It’s always in style to acquire new clients. But let’s be honest: the strategies of customer acquisition change all the time.
Marketing blasts that work for everyone are a thing of the past. Today’s clients are smarter, more connected, and have higher standards than ever. They want to buy from brands that get them, give them real value, and share their values.
This article cuts through the clutter to give you useful, tried-and-true strategies for new customer acquisition in 2024. We’ll talk about what’s working now, what’s coming up, and how companies of all sizes can change to stay ahead of the competition.
Key Facts
- Acquiring customers is essential for the successful growth of any business. Financial gain is a bonus, and the goals of the enterprise include building and staying ahead of the competition.
- Customer acquisition channels are ways companies attract and turn potential customers into paying customers.
- Successful customer acquisition channels combine a lot of ways, like sales, marketing, etc, to lure customers in.
- A good customer acquisition strategy helps your business expand at a steady rate, and its balance will be maintained.
What is Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition is the act of involving new customers in your business. It encircles buyers’ journey from the point they entered the company to becoming a paying customer.
It is the act of looking for and convincing new customers to buy from your business repeatedly, measuredly. Examples of customer acquisition include providing exceptional customer service, email marketing, using a CRM, etc. Customer acquisition helps your company earn more business through the use of different teams’ power, channels, and tactics.
A good customer acquisition strategy includes attracting leads, developing them into a product that is ready to sell, turning them into customers, and retaining the leads. The total expense of these actions is called a customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Benefits of Customer Acquisition
Every business needs new customers for its growth and longevity. In this section, we will be discussing the benefits of customer acquisition.
#1. Increase in sales
The reason why businesses attract new customers is to increase sales. Businesses embark on doing advertisements and promotions because they are pursuing money. Remember that running a non-profit business is the same as managing a non-profit organization, which is not the reason a business was established.
Getting new customers increases a business’s revenue, boosting the profit. There is a huge tendency for new customers to make purchases. Also, there is a huge possibility that your margins will increase when there are new customers because they will make some purchases of the company products.
After our series of studies, we launched a digital marketing strategy targeting growing businesses. Under three months. We got thirty new clients. Each of our new customers registered with some money, increasing our income. Our company’s annual revenue increased in a year, demonstrating how customer acquisition helps in financial development.
#2. Increases Brand Awareness
One of the main reasons for advertising and acquiring new customers is to increase brand awareness. You will always try to expand your brand to other cities if it is known only in one place. The product you advertise and promote to new customers helps your brand awareness to grow. There are many advantages of having a strong brand awareness, which includes improved brand perception, gathering audience data, and an increase in sales and market shares. You need to increase your business through various marketing strategies for brand awareness to be successful.
Partnering with an influencer and having interesting content were the key components we used in our social media campaign. This campaign aimed to create awareness about our cutting-edge product. In a few months, many people were touched by this campaign., bringing in 25,000 new customers. Also, we had an increase of 300% in social media engagement, shares, likes, and comments, boosting our brand’s recognition.
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#3. It Helps Maintain a Business
Most times, businesses lose customers. They must have moved to a rival company, died, etc. A business needs new clients to save the business from losing revenue. If your business can not attract new customers, it will lose revenue ultimately. The number of your customers will decline if there is no attempt to draw in new customers and no measure is taken to maintain existing ones. Haunting for new customers will always help your organization to stay in the market. Your firm will also continue to be profitable and make sales even if other firms are folding. Because of this, many notable companies have endured for a very long time. Those that didn’t implement customer acquisition also encounter difficulties and setbacks.
#4. New Customers Help Business Grow
Having new customers helps your business to expand in so many ways. Customers contribute to the enlargement of your company through their purchases, recommendations, reviews, and comments. Without these, your company can stagnate or fold. Customers help you know how your company is doing, point out errors, and give you the necessary information from competing firms to boost your firm. Many businesses have started new products due to the suggestions given to them by their customers. Your company can create new items based on the suggestions the customers give so that new customers might be attracted to the company.
