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An exhaustive guide to customer acquisition strategy (with 13 examples)

Anyone who's lived in the high desert knows that weeds are no joke out here. Even though I'm a die-hard DIYer, I recently succumbed to hiring a neighborhood kid—I'll call him Dave—to rid my backyard of them. 

When Dave posted flyers all over the neighborhood at the start of spring, I took the opportunity. The negotiable rate, mission to save for college, and cheery headshot complete with gardening tools and disposable surgical mask promised this would be safe, quality work for a good cause—all at value pricing.

What this industrious adolescent understood intuitively is the core of good business: a strong customer acquisition strategy that identifies a market, an opportunity, and a product tailored to both. Here's how to take a page from Dave's book and build an effective game plan for bringing in a sustainable stream of customers.

Table of contents:

What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of gaining prospective customers, nurturing them into leads, and then converting them into buyers. This flow, known as the customer acquisition funnel, has five phases: awareness , interest , consideration , conversion , and retention . 

Benefits of building a strong customer acquisition strategy

Customer acquisition doesn't just happen on its own—the "if you build it, they will come" approach only worked in Field of Dreams because Kevin Costner had the help of baseball-playing ghosts. (I haven't seen this movie in over a decade, so don't fact-check me.) 

In the real world, you need to proactively bring in leads. This kind of intention can bring benefits like:

Improved ROI: Targeted campaigns for customer acquisition allow you to focus on the campaigns, markets, and channels with the highest value and conversion rates. 

Resource optimization: A defined strategy allows you to budget resources for predetermined tasks and campaigns. Over time, you'll see which acquisition channels are the most effective, allowing you to cut resources from the ones that aren't working.

Measurable progress: Because customer acquisition sets clear values on leads and conversions by corresponding directly to sales information, you can readily put real dollar amounts on successes and failures.

Visibility: As you nurture leads through the acquisition process, you can see where you're losing them in real time.

Sustainable growth: As you identify the acquisition strategies that work best, you can replicate them across products to steadily increase ROI.

Lower churn rates: Once you effectively and systematically acquire customers, you can perfect retention efforts. This allows you to proactively turn one-time customers into return customers—not just hope it happens on its own.

Visibility: The data you gain from monitoring customer acquisition campaigns shows you a massive amount of detail about your market and customers' buying behaviors.

What is customer acquisition marketing?

Customer acquisition marketing refers to marketing tactics that are intentionally geared toward converting current leads into customers. This differs from other forms of marketing because it involves strategically appealing to targeted potential customers with the end goal of progressing them through a predetermined acquisition funnel.

What is the customer acquisition funnel?

The customer acquisition funnel refers to the general set of phases a potential buyer progresses through, from first impression through conversion. Another way of visualizing the CX lifecycle, this customer journey framework caters more to the business perspective of proactive lead targeting. 

If you picture an actual funnel, those phases can be broken down into five milestones, going from the wide opening down to the skinny spout:

Awareness: The first phase in customer acquisition is building awareness for your brand, product, or service. This can be done through traditional marketing and publicity campaigns to build a preliminary pool of potential leads.

Interest: Not everyone who knows about your offering will find it relevant or be in a position to think about buying it. Those who do find it relevant to their needs or desires will become interested, making them leads.

Consideration: Leads with an interest in your offering who are theoretically ready and able to buy then move into the consideration phase. There'll be comparatively fewer leads here than at the start of the funnel, but at this point, they're nearly ready to purchase.

Conversion: Those who follow through with the purchase convert from leads into customers. This is obviously the primary goal, but it's still not the ideal end of their journey.

Retention: Satisfied buyers who stay interested in your products or services can then be retained so they continue buying from you. 

Here's what that funnel looks like for Dave and his yard services:

Dave builds awareness for his services by distributing flyers around a neighborhood primarily made up of middle-income homeowners.

By targeting homeowners with yards as the temperatures rise along with the grass and weeds, Dave generates interest .

As the weeds continue growing, the days get longer, and the mosquitoes start multiplying, interested leads start considering Dave's yard services.

Leads who get a quote convert when they pay Dave to come clean up their yards.

Dave retains customers when they see their weeds coming back during monsoon season when it's 101 degrees.

How to choose your customer acquisition channels

To acquire new customers, you need to be able to reach them on the right channels. This helps you define your market, refine your outreach strategies, and meet potential customers where they are. 

Those channels can be broken down into two main types.

Digital channels: These will probably apply to just about every major business, while digital-first offerings like SaaS or cloud products may exclusively operate here. Common examples of these channels include:

Social media

Influencers

Newsletters

Pay-per-click (PPC)

Traditional channels: While these can seem most applicable to physical or geographically-specific offerings like automobiles or yard services, many digital products can still gain a lot of traction from non-digital channels like:

Pop-up shops

Trade shows

Guerilla marketing

Physical advertising

Partnerships

How do you know which ones are right for you and your potential customers? Start by following these four steps.

1. Audit your current channels

As someone wise (probably) once said, you can't know where you're going until you see where you're standing. In this case, that means taking stock of all your current channels.

Once you've listed your channels, compile performance metrics, so you can evaluate how active you are on these channels and how successful your efforts have been. Without getting too granular, here are some common metrics you can start with:

Conversions and conversion rates

Clicks and click-through rates

Impressions

Time on page/site

Operational expenses

Obviously, the metrics you use will vary widely by channel. The main thing is to get a holistic view of your current acquisition channels, so you can see where your resources are and aren't going.

2. Define your market

Knowing how to reach your market means first knowing who's part of it. Customer demographics and buying habits can have a huge influence on where they spend their time and attention, which in turn can tell you where they're likely to interact with businesses and find products. 

Again, this is a very nuanced step in the process that can take a lot of time and involve multiple teams. Depending on where your product is in the sales process, your marketing, sales, and product teams may have already done much of this work. These processes can help you define your market:

Find public demographic data from government agencies.

Like other steps in this process, this is a cross-functional (and potentially time-consuming) one. But it's well worth it to know everything you can about who you're trying to reach.

3. Identify which channels they use

It's probably not a great strategy to just start blasting your Twitter/X feed with promotional content because it's the only social media outlet you use. Rather than risk shouting into the void, you should be sure that there are real, engaged customers on the other end of it.

This is where your research in the last step comes into play. For example, a SaaS company may find that the busy, mid-career executive decision-makers they market to get recommendations from industry leaders on LinkedIn or conference panels. Meanwhile, a provider of trendy, nontoxic kitchenware should know that the stay-at-home middle-income parents they sell to get a lot of their cooking tips from influencers on TikTok and YouTube.

Data about which channels your potential customers use should come from market research, but here are some general tips on how you can find out which ones are important for reaching them:

Monitor where your competitors dedicate social media, advertising, and promotional resources.

Conduct customer surveys.

Search relevant hashtags across social media outlets.

Explore your own website analytics to see which sources drive your traffic.

Read through Reddit threads related to your industry or competitors to see which channels they commonly mention.

Use keyword research to see which channels are brought up alongside search terms that are relevant to your product.

Look up Google Trends data on key terms related to your product and industry to see what potential customers are interested in.

Remember that trends in channel usage can change quickly. Reports, anecdotal experience, and campaigns that are just a few years old could be completely out of date today. If you can identify trends in your market's behavior and plan around them before your competitors catch on, you could create a major competitive advantage. 

4. Decide which channels are viable for you

Once you know who your market is and which channels they actively look to for product inspiration, you can combine each of the three steps above to find out how to adjust your efforts. Ideally, your Venn diagram will show that your market's channels overlap with many of yours. Even if it doesn't, the information should be illuminating about where you should look to grow your presence.

Keep in mind that this data doesn't have to be 100% prescriptive. For example, it may not make sense for a virtual legal services upstart to try to compete with giant law firms' localized network advertising campaigns since they have no name recognition or physical offices. Meanwhile, a growing funeral services provider might find that their competitors aren't active on Instagram, but creating tastefully funny Reels aligns with their unique angle of bringing levity to their market of older millennials with aging parents.

Deciding on channels is one part data, one part art. Your research from the previous steps should give you a real idea of what the norm is for your market and industry. That data may also point to trends that haven't actualized yet; now that we all accept TikTok's explosive growth, we can see the writing was on the walls in 2019 when people had an insatiable appetite for short, candid, personal video clips and synchronized dancing.

Having a baseline about what your potential customers expect can't tell you what makes sense for your product, brand, growth goals, and unique selling point. You'll also need to consider factors like these before you dive blindly into every channel your competitors and market use: 

Marketing budget

Level of brand awareness or industry authority

Marketing personnel and bandwidth

Alignment with broader company goals or timelines

Time to value for efforts in each specific channel

Cost to keep up with established competitors

Scalability

Any potential regulatory or compliance obstacles

Remember that any channel will take time and planning to see through to success, but the last thing you want to do is waste valuable resources on channels that don't come to fruition soon enough. Before you make any decisions, set specific goals for each channel so you can measure success over time and be sure you've made the right choices.

13 customer acquisition strategy examples

You know your market, you've got your channels, and you're ready to start moving all those customers along the acquisition funnel—now it's time to plan your campaigns. 

Consider these customer acquisition strategies from across channel types to find and convert new leads.

1. Content marketing

Case in point: you're looking at it. 

2. Search engine optimization (SEO)

For many businesses, their website is the foundation of the customer acquisition journey. It's where people become leads and where leads convert to customers. SEO thus goes hand in hand with many other customer acquisition strategies—especially content marketing.

If you search for your general product or service type, chances are the first result in the SERP has top-notch SEO execution. For example, when I search Google for "basketball shoes," it's no surprise that Nike.com's basketball shoes page pops up first. 

This is a site with a ton of products, images, and pages, and it still loads before I can say "Air Jordan XXXVIII Fundamental" three times fast. The URL of its Mens Basketball Shoes page doesn't have a ton of unnecessary categories or subdomains, the top nav has six simple options, and there are no distracting pop-ups or fancy effects detracting from my user experience. The title tag and description are concise and clearly optimized for the keyword "men's basketball shoes" without getting all keyword stuffy.

At the bottom of the page, below all the beautiful sneakers, there's even a "Related Stories" section to keep sneakerheads moving through the website. Featuring product launch details, news, and buying guides like "The Top 5 Nike Gifts for Teen Boys," its (also clearly keyword-optimized) content pages support its shop pages by directing traffic back to relevant product lines. By keeping its SEO game as tight and clean as a pair of brand-new Jordans, Nike can draw general, brand-agnostic customers to its website before competitors have a chance to do the same.

3. Social advertising

The strength of social media advertising is precision. Once you know which platforms your market uses, you can zero in on exactly who you want to reach based on demographic info like age, interests, location, and even online behavior. If you sell automotive accessories, you can home in on users who like cars. If you sell image editing software, you can display your ad only to people listed as graphic designers.

To illustrate, let's get meta: LinkedIn doing LinkedIn advertising on LinkedIn. 

The link goes to a LinkedIn Business Solutions landing page for the B2BUILD campaign, where users-turned-leads are walked through the advertising hub. On the back end, LinkedIn's marketing team can see how users who land on the page interact with it to find where they're losing leads, the rate at which leads convert into customers, and data for calculating the return on their advertising investment.

4. Pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising

Like social media advertising, PPC advertising has the benefit of being able to target leads. You also only pay when a potential lead actually becomes a real lead by clicking your ad. Within your ad hub, you can see how your ads are ranking compared to competitors', how many total impressions they're getting, and how often they're getting clicks. By setting up dedicated landing pages to link these ads to, you can even track the exact conversion rates of leads who arrive via your PPC ad.

With this level of analytical detail, you get real proof of how effectively you're both acquiring leads and converting them into customers.

To illustrate, here's how Article stuck out for the search term "leather couch":

Visually, this was the first result I noticed in the carousel of PPC competitors. In half a second, I see an attractive couch that stands out, I know what it costs, and I know buyers like it, which is essential since I can't give it a nap test first.

5. Referral programs

Generations of sales teams have used referral programs to acquire customers, and there's a reason they're still in use: they work. The beauty of a referral program is that  it taps into the resource of existing satisfied customers, setting up a quid pro quo for them to bring in new customers or users.

The specific incentives depend on what you're offering, but typically come in the form of one or more of these:

Discount codes

Account deposits

Free trials

Free subscription periods

Promotional points

Free services 

Free upgrades

A prime example is fee-free stock trading platform Robinhood, which offers current users a free stock for referring new users, who also get a free stock. 

In the meantime, Robinhood benefits because it's acquired more vested users who are now depositing money into their accounts to buy the next big stock du jour. And since stocks are typically long-term investments, it hooks long-term users, who have more time to continue depositing and referring more new users. It's technically a win-win, but I get the feeling Robinhood wins more than most users. 

6. Partnerships

Home lifestyle brand Williams Sonoma has been very effective in choosing partnerships, especially in its family brands dedicated to kids. One such partnership is West Elm Kids and National Geographic. 

This partnership helps National Geographic expand into a sector (home goods) it has no access to while giving several benefits to West Elm Kids, like promotion of its commitment to sustainability, which aligns with NatGeo's audience's interest in the environment.

Anyone who's ever made a collage in elementary school knows NatGeo has long been a fixture of American public education. Meanwhile, anyone who's ever bought toys, linens, and decor for kids knows that anything considered remotely educational gets a bump in parent approval ratings. A smart partnership (smartnership?) like this gives businesses like West Elm Kids a new avenue for acquiring customers that aligns with and expands its current market.

7. Webinars and workshops

Nobody knows your industry and product like you do. Sharing your knowledge with your market through free live webinars and workshops allows you to:

Home in on people in your market who are already hypothetically interested in your offering (who are now also pre-educated about its benefits)

Differentiate from competitors

Build brand recognition by making a lasting impression

Collect marketing data like contact information

Qualify potential leads with more information

Position your offering as a solution to common problems your market faces

Learn more about people in your market by interacting with them

Piggy-back with additional research like surveys or interviews

By educating the public on product features and broader subjects like product planning, workflow management, consumer behavior, and digital marketing through webinars, Airtable can give thought leadership on in-demand issues and then tie in its own product seamlessly. This allows the company to acquire high-value leads that are much more likely to become customers.

