How to Create a Successful Customer Acquisition Strategy
Attracting new customers is a fundamental skill that every business should be focused on mastering. Aside from promoting growth and capturing the attention of your ideal clients, an effective customer acquisition strategy can also help to keep your audience engaged and build brand loyalty over time. In the competitive environment of the digital business age, operating without a solid acquisition plan puts your company at a significant disadvantage.
Whether you’ve never spent much time thinking about customer acquisition, or you’re simply looking to give your organisation’s approach a refresh — the following tips will guide your business through every step of the process. From the initial awareness stage to long-term engagement beyond the point of purchase, you’ll learn exactly how to optimise your strategy for every stage of the customer acquisition funnel.
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What is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition refers to the process of converting potential customers to paying customers, guiding them to the point of purchase and fostering long-term engagement. It combines elements of marketing, sales and customer service to produce one holistic strategy that’s crucial to growth and success. The overall investment required to establish and sustain your customer acquisition strategy is known as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
Being capable of attracting new clients is essential to any company’s survival and success, but many businesses are still failing to put a comprehensive customer acquisition strategy in place. While acquiring new customers is an expensive process that can cost 5-7 times more than retaining existing ones, it’s a foundational step that will allow you to engage and keep hold of a loyal client base in the long run.
7 Essential Steps to a Successful Customer Acquisition Strategy
An effective customer acquisition strategy brings you closer to our target audience, providing deep insights into their needs and preferences that can be leveraged to stimulate business growth at every level. From identifying your ideal client to understanding each stage of their journey, a robust acquisition framework allows your business to provide the precise customer experience that your target audience is searching for.
While the benefits are clear and the basic principles are easy to grasp, knowing how to implement each component of a customer acquisition strategy can be difficult. If you’re not sure how to get started or have got stuck along the way, here are 7 key concepts that are crucial to the success of any customer acquisition strategy.1. Define Your Strategy
A customer acquisition strategy will not produce the benefits you’d like to see unless it is tailored to your specific industry. An acquisition strategy for a business in the financial sector might look completely different to what succeeds for a tech start-up, so it’s worth spending time thinking about your unique market and audience before getting started.
Consider the current performance of your business, the goals you are striving for and how a customer acquisition strategy might help in reaching them. Without a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve, the process of developing an acquisition strategy can become a lot more costly and convoluted than it needs to be.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
Whether you are refining your customer acquisition strategy or creating one for the first time, gaining a deep understanding of your target audience is a vital step. There are multiple measures that can be taken to identify your ideal client’s needs, from reading official reviews to creating and distributing a customer satisfaction survey.
These simple processes provide data-driven insights into your target audience’s preferences and pain points, allowing you to improve their experience while paving the way for future clients. If you have a fundamental understanding of your customer base but want to optimise your approach, customer personas can provide granular insights into demographics, buyer behaviour and your ideal client’s expectations.
3. Develop a Strong Value Proposition
A customer value proposition (CVP) is a statement or summary which outlines why customers should buy products or services from your business. The advent of online business has led to a significant increase in competition, which is why it’s more critical than ever to clearly communicate the reasons why customers should choose you. Around 90% of customers don’t decide on a brand before they start searching for services, so it’s important to keep your CVP as prominent and powerful as possible.
An effective CVP should highlight the overall value and benefits that customers can gain from your business, establishing a broad scope that emphasises a variety of features and solutions. Think about the factors that set your business apart from its competitors, and highlight this information on highly-visible channels like social media, marketing brochures and your website’s homepage.
4. Choose the Right Acquisition Channels
Once you have identified your audience and gained a detailed understanding of who your ideal customer is, you should have an idea of what channels are best for reaching them. From email marketing to social media and directly communicating through SMS, there are endless ways in which you can get your message across to customers in today’s digital world.
Actively encourage your audience to provide feedback on their preferred channels, and use digital analytics tools to figure out where your online customer engagement is at its highest. If your target audience is highly active on social media, for example, it may be worth investing in a dedicated online campaign or incorporating an influencer marketing strategy.
5. Leverage Product-Led Growth
Targeting your ideal customer through their preferred channels can be extremely effective, but it doesn’t mean that the value of your products or services should be neglected. A product-led approach is often the most effective customer acquisition strategy, allowing potential customers to experience the value of your services firsthand.
Offering free trials or ‘freemium’ versions of your service is a great way to get new customers in the door, offering limited-time access that’s designed to leave your audience wanting more. New research has shown that 30-day free trials are categorically the most effective, producing the highest customer acquisition (32%) and conversion rate (56%) of any time frame.
6. Focus on Engagement & Conversion
Once you have found your ideal customer and piqued their interest through relevant channels, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the acquisition process is complete. A comprehensive customer acquisition strategy accounts for everything from awareness to conversion and long-term engagement, ensuring that each customer provides more value than just a one-time purchase.
Offering exceptional customer service, targeted promotions and personalised communications are just a few ways in which you can elevate your customer engagement strategy. Gathering customer data and segmenting your audience based on demographics, behaviour or interests can make your marketing tactics feel more personal, increasing the chances that your new customers will stick around. In fact, studies have shown that approximately 86% of consumers are more loyal to brands who offer personalised experiences as part of their service.
7. Evaluate & Adjust Your Strategy
Very few plans work perfectly the first time around, so it’s important to regularly evaluate and review the effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategy. Create a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like specific conversion rate benchmarks or Return on Investment (ROI) targets, and measure any uplifts as your acquisition strategy progresses.
Digital analytics tools provide accurate insights into the success of individual channels, while giving you a clear picture of how your overall strategy is performing. From here, you can identify the key areas where improvement is needed and optimise your strategy accordingly. Simple A/B tests, experimentation with new channels and continuous refinement will give your acquisition strategy the best possible chance of success.
Elevate Your Customer Acquisition Strategy with Red Letter Days Corporate
Attracting and retaining valuable customers is never easy, but the implementation of a strong customer acquisition strategy is a crucial first step. As well as putting your products in front of the customers who are most likely to buy them, a thoughtful approach to customer acquisition can help you to foster a loyal audience and ensure that each client’s lifetime value is maximised.
If you’re ready to take your customer acquisition strategy to exciting new levels, get in touch with our expert team today to learn more about our industry-leading range of corporate gift experiences and vouchers. At Red Letter Days Corporate, we offer over 5,000 tailored experience gifts that leverage the power of memory-making — guaranteed to take your potential customers from prospects to lifelong supporters.