What is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition is a process to induce visitors to become one of your customers. You need to figure out which inbound strategies (content marketing, webinars, social media marketing, etc.) fit best for your target audience, then constitute an implementation plan accordingly.
Customer acquisition process depends on the strategies containing methodologies to execute customer inquiries. Example strategies may be given as email list building, customer referrals, and so on.
Customer acquisition is a process to induce visitors to become one of your customers. Acquisition techniques change in accordance with technological developments. There must always be a room for optimization and upgrading the ways of marketing practices to stay in the competition and get a high acquisition rate.
Customer Acquisition vs. Customer Retention
The difference is basically that customer retention aims at nurturing the relationship with current customers, whereas customer acquisition has the goal of gaining new customers.
Obviously, you cannot run a business without having new customers; this is why customer acquisition process is a very monumental challenge to handle with in the first place.
As the number of customers begins to increase, raising your brand awareness, producing dedicated help, and managing loyalty programs become very vital for substantial growth and maintaining a competitive edge.
The difference is basically that customer retention aims at nurturing the relationship with current customers, whereas customer acquisition has the goal of gaining new customers.
There is no reason to claim that one of them is more important than the other one. The vitality of each depends on the timing!
When you first established your business, customer acquisition is necessary to build a customer base. Once enough number of customers are obtained, customer retention becomes incredibly fundamental to keep increasing revenue.
Hence, on average, 80% of a company’s income comes from 20% of its existing customers.
16 Steps for Customer Acquisition Process
You need to answer a few questions before managing the acquisition process;
- Are my products ready for all target market?
- Would customers acquire a pleasant experience from my online store?
- Is my server for online store ready to get high traffic?
- Is my support team qualified enough to respond to customer inquiries?
If you can answer all questions above as ‘yes,’ let’s begin our profound journey of obtaining and keeping new customers!
I know, customer acquisition process is not an easy job, but you can follow the below steps and build up an effective acquisition plan to attract your prospective customers;
1. Define Your Business Strategy
Start with defining a business strategy after making a SWOT analysis for your customer acquisition process. Those strategies can be maximizing sales, increasing brand awareness, obtaining loyal customers, and so on.
Then, stick to your strategy while focusing on strengths and improving weaknesses to increase the efficiency of your efforts during the process.
2. Pre-estimate Customer Acquisition Cost
Estimate the total cost that you are willing to bear to implement the process before initiating your efforts. Then, set expectations for return on investment according to your customer acquisition budget.
Usually, cost of customer acquisition (CAC) determines how much value a customer will bring to your business. Thus, do not forget that this cost is vital to define customer value, and the ultimate aim is to gain a high ROI.
What is customer acquisition cost (CAC)?
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) calculation is as;
(Marketing Costs + Sales Costs + Salary Expense) / (Number of New Customers)
3. Create Your Target Market
Define potential or targeted customers. Figure out who they are, how to gain them, how you can communicate with them, and how you will market your products to them. Predefining those customers will help you in getting the competition.
4. Decide on Right Acquisition Channel
Find ways to contact your target customers. Do researches, conduct surveys, collect email addresses, and use analytical tools to find the right customers for your products.
After that, segment them according to their wants, needs, and behaviors. Then, reach through various channels according to the characteristics of each segment.
5. Hire Trained and Talented Staff
Hire dedicated and hardworking staff. Make sure they can manage the process, understand the customer needs, and take significant responsibilities.
Also, ensure your support team can tackle any unforeseen circumstance and to remain calm against customer complaints.
6. Build Optimizable Web Pages
Have landing pages directing users to buy your product or service, when it comes to customer acquisition. Create pages that are well-designed and contain calls-to-action.
Regularly A/B test to your pages to improve them. Increase page speed if necessary. Make sure your pages are mobile-responsive and user-friendly. Lastly, customize your pages according to audience expectations.
7. Use Content Marketing to Acquire Customers
Content marketing is an adequate method for all types of businesses aiming at customer acquisition. Therefore, generate relevant, unique, and easily sharable content which has the power to grab the attention of your audience and send them to your website.
Here are some of the most popular types of content that are really effective in taking interest; blog posts, ebooks, guides, and video content.
8. Manage Social Media Marketing
Boost your brand awareness, develop a company personality, and enable readers to share content through social media marketing.
Social media carries the characteristics of virality, at which your followers help you advertise; so, create funny, attractive, exciting, and trendy social media campaigns.
9. Practice Search Engine Optimization
Practice SEO and create contents that show up on the first page of search engine results and makes searches want to click on your webpage.
This method does not only drive traffic to your website but also offers you an opportunity to convert those visitors into leads.
10. Attain Customers with Email Marketing
Email marketing is not only effective in promoting high-quality content, informing subscribers about products, discounts, and events but also a great way to simply communicate with your audience to create brand value.
Therefore, build an email list and convert your subscribers into customers with email marketing campaigns.
Don't know how to find emails in the first place? Find out how in our article, Top 15 Email Finder Tools: Pros and Cons + Reviews 2020 .
11. Create Your Product Demand
Inform people about your brand, be with them throughout the purchase activities, present value to show how much you care for them, and acquaint them with the information of how effectively your product meets their demands.
Otherwise, you would have significant challenges in acquiring new customers, especially if your company is a startup or a small brand.
12. Acquire New Customers with Popups
Convert visitors into leads with Popupsmart, no code popup builder’s advanced targeting options and conversion-ready pop-ups. Determine your conversion goals, create a high converting pop-up, then present it on your website to give the best user experience.
Tendering something valuable is the way of obtaining leads and acquiring new customers. Email popups are one of the best practices to acquire new customers by collecting leads for email marketing efforts.
Introducing a new product, showing a premium service, giving customized discounts, or presenting a beneficial e-book with pop-ups may help you to attract the attention of visitors with irresistible offers that are differentiated from your competitors.
13. Build a Sustainable Relationship With Customers
Build a comprehensive relationship with your customers to increase your revenue since loyal customers tend to always buy from the same business.
Also, it is very likely that they will recommend you to their inner circle which brings you more visitors and leads to acquiring new customers thanks to your healthy relationship with the existing customers.
14. Ask for Customer Stories
Rather than boasting your own company via social media or paid advertisements, let your customers do it for you. Ask them to share how they discovered your business, why they love your brand, and what they favor in your company characteristics.
You will acquire more customers with this method because people tend to become a customer of a brand if they see there are happy customers engaged with this brand beforehand.
15. Run a Referral Program
Running a referral program offering irresistible incentives would bring you new customers for sure. Thus, create a structured program and motivate your customers with incentives like credit, physical gifts, or monetary rewards.
Always provide value first, ask for something later. Give them a reason to be a direct referral for you.
16. Show Testimonials
Persuasive sales messages mostly come from your current satisfied customers, not from your digital marketing efforts. Your business will be perceived as credible in the eyes of prospects if they expose to social influence before buying behavior.
Therefore, show your testimonials on your website, demonstrate how you care for your customers, give a valued reason to visitors for purchasing from you.
Now we have created some insights about customer acquisition process. Additionally, to learn more about customer retention, I highly recommend you to visit our related article;
Customer Acquisition Process Infographic
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I hope this recent information related to customer acquisition strategies would guide you in the way of obtaining new customers. If you have any questions or recommendations related to the topic, please do not hesitate to contact me via comments!
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