8. Influencer marketing

Scrolling TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube for literally any amount of time shows what makes influencer marketing so potent: even if these loosely veiled product placements littering your feed are a form of paid advertising, they still feel like carefully vetted recommendations from real, down-to-earth, not incentivized human beings. 

From a marketing point of view, this is hugely valuable. This is a genuine word-of-mouth product promotion you can pay for. While high-level influencers with millions of followers may charge for their services, smaller influencers will make videos for the cost of one free product or software license. Even amateur influencers' reviews could be read or seen by thousands of people, which is still a really strong return on a very minimal spend. 

Here's what I'm talking about.

@coffeelicker No more looking like a turtle 🐢. Check it out at brevite.co/coffeelicker — #ad #camerabag #brevite #photography #filmmaking #cameragear @brevite ♬ original sound - Herman Huang

Herman Huang (@coffeelicker) is a creator whose content focuses on videography. This makes him a perfect paid partner (note the designation below the caption) for Brevitē, manufacturer of the multifunctional camera bag featured in the video pictured above. This video is nestled into his library of editing tips, software guides, and craft tutorials. As you're scrolling through original, non-sponsored content, it feels like just another original, non-sponsored video that happens to recommend a product.

With just over 7,000 followers, Herman was probably a relatively low-cost partner compared to celebrities or career influencers. However, he was a very targeted one with a dedicated following of exactly the kinds of people who would buy a Brevitē bag. Reaching out to creators like him (which the company's feed shows me it does often) allows Brevitē to reach highly targeted audiences with user-created content.

9. Email marketing

Going (formerly Scott's Cheap Flights) is a master of this—in fact, its business model is centered around email.

Going sends its free users like me cheap flight deals from all around the world. These are flights I wouldn't necessarily think to look up on my own, so it's fun to see them appear in my inbox periodically, so I can suddenly feel like I have the option to take an impromptu trip to Puerto Rico. 

These emails are also vehicles for Going to sell its premium service—which, if I wanted a more bespoke cheap travel recommendation experience, I may be willing to pony up for. It also allows the company to advertise sponsors like Babbel, a language-learning app that's an obvious choice for an audience of international travelers.

10. Free trials or freemium models

I don't know who said it or where I heard it, but there's an adage I think about often: if something is free, you're the product. Free trials prove that to be true for sales teams.

But the saying is a little harsh in its cynicism. By offering potential customers a free trial of your product or a stripped-down freemium model, you do give them real value—either the free offering is all they need and they get to save money on something they would have paid for, or they get to test drive it before they buy. And from a sales perspective, both outcomes can be valuable.

The cable replacement streaming service Fubo is a prime example. 

When I wanted to watch the Oscars this year, I realized the only way to watch it was to have a live TV subscription. The red carpet had already started, and I was running out of options because I hadn't had access to cable in about a decade. It turned out Fubo was one of the only streaming options with a free seven-day trial, which I started up just in time to catch Pedro Pascal being charming in a double-breasted Zegna suit. 

11. Gated resources

Once you have these contact details, you can proceed with other customer acquisition campaigns, like email campaigns containing free trials, discounts, product advertisements, and other offerings.

Industry research provider IBISWorld has built its whole business on this model. 

Good market research is hard to come by, and IBISWorld has it in spades—if you're willing to pay for it. However, interested users can start with a free trial report from an industry of their choice. It may not include the exact information they're looking for, but it gives a clear picture of the quality of data customers can expect. 

To get that free sample report, you have to sign up using your work email and company name. (This no doubt contributes in some way to more proprietary data.) Once you do that, you may get your sample report and move on with your life, but IBISWorld can continue marketing its reports to you for as long as you keep them out of your junk folder. So even if you don't buy the full version of that report, you'll be more likely to come back to the company the next time you need premium industry data.

12. Customer reviews and testimonials

To encourage reviews, it can be worthwhile to incentivize customers with perks like discount codes or freebies. I know from experience because Rainpoint, a company I bought a watering timer from, told me it'd send me a free upgraded timer if I left a review.

Did I like my watering timer enough to leave it five stars? Yes. Would I have left a review if I didn't have the prospect of getting another free one for doing it? No. What RainPoint understood is that authentic reviews from satisfied customers are worth their weight in digital outdoor faucet apparatuses. 

If I hated the timer, obviously a free one wouldn't have changed my mind, so I wouldn't have left a dishonest five-star review. RainPoint's hope is that for the production cost of a handful of products, it can get enough positive reviews to beat competitors in Amazon's algorithm and sell to new customers on the strength of an impressive near-five-star product rating over thousands of reviews. It also makes past buyers like me more likely to buy more of its products (which I have).

13. Social engagement

A theme that's popped up among many of these strategies is the value of authentic end-user experiences, and social engagement—as opposed to paid social media advertisements—is another way to promote that. Because, when it's done well, social media breaks down the barrier between customers and corporations. 

As content channels, your social media feeds can be outlets for promoting thought leadership while also driving traffic to your blog or directly to your product pages. They can also serve as branding opportunities to grow your reach to new customers if your channels provide real value in the form of useful information, discount codes, giveaways, updates on your products, or pure entertainment.

Here's Beyond Meat illustrating what I mean.

Because this is what heroes do: goes on to inconvenience a minimum wage grocery store employee https://t.co/V6u0AS8a5A — Beyond Meat (@BeyondMeat) May 15, 2023

Beyond Meat stays top of mind to its customers while coming across as personable, empathetic, and aligned with their own values, which makes those potential customers want to continue buying its products. Followers may also feel compelled to share its funny tweets on their own feeds, expanding the potential customer base further.

Measure success by calculating customer acquisition cost

Once you've picked your customer acquisition channels and executed your customer acquisition strategies on those channels, there's still more you can do. The key to effective customer acquisition is measuring the success of your campaigns in real dollar amounts.

To do that, you can repurpose a standardized marketing equation that breaks down to spend over acquisitions . This gives you the cost per acquisition.

Let's say your expenses on social media combine a freelance designer's pay, your copywriter's salary (adjusted for the time they took to work on the campaign), and relevant monthly software fees, coming out to $500 for a four-week campaign. The campaign funnels through a dedicated product code, which is used 50 times . That means each customer costs you $10 to acquire .

Now, let's say the average spend through that product code is $100. That means you've generated $10 per $1 of marketing spend, while the total campaign generated $5,000 on a $500 investment.

Whether that's successful on your terms depends on your goals for the campaign. With real dollar values in hand, you can decide whether this approach is worth doubling down on later, abandoning, or tweaking before you try again.

How to keep customer acquisition costs down

Once you know the quantitative performance of your customer acquisition strategies, you can maximize your return by making your campaigns more efficient. Then, once you can get maximum value at minimum cost per acquisition, you're ready to grow your efforts.

To improve acquisition efficiency, you can either increase conversion rates, lower the cost per conversion, or increase the average value of each conversion. Here are a few common strategies for making one or more of the above happen.

A/B testing: Testing minor changes to marketing elements like copy, images, keyword focus, message timing, email layout, and acquisition channels allows you to focus efforts on what works best for your customers.

After new customer acquisition comes retention

Automate your customer acquisition strategies.

Customer acquisition is a moving target. There are always ways to improve lead volume, conversion rates, and conversion value. And what works for one product at one time may not work for a different product or even for the same product by this time next year. Even when you're satisfied, you have to stay fluid with your market.

To give you the bandwidth to focus on those strategies, you can let automation and AI handle the work that's meant for computers. Here are some guides to automating various customer acquisition channels:

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Bryce Emley

Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. His work has been published in magazines including The Atlantic, Boston Review, Salon, and Modern Farmer and has received a regional Emmy and awards from venues including Narrative, Wesleyan University, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Pablo Neruda Prize. When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.

• Sales & business development

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A Complete Guide to Customer Acquisition for Startups

Customers are the lifeblood of any business. That’s why you need a strategy to continually bring new customers, but according to ProfitWell, customer acquisition costs have risen 50% over the past five years.

The problem is that many businesses don’t have a defined customer acquisition strategy. It’s easy to keep doing what you think is working; however, this often leaves you investing too little money in high-performing channels or — on the other hand — missing out on channels where potential customers are hanging out.

The best way to improve customer acquisition is to create a clear strategy. In this guide, we’ll help you understand how to generate demand, keep track of what you’re spending, and convert leads into paying customers.

What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition refers to the activities and actions a company takes to gain new customers. A successful customer acquisition strategy helps you win new business, retain loyal customers, and improve profits.

It’s important to remember that acquisition starts at first contact with a new customer and rolls into your strategy for retention — the two work together to keep a marketing program profitable.

Customer acquisition covers each aspect of the customer journey , from lead generation to activation, customer loyalty , and conversion rate optimization.

Customers won’t always stick around — no matter how good your retention strategy is — so you need a way to fill the gaps and keep your business moving forward.

How to create a customer acquisition strategy

To make planning easier, we’ve highlighted some best practices you’ll want to consider when creating a customer acquisition strategy:

Identify your ideal customers.

Define your goals.

Choose your customer acquisition channels.

Develop a unique strategy for each channel.

Communicate with your customers.

Measure and improve your strategy.

1. Identify your ideal customers

The first step toward customer acquisition is to gain an understanding of your customer base — both your current and target audiences. This includes studying competitors and analyzing market research done by Pew Research Center or the U.S. Census Bureau .

Learning your product-market fit will help you identify ideal customers and set marketing goals.

If you don’t have a good idea who your audience is yet, ask yourself the following questions:

What do customers accomplish with your product or service?

What are your customers' struggles?

What are your customers’ demographics?

What benefits do customers look for in buying your product(s)?

Where do your ideal customers find information?

Why wouldn’t they buy your product(s)?

When does your ideal customer buy your product or service?

As you grow, keeping track of these customer profiles can help you analyze, understand, and expand your customer base. You can identify your highest-value customers' different traits and behaviors, which you can use to invest more or less in the best customer acquisition channels.

2. Define your goals

With your ideal customers in mind, you can define your goals and objectives. Setting an end result will help you think through a customer acquisition plan and guide your efforts.

To meet revenue expectations, set goals for your customer acquisition strategy that account for customer churn and current customer growth. You could earn $20 million in new business over the next year, but you may not reach total revenue goals for the year if your industry has high turnover.

It’s not hard to prove your marketing efforts are working. By measuring customer acquisition metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), customer acquisition costs (CAC), and churn rate , you can create a strategy that aligns with overall business goals.

3. Choose your customer acquisition channels

Identifying your ideal customers and customer acquisition goals is a great start to creating an effective strategy, but that’s only the beginning. You’ll want to think about which channels to use based on your research and what types of content do best there.

A customer acquisition channel is any place your customers meet your brand for the first time — whether through social media, organic search, or a paid ad. Customer acquisition channels are how you bring in new customers.

Some popular customer acquisition channels include:

Instagram: Visually attractive posts and short videos.

Facebook: Live video streaming, one-to-one messaging, advertising.

YouTube: Longer, more informative, and entertaining video content.

SEO: Written, long-form content that's optimized for search engines.

Paid social: Short, snappy ads with compelling visuals.

Referrals: Discounts and loyalty rewards.

We'll discuss customer acquisition channels in more detail a little later in this post.

4. Develop a unique strategy for each channel

You may want to get on every channel possible to start, but this can hinder your customer acquisition strategy. For example, if you are trying to reach customers in their early 20s, you may find your audience is on Instagram or TikTok. It wouldn’t be worth putting all your resources into Facebook or Google Shopping ads.

When creating a marketing strategy for each channel, focus on:

What content your audience interacts with.

What your competitors are posting.

What your KPIs tell you.

Depending on your customer acquisition strategy, you may realize that you don’t have to use TikTok if your customers are mostly on Facebook. Or if you find that you can say more in video than you can with words, YouTube or Instagram may be more useful.

Research the best strategies for each channel you use to get the most out of your customer acquisition efforts.

5. Communicate with your customer base

It’s hard to find the gaps in your customer acquisition process without direct feedback from your customers. To collect this valuable information, you have to request it.

Customer surveys , email contact forms, customer interviews, social media posts, and blog posts are all excellent ways to communicate with your customer base. You can promote a deal, ask for feedback, and be available to talk.

Create a communication plan to keep conversations going with your customers regularly. This will help you identify and capitalize on the value customers expect from your products and services.

6. Measure and improve your strategy

Building an online business without utilizing analytics is like driving with your eyes closed. If you don’t know what’s working (or what’s not), where people are visiting, and how your pages are performing, then you’re headed toward failure.

Many factors can affect customer acquisition, and that’s why it’s so important to analyze and measure your results. Customer acquisition analytics can help you figure out:

Where customers hear about your products.

Where they bought products.

Where they live.

Other identifying factors.

Before you start tracking, figure out which customer acquisition metrics you will monitor. Some common metrics include the following:

Customer acquisition costs (CAC)

New customer growth

Customer lifetime value (LTV)

Ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost (LTV:CAC)

Customer acquisition may seem daunting, but with the right preparation and tactics, your business can attract high-value customers, keep them around longer, and grow more sustainably.

7 best customer acquisition techniques

As you start to build out your strategy, consider the following seven customer acquisition techniques that will help get your products in front of more prospective customers.

1. Content marketing

Content marketing involves creating blog posts, guides, infographics, videos, podcasts, and more to answer questions, solve problems, and introduce readers to your business.

Content marketing is efficient, compelling, and persuasive for capturing website traffic. Plus, it generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less, according to research from Demand Metric .

With content marketing, you can:

Improve ROI 13x by prioritizing blogging in your marketing strategy.

Build authority in your industry with lower upfront costs and more profound long-term benefits.

Support your entire customer journey, from lead generation to acquisition and retention.

Create videos that capture up to 66% more qualified leads than those without.

Build marketing assets for multiple customer segments.

Build trust with prospects, considering 61% of U.S. consumers bought something after reading recommendations on a blog.

Assist your SEO efforts by adding more targeted, indexed pages to your website.

But how often should you be blogging? It depends. For smaller businesses, you can see success by publishing one to four blog posts per week. Larger companies (think Shopify or Forbes) often publish articles daily or multiple times per day.