#5. Competitive Advantage
Having new clients increases revenue and builds evidence through beneficial examinations and reviews. More consumers and favorable reviews make your company more reliable and lure in new customers, which will boost your business. Having proof will help your company in the competitive market.
Customer Acquisition Channels
Businesses interact with their potential buyer persona through customer acquisition channels. Customer acquisition strategies can be enforced by using the following channels at every stage of the customer journey.
Common customer acquisition channels include:
- Website
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Digital Events
- Organic social media
- Recommendations
#1. Website
According to the research we conducted, many firms use their websites to get new customers, and this makes them one of the most popular ways to expand their clientele. We also found out that with websites, companies can accomplish a lot, ranging from giving new leads useful information about the brand.
Always boost your website’s SEQ because it will make it appear higher in search results. Almost 70% of customers look on Google before making significant purchases, so maintaining an up-to-date website will greatly benefit your business.
#2. Blogging
Blogging on your website is a great way of attracting new customers because, in your blogs, you talk about various subjects, show off your knowledge about the industry, and show yourself as an authority.
You can interact with your audience daily and educate them through your blogs. Also, there are options in which you can write, including writing by yourself. Assigning a member to write or hiring a remote writer.
#3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a lasting channel. This is encouraging for companies in every industry because of branded emails. Emails can serve as a tool to convert leads to customers and retain customers.
Furthermore, you can start by giving people options to opt in so that it will be easy for you to compile your email list. Provide free blog subscriptions, coupons, or something enticing in place of their email address. If you are selling to a customer physically, always request the customer’s email address at the point of sale.
#4. Digital Events
Digital events are virtual gatherings that businesses may use to widen their business. This can be online shows, webinars, or conferences.
Companies impart knowledge to their participants through virtual seminars called Webinars
Companies attend speeches and seminars through online conferences and interact with other firms.
Companies present their goods or services to potential clients in online trade shows.
Digital events are an excellent online customer acquisition strategy, enabling businesses to acquire many new customers simultaneously. They are also affordable.
Read Also: The Power of Trust in Marketing: How to Build Strong Connections With Customers
#5. Social Media
Over 3.7 billion people use social media regularly, and it has the potential to be a profitable marketing channel for companies. To reach new customers, you can pay for ads on any of the major social media platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Try determining the right social media platform for your company. B2B enterprises always do well on a platform like LinkedIn, while business that deals with younger targets, which will have a more appealing product, will do better on TikTok and Instagram.
#6. Recommendation/ Referral
Getting referrals from existing customers is a good strategy for the expansion of your business. You can encourage your customers to refer your business to others, especially satisfied customers, even though they can’t be forced to do so.
A strategy that has proven its importance is the referral program. You can provide prizes like cash and merchandise to encourage customers to spread the news about your brand, but you must offer a valuable trade for this to be successful.
There was a time when my company brought gifts for our customers and encouraged them to recommend our business to others. With this exercise, our company had about a 60% increase in new customers, and these customers bought things from the company, which increased our income, and the business grew and became more popular than before.
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Customer Acquisition Funnel
There is a need for a customer acquisition plan regardless of how you are selling your products, whether directly or not. The way to get customers can be broken down into phases, and they are commonly represented with a funnel
The path of a potential customer is represented visually by the customer acquisition funnel. This funnel has three stages, and marketers and entrepreneurs always refer to this funnel
The stages are:
#1. Awareness
Your main objective at this point is to expand target audience awareness and lead generation. Your targets might be a sizeable, diverse audience that might be interested by the name or goods of your business, but they might be considering buying. Always make use of hashtags when promoting your products on social platforms.
#2. Consideration
Any customer that moves from the top of the funnel to the middle probably has an intention to buy things from you. They might have followed your brand on social media platforms. It is now your responsibility to convince them to be your customer.
#3. Purchase
This is the last stage a potential customer undergoes before becoming a customer. Usually, they do things that show that they are ready to buy things from your brand, such as registering for a free trial. Companies do provide incentives like discount codes to potential customers who are ready to make a purchase.
