determine which strategies produce the greatest outcomes. A common way of determining customer acquisition expenses is to divide marketing costs by the number of customers received.
The rate of new customer acquisition allows you to analyze client acquisition rates over time to discover if your results are improving. It is calculated by multiplying the number of customers acquired over a certain time by the length of that period.
The frequency of visits to certain product pages is a method for tracking early-stage contacts with potential consumers. It allows you to measure the efficacy of these items or landing pages and identify areas for improvement.