Even if you don’t have the budget for a full content team, you can have people from different departments write content for your audience, hire an editor, and start publishing. The goal is to create good content consistently so you can build closer ties with readers and get the most from your acquisition budget.

2. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of tailoring your website content to boost rankings on Google or other search engines.

SEO is one of the most important customer acquisition methods for online businesses, and it’s likely your customers are using search engines to find information. That’s why it’s a valuable channel for acquiring new customers.

With SEO, you can:

Drive quality traffic to your website. Unlike paid acquisition channels that involve unsolicited outreach, customers can find you when they’re looking for information. It’s a more customer-centric approach to customer acquisition.

Lower Google ad spend. Producing content that ranks high in Google search is an investment. But once you rank in a good position, you can drive the equivalent monthly cost of PPC campaigns so you don’t have to spend as much on ads.

Get more clicks than pay-per-click advertising. Even though Google ads show up higher on search result pages, 71.33% of people click through an organic result on page one.

Convert more leads. SEO leads have an average 14.6% conversion rate versus traditional outbound marketing (think direct mail or advertising), which has an average 1.7% close rate.

The one drawback of SEO is that it’s not an overnight success. Getting your articles found in search results can take time, so you want to plan for the long term. However, the results from SEO are worth your time.

NerdWallet , a personal finance company, bet big on SEO over the past five years. In July 2020, the company, valued at roughly $500 million, generated nearly 14 million organic search visits. You’d think a company of this size would be dumping money into paid ads, but the story is quite different.

In a recent post on Some Good Content , the company revealed how it took over the market on all “The Best of…” content on the web related to personal finance. Through well-written content and a simple SEO strategy, the company continues to acquire new customers from search engines.

3. Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing refers to reaching customers on their smartphones through SMS, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, or mobile apps. Mobile sales are expected to reach over 280 billion dollars in 2020, making up 45% of the total ecommerce market.

With mobile marketing, you can:

Easily create automated omni-channel campaigns. With marketing automation software like ManyChat , you can create integrated, cohesive shopping experiences across your customer touch points, including email, text, Facebook Messenger, and push notifications.

Align with consumer market demand. Audiences today want to interact with brands 24/7. An omni-channel presence can help deliver an informed, consistent message across multiple channels.

Personalize at every stage of the buyer journey. Mobile channels help you more easily collect customer data to create more targeted outreach to cold audiences.

For example, hideAWAY Handmade , an Australian online retailer, developed a customer acquisition process for new website visitors that drove over $100,000 in additional monthly revenue.

The company captured new leads on their website, built detailed customer profiles — based on buying behavior, quizzes, giveaways, and demographics — to create personalized experiences for shoppers, generating 68,000 subscribers to improve future marketing efforts and sell more products.

4. Social media

For online businesses, having a presence on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter matters. With an estimated 3.6 billion people on social media worldwide, it’s easy to promote your business.

Benefits of getting on social media include:

Increasing brand awareness by posting consistently.

Showing customers a more creative side of your business.

Engaging with your audience on social media to bring them back to your website.

Promoting your products to followers.

Three key tactics to consider when looking at social media are:

Organic social posts — Scheduling or instantly publishing posts on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels your audience lives on.

Facebook ads — Finding new fans, connecting with existing ones, and retargeting website visitors who didn’t buy.

Instagram ads — Visually promoting your brand to find new customers and retarget visitors. Kortni Jeane , an online swimwear brand, ran Facebook video ads and photos in a campaign to reach more shoppers and increase sales.

Using the Facebook ads platform, they automatically placed ads where they were likely to drive results at the lowest cost possible. They also used budget optimization to distribute the budget across top-performing ad sets in real time.

In five days, the Kortni Jeane campaign resulted in:

A 22.9x return on ad spend.

Over 2,000 purchases.

An 11% increase in conversion rate.

5. Email marketing

Do you know what smart entrepreneurs do with the traffic they receive from content marketing and SEO? They build an email list .

Outside of direct sales, there is no better business outcome attached to first-time visitors than when they subscribe to receive updates from you. You can send sales or discounts for your products or services, exclusive content, customer features, and other promotional campaigns.

When you want to communicate something with your customers, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to do so. In fact, a study by the Direct Marketing Association found that for every $1 spent, email has an average $38 return on investment.

Some other reasons to use email marketing are:

It’s easy to start. Email marketing platforms like MailChimp are easy to use and intuitive. They come packed with features to help you get sign-ups, design emails, collect data, segment customers, measure success, and more.

To automate marketing tasks. Unlike paid marketing campaigns, you can set up an automation to trigger a series of emails you can set and forget. From welcome series to post-purchase follow-ups to rewarding customers with special promotions, you can connect with thousands of customers quickly and easily.

To increase brand awareness. Each time you send an email, your customer gets a notification. Whether they decide to open your email or not, they see your brand and offer, which can keep you top of mind the next time they want to buy something.

It’s easy to measure performance. Email marketing platforms also make it easy to collect data and use it to improve your marketing strategy moving forward. You can track opens and clicks, ecommerce activity like purchases and abandoned cart recoveries, and even how much traffic you send to your online store or website.

If you have the means, hiring an expert in email marketing can pay off. But if you don’t have the budget, you can still invest in client acquisition software with email marketing features, which can expand your reach and increase your sales.

6. Referral program

Referral programs are an easy way to improve client acquisition in your business. You’ve probably come across them before for professional services or online stores. The programs are typically straightforward: The more people you refer, the more you save or earn.

Some key reasons to start a referral program are:

People are 4x more likely to make a purchase when referred by a friend.

Referred customers' lifetime value is 16% higher when compared to non-referred customers.

Customers acquired through referrals have a 37% higher retention rate.

81% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands that have reward programs.

Referred customers have an 18% lower churn than customers acquired through other channels.

Referred customers bring in 16% more in profits at minimum than non-referred ones.

One of the top customer acquisition examples using a referral program comes from the cloud-based storage company Dropbox . The famous program offers you and your friends 500MB of additional free storage space — up to 16GB in total.

Upon launch, Dropbox’s refer-a-friend program increased their sign-ups by 60%, seeing over 2.8 million referral invites in the first month. They also went from spending up to $388 in ad spend per customer down to zero, thanks to their referral program.

Dropbox now has over 14.3 million customers and has continued to use this referral program to drive customer acquisition for nearly a decade.

When creating your referral program, give something away for free so that referred leads have nothing to lose when signing up. If you’re a SaaS business, offer Pro features for a limited time. For ecommerce businesses, give them a fair discount on their first purchase.

Once a customer interacts with your brand (and enjoys it), they’ll continue to refer new customers to your business.

7. Paid advertising

If you’re a newer business or online store, chances are you’ll have to invest more in paid advertising to acquire new customers.

Ads produce results immediately, generating traffic, leads, and sales right after you launch. And paid ads can support SEO efforts by helping you find keywords to drive your organic search campaigns.

However, pay-per-click (PPC) can get expensive fast without the right tactics. Some best practices to follow to maximize ad spend are:

Always include a remarketing strategy. Whether you run Facebook ads or Google ads, not everyone who clicks through your ad will buy something. Support your paid advertising with remarketing ads to (basically) follow shoppers around the internet while showing your ads until they buy. Some brands see up to 1,300% ROI from using remarketing ads.

Use Google Dynamic Search Ads. Dynamic Search Ad headlines and landing pages pull content from your website based on what a person was shopping for. They help keep your ads relevant, save you time, and increase conversions for your ads.

Use automation for Facebook ads. If you choose to run Facebook ads, consider using a chatbot to start a conversation with paid traffic. It’s an easy way to create interactive experiences for potential customers and maximize your ad spend versus traditional methods.

Customer acquisition costs

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost involved in getting a new customer, including marketing, research, sales, and product cost. It’s an important metric because it helps a company determine how important a customer is. CAC also helps you calculate the ROI of an acquisition strategy.

How to calculate customer acquisition cost

An essential part of maintaining a viable customer acquisition process is making sure that the channels and tactics you choose are working for your company. To do that, you need to know how to calculate your CAC.

Here’s what a common CAC formula looks like:

CAC = (Cost of Sales + Cost of Marketing) ÷ New Customers Acquired

You can calculate CAC by dividing all the costs spent on sales and marketing by the number of customers acquired during a time period. For example, if you spent $100 on marketing and $100 on sales in a month and earned 200 customers in that same month, your CAC is $1.

What is the average customer acquisition cost?

The average CAC per industry, according to HubSpot , is:

Retail: $10

Consumer Goods: $22

Manufacturing: $83

Transportation: $98

Marketing Agency: $141

Financial: $175

Technology (Hardware): $182

Real Estate: $213

Banking/Insurance: $303

Telecom: $315

Technology (Software): $395

What is a good customer acquisition cost ratio?

For most industries, the ideal LTV:CAC ratio should be 3:1. This means the value of a customer should be three times more than the acquisition cost. If it’s closer to 1:1, you’re spending too much money.

Customer acquisition vs. retention

Overall, customer acquisition is how you gain new customers — from attracting them to persuading them to buy your products or services. Customer retention takes place after purchase as you try to keep new customers around for an extended time.

As you create your customer acquisition and retention strategies, remember to focus on delivering great customer service throughout the entire lifecycle. If you create a great experience for customers from first touch, you won’t have to constantly spend so much money on new customer acquisition.

Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

Teams using Help Scout are set up in minutes, twice as productive, and save up to 80% in annual support costs. Start a free trial to see what it can do for you.

Ready, set, fill your toolbox

It’s time to take what you’ve learned and start building. Every entrepreneur needs a customer acquisition toolbox that helps them work smarter than the big companies.

Considering your business’ capabilities and limitations, create a strategy that prioritizes the pieces you want to deliver first to begin driving customer acquisition.

Your business will win by marketing smart – acquiring customers in a way that differentiates you from the crowd and builds an enthusiastic customer base you don’t have to keep paying for every month.

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Michael keenan.

Michael is a SaaS Marketer and SEO living in Guadalajara, Mexico. Through storytelling and data-driven content, his focus is on providing valuable insight and advice on issues that prospects and customers care about most.

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Customer acquisition: A complete guide

Salesforce Staff

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Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of any business. It’s the process of bringing in new customers and growing your business. Without a steady stream of new customers, your business will eventually stagnate and die. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about an effective customer acquisition strategy, from the basics to advanced strategies. We’ll discuss what customer acquisition is, why it’s important, and how to create an effective and sustainable customer acquisition strategy. We’ll also explore the different channels you can use to acquire customers and how to measure your success. By the end of this guide, you’ll have the knowledge and tools you need to develop a successful customer acquisition strategy for your business.

What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of any business. Simply put, it is the process of identifying and acquiring new customers. As the first stage in the customer lifecycle, a customer acquisition plan involves creating awareness of your product or service, generating leads, and converting those leads into customers.

Every business needs a steady stream of new customers to survive and grow. Without a consistent influx of fresh faces, your business will eventually stagnate and eventually cease to exist. Customer acquisition is an ongoing process that requires businesses to constantly be on the lookout for new ways to reach and engage with potential customers.

Customer Acquisition and the Customer Lifecycle

Customer acquisition is the first stage in the customer lifecycle, which is the journey a customer takes from the moment they become aware of your business until they become a loyal customer. The customer lifecycle can be divided into four main stages:

1. Awareness: This is the stage where potential customers first become aware of your online business, and what you have to offer.

2. Consideration: This is the stage where potential customers are considering your product or service as a solution to their needs.

3. Conversion: This is the stage where potential customers make the decision to purchase your product or service.

4. Retention: This is the stage where you focus on keeping your customers happy and satisfied so that they continue to do business with you.

Customer acquisition is the key to moving potential customers through the customer lifecycle and ultimately turning them into loyal customers.

Why is customer acquisition so essential?

Customer acquisition holds significant value for enterprises across all stages and sizes. This process enables your company to:

• Generate revenue to cover expenses, compensate staff, and fund further expansion, and
• Demonstrate growth and momentum to external stakeholders like investors, partners, and key influencers.

The ability to consistently draw in and secure new clients is an essential for maintaining the vitality and expansion of businesses, ensuring investor confidence in the process.

What is the purpose of customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of identifying and acquiring new customers. It is an important part of any business’s growth strategy and can have several key benefits for a business. Some of the main benefits of paid customer acquisition strategies include:

– Increasing the number of satisfied customers a business has: This can lead to increased revenue and profit, as well as a larger customer base to which the business can market its products or services.

– Increasing revenue and profit: Acquiring new customers can directly increase a business’s revenue and profit. This is because new customers can purchase products or services from the business, increasing the business’s overall sales.

– Building brand awareness and customer loyalty: Acquiring new customers can help build brand awareness and loyalty. This is because when new customers have a positive experience with a business, they are more likely to return for future purchases and become loyal customers.

– Entering new markets or expanding into new customer segments: Acquiring new customers can help a business enter new markets or expand into new customer segments. This can help the business grow its customer base and reach new customers who may not have been aware of the business before.

– Increasing market share: Acquiring new customers can help a business increase its market share. This is because when a business acquires new customers, it takes away market share from its competitors.

What is acquisition marketing?

Acquisition marketing focuses on attracting new customers or clients to your business. It encompasses various strategies and channels aimed at generating leads and converting them into paying customers. The primary goal of any customer acquisition channel or marketing is to increase your paying customer base and boost revenue.

One of the key elements of acquisition marketing is lead generation. This involves identifying potential customers who have shown interest in your products or services. This can be done through various channels such as online advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO), and email marketing. By creating engaging and relevant content, you can attract potential customers and encourage them to provide their contact information, thus becoming leads.

Once you have generated leads, the next step is to nurture them and convert them into customers. This can be done through personalised email campaigns, follow-up phone calls, or providing prospective customers with additional resources and information to help them make informed decisions. By building relationships and trust with potential customers, you can increase the likelihood of converting them into paying customers.

Acquisition marketing involves ongoing marketing efforts, to continuously attract and acquire new customers. It requires a combination of effective strategies, understanding your target audience, using customer acquisition techniques and analysing customer behaviour. By implementing a well-executed acquisition marketing plan, you can expand your customer base, grow your business, and achieve long-term success.

