Build a customer acquisition strategy
What is the customer acquisition strategy?
Customer acquisition is the process of getting new customers. It relies on knowing the customer well enough to understand how to capture his attention, engage with the brand, give the brand a way to contact them and then become a customer.
It is therefore a process, a path taken by the customer, as well as a marketing strategy that consists of moving the customer from one stage to the next. Depending on your business, you'll need to produce a variety of content to attract customers online, and new content on a regular basis to ensure that the search engine crawls your website.
Content is essential to showcase your products or your service, mention the latest news or give your customers tips on how to use your products and your service. But producing new content on a regular basis has a cost: writing web pages, managing online social networks or producing infographic or video content takes time and cost money.
In short, customer acquisition has a cost, and the challenge for you as a business is to keep this cost as low as possible.
Maintain your customer acquisition cost or CAC as low as possible
They’re are different ways to reduce your customer acquisition cost, but to sum up, it depends on your marketing strategy.
A customer acquisition strategy based on your persona and the channels
First of all, to keep your CAC down, you need to draft your strategy – and content strategy as well. Who are you targeting? What is your target's path before buying? Where do they get their information, on which channel? Do they read certain magazines?
Do they watch television? What websites do they visit online? By answering these first questions, you begin to understand better your strategy and the media on which you will have to maintain your exposure so that you can acquire the future customer.
Let's talk more specifically about the web strategy: if you know that your customers will make online researches before choosing you or your competitor, you know that you will have to take care of your website for the Google channel. You will also be interested in key KPIs, such as PPC or LTV, i.e. Pay per click or lifetime value. Indeed, by knowing how much it will cost to make the audience click on your website, you start to know how much he/she"costs" to your business, how much you pay.
But the LTV is also a crucial indicator. Some businesses pay a lot of money for their customer acquisition, but their business model is built on the longevity of their customers, which allows them to quickly recover their acquisition cost.
All this marketing cost are really important for your business.
The CAC is a linked to high value delivered
The CAC is linked to the value. The more the futurecustomer feels the high value of your products, the easier it will be to convert them and to develop a potential. If it is easy to convert, it will obviously take less time and therefore less money.
By proving the high value of your products or a service, you create an irrepressible desire to buy but also a shortening of the conversion funnel. Some costly steps to convert are avoided and everyone wins! Creating value can be done in many ways and through several channels, but value is often linked to societal trends. We think of local products, short circuits, products made without animal abuse, sustainability, a great service.
The point is that customer must like your brand and your company more than your competitors. By structuring a business model around value and allowing this value to be communicated through different channels, the brand allows customers to notice that the value exists and creates a snowball effect for its business.
That’s Starbucks’ strategies : they offers high quality product in addition to a strong territorial presence. The quality of its products and the diversity of options in their range has quickly created a virality in the development of their business. But the value can also be boost by marketing : the marketing team can provide the best way to create value by enhancing brand image for example. A company can sell the best products ever and suffer from a poor image that will impact sales.
This image is built from the start of the company, through the various communication channels, whether by email or in ads. In the way of communicating by email, it is easy to decide to address the audience in a certain way so that they can understand the value of the company. In ads, audiences will also be able to understand what the brand message is.
How your CAC can improve your sales
Quite naturally, the customer acquisition cost also improves the sales. The lower the cost, themore customers you can get by reducing your marketing expenses. The strategy then consists in retaining this newly acquired customers to further reduce the acquisition costs.
But the loyalty is expressed by the buybacks, and thus an increase of sales. The cost of acquisition therefore directly impacts the sales.
Plus you can reinvest your company’s savings in new marketing channel that will still play in your favor.
Google can help your with customer acquisition
Acquiring new customers with all the Google tools
Your company is familiar with Google Analytics, which helps your business to analyze who comes to your site, on which pages, how long they spend on your website and if they buy. Google analytics can help you in your acquisition, by allowing you to access a report that will tell you exactly from which channels your customers come from.
By knowing if your visitors are coming from your emails, your social networks or from a website that talks about you, your company will be able to spend more money in this media/channel and acquire more qualified customers!
Such information will really help your and your team to make the right decisions. If you find out that Google ads are your best acquisition channel, you will be able to boost this !
Google analytics and Google ads can be linked so that it can help you to see your ads’ KPI in Google analytics. The best way to analyze your performance is to keep an eye on your Google ads dashboard though.
On Google search console, you will have a glance on your online SEO performance. You absolutely need Google search console to understand how your brand acquire new customers, how the content lead to sales. You got it, Search console helps for the organic acquisition strategy but also show which products are the most liked online.
With this organic KPI you can then launch paid campaigns on best sellers to increase sales and still reduce the CAC. By registering your website with Google tag manager and allowing the tool to understand how audiences click on your site's CTAs (call to action), you will also add a few more elements to your different strategies and reduce your CAC.
Customer lifetime value and CAC
We talked about lifetime value previously. This is the total income that can be expected from a typical customer throughout their customer lifetime. It is an indicator that is sometimes difficult to compute, because it will be more meaningful once the business has been in existence for a few years.
However, in some businesses, it is easy to identify 20 y.o customers that will then evolve and develop their purchases according to their personal evolution, from their 20s to their 30s.
For example, the customer of a furniture store will purchase for his student accommodation, then he will make new purchases for his first apartment, etc.
Customer support has a crucial role to play in influencing the LTV. Very clearly, the customer will not spontaneously choose the brand at each stage of his life, but the brand must recall him. Customer support, by providing answers and information to the marketing teams about the persona, makes it possible to launch the right communications at the right time. It also helps to nurture the relationship with the customer to create brand preference and increase LTV.
Combine marketing strategies to enhance the potential
Live shopping and Google strategies both together
Live shopping is a channel that interests more and more the internet audience. They are considering this as a new media allowing them live new experiences with brands, so they’re starting to gather some information about it. Every week, more and more customers type "live shopping" into the search engine. In order to get more clicks, here's a great tip: launch Google Ads campaigns (paid campaigns) by including the keyword "live shopping" in your title.
Thus, you will trigger more clicks and interest for your brand! Plus, advertising is always a good idea to have clear insight of what the audience wants: you have access to impression, paid clics, querys, and it will give you a better idea of the copyrights that converts.
Better advertising is also a tip to help to reduce your customer acquisition cost !
Human and automation
Repetitive and uninteresting tasks take time and prevent you from closing new sales. To acquire new customers, it is mandatory to automate the creation of content and missions with no interest but which must be carried out all the same.
For example, emails sent automatically can be easily supported by Hubspot, Mailchimp or even Klaviyo. Customer service can be optimized with platforms like Gorgias. The presentation of interactive content can be created automatically via live shopping replays offered by Live Me Up. With a strong strategy and some tips, your best CAC is on its way !