Read also: Brand Affinity Hacks: Get Customers Fiercely Loyal to Your Company
Customer Acquisition Strategy
A customer acquisition strategy a plan companies employ to draw in new customers. It includes all teams, especially sales and marketing departments. It also involves methods and platforms teams will employ to interact with potential customers and spread their message.
A customer acquisition strategy locates, draws in, communicates with, and closes potential customers. It is necessary to engage with your potential customers regularly across many channels.
Some Customer Acquisition Strategies
The amount you invested in marketing strategies does not guarantee a huge rate of return you will get. Therefore, you need to choose the right strategy that will help you develop a successful marketing plan
Let’s talk about the different customer acquisition strategies
- Advertise with Pay-Per-Click
- Collaborate with influencers
- Conduct email marketing campaigns
- Start a referral program
- Invest in traditional advertising
#1. Advertise with Pay-Pay-Click
You can get new customers through online advertising, which is the most used strategy. A lot of e-commerce brands use Facebook, Google, and other channels because they offer a lot of measurement tools that will allow you to optimize your ads.
The largest sources of sponsored traffic for online advertising are Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
However, You need to know your audience and the best platform to reach them before purchasing advertisements on social media because you can buy advertisements on many social media platforms.
Every paid advertisement platform is unique. These social media platforms use cost per thousand impressions to charge you for user impressions and times your ads were seen.
Additionally, they allow you to choose your targeted audience based on likes and demographics. You can focus on prospective customers and reach them through these sponsored advertisements because of the targeting features given by the internet.
Advantages:
- Quick growth: One of the quickest ways to grow your business rapidly is by paying for advertisements. Your business will get a lot of exposure, and with the right strategy, you will need to increase your budget to acquire new customers.
- Focusing abilities: One of the benefits of paid ads is that you can choose who sees them. Using interest targeting, Facebook ads allow you to focus on a specific audience based on user activity.
Disadvantage
- Costly: There is a discussion about the yearly rise in the price of CPM on popular social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, etc. According to Forbes, Facebook ads have increased by 90%, and TikTok’s price increased by 92%.
Read also: 15 Ways to Use Technology to Improve Customer Engagement
#2. Collaborate with Influencers
One of the fastest ways of getting your brand or product upfront to the public is by partnering with an influencer with online followers to promote the product or brand for you.
Influencers have become popular through Instagram, YouTube, Bloggers, TikTok, etc, and it has become a popular form of advertising online.
For influencer marketing to boost your product or brand, you need to get the right influencer with the right audience. The difficulty you can have is finding the influencer with the right followers that will have interest in your brand and also for the influencer to be able to create engaging content that will attract audiences to your brand.
Advantages
- Brand awareness: Working with an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers is enough to attract people into your customer acquisition Funnel through brand awareness. You are paying not only for the audience in influencer marketing but also for the wider exposure of your product.
- Niche targeting: An influencer with small but more dedicated followers can give your business with niche products access to an important online audience, and it is less expensive to work with them. Also, your product will have better engagement metrics, which will lead to a higher acquisition of customers.
Disadvantages
- Tracking ROI: One of the drawbacks of collaborating with influencers is that most social media platforms do not track sponsorship well. You can monitor your affiliate campaigns from within the Shopify admin and Shopify Collabs. Although some paid advertising platforms allow you to track viewers, influencers’ posts can be tracked through UTM links, promo codes, and other inventive methods. You are at risk of not knowing if the influencer’s sponsorship yielded results.
- Payments in advance: Through a variety of channels, you can see influencers that will promote your brand. Most of the time, influencers do ask for upfront payment before they will work for you.
Read also: What Is a Lifestyle PR and How Does It Work in 2024
#3. Conduct Email Marketing Campaigns
The first step to customer acquisition is lead generation. Lead generation involves gathering data from potential customers so that you may educate them with ads in the hopes that they will become converted. Additionally, most new visitors generally won’t buy anything at a spot.
Email marketing is known for generating income for firms; therefore, collecting email addresses is known as one of the top lead-generation investments for client acquisition.
Many other strategies to grow your email list include giving your new subscribers a welcome discount on your website.