The customer acquisition funnel

is a model that businesses use to understand and track the customer journey from awareness to purchase. The funnel is divided into five stages: awareness, interest, consideration, decision, and retention.

At the top of the marketing funnel is the awareness stage, where potential customers first become aware of your brand or product. This can happen through various channels, such as advertising, social media, or word-of-mouth. The goal of the awareness stage is to generate interest and motivate potential customers to move down the funnel.

The next stage is the interest stage, where potential customers start to show interest in your product or service. They may visit your website, read your blog, or follow you on your social media channels. The goal of the interest stage is to engage potential customers and provide them with more information about your offering.

Once potential customers are interested in your product, they move into the consideration stage. At this stage, they are comparing different options and considering whether or not to make a purchase. The goal of the consideration stage is to differentiate your product from the competition and convince potential customers that your offering is the best solution for their needs.

The fourth stage of the funnel is the decision stage, where potential customers make a decision about whether or not to purchase your product. This is the critical stage of the funnel, as it is where you convert leads into customers. The goal of the decision stage is to make it easy for potential customers to purchase your product and provide them with the information they need to make an informed decision.

The final stage of the funnel is the retention stage, where you focus on retaining existing customers and building long-term relationships. The goal of the retention stage is to ensure that customers are satisfied with your product and continue to do business with you.

By understanding the customer acquisition funnel, you can develop targeted marketing and sales strategies to move potential customers through each stage of the funnel and increase your chances of converting them into customers.

Acquisition channels

There are various other customer acquisition methods and channels that businesses can use to reach and acquire new customers. These channels include organic search, paid search, social media, email marketing, and content marketing.

Organic search refers to the process of optimising a website so that it appears higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. This can be achieved by creating high-quality content, building backlinks, and improving the technical aspects of a website. By optimising for organic search, businesses can increase their visibility in search engines and attract more visitors to their website, leading to increased customer acquisition.

Paid search involves using paid advertising to place ads at the top of SERPs for specific keywords. This can be an effective way to reach potential customers who are actively searching for products or services like yours. However, it is important to carefully manage paid search campaigns to ensure that you are getting a positive return on investment (ROI).

Social media marketing strategy involves using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to connect with potential customers and build relationships. By creating engaging content, running social media ads, and interacting with followers, businesses can use social media to generate leads and drive traffic to their website.

Email marketing involves sending promotional emails to a list of subscribers. This can be an effective way to stay in touch with potential and existing customers, promote new products or services, and drive traffic to your website. However, it is important to follow best practices for email marketing, such as obtaining permission before sending emails and providing valuable content, to avoid alienating subscribers.

Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. This can include blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and other forms of content. By creating high-quality content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience, you can build trust and credibility, generate leads, and ultimately acquire new customers.

How to develop a customer acquisition strategies

To develop a customer acquisition strategy, the first step is to identify your target audience. This involves understanding their needs, pain points, and demographics. This information can be gathered through market research, surveys, and analytics. Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can develop a strategy to reach and acquire them.

Setting clear goals and objectives is essential for any customer acquisition strategy. What do you want to achieve with your customer retention strategy? Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales? Once you know your goals, you can develop a plan to achieve them.

Developing a customer journey map is a helpful tool for visualising the customer experience from the initial touchpoint to the final purchase. This will help you identify any gaps or friction points in the customer journey and make improvements to optimise the process.

Creating compelling content is essential for attracting and engaging potential customers. This content can take various forms, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media posts. Ensure that your content is relevant to your target audience and provides value to them.

Customer acquisition metrics

Metrics are essential for measuring the success of your customer acquisition efforts. This section will discuss the key customer data metrics you should track, including customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLTV), customer churn rate, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and sales qualified leads (SQLs).

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost of acquiring a new customer. This includes all costs associated with marketing, sales, and customer onboarding. CAC can be calculated by dividing the total cost of new customer acquisition by the number of new customers acquired.

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is the total amount of revenue that a customer is expected to generate over their lifetime. This can be calculated by multiplying the average customer value by the average customer lifespan.

Customer churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company over a given period of time. This can be calculated by dividing the number of customers who churned by the total number of customers at the beginning of the period.

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are potential customers who have shown interest in a company’s product or service but are not yet ready to make a purchase. MQLs can be generated through various marketing channels, such as website visits, email campaigns, and social media.

Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are potential customers who have been identified as being ready to make a purchase. SQLs have typically been through the MQL stage and have expressed a strong interest in a company’s product or service.

Tracking these customer acquisition metrics can help you measure the effectiveness of your customer acquisition efforts and make adjustments as needed. By optimising your customer acquisition process, you can reduce your CAC, increase your CLTV, and improve your overall customer acquisition ROI.

3 customer acquisition strategy examples

Here are three examples of customer acquisition strategies that businesses can use to grow their customer base:

1. Paid advertising

Paid advertising is one of the most direct ways to reach new customers. By using platforms like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads, businesses can target potential customers with specific ads based on their interests, demographics, and online behaviour. Paid advertising can be an effective way to generate leads, drive traffic to a website, and increase brand awareness.

2. Referral programs

Referral programs are a great way to incentivise existing customers to bring in new customers. By offering rewards or discounts to customers who refer new business, businesses can tap into the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Referral programs can be especially effective for businesses with a loyal customer base.

3. Partnerships and collaborations

Partnering with other businesses can be a great way to reach new customers and expand your market reach. By collaborating with complementary businesses, businesses can cross-promote each other’s products or services and access new customer segments. Partnerships can also be a great way to gain credibility and build trust with potential customers.

These are just a few examples of customer acquisition strategies that businesses can use to grow their customer base. By understanding the target audience, setting clear goals, and creating compelling content, businesses can successfully attract and acquire new customers.

Common customer acquisition challenges and solutions

There are several common challenges businesses face in their organic customer acquisition strategies. These include:

– Competition : In today’s competitive business environment, there are numerous businesses competing for the attention of the same potential customers. This means businesses need to find ways to stand out from the competition and differentiate their products or services.

– Lack of brand awareness : For new businesses or those with limited brand recognition, creating awareness of their products or services can be a significant challenge.

– High customer acquisition costs : Acquiring new customers can be expensive, especially if businesses rely heavily on paid advertising or other marketing channels that require significant investment.

– Long sales cycles : For some businesses, the sales cycle can be long and complex, which can make it difficult to convert leads into customers quickly.

– Customer churn : Once businesses have acquired customers, they need to focus on retaining them and preventing churn. This can be challenging, especially in industries with high levels of competition.

To overcome these challenges, businesses can implement various solutions, such as:

– Developing a strong value proposition : Clearly articulating the unique value proposition of a business’s products or services can help differentiate it from competitors and attract potential customers.

– Investing in brand building : Building brand awareness through effective marketing and communication strategies can help businesses reach a wider audience and establish a strong reputation.

– Optimising customer acquisition channels : Analysing and optimising the effectiveness of different customer acquisition channels can help businesses allocate their resources more efficiently and reduce customer acquisition and marketing costs further.

– Streamlining the sales process : By simplifying the sales process and removing unnecessary steps, businesses can shorten the sales cycle and improve conversion rates.

– Implementing customer retention strategies : Developing and implementing customer retention strategies, such as loyalty programs and excellent customer service, can help businesses measure customer acquisition, reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.

How Salesforce can help with customer acquisition

Salesforce is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platform that can help businesses of all sizes acquire new customers. It provides a complete view of your customers across all touchpoints and channels, so you can understand their needs and preferences and tailor your marketing and sales efforts accordingly.

With Salesforce, you can automate your marketing campaigns, nurture leads with personalised messaging, and manage your sales process from start to finish. You can also build a seamless omnichannel shopping experience for your customers, so they can easily purchase from you no matter how they choose to interact with your business.

In addition, Salesforce provides robust analytics and reporting tools, so you can track your customer acquisition progress and make informed decisions about your marketing and sales strategies. By using Salesforce, you can streamline and improve your customer acquisition and process and grow your business faster.

Here are some more customers’ specific examples of how Salesforce has helped businesses acquire new customers:

– A leading technology company used Salesforce to create a personalised customer journey for each of its website visitors. By understanding the interests and needs of each visitor, the company was able to target them with relevant content and offers, which resulted in a 30% increase in conversions.

– A major retailer used Salesforce to automate its email marketing campaigns. By sending targeted emails to its customers, the retailer was able to increase its open rates by 20% and its click-through rates by 15%.

– A small business used Salesforce to manage its sales process. By tracking leads and opportunities, the business was able to increase its sales by 25%.

These are just a few examples of the many ways that Salesforce can help businesses acquire new customers. If you’re looking for a CRM platform that can help you grow your business, Salesforce is a great option.

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How to Create Your Customer Acquisition Plan

What is customer acquisition?

How to create your customer acquisition plan, the most important customer acquisition tip you can get.

• Understanding the evolution of the customer experience
• Knowing how much your business spends
• Knowing how much your business earns
• Do you have leads?
• What kind of leads?
• Can they be prospects? Do you have prospects? What kind of prospects?
• Can they be customers?
• Can you grab more of them, and how?
• Facebook Ads
• Viral display
• Social media
• Content marketing influencer partnerships

“What is a good fit? What are we knowledgeable about that we can get started on? Where are our customers?”

• Define your ideal customer (and it’s ok to be wrong)
• Define your goals – what are you optimizing for?
• Define your acquisition funnel
• Know your metrics
• Track everything

1. Define your ideal customer (and it’s ok to be wrong)

• Geographic location
• Facebook interests
• Influencers and topics they follow
• Site tracking
• Customer status
• One-time or repeat buyer
• Type of product they buy
• Email engagement

• Identify their problems, hesitations, and friction points.
• Create lookalike audiences – In other words, look at the behaviors of an audience group similar to your target audience.
• Follow the Scientific Method – Determine your customer from a scientific perspective. Create a hypothesis, choose elements to test, and get it down to a science.

2. Define your goals – what are you optimizing for?

• Specific – Each goal should focus on one outcome
• Measurable – You can efficiently track their progress
• Achievable – You aren’t setting goals that are impossible
• Relevant – The goal is aligned with what your business needs
• Time-based – Choose a timeframe to complete your goal
• Current customers
• Volume of leads
• Website traffic

3. Define your acquisition funnel

• How many people are on our Facebook page? What types of people are they? What can we do to get them to our website via a blog post?
• Ok, they’re on our website. How do we get them to subscribe to our email list?
• Once they’re on our email list, how can we advertise a free trial to get them into our sales pipeline?

4. Know your metrics

• CPL – The cost per lead that your business covers
• CAC – The cost to acquire a customer. To get this metric, take the number of customers in X month divided by the amount of marketing spend (like what you spend on ads)
• ARPA – The average revenue per account, sometimes referred to as “per customer”
• LTV – The lifetime value ( otherwise referred to as predicted revenue) of a customer
• Lead Yield – The total amount of revenue divided by the number of leads
• CVR – Conversion rate
• CAC: LTV – How much it costs to acquire a customer divided by the predicted customer revenue

5. Track everything

• Google Sheets
• Google Analytics
• Viewers retain 95% of a message from video, compared to 10% when reading text.
• 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service through video.
• 65% of people use YouTube to help them solve a problem.
• 64% of consumers make purchases after watching branded videos on social platforms.

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A guide to your customer acquisition strategy

• Post category: Small Business Success

Regardless of how long you’ve been in business, if you want your company to grow, you need to continually add new customers and improve your customer retention . The best way to do this is through a repeatable, sustainable process that will predictably generate new revenue over time — a customer acquisition strategy .

What is customer acquisition?

In simple terms, customer acquisition is the process of acquiring new customers . It involves moving them through the customer journey or customer acquisition cycle from the brand awareness and lead generation stages to the point where they become a paying customer for your business. 

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

A customer acquisition strategy is a well-defined plan to help prospects find your brand, guiding them through their buying process until they become customers. 

It details acquisition tactics such as:

• Customer acquisition goals, like the desired number of customers
• A description of your ideal prospect and best customer
• Specific digital marketing efforts you’ll employ
• How you’ll measure successful customer acquisition
• The timing of various tactics
• Who will be responsible for which elements

The idea is to educate and engage your ideal potential customers so they become leads that eventually convert to loyal customers who buy your product or service.

Why do you need a customer acquisition strategy?

It’s important to develop a carefully considered customer acquisition marketing strategy . Otherwise, you risk wasting time, money, and resources. Additionally, having a user acquisition strategy shows other stakeholders that you’re going into business with a plan. It can help win the trust of investors and partners. 

Although no plan is perfect, you need to start somewhere and make adjustments based on performance. Having a customer acquisition plan gives you an advantage over competitors who don’t, allowing your company to grow more consistently.

How to plan and execute your customer acquisition strategy

Wondering how to create a customer acquisition strategy ? Here are the steps you’ll want to take to plan and execute yours:

1. Create your team

Involve all the appropriate members of your staff as you create your acquisition strategy. This should include those responsible for sales, marketing, product, customer service, and leadership.

These are the stakeholders who will work to attract and retain users. Involving them in the process helps keep your user acquisition strategies on point. By incorporating more viewpoints, you avoid overlooking important details to ensure you have a complete plan.

2. Define your target audience

It’s important to understand who your target audience is before spending time and effort on marketing. Although you want to get the word out about your company and offerings, you also need to be sure you know who you’re talking to for maximum impact. Otherwise, your efforts will be wasted.

Some questions to answer include:

• Are they executives, employees, or freelancers?
• What are their basic demographics , i.e. what age are they, etc.?
• What are their likes and dislikes related to your product or service?
• What are their roles and responsibilities?
• How and where do they go to research products or services like yours?
• Which social media platform (s) do they frequent? LinkedIn , Facebook, etc.?
• What issues are they likely facing that your product or service can solve?

The more you know about your audience, the better—and the more success you’ll have when implementing your strategy. That’s because you’ll be able to create content, such as blog posts, that are better targeted toward them.

Of course, this step will be significantly easier if you already have existing customers , as it takes the guesswork out of the equation. You can speak to or survey your customer base to learn more about them and their preferences. Whatever you do, do not proceed to the next step until you have completed this critical one. This step could be the difference between success and failure, and it’s the only way to ensure that your marketing and ad spending are worth it.

3. Define your goals

Before selecting which tactics to include in your acquisition strategy, you need to define what you want to accomplish. Without customer acquisition goals, you won’t know which approaches to use. It’s like heading off on a road trip without a map or destination.

Your goals should include information such as how many new customers you want to gain over what time period and how you define customer loyalty . Start by setting yearly goals, then break them down into quarterly and monthly targets. 

It’s a good idea to set up your revenue goals first. Based on these goals, you’ll know exactly how many customers you need to acquire within a given time frame. If you have a defined sales process with metrics relating to how customers move through your sales funnel , goal-setting will be that much easier. Leverage this information to define goals for each stage in the customer acquisition process .

4. Select your methods and channels

There are a variety of different customer acquisition methods . They include paid or free as well as inbound or outbound options.

With inbound marketing, you attract your audience by helping them find you. A good inbound acquisition strategy example is SEO -optimized landing pages . These pages are solely created to drive lead generation by convincing visitors to provide you with their contact information. The landing pages are optimized for SEO to ensure that they rank higher in the search engines, which can increase traffic.

Outbound marketing involves going where your customer is, such as cold-calling off a purchased list or having a booth at a trade show. Social media and search engine ads, like Facebook ads or Google ads are other popular outbound marketing methods for attracting first-time audiences. 

The best methods for your business will be based on your ideal customer , resources, and the other approaches you employ in your overall strategy.

Content marketing is an excellent place to start. It drives organic search traffic to your website, captures leads, nurtures them until they’re ready, and helps them make a buying decision. It’s an effective method for all types of businesses and lies at the core of many customer acquisition strategies . This is particularly true because today’s buyers are 50-70% through their decision-making process before they engage with a salesperson.

If you already have a few customers, you can also launch a referral program to give a boost to your customer acquisition plan. Referrals help you leverage the influence of your existing customers to get new ones. For each successful referral, you can reward your customers with freebies. These incentives help to keep check customer churn in check.

5. Create engaging content

Start by creating a library of unique, valuable, and educational content that helps your ideal customers answer their questions and solve their challenges throughout the buying process. You’ll need to decide which content options best suit each stage of your funnel .

Some options include blog posts, e-books, case studies, white papers, videos, and webinars . The content format choices will depend upon what your customers prefer. For instance, if your customers are younger buyers, you can choose to leverage short-form videos. Meanwhile, if your audience consists of executives, they may choose to read e-books or case studies.

6. Create conversion points

Next, you need to provide interested parties with the opportunity to convert into leads and enter your sales funnel . This happens through appropriate calls to action (CTAs) on various pages of your website, depending on where the prospect is in their buying process. 

You’ll want to create conversion points for each stage of your funnel to boost your overall conversion rates and gather more leads. Landing pages are great points for your customer acquisition strategy as their sole goal is to drive lead generation . 

7. Drive qualified traffic to your site

Also called “demand generation,” you want to help your potential customers to find your site so you can convert them into leads and add them to your sales funnel . Potential tactics to leverage here include search engine optimization ( SEO ), social media marketing , email marketing , trade shows, direct mail, pay-per-click ( PPC ), and search advertising. The best digital marketing options will vary based on what works best for your audience and your budget.

8. Nurture your leads

Using marketing automation will simplify and streamline your customer acquisition efforts , improve your customer experience and reduce your marketing costs while helping you stay on track. An email newsletter—or any other cost-effective method of staying in touch with your leads until they’re ready to buy—will increase your customer acquisition results.

The idea is to keep leads engaged and show them what you have to offer.  Providing them with middle-of-the-funnel content such as case studies, client testimonials, and e-books is a great way to accomplish this. Such content can help position your brand as an authority figure in the industry and build their trust in it, too. 

9. Leverage a CRM

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is integral to any user acquisition strategy. Ideally, it integrates with marketing automation tools to simplify the lead generation and nurturing process while garnering valuable insights, lead data, and important metrics . 

With a CRM, you can build high-converting landing pages with contact forms, enabling you to capture their contact information seamlessly.

It arms your sales team with a history of each lead’s interactions with your website and your brand, better preparing them to speak with prospects during each encounter. 

A CRM also makes it easier for you to determine where leads are getting stalled so you can figure out where to add more content to advance prospects through the process. It will also tell you which CTAs are working best and what needs to be adjusted.

10. Measure your results and refine your strategy

There are many ways to measure your customer acquisition success. These include conversion rate , rate of new customer acquisition , and customer acquisition cost ( CAC ) . Once you review these metrics , you’ll be better equipped to determine which user acquisition strategies are working and which ones aren’t the best fit for your business. 

Be sure to measure results routinely to stay current with ever-changing market conditions and buyer preferences. This will help you see consistent growth while receiving the best possible results for the time, money, and resources invested.

What’s your customer acquisition plan?

A customer acquisition strategy is a must-have for every business that intends to grow. Without it, you’re shooting arrows in the dark and likely wasting your marketing budget. 

Along with this customer acquisition plan, it’s also necessary to have the right tech that can help you build landing pages , capture leads, and nurture them. Act! ticks all the right boxes. If you’re interested in seeing how an all-in-one CRM and Marketing Automation software can improve your customer acquisition, try Act! for free for 14 days . No credit card or download is required. 

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Customer Acquisition: Definition, Formula and Creating a Strategy

Paying customers are the lifeblood of any business, no matter which industry, niche, or profession you’re in. While every business owner and manager is paying attention to customers, not everyone is looking through the lens of a solid customer acquisition strategy.

With a customer acquisition process in place, you’re better able to turn your revenue into a more predictable, repeatable process, instead of a random occurrence. You’ll also have a better idea of how it all ties into your finances, including the average earnings each customer brings versus how much it costs to acquire customers and earn their loyalty.

If you’re looking to build a customer acquisition plan, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll look at what it is, how to calculate it, and how you can start implementing a customer acquisition strategy today.

What is customer acquisition?

In literal terms, customer acquisition is the process of converting potential customers into paying customers. But in reality, a customer acquisition strategy has a lot more to it.

It’s a measurable, repeatable marketing process that catches a prospective customer’s attention, moves them through the buying cycle, and turns them into a long-term paying customer.

The customer acquisition process is often divided into three stages:

• Awareness. A lead discovers your brand and shows interest.
• Consideration. The lead shifts into becoming a prospective customer as they start to do research and consider making a purchase.
• Conversion. The prospective customer converts into a paying customer. From this point, the brand can shift its marketing efforts toward retention, or earning their long-term customer loyalty .

A successful customer acquisition strategy takes all of these stages into consideration, implementing tailored marketing practices and curating the user experience every step of the way.

Calculating customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Every business needs to understand how to calculate its customer acquisition cost (CAC). It’s how you get to know whether your marketing approach is profitable. 

To determine your CAC, divide the total cost of marketing incurred by the number of new customers acquired.

Customer acquisition cost formula: Total marketing spend / total new customers

Let’s assume our LinkedIn page brings in 15 customers a month and you spend $200 developing content. Your CAC would be: $200 / 15 = $13.33 per customer.

Once you’ve calculated your CAC, you can use it to calculate your profit on each order.

For instance, if a customer spends $70 on average when they buy from your business and you keep a 50% margin on each order, your profit would be:

$70 (average order value) x 50% (gross margin) – $13.33 (CAC) = $21.67 (profit)

You can know our customer acquisition cost for different marketing initiatives by using tracking/reporting tools like Shopify Reports .

6 customer acquisition strategies to try

Ready to start your own customer acquisition efforts? Let’s look at a few of the top tried-and-true techniques that brands all over the world are using.

Email marketing is one of the most profitable forms of marketing out there. Data from Statista shows that brands in the retail, ecommerce, and consumer goods industry earned a whopping $45 in return on investment (ROI) for every $1 they spent on email marketing.

First, you’ll need to generate an email list. You can do this through pop-ups and newsletter signup forms on your website, as well as events like hosting contests and giveaways through your website and social media.

Once you’ve built your list, there are plenty of ways to use email to build relationships with leads, including:

• Newsletters. Keep customers in the loop about what’s happening in your business. Discuss news, new product launches, and get creative with “behind the scenes” content like how your products are made and who your team is.
• Promotions. Have a sale or event coming up? Generate interest through email.
• Transactions. Use sign-up and purchase confirmations as an opportunity to sell, upsell, and cross-sell more goods.

2. Content marketing

You know the saying “Content is king.” Especially in today’s world, where users are spending hours per day consuming content on websites, social media, and streaming services.

A solid content marketing plan is necessary if you want to grab people’s attention, engage them, and convince them to take the plunge and make a purchase. 

Your content marketing plan can include:

• Blogs. Write helpful and interesting articles about your industry, products, and topics related to your products. For example, if you’re a beauty brand, you can blog about skin care tips and offer makeup tutorials.
• Social media. Create posts, videos, and interactive content related to your brand. Be sure to back it up with user engagement—for example, reply to every comment and leave comments on other posts to stand out.
• Other forms like podcasts, print publications, apps, press releases, and more.

Beauty brand Beauty Pie blogs about everything from customer spotlights to skin care, to supplements to myth-busting investigations in the beauty world.

3. Influencer sponsorships

Influencer marketing is a massive industry, especially on social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. With this customer acquisition channel, brands partner with influencers to promote their products or services. By definition, an influencer is an online personality or entity that has their own loyal, engaged following.

If you find the right influencers to partner with—those who are in your niche and are relevant to your brand—you can get in front of hundreds or thousands of potential customers.

You can have an influencer create content about your brand or products in exchange for payment or free goods. You can also try affiliate marketing , where influencers get a cut of your sales.

Just watch out for the pitfalls: it can be tough to track ROI, and you’ll need to put forth some investment upfront.

4. Traditional advertising

Advertising isn’t dead. You can still benefit from customer acquisition channels like print advertising, TV ads, billboards, and direct mail. These will of course depend on the type of business you have and the ROI potential for using these less-scalable, more geographically targeted techniques.

This will come with some trade-offs: for example, you won’t be able to track impressions, views, and engagement with your physical ads the way you can with digital marketing techniques.

But you can use omnichannel marketing to tie it all together. For example, a printed ad that leads customers onto your website or app, and into your digital funnel.

5. Audience building

With social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch, ecommerce brands have been able to build huge online followings of potential customers. A real-world example is Gymshark . 

Gymshark has more than six million followers on Instagram and cultivated a community of brand ambassadors who endorse the brand everywhere.

This not only lends its brand authority, but it also creates a base of customers Gymshark can reach whenever it wants to increase sales or promote a new item.

Although most audience-building strategies require time, effort, and consistency, they are often considered worthwhile since they can help you create a customer group you can reach at any time for free.

6. Paid advertising

Paid advertising has emerged as a popular way for ecommerce brands to attract new customers.

Paid ads offer several benefits that can help businesses grow quickly, such as driving exposure to your brand and offering targeting abilities that let you tailor offerings to people’s interests and behaviors. So it isn’t a surprise that many ecommerce companies are using them as part of their customer acquisition efforts.

For instance, makeup brand Glossier uses Facebook ads to find new customers online.

While Facebook and Google reign as the most prominent platforms for paid ads, there are other options to consider. The choice of which site to use depends on understanding the audience and where they spend their time online.

Build the process, reap the benefits

When you approach it thoughtfully and methodically, a customer acquisition strategy can have major benefits for your business. You’ll be better able to systematically bring customers in the door and keep them coming back for more. You’ll also have a better understanding of the financial components, like your customer acquisition cost and how it ties into your profits.

All that’s left to do is start building your plan, implementing the steps, and measuring your outcomes—then keep repeating the process, improving a little more with each cycle.

Customer acquisition FAQ

What is a customer acquisition strategy.

A customer acquisition strategy is a plan to attract and convert potential customers. It involves using various tactics tailored to your target audience’s preferences to guide them through the buying process. The goal is to capture their attention and turn them into loyal clients.

How is customer acquisition different from customer retention?

Customer acquisition focuses on identifying and converting new customers, whereas customer retention is the process of satisfying and nurturing existing clients to ensure repeat business. Both are crucial for business growth and sustainability, but they require different strategies and tactics to achieve success.

What are the best customer acquisition tools?

• Shopify Email : This is an email marketing app built for ecommerce stores. You can use it to create elegant, branded emails to send to your subscribers.
• Shopify Inbox : A free Shopify app, Shopify Inbox lets you turn visitors into customers via real-time chat. You can send discounts and recommendations from your Shopify store inside chats with just a few clicks, turning browsing sessions into shopping sprees. 
• Referral Candy : This is a tool for building referral products for your business. You can use it to create fun, engaging loyalty programs that help you reach new customers via word of mouth.

Want to learn more?

• Dropshipping Vs Affiliate Marketing: Which is More Profitable?
• 24 Effective Marketing Tips to Skyrocket Sales
• 10 Best Customer Retention Strategies for 2023
• 7 Types of Internet Marketing: Simplfiied

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How Customer Acquisition Fuels Greater Growth

Shape a customer acquisition strategy that meets buyer preferences and maximizes revenue opportunities.

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Evolve your strategy to meet today’s buyers where they are

Traditional approaches to pipeline generation no longer work for today’s buyers. CSOs must rethink customer acquisition to maximize revenue. Download this eBook to learn how to transform sales execution, deliver optimal value to buyers and win more business. Plus, learn how leading sales organizations:

Increase key account revenue

Accelerate the pipeline and achieve hypergrowth

Shorten sales cycles and increase win rates

Chart a new course for customer acquisition

Amid rapidly shifting buyer preferences, leading CSOs are transforming sales strategy by taking the following critical actions.

• Design High-Value Offers
• Redefine Prospecting
• Optimize RevTech Stacks
• Improve Pipeline Quality

Boost customer acquisition with offers that compel buyers to purchase

Customer acquisition is getting harder than ever. The stark reality: Competition for high-value prospects’ attention is high, and 70% of B2B sellers find that gaining access to customer stakeholders is a challenge when selling virtually.

One way to overcome the customer acquisition challenge is to design a “high-value offer.” High-value offers increase success rates in securing meetings with new prospects, leading to new revenue opportunities.

As a linchpin in your customer acquisition strategy, a high-value offer should be the single best opportunity a buyer can find to learn more about how to solve a problem, interact with experts from your company and explore potential solutions.

High-value offers share four key attributes:

They include a live interaction or discussion that buyers rate as high-value compared to other tactics.

They offer business value that makes the time investment worthwhile.

They address timely topics that align to the buyer’s immediate priorities.

They present a unique opportunity not readily available elsewhere.

Prospects find the most value when an offer includes one or more of the following:

Problem-solving and/or personalized advice to improve their situation

Collaborative planning to chart a path to advance their situation

Unique domain expertise and experience that can make a positive impact on their situation

When communicating your high-value offer, focus on the following:

Relevance to the audience.  Center your topic on the prospect’s most pressing issues, focusing on business or role-based value. Apply and tailor the offer to the prospect’s unique situation. 

Exclusivity for the audience . Emphasize your unique insight, expertise or content and tie your interactions to commercial value (i.e., make it clear that the insights you share could have a price, but you’re giving them for free in return for the prospect’s time).

To demonstrate the contrast between an “average” and “high-value” offer, let’s use the example of an online ROI calculator. The average online ROI calculator is available to any contact who completes a form. Then sales representatives email and call to follow up with the prospect. This is not exclusive, nor is it uniquely relevant to the recipient.

However, that same ROI calculator can be developed into a high-value offer by making it more relevant and exclusive. For example:

The ROI calculator is customized based on the buyer’s publicly available financial reports for the prospect to review, without the need for them to “do the work.”

The key findings are proactively summarized and accompanied by an invitation to join a 30-minute discussion with a subject matter expert to review the findings and make recommendations based on buyer-specific information.

Ultimately it is the prospect, not you, who decides if an offer is high-value and irresistible. Ask for client feedback and/or pilot offers and evaluate response rates.

Modernize your customer acquisition strategy with a team approach

The number of daily quality conversations (defined as a connect or response where at least one piece of qualifying or disqualifying information is learned) has dropped 55% from 8 to 3.6 per rep since 2014. As buyers continue to shy away from engaging with sellers, prospecting has become a team sport.

Enable a cross-functional customer acquisition strategy

Even though sales and marketing share a common goal of driving revenue growth, disconnects between the two functions lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Aligning sales and marketing can improve seller productivity and help meet customer acquisition goals. 

Sales enablement typically sits between sales and marketing — but enablement activities around prospecting often happen in silos. A modern customer acquisition strategy clearly identifies the objectives of each commercial leader. Sales enablement can bridge the gap by designing a clear, cross-functional prospecting approach. B2B organizations that unify commercial strategies and leverage multithreaded commercial engagements will outperform their competition by 50%.

Refocus seller time on engaging and developing quality opportunities

Embracing a data- and technology-driven prospecting strategy not only enhances seller productivity but also supports sellers in increasingly competitive markets.

Focus sales teams on how to engage buyers and generate quality conversations instead of just generating a greater quantity of low-value meetings. To achieve this, leverage technology, data and AI to drive modernized prospecting strategies.

Technology — Automation can help streamline sellers’ workflows for prioritizing accounts and contacts while executing tasks from a single application. 

Data — High-quality account and contact data accuracy controlled by the organization prevents seller productivity from being wasted on data searching to execute sales activities. 

AI — Use predictive scoring and intent signals to prioritize accounts. By using generative AI to analyze behaviors and data specific to the account and buyer, sellers are equipped to prioritize accounts more readily and can articulate a more effective and persuasive value message. 

By 2026, 65% of B2B sales organizations will transition from intuition-based to data-driven decision making, using technology that unites workflow, data and analytics. And B2B sales organizations using GenAI-embedded sales technologies will reduce time spent on prospecting and customer meeting prep by more than 50%.

Drive customer acquisition success by honing your RevTech selection process

To support customer acquisition and sustain revenue growth, many CSOs increase their spend on new sales technologies . 

But most CSOs don’t see their current tech stacks as effective, and sales often gets stuck in a cycle of purchasing tech that fails to meet expectations. To jump-start customer acquisition, move from a technology-first focus to an outcomes-first focus. 

Embrace complexity by defining use cases

Sales tech procurement traditionally begins with questions about the technology. Yet much of the complex information that could better inform the RevTech selection process and utilization plan is either defined late in the process or omitted.

Defining use cases early on lowers the risk of complications further down the line, such as:

Incompatibilities with your existing technology, data or operations

Technology capabilities that are not fit for purpose 

Poor adoption from frontline users

Limited ability to measure or clarify impact and value on customer acquisition

RevTech use cases are vital for planning and can be split into two categories: value to the organization and value to the user or process.

To address value to the organization:

Manage expectations.  Define what the proposed solution will do, and commit to it before engaging stakeholders. 

Engage stakeholders.  Solicit understanding and agreement on future capabilities and how they impact revenue operations. Examples of stakeholders include:

Sellers. Solicit input and buy-in for adoption from frontline users of the technology.

Finance. Get approval for investment and agree on measurement parameters.

Commercial. Discuss the fit in relation to the commercial model of the business.

Analytics. Explore the size of opportunity to validate assumptions about what the use case would deliver toward the business outcome.

Plan outcomes.  Defining and communicating the value and how value will be measured are key to optimizing your future RevTech. Define, prioritize and schedule core units of value delivery, such as seller productivity, deal value, deal volume and sales velocity.

To address value to the user or process:

Clarify cross-team requirements.  The process of iteratively documenting specific use cases will clarify what each team relies on and will deliver.

Challenge prospective vendors.  The depth and detail of your story through use cases challenge prospective vendors to prove how they will meet your needs beyond features and functions or high-level ideas.

Eliminate poor-fit solutions.  Clearly defining the use cases upfront helps distinguish appropriate solutions. This also supports efficient RevTech procurement processes.

Speed to market. Use cases will help accelerate the process of delivery by highlighting important scope dependencies and expectations.

To get started with use cases, pinpoint the customer acquisition outcomes you want to achieve. Then work back to technologies that can help drive those outcomes. This critical shift, from technology-first to outcomes-first, helps set realistic expectations for what technologies will deliver, and guides the tech evaluation process.

Also keep in mind that outcomes are often derived through smarter deployment of multiple different technologies working together to achieve specific results. New capabilities can then be expanded by connecting complementary technologies as part of a larger ecosystem.

Lead cross-functional collaboration on pipeline generation

CSOs face a persistent challenge to generate a high-quality pipeline in new and existing accounts. To improve pipeline quality, lead the charge to align all functions around a shared strategy for pipeline generation .

An account-based customer acquisition strategy focuses the organization on a specific business objective. For example, in a growth strategy, the objective might be to grow the pipeline by increasing the average deal size of new opportunities. If efficiency is the priority, the objective might be to increase conversion rates or reduce average cycle time for opportunities in the funnel, shortening the time to realize new revenue.

After identifying the strategic objective, work closely with marketing to enable more effective cross-functional execution. Improve collaboration by prioritizing the following activities:

Target-audience understanding.  Define and agree on target account fit and prioritization criteria by merging sales’ qualitative input on ideal target markets and accounts with marketing’s quantitative data on market segments and accounts with good market fit.

Messaging alignment. Co-create messaging, content strategy and an integrated multichannel engagement plan by combining sales’ voice of the customer insights alongside marketing’s demand gen engagement results.

Measurement. Agree on shared metrics and track pipeline progression via shared KPIs.

Process design. Work with marketing to define account scoring criteria and seamless multichannel buyer interactions based on buyer feedback.

Data and technology. Develop a shared data and technology foundation to support coordinated execution.

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FAQ on customer acquisition

What is customer acquisition.

Customer acquisition is the process of identifying and developing opportunities in the sales channel and executing them to close deals. It involves engaging with prospects and aligning with sales efforts across the buyer’s purchase journey.

How do you measure customer acquisition?

To measure customer acquisition, focus on coverage analysis in the planning phase, engagement metrics as campaigns take flight, and activity metrics as offers are delivered across channels. As your program matures, gauge how the collective effort is driving pipeline opportunity velocity, win rates and deal size.

How can you improve a customer acquisition strategy?

CSOs can partner with CMOs to optimize the customer acquisition strategy by focusing jointly on demand generation, sales enablement and account growth programs.

Drive stronger performance on your mission-critical priorities.

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Customer acquisition: how to attract and win new customers

You can’t have a stable, profitable business without a steady stream of new customers. 

Where customer acquisition ranks on your list of priorities can define how much—and how fast—your company grows. But for many business owners, gaining new customers can feel like a game of chance. And maintaining a consistent and effective customer acquisition rate is easier said than done.

Last updated

Reading time.

Acquiring customers is about understanding how people discover your brand and why they buy from you so you can improve the customer journey. 

This guide helps you understand customer acquisition and why it’s essential for your business and audience. Over the next few chapters, we dive into how to systematically acquire new customers, keep track of what you’re spending, and equip your team to succeed.

Attract and retain new customers

Hotjar puts your customers' needs and wants in the spotlight, setting you up for improved acquisition and retention.

What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of attracting, engaging, and converting prospective customers into paying ones to expand your business's customer base.

Customer acquisition happens in stages, often visualized as a customer acquisition funnel, covering the entire customer journey—from the moment a person becomes aware of your business online to when they finally convert.

The main goal of customer acquisition is to find a systematic and sustainable way to attract people to your business and persuade them to take action —for example, to make a purchase or sign up for a paid subscription. This involves different teams, channels, and strategies, such as:

Why is acquiring customers important?

Whether you’re a new business trying to win over your first customer or a household name acquiring your 10,000th, customer acquisition is always relevant. 

Maintaining a sustainable flow of new customers allows you to:

Grow your business by expanding your customer base and increasing brand awareness

Gain revenue to meet costs, pay employees, and reinvest in your company

Show evidence of traction , steady growth, and success for outside parties such as investors, partners, and influencers

Being able to continually drive new business is crucial to the long-term success of your company. To keep growing, it’s important to continue creating opportunities to gain new customers—even for companies with a large audience of repeat customers. After all, every loyal customer or repeat purchaser started their journey with your business as a new customer.

Customer acquisition vs. customer retention

Creating a customer experience that brings in revenue involves more than just gaining new customers—it’s also about keeping them coming back for more. 

Both customer acquisition and customer retention focus on building good customer relationships to grow a business. But they do it in different ways:

Customer acquisition involves attracting prospects to your company and then persuading them to buy your product or service

Customer retention involves nurturing the customers you already have and keeping them active and happy 

Without customer acquisition, there is no business to begin with; without customer retention, your company becomes unsustainable. 

That’s why every business should focus on both acquisition and retention , combining efforts to ensure a constant stream of new customers without losing existing ones. With a strategy incorporating initiatives for both, you'll enjoy steady and sustainable growth for years.

5 customer acquisition tips that are key for growing your business

Acquiring customers involves creating a sustainable acquisition plan that can evolve. These five tips will get you started on your customer acquisition journey, helping you develop a process for getting potential customers through the door and convincing them to buy from you:

Understand who your customers are

Define a customer acquisition strategy

Communicate with your customers

Build a customer acquisition toolkit

Measure and improve your strategy

1. Understand who your customers are

The first step toward customer acquisition is to understand your customer base—both your current and target audiences. 

This will help you achieve product-market fit faster and set realistic marketing goals. With this understanding, your customer acquisition efforts can make better use of precious resources like time and money.

Before you invest in any customer acquisition methods, take time to define who you’re targeting:

Build user personas : a profile of your customers based on psychographics, demographics, interests, and purchase history, so you can focus your efforts on improving the experience for real people and use cases

Identify your ideal customers : pinpoint your highest-value customers' traits and behaviors, and use that knowledge to invest in customer acquisition channels that help you more effectively reach your target audience where they are

Remember that their needs and expectations change as consumers move through the customer acquisition funnel to become buyers. Keeping track of these customer profiles helps you analyze, understand, and expand your customer base at each step.

📚 Further reading: check out our in-depth chapter on the customer acquisition funnel , including how to optimize and improve your customer experience at each step.

💡 Pro tip : understand customer needs by learning directly from your customers.

To build a business your target audience will love and want to buy from, you need to go beyond who your customers are to identify their most significant needs.

As you grow, use Hotjar Observe and Ask tools to identify your ideal customer's pain points and build solutions to address them:

Study Recordings to see how individual users interact with your business. Recordings give you insights through your customer’s eyes so you can iterate on your offering based on a genuine understanding of the customer experience.

Use Surveys to understand what your customers are looking for in their own words. Use long- or short-answer questions, open- and closed-ended questions, rating scales, and more to customize your surveys based on what you're trying to learn—making it easier to achieve a product-market fit and create the best possible experience.

Use Hotjar Recordings to gather reliable evidence of the actual user experience

2. Define a customer acquisition strategy

Creating a clear strategy for finding, attracting, engaging, and converting prospects is crucial to improving customer acquisition. 

Customer acquisition includes two main components: discovery and persuasion. Start by finding and attracting potential customers to your business (discovery). Once you’ve got their attention, you need to convince them to buy from you (persuasion). Here are a few tips on how to build a strong customer acquisition roadmap:

Begin with the basics: develop a set strategy for where to generate demand, what you'll spend on these marketing efforts, and how to convert visitors into paying customers.

Choose the right channels : consumers use a variety of channels every day—like websites, email, and social media—so your customer acquisition process must involve different ways to engage them. Develop a unique strategy for each channel and test new customer acquisition methods.

Develop a sustainable strategy : simplify and systematize the process of acquiring new customers. Your methods should be easy to sustain and effective in the long run.

Set up your acquisition strategy correctly, and you can expect to spend your budget more effectively, improve customer lifetime value (CLV) , and grow your business steadily over time.

📚 Further reading : check out our comprehensive chapter on customer acquisition strategies , including tips on diversifying your approach for a greater chance of reaching new audiences and generating new business.

