What is Customer Acquisition?
In simple words, customer acquisition is the process of getting new customers for your business. It is a process in which you target the prospects so that they turn into your customers. One way to think about customer acquisition is to consider the link between advertising and customer relationship management, as it is the crucial connection that makes the acquisition of prospects in an effective way.
Why do you need a Customer Acquisition Strategy?
The aim, for any business, is to develop feasible and organized acquisition strategies that keep up with industry trends. To remain in the industry, businesses need to regularly fuel growth in two ways. First, they need to attract and convert new customers which is called lead generation.
Second, they need to coax existing customers to spend more. Also, a well-developed and expertly executed customer acquisition strategy can preserve resources. As well as maximize ROI by targeting the right prospects and delivering the right message at the right time.
Stages of Customer Acquisition Funnel
In the business world, there are several stages of the customer journey such as:
- Awareness: It is to create brand awareness in the leads for your business. It can be done by PR marketing. In this customers gain awareness about your brand.
- Interest: In this stage customers/possible prospects generate interest in your offerings. The brand differentiates its products by educating consumers.
- Consideration: This stage is all about prospects visiting your website, downloading content, and registering themselves for a free trial. Then they become more familiar with the brand and its products.
- Intent: Prospects make their way further and move closer to making a purchase decision. They do this by watching product ratings, reviews and adding products to their shopping cart.
- Evaluation: The brand engages the prospects further in response to their recent activity. Then prospects start to seriously consider the benefits of completing the buy from your website.
- Purchase: Once they complete the transaction, they become customers of your website.
Strategies of Customer Acquisition
Define Target Audience
The very first and most important step is to identify your potential customer or target audience to whom you want to sell the product. If you don’t have a target customer in your mind, you may be limiting yourself from marketing your brand effectively. Unless what you offer meets a universal need, you are better off finding a forte for your market
Conduct complete market research and try to figure out who and how you should market your product to win over new customers.
Choice of Acquisition Channel
For customer acquisition, it is very important to find the right channel to get the desired results. To find the right channel, there are many frameworks but at the same time, it takes a lot more experiments to find the correct channel for your website. To find a perfect channel you need to set your goals straight and use try & test formulae to get the best results. It could be done via channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
If you are in a super-competitive industry like real estate, use the power of paid channels to increase your lead generation. An experienced Google Ad Words agency can help you acquire better leads/prospects than organic channels like Google Search.
Cross-Pollination is a great tactic to use to increase your number of followers on each channel. So that your content gets featured on every channel your customers are following you as it ensures that anyone less performing channel or ad doesn’t waste your overall customer acquisition efforts.
Incorporate Video Content
In the current market scenario, a lot of businesses use videos for marketing to attract and inform the prospects for your product as people tend to be visual learners. You should try to find a good balance between informative and interesting videos. Take advantage of influencers to create such videos, to share on social media, and on your website.
Videos can be about your brand story or any customer story. Videos can help understand the customer about your product offerings and videos could be the central attraction of your marketing campaigns.
Introduce Giveaways:
This is a very new tactic that is currently used by even very big brands on social media. If you want to convert your customers into loyal ones, you need to give them offerings in which they get a chance to win your giveaway campaigns to experience your product and it will give them that extra push to be your consistent customer. You can run these giveaway campaigns on social media and that way you will also be able to generate leads from such giveaways.
Produce High-Quality Content
Content marketing is one of the most fruitful and everlasting acquisition strategies. It helps you establish your expertise in your industry. Getting customers to trust your brand is half the battle and content marketing helps you win that battle.
From a lead generation stance, content marketing is thrice as effective and less expensive than typical outbound marketing. Starting a blog for your business, sharing content on social media, and publishing white papers are all ways to establish yourself as an expert in your industry.
Focus on SEO
Only creating the content is not enough, you need to work on search engine optimization for your website so that the content gets featured on top of the list when any prospect searches something similar to your product by keyword. Another effective SEO tactic you can use to gain more customers is to optimize your site for mobile devices. Close to 50% of the internet traffic last year came from mobile devices.
Providing prospects with a user-friendly mobile experience can prove to be the best way in transforming customers, especially for social media platforms.
Add Referral Program:
Asking customers to refer their friends, and offering discounts or other benefits to both parties, is quite an inexpensive technique. You can offer your active users some discounts or other incentives to refer your product to their friends. Also, you can give some discount to these new customers to give an extra pop to use your product. Dropbox, Airbnb are some of the businesses giving very good referrals to their customers to increase their traffic and customer base. You can use tools like InviteReferrals on your website to create the referral program.
Create Optimized Landing Pages:
Optimization of your landing pages is one of the most potent strategies. Landing pages help direct customers to your product. Any worthy landing page doesn’t just offer valuable information but also includes a captivating call-to-action that eases conversions.
One can use some of the tools available in the market to test their website’s landing pages are fully optimized and error-free. Try pages with no navigation bars, try different fonts and elements. This is a repetitive process and you need to keep experimenting to know the win-win situation for you.
Keep good Email Engagement:
It is a very old but easiest tactic to acquire customers for a good customer engagement on your website. You can do it by sending personalized emails to your customers according to which stage of the customer acquisition process they are. For example, Amazon, Myntra always send their customers customized emails whether it is about reminding them about the item in their cart or discounts on the specific product or abandoned cart.
Customer Acquisition Model
The customer acquisition model automatically pick out the best potential leads that can be further converted into your active customers
The customer acquisition model always varies from one business to another because every business has a different definition of customer acquisition. For some only getting the leads for future marketing can be acquired while for some it cannot be an acquisition until the customer purchases any product from you.
The customer acquisition model has a process that includes:
- Identify quality potential customers and involve them earlier in the customer decision-making journey.
- Define priority for each customer segment according to size and your ability to win and get your target customer.
- Determine which individual or business is expressing their interest in or already using a similar product to yours.
- Identify preferred channels of communication according to the customer segment, and use them for further interactions. Automate targeted ads, blogs, and emails. So that these leads can turn into your prospects then eventually in the buyer of your product.
Benefits of Customer Acquisition
By the use of apt strategy and model, companies can grow and make a good place in the market. Using a targeted customer acquisition strategy helps businesses acquire customers in a cost-effective way. New companies or businesses with less established products especially need to place more focus on customer acquisition. As companies grow and start getting good ROI, they can shift their focus to customer retention. It is important to keep in mind that customer acquisition costs often are higher than customer retention costs and therefore require a rigorous analysis of the associated benefits.