A company named 100% Pure connects with subscribers and gets emails through a pop-up on their website. The brand stated that email marketing generates 20%of their sales.
You can use email marketing platforms like Klaviyo to execute email marketing and set up automated emails to deliver personalized messages after creating your email list. You may change your leads into customers by using behavioral data to trigger and tailor the emails.
Advantages
Ongoing earning: Marketing to customers for a long period and extending the lifetime value of each customer is one of the advantages of creating an email list. You can also configure email automation to keep in touch with customers after the emails have been gathered.
Customer data: An email list can assist you in finding new potential customers in addition to nurturing existing ones by using “Lookalike audiences.” Facebook and Google offer a characteristic known as “lookalike audiences,” which enables marketers to upload CSV files containing the email addresses they have gathered.
Disadvantages:
Delivery charges: Every day, it is getting harder for marketers to get their emails to reach people’s inboxes because spam filters are getting more sophisticated. You can increase the rate by which your campaigns are delivered by personalizing your emails and keeping to best practices for email design.
Poor-quality electronic mail: Quality always wins, even though a large email seems ideal. It is always critical to examine the rate of conversion from each email source. Always purging your unengaged list or list of people who last read an email from you a while ago is an approach that lowers the cost of your email marketing.
#4. Begin a Referral Program
A referral from a friend is a powerful thing. Because of the trust among peers, people do listen to friends who recommend new brands or products.
A business owner must encourage his devoted customers to refer people to the brand to get new customers. Also, you need to implement a referral program that will pay your existing customers anytime they bring a new customer.
Some apps like Smile.io, LoyaltyLion, and ReferralCandy teach how you can motivate your existing customers to recommend friends through the use of marketing letters also the provision of discounts for both customers.
For example, through Skin O2’s referral program, customers are encouraged to refer friends, and they will obtain coupons.
Because of the success of the word-of-mouth recommendations, implementing a referral program is a good way of bringing in customers.
#5. Invest in Traditional Advertising
According to Harvard Business Review, consumer-facing companies are leading in the shift into traditional advertising, predicting an 11.7% increase in spending over the next 12 months.
It is easier for customers to reject or use ad blockers to stay off digital marketing campaigns because display advertising is now common. Using traditional media to reach new, focused audiences is a smart strategy if you change your customer acquisition channels. This includes the use of printed fliers, billboards, and TV commercials.
Technology has reduced expenses and increased the accessibility of traditional advertising strategies for small businesses. Recently, you can deliver postcards to your leads or customers using Touchcard.
For instance, there was a day I was going to work and bumped into one of my colleagues at the office. We were now working together when a woman walked up to us and gave us a flier about a grand opening of a photo studio, and they are giving some discounts for any photoshoot taken on that day.
Conclusion
One of the most difficult tasks for marketers is getting new clients. But it is important for the promotion and sustaining of the company. To obtain an advantage, businesses always require well-planned customer acquisition strategies to reach and convert targeted audiences. We hope that this guide has shed light on the essential elements of developing and implementing a customer acquisition that will yield results for your company.
Frequently Asked Questions on Customer Acquisition
What are the types of customer acquisition?
Organic, paid, and referral are the main types of customer acquisition. Organic entails non-paid methods like social media marketing and SEO. Paid includes social media ads, PPC, and display ads. Referral entails influencers and word-of-mouth marketing the attract new customers.
What is an example of customer acquisition?
The act of using many marketing tools and strategies to draw in customers and make them a paying customer is an example of customer acquisition. This may involve giving discounts, running promotions, running ads, etc
What is the difference between customer acquisition and customer retention?
Customer acquisition is the act of drawing in potential customers and converting them into paying customers while customer retention is things that happen after getting the customers. Having a high retention rate will make your customers stay for a long time.
What is Customer Acquisition Cost(C.A.C.)
Customer acquisition cost is the price sustained when bringing in a new customer. CAC can also be defined as the total amount needed for the bringing in of a new customer. Also, customer acquisition cost is an important business metric that is mostly used with customer lifetime value (LTV) for the quantification of value created by the new customer
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