3. Communicate with your customers

When it comes to customer acquisition, it’s easy to follow a routine without examining how practical your approach truly is. And it's even more challenging to find the gaps in your customer acquisition process without direct customer feedback .

Asking your most valuable (or most vulnerable) customers for feedback reduces the communication barrier between you and your target audience. It helps you identify and capitalize on the value customers expect from your products and services.

Create a communication plan to keep conversations going with your customers. Here are a few great ways to stay in touch with your customer base:

Customer surveys : a simple, low-commitment way to gather first impressions and make sure new customers feel empowered to explore your brand and share their experiences with you

Website feedback widgets : gather impromptu feedback that captures your users’ feelings as they navigate your website or interact with your business, while their experience is fresh

Customer interviews : create an intimate forum to collect customer opinions, discover the true value of your business in their eyes, and develop realistic action plans to better meet their needs 

Social media posts : centralize unsolicited customer feedback that gives you unfiltered insights into popular customer sentiments, problems, and experiences

By allowing users to share their thoughts, you discover exactly what they loved (or hated) about their experience with you—no guesswork necessary. Use these insights to create a delightful customer acquisition experience that increases your ability to convert and retain them.

💡 Pro tip : supercharge your customer feedback collection with Hotjar Ask and Engage tools.

Customer feedback tools let you create a continuous loop of incoming feedback, product discovery, and development—so you can acquire new customers with relevant solutions.  

Use Hotjar Ask and Engage tools to unobtrusively collect feedback to better gauge customer delight:

Gather feedback in the wild with Hotjar Feedback : place feedback widgets throughout the customer acquisition funnel for insights into the customer experience at different touchpoints. Ask customers to rate their experience, highlight parts of your page or product they like or dislike, and provide a reason for their score. 

Gauge customer opinions and feelings with Hotjar Surveys : use customer satisfaction surveys to measure satisfaction or exit-intent surveys to ask customers why they’re leaving your website

Automate customer interviews with Hotjar Engage : understand exactly what your customers are experiencing and anticipate their needs by recruiting users, then host, record, and transcribe your calls with them

Hotjar’s Feedback widget makes it easy to collect feedback and create a continuous feedback loop

4. Build a customer acquisition toolkit

Every business needs a customer acquisition toolkit. Depending on your goals, consider adding these types of tools to your existing sales and marketing suites:

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools : with sales engagement, reporting, and analytics features, these tools help you analyze your conversion rates and improve your business

Behavior analytics software : tools like heatmaps and session recordings show you how prospects interact with your website, so you can make changes to improve it according to real user behavior

Lead generation tools : grow your email list, get higher conversions, or make more sales

Search engine optimization (SEO) tools : everything you need to optimize your site for organic search and start ranking on search engines

PPC software : create paid ads and equip your content to perform best in SERPs and on partner websites and publishers

Chat tools : enable your salespeople and marketers to chat with potential leads, send customer details to your CRM, manage orders, and accept payments

Customer feedback software : collect direct feedback from your prospects and customers and turn it into actionable insights

Social media tools : from social proof to planning software, these tools help you leverage social media to attract prospects and make more sales

Referral software : automate your referral program, offer customers rewards, and analyze results

Email marketing tools : create, design, and share marketing campaigns with relevant customers and clients directly in their inbox

📚 Further reading: check out our in-depth chapter on customer acquisition tools and how to use each one to help you gain new customers.

5. Measure and improve your strategy

Your targeted customer acquisition strategy also involves taking a step back and figuring out what’s best for your business, resources, and audience right now . 

Remember to routinely measure your results and track related costs to ensure continuous improvement:

Determine the ROI of your acquisition tactics : regularly review important metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), new customer growth, churn rate, and CLV, so you can optimize for the most successful channels and refine your strategy

Make sure your current channels and tactics are working : track each channel’s quantitative and qualitative analytics and update your strategy regularly, and develop a customer retention strategy to maximize your company’s growth

How much does it cost to acquire customers?

Your customer acquisition cost (CAC)—the budget required to acquire a new customer, either overall or from specific marketing channels—is crucial to identifying the most effective strategies for your business.

Knowing your CAC helps you:

See which marketing channels are actually contributing to your growth , plus exactly how many new customers they’ve brought in compared to other channels

Calibrate your investment in different acquisition channels and decide what to scale up, scale down, or stop

Acquire more customers with cost-effective marketing and develop and document a successful customer acquisition strategy

To calculate your CAC, choose a specific period of time and divide the total amount you spent on your customer acquisition efforts by the number of customers acquired during that same timeframe:

Total cost of sales and marketing / total number of new customers = CAC

The result will be your average cost to acquire a single customer. If you’re looking for the CAC of a specific channel or campaign—like Facebook ads or content marketing—the steps are the same, except you’ll divide the amount you spent on that particular acquisition method by the customers it brought in.

Note : check out our in-depth chapter on customer acquisition cost , including how to optimize it and gain more customers with cost-effective marketing strategies.

Next steps to customer acquisition

Acquiring new customers may seem challenging, but with the right preparation and strategy, your business can attract high-value customers, keep them around longer, and grow sustainably .

Consider your business’s capabilities and limitations when creating a customer acquisition strategy. Once you know which acquisition methods work best, implement them consistently, and remember the importance of understanding your customers and their objectives.

FAQs about customer acquisition

What is a customer acquisition strategy.

A customer acquisition strategy details the methods, channels, and tools a business needs to attract, engage, and convert prospective customers into paying ones to expand a business's customer base.

What are the main customer acquisition channels?

The most commonly used types of customer acquisition channels include: 

Content marketing 

Social media marketing 

Paid advertising 

Referral program

Email marketing

What is a good customer acquisition cost (and CAC ratio)?

A good CAC depends on the industry and methods used and will vary greatly for different businesses. Most commonly, companies will benchmark their customer acquisition cost against customer lifetime value, looking for a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:3.

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Enhance Your Customer Experience to Acquire New Customers

Table of contents

A guide to customer acquisition in 2024 [strategies, tools and more].

If you’re running a business, you know how customer acquisition can be an important indicator and driver of revenue. 

Now, different brands acquire customers in different ways. Some see success in Google Ads, some in email campaigns, some with SEO, and so on.

Irrespective of how you acquire customers , what’s fundamental is understanding and optimizing the way you do customer acquisition. 

Doing this right will help you save time, effort, and money in getting new customers. It will also, indirectly, lead to better profit margins. 

In this article, we’ll explore a range of strategies, hacks, and tools that can help you do customer acquisition right in 2024.

Key Takeaways

Table of contents, what is customer acquisition.

Customer acquisition is the process through which a business gains new customers. It involves identifying potential customers, reaching out to them through various channels, and ultimately convincing them to purchase a product or service. This process is crucial for business growth and sustainability. It not only expands your customer base but also contributes to the company’s revenue and market presence.

Let’s consider the example of ‘EcoFriendly Bags’ – a startup specializing in environmentally sustainable bags. To acquire customers, they need to implement various customer acquisition strategies.  First, they need to identify their target market: environmentally conscious consumers and those preferring eco-friendly products. 

Next, they might employ digital marketing strategies like social media campaigns and SEO-based (Search Engine Optimization) blogs and videos, to increase visibility among this audience. They can also partner with eco-friendly influencers to reach a broader audience.

This is how a customer acquisition strategy overview of EcoFriendly Bags would look like:

 Through these efforts, ‘EcoFriendly Bags’ can successfully attract new customers who value sustainability, thereby growing their customer base and establishing a strong market presence. 

This example demonstrates how identifying the right audience and using the right channels are pivotal in the customer acquisition process.

Why is Customer Acquisition Important?

Customer acquisition is a fundamental aspect of business growth and success. Here are some key reasons why it holds such significance:

Recommended read: Customer Feedback Guide: How to Collect and What to Do With It?

What is a Customer Acquisition Strategy?

A customer acquisition strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a business intends to attract and convert new customers. It’s a blend of tactics and methodologies designed to increase its customer base.

A well-crafted strategy is crucial for businesses to ensure they’re not only reaching potential customers but also engaging them in a way that leads to sales. Here’s a closer look at the key components of a customer acquisition strategy:

11 Customer Acquisition Strategies for Your Business

Customer acquisition strategies are the methods and approaches businesses use to attract new customers. These strategies vary depending on the type of business, target audience, and market conditions. 

Here are 11 effective customer acquisition strategies that you should be aware of in 2024:

1. Segmenting The Target Market

Target market segmentation is a strategy in customer acquisition involving the division of a potential customer base into discrete groups with common needs, interests, or characteristics. 

This approach enables businesses to tailor their marketing efforts more precisely, resulting in more effective customer acquisition. 

Here are some key pointers to consider when implementing target market segmentation:

2. Creating A Value Proposition

Developing a compelling value proposition is critical in distinguishing your product or service and convincing potential customers why they should choose you over competitors. It’s about clearly articulating the unique benefits and value your offering brings. 

Here are key pointers to consider in developing an effective value proposition:

Recommended read: How to Create a Unique Value Proposition [5 Real-World Examples]

3. Creating a Brand Position

Brand positioning and messaging are about strategically defining your brand’s place in the market and communicating it effectively to your target audience. It’s a way of setting your brand apart from competitors and creating a unique identity in the minds of consumers. 

Here are key aspects to consider for effective brand positioning and messaging:

4. Mapping Customer Journey

Customer Journey Mapping is crucial for optimizing the customer acquisition process. By understanding the path from initial brand awareness to purchase, businesses can pinpoint critical touchpoints that influence decision-making. This insight allows for targeted interactions to attract and convert prospects effectively, thereby enhancing overall acquisition efforts.

Here’s a breakdown of the customer acquisition funnels to help you map your customer journey better:

Recommended read: A Detailed Guide to Customer Journey Mapping

5. Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is a critical strategy for businesses to stay ahead of the curve. It involves systematically evaluating your competitors’ products, sales, and marketing strategies – against those of your own – to understand strengths and weaknesses. 

This analysis is crucial to understand how to stand out in the market and meet customer needs more effectively than your competitors. By assessing what others are doing, you gain insights into market trends and customer preferences, allowing you to tailor your customer acquisition strategies to be more appealing and distinctive. 

This process is essential for identifying potential opportunities to differentiate your business and attract customers who are seeking something different or better in your industry. Here’s how to effectively conduct a competitor analysis:

For instance, Hiver stands out in the market of customer support help desks. The main USP of the product is that it works on top of the Gmail’s interface, making it different from its competitors. Along with this, Hiver provides multiple help desk features like Shared Inbox, assignments, analytics etc. but it is comparatively cheaper than most of its competitors.

6. Budget Optimization

Budget optimization is vital in customer acquisition as it directly impacts the cost-effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It’s crucial to acquire customers at a cost that is lower than their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Without this balance, you risk spending more on acquiring a customer than they will ever bring in revenue, which can lead to unsustainable growth and diminished profits. 

Strategic budget allocation and continuous adjustments based on channel performance ensure that your customer acquisition costs remain within a profitable range, aligning with the overall financial health of your business.

Here are some pointers for effective budget optimization:

7. Collaboration between Sales and Marketing

Collaboration of sales and marketing is essential for creating a unified approach to customer acquisition. When these two functions are aligned, they can work synchronously to attract, engage, and convert leads more effectively. 

Here are key pointers for integrating sales and marketing efforts:

Recommended read: How to Create a Customer Feedback Loop to Improve Your CX

8. Leverage Technology and Automation

Incorporating technology and automation in customer acquisition strategies can enhance efficiency. By using tools like CRM systems, marketing automation, and data analytics, businesses can streamline processes and tailor their approaches according to individual buyer needs. 

Here’s how you can leverage technology and automation for acquiring customers in 2024:

Recommended read: The 10 Best Live Chat Widgets for Your Website

9. Leverage the Right Channels

Choosing the right channels for customer acquisition is essential to connect with your target audience effectively. It’s about identifying where your potential customers are most active and tailoring your efforts to these platforms.

Here are the key pointers to consider while choosing the right channel for customer acquisition:

10. Content Syndication

This strategy is particularly helpful for B2B businesses. Content syndication is a strategic approach to distribute your business’s content on external platforms frequently viewed by your target audience. This method can significantly increase your reach and establish your brand’s authority in your industry. 

Here are key points to consider for effective content syndication:

11. Community Engagement and Participation

Community engagement and participation is a strategic approach to customer acquisition that involves actively connecting with and contributing to groups and events relevant to your business. 

This method builds brand awareness and loyalty within the community. It not only builds brand awareness and and brings in loyal customers but also play a l role in customer acquisition. By consistently contributing to relevant groups and events, your business gains a reputation as an active and trusted member of the community. 

This growing authority and visibility make prospects more inclined to explore and engage with your offerings, converting community goodwill into tangible customer interest and acquisition.

Here are essential pointers for effectively engaging in community participation:

10 Customer Acquisition Tools to Try Out in 2024

There are effective tools to assist businesses in reaching, engaging, and converting potential customers effectively. 

Here’s a breakdown of key customer acquisition tools and their applications:

1. CRM Software

CRM systems are pivotal for managing customer relationships, tracking interactions, and personalizing communication, based on customer history and preferences. They are essential in organizing and optimizing sales and marketing efforts.

Salesforce, for example, is a robust CRM platform that helps businesses track customer interactions, manage leads, and personalize customer communication.

2. Marketing Automation Platforms

These platforms automate repetitive marketing tasks, enabling personalized customer journeys and more efficient lead-nurturing processes. They help in aligning marketing efforts with customer behavior and preferences.

HubSpot is widely used for its ability to automate email campaigns , manage social media posts, and analyze customer engagement, making marketing efforts more cohesive and targeted.

3. Analytics and Data Analysis Tools

These tools provide valuable insights into customer behavior, campaign performance, and website engagement, aiding in making data-driven decisions to optimize marketing strategies and improve user experience .

Google Analytics provides insights into website traffic, user behavior, bounce rate, and conversion rates, helping businesses understand and improve their online presence.

4. Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing tools help businesses design, send, and track email campaigns. They offer features like audience segmentation, scheduling of campaigns, and performance analysis to enhance engagement and conversion rates.

