Customer Acquisition Strategies to gain new customers
Driving customers in through acquisition strategies
By definition ‘Customer Acquisition’ refers to the process of finding and securing new customers for the business. It involves all the measures a company adopts to acquire or gain new customers/clients, existing and new.
Creating a new sales potential in a highly competitive market requires a systematic and more strategic approach. It is more challenging and more expensive to acquire new customers compared to retaining existing ones. Therefore companies must adopt customer acquisition strategies.
What is the need for Customer Acquisition?
Isn’t it true that you can’t run a business without customers? As a result, the goal of customer acquisition is to acquire new customers to run your business. Though customer retention is different from acquisition, retention is to keep already existing customers. With customer acquisition and retention, the profit of your business can improve drastically.
Create a customer acquisition strategy
- Identify answers to the following questions
Who are your customers?
Where are they located?
How you can reach them?
A customer can be an individual( Private) or a legal representative (Company/business) who buys a product or service and can be existing or potentially available in the markets. Segment your customers by size, profit margin, sales, and other factors like behavioural( brand loyalty, usage rates, Benefits sought, occasion, readiness to buy), geographic(Region, country, climate, population), demographic (age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, occupation, income, family size)and psychographics ( lifestyle, personality, values, interest) based on your business objectives. After segmenting your customers choose the appropriate marketing tools to attract them and build an action plan to reach them.
2. Set your Goals
Once you identify your customers you can define your goals and objectives to make a plan for your customer acquisition and work in that direction.
To understand how your customer acquisition plan is working measure it through customer acquisition metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value(CLV), Monthly Recurring Revenue(MRR), Customer Acquisition Costs(CAC), CPA(Cost Per Acquisition) and churn rate(proportion of customers who leave during a given time)
3. Identify Customer acquisition channels
A customer acquisition channel is where your target customer meets your brand for the first time. It could be through social media, organic search, or paid ad services. Customer Acquisition channels are the medium through which you bring in new customers.
Points to consider while identifying the right channel:
· Use your ideal customer profiles as a reference to identify the right channels with the highest probability of successful customer acquisition and conversion.
· Use the knowledge about the customer base and usage patterns. If your target audience is under the age of 20, for example, targeting them on Instagram rather than Facebook is a good idea.
Some of the channels are
· YouTube
· SEO
· Paid Social
· Referrals
After identifying the channel create a unique strategy for each channel. It will be wise to choose to appropriate channel instead of hitting all the channels which can affect your customer acquisition strategy.
4. Create a market strategy for each channel
when creating a marketing strategy for the channel of your choice focus on the kind of content your target customers interacts with. For example, if you choose Instagram as a channel then create visually attractive posts and short videos.
Perform a market analysis to identify what your competitors post on different channels and also be clear with what your KPIs indicate. Research extensively to identify the suitable strategy for each channel you choose to get the best customer acquisition results.
The most Popular acquisition channels used by online merchants are listed below:
a) Free Trials: Allows new customers to try your products with minimal or no risk
b) Affiliate Networks: Partners that drive traffic to your website
c) Display Advertising: Ads are displayed at different places across the website.
d) Email Marketing: Send emails to a list of customers to entice them to sign up or visit the website or buy products.
Easy to implement, can be automated, increases brand awareness, easy to measure performance
e) Social Media: Social networks, target customers based on their interests or engagement with Q&As and monitor with a set of keywords searched. Social media offers high conversion with lower costs and volume can be smaller compared to other channels.
Organics Social Posts, Facebook ads, Instagram ads
f) Search Advertising: Paid search and natural search based on certain keywords. Natural search requires high-quality content and Search Engine Optimization(SEO). Paid search can lead to good results when it is rightly done but the popular keywords can be expensive and if you do not optimize keywords properly, you end up spending more with low conversion.
Drives quality traffic to the website, pay less for Google ads, convert more leads, more clicks than PPC
g) Customer Referrals: This can be a very profitable channel and you can encourage customer referrals by rewarding them with discounts, virtual currency, free services or virtual goods depending on the type of business you do. This can lead to very high-quality traffic at the lowest cost.
h) Campaigns and Promotions: These are key channels. With this channel; you can target specific customers and you may include free trials, discounts and any other benefits for specific pricing.
Some of the common campaigns and promotions are given below:
i) Free trails: This can be a campaign/promotional strategy used as an acquisition channel as mentioned above. along with free trials, you can also offer long trial periods to attract customers.
ii) Discounts: Price break from the list price and you can use it for a certain period or keep it as an ongoing offer.
iii) Community Events: This can bring a large number of new customers along with existing ones if you pair it well with unique content and offers. Typically you can target community-focused products in this approach for example community events, gaming and virtual world or social networks
iv) Additional Content: Works well with events or incentives to make an additional purchase. It is a promotion done by offering unique goods or goods with extended offers to entice the customers to buy or sign up or take free trails
v) Bundles: In this type of promotion, you will offer access to multiple products for a lower or nominal fee. This can be a hit if the customer is looking forward to buying multiple products from the same merchant or complementary products offered with other merchants' partnered companies.
Paid Advertising: Pay-Per-Click (PPC), remarkable strategy, Google dynamic search ads, Facebook ads, chatbots for converstation and ads automation
Summary
Customer Acquisition is a broad topic that covers every area of online business and each company should define its unique Customer Acquisition strategy based on the products, offerings, acquisition channels, promotions, and even payment methods to run a successful business. A good customer acquisition strategy can bring growth and at the same time cripple the business if it is not done rightly. So what are you waiting for? build your unique Customer Acquisition Strategy and grow your business.
Dr Nirupama M P , PhD