Mailchimp is one such tool that helps to design emails, segment audiences, and track campaign performance, making it easier for businesses to engage with their audience via email.

5. Social Media Management Software

Social media tools help streamline, manage and schedule posts across multiple social media platforms. They also offer to track engagement, analyze trends, and understand audience behavior.

For instance, Hootsuite provides a comprehensive dashboard, which allows businesses to manage and monitor all their social media accounts from one central location. 

This feature simplifies the process of scheduling posts, tracking engagement, and analyzing performance across various platforms, enabling more efficient and cohesive social media management.

6. SEO Tools

SEO tools are essential for optimizing web content. They offer recommendations to improve search engine rankings, and provide insight into search volume for different keywords. These tools also help analyze competitors’ content, and make it easier to set benchmarks and identify content gaps.

Using SEMrush free trial , users can leverage Semrush’s suite of tools for keyword research, site audits, backlink management , and competitive analysis, empowering businesses to enhance their search engine rankings and online visibility with data-driven insights.

7. Content Management Systems (CMS)

CMS platforms enable easy creation, management, and optimization of digital content. It facilitates a dynamic web presence and ensures that content is up-to-date and relevant to the audience.

WordPress, known for its flexibility and ease of use, enables businesses to create and manage website content effectively, enhancing content marketing efforts.

8. Advertising Platforms

Digital advertising platforms provide tools for creating, managing, and optimizing online advertising campaigns. They have capabilities for targeting specific audiences and tracking ad performance.

Google Ads provides a platform for businesses to create targeted ad campaigns across Google’s search and display network, helping them reach potential customers effectively.

9. Customer Feedback Tools

Customer feedback tools are crucial for gathering insights directly from customers, enabling businesses to improve their products or services and enhance customer satisfaction.

SurveyMonkey enables businesses to create and distribute customer surveys. Through this, you gain valuable feedback that can inform you about product development and customer service improvements.

10. Customer Support Tools

Customer support tools help manage inquiries and issues, ensuring timely and organized responses. 

One such customer support platform is Hiver. It enables businesses to manage customer support directly from their email inbox. It allows teams to assign, track, and collaborate on customer emails arriving in shared inboxes, ensuring that timely and consistent responses are being sent out. These capabilities not only improve response times but also ensure consistent, high-quality customer service to all the customers.

11 Effective Customer Acquisition Channels For Your Business

Customer acquisition channels are the various pathways through which businesses can reach and convert potential customers into actual customers. Choosing the right channels is essential for the effectiveness of your customer acquisition efforts. 

Here’s an overview of various customer acquisition channels, highlighting their unique features and applications:

Final Words

Mastering customer acquisition in 2024 involves a blend of understanding your market, leveraging the right tools, and continuously adapting to changing customer behaviors and preferences. 

From the initial stages of target market segmentation to the final steps of retention and advocacy, each aspect of the customer acquisition process plays a vital role in building a sustainable and growing customer base. 

Among the plethora of tools available for optimizing your customer acquisition strategies, Hiver stands out as a versatile asset, for customer service and interaction. 

As a customer support tool, Hiver enables businesses to manage customer interactions seamlessly, ensuring that every customer query is addressed efficiently and effectively right from the inbox. Its ability to track customer interactions makes it a powerful tool for not just resolving customer issues, but also for building stronger, more personalized relationships with each customer. 

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Customer acquisition is the process of gaining new customers by identifying potential ones, reaching out through various channels, and convincing them to make a purchase. It’s essential for business growth and contributes significantly to revenue and market presence.

Customer acquisition is vital for sustained business growth, market expansion, brand awareness, competitive advantage, and receiving feedback for improvement. It ensures a steady flow of revenue and helps businesses tap into new markets.

Effective strategies include 

A value proposition clearly articulates why customers should choose a particular product or service, focusing on unique benefits and aligning with customer needs. It’s crucial for differentiating a brand in the market.

Customer Journey Mapping helps businesses understand the steps customers take, from becoming aware of a brand to making a purchase. This understanding aids in creating tailored strategies for each journey stage.

Hiver, as a customer support tool, helps manage customer interactions efficiently, ensuring timely and effective responses. Its ability to track customer history and interactions within email enhances relationship-building, which is crucial for customer acquisition and retention.

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What Is Customer Acquisition? A Complete 2024 Guide

If you want to grow your business consistently and profitably, you need to think of customer acquisition not as an outcome but as a process. Here's an in-depth look at how to calculate customer acquisition cost and seven strategies to test.

Whether you’re a new entrepreneur trying to win over your first 10 customers or a seasoned veteran acquiring your 10,000th, customer acquisition never stops being relevant.

But for many business owners, sales can be unpredictable, and gaining new customers can feel like a game of chance.

If you want to grow your business consistently and profitably, you need to think of customer acquisition not as an outcome but as a process—one that considers how you can systematically acquire new customers, the cost to get them through your door, and how much money each one will spend with your business.

What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of finding and persuading prospective customers to buy from your business in a way that is both measurable and repeatable—not random. Examples of customer acquisition include email marketing, using a CRM, and providing superior customer service. 

Customer acquisition channels

Businesses use customer acquisition channels to connect with their ideal buyer personas. You can use these channels across all touchpoints of the customer journey to bring your customer acquisition methods to life. 

Popular customer acquisition channels include: 

• Your website
• Email marketing
• Events 
• Organic social media
• Customer support
• Referrals 

The customer acquisition funnel

Whether you’re selling wholesale or direct to consumers, you need a customer acquisition strategy. Customer acquisition happens in stages, which are often visualized as a customer acquisition funnel:

The customer acquisition funnel visualizes the journey a potential customer takes. Marketers and entrepreneurs often discuss the funnel as having three main stages:

• Top of the funnel (awareness). At this stage, your goal is to generate awareness and leads amongst your target audience. Typically, you’ll focus on a large, broad audience that may be interested in your company’s brand or products but doesn’t have a definite intent to buy. A baby brand may use the hashtag #nurserydesign on Instagram to expose its posts and products to those looking to decorate their nursery. 
• Middle of the funnel (consideration). Prospective customers that move from the top of the funnel to the middle have usually taken an action, such as signing up for an email list or following your brand on social media, that shows they are considering a purchase. It is now up to you to convince them to become customers. 
• Bottom of the funnel (purchase). This is the final stage a prospect goes through before they convert into a customer. Usually, they have taken some action that indicates a strong intent to buy, whether it’s adding a product to their cart or signing up for a free trial. Businesses will often send incentives, like a discount code, at this stage in order to convert prospects who are close to making the decision to buy.

There are many different ways a business can go about finding and converting these new customers, especially online. 

With digital marketing, it has become easier to track exactly how your business acquires new customers, discover and test new marketing tactics, and scale those that work.

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

A customer acquisition strategy is the plan to find, attract, engage, and convert prospects. Consumers use a variety of channels every day, so your customer acquisition process will involve different channels to engage them.

8 customer acquisition strategies to try

Pumping money into marketing campaigns doesn’t mean you’ll see a high return on your investment. To create a profitable marketing strategy, you want to use the right customer acquisition channels. 

Let’s explore some of the customer acquisition strategies you can use to grow your business, and how to prioritize them. 

• Run PPC ads
• Partner with influencers 
• Run email marketing campaigns
• Start a referral program
• Invest in traditional advertising
• Improve your search engine visibility
• Focus on audience building
• Start a blog 

1. Run pay-per-click (PPC) ads

One of the most common ways to acquire new customers is through online advertising. The reason many ecommerce brands turn to Facebook, Google, and other platforms to run ads is that they provide extensive measurement tools that allow you to optimize your ads and get the most out of your budget.

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When it comes to online advertising, Facebook ads and Google Ads are among the biggest providers for paid traffic.

But almost every other social platform, marketplace, or search engine you can think of offers the option to buy ads, so deciding which one to use is a matter of understanding who your customer is and where they spend their time online.

Here's an example of makeup brand Glossier  using Facebook to find customers online.

Although each paid advertising platform has its particularities, they mainly all charge for user impressions (how many times your ad is seen), using a metric called CPMs (cost per one thousand impressions).

They also usually allow advertisers to choose who they want to target, based on demographics, interests, and other traits. By using these targeting parameters provided by an online advertising platform, you can narrow in on prospective customers and acquire them through paid ads. 

Advantages:

• Fast growth. If you’re looking to rapidly scale your business, some would argue the quickest way to do it is by paying for traffic. Your business is guaranteed to get exposure, and with the right strategy and optimization techniques, businesses have been able to quickly increase their budget to acquire customers rapidly. 
• Targeting abilities. One of the great advantages of paid ads is the ability to choose exactly who your ads are shown to. With Facebook ads, for example, you can use Interest and Behavior targeting to reach practically any unique niche based on user behavior on the platform. 

Potential pitfalls:

• Expensive. There is an ongoing discussion about rising CPM costs year-over-year on popular online ad platforms like Facebook. Forbes  reports Facebook ad costs have increased by 89%, and TikTok’s CPM has increased by 92%. 
• Learning curve. Running paid ads isn’t rocket science, but the intricacies of the platform might be enough to intimidate those without experience. 
• Businesses with a budget. Most advertising platforms don’t require upfront payments or minimum spends to access their audiences, but that doesn’t mean they’re cheap. Being successful at paid ads requires testing different creative variations, audiences, and overall strategy in order to be profitable, so those who have some money to invest in marketing will benefit long term. 
• Businesses with creative assets. One of the key factors to success with paid ads is having the right creative that can attract new customers to your business. If your brand has an archive of photos, videos, and copy that can successfully introduce new people to your product and convert them into paying customers, you might want to consider putting some money behind them. 

2. Partner with influencers

If you have a marketing budget, one of the quickest ways to get your product or brand in front of a relevant audience is by paying someone with an online following to promote it for you. 

Influencer marketing (through Instagrammers, YouTubers, bloggers, TikTokers, etc.) has become a popular form of online advertising, even rivaling referrals from real-life friends.

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The success of influencer marketing involves finding the right influencers to promote your product. The challenge is identifying those who have an active, engaged following that would be interested in your product, as well as the creative ability to produce content that reflects well on your brand.

Here's an example of influencer marketing from Doe Lashes. The shares influencer content its Instagram Stories to lend credibility to its products. 

Advantages: 

• Brand awareness. With hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, working with large influencers can bring people into your customer acquisition funnel through brand awareness. With influencer marketing, you are not only paying to acquire new customers but also to have your product exposed to a wider audience so that when they are in the market for your particular product, it’s top of mind. 
• Niche targeting. A micro-influencer, typically someone with a smaller, more dedicated following, can give businesses with niche products immediate access to a relevant online audience. These micro-influencers typically cost less to work with and have better engagement metrics , which means your sponsored content is more likely to get noticed by their followers and lead to a higher conversion rate of customers. 

Potential pitfalls: 

• Tracking ROI. One of the shortcomings of using influencers as a paid marketing channel is the lack of extensive tracking that most social platforms have for sponsorships. With Shopify Collabs , you can easily track your affiliate campaign performances from within the Shopify admin. While other paid advertising platforms can track those who view or click on your ads, most influencer posts need to be tracked through UTM links , discount codes, and other creative mechanisms. Without intentionally tracking them, you run the risk of not knowing whether a sponsorship produced sales or not.
• Upfront payments. There are various platforms and experts that can connect your brand or business with influencers who will promote your product. Most of the time, a creator will ask for an upfront payment in the form of money or a product donation. 

Good for: 

• Products that require demonstration. Say you have a new, innovative product that the average consumer isn’t familiar with. By working with an influencer, you can have them test out, demo, or provide validation for your product that can be shared online to help convince prospective customers. 
• Trendy brands or products. Oftentimes influencers are looked up to for their ability to discover new products or trends, whether it be in fashion, food, or technology. If your business or brand has that “cool” factor, approaching an influencer with the opportunity to advertise your product might be more appealing.

3. Run email marketing campaigns

Lead generation is often the first step to customer acquisition. Generating leads involves collecting information from potential customers in order to nurture them or retarget them with ads to eventually convert them into a customer. Most first-time visitors to your site probably won’t buy on the spot, after all.

Create branded emails in minutes with Shopify Email

With Shopify Email, you can easily create, send, automate, and track email campaigns all from your Shopify admin—no coding required.

Collecting email addresses is seen as one of the best lead generation investments for customer acquisition because of the revenue that email marketing produces for businesses.

There are plenty of ways to build an email list , from driving paid traffic to a page with an email capture form to offering a welcome discount on your website for new subscribers. 

100% Pure uses a website pop-up to collect emails and connect with subscribers. The brand reports driving 20% of revenue with email.

Once your email list is built, you can run email campaigns and set up automated emails to send targeted messages to your list through email marketing services like Klav i yo . These emails can be personalized and triggered based on behavioral data to help you turn leads into customers.

• Recurring revenue. One of the biggest benefits to building an email list is that it gives you the ability to market to customers over a long period of time, extending the lifetime value of each customer acquired. Once the email is collected, you can set up email automation to continue engaging the customer and recommending new products. 
• Customer data. Aside from nurturing prospective customers, an email list can also help you find new prospects using “lookalike audiences.” Lookalike audiences are a tool provided by advertising platforms like Facebook and Google, where an advertiser can upload a CSV of emails they collected to find users who “look like” the business’s existing leads.
• Delivery rates. As spam filters become more sophisticated, getting your emails delivered to someone’s inbox has become increasingly difficult for brands. Personalizing your email communications and following best practices when it comes to email design can help improve the deliverability of your campaigns.
• Low-quality emails. Although a large email list sounds great, quality always overrides quantity. Although some email acquisition tactics may be working, it is important to analyze the conversion rate from each email source to make sure you are acquiring quality leads. One way to decrease your email marketing costs is by regularly cleaning your list of those who haven’t opened an email from you in a long time, otherwise known as your “unengaged list.”
• Businesses with multiple/consumable products. If your product is consumable, and therefore needs to be replenished (like coffee), or if you have a line of complementary products (like clothing), email can become your biggest source of recurring revenue. 
• New product launches. If you’re still in the product development stage of creating your business, collecting emails can help you prepare for a successful launch. 

4. Start a referral program 

A personal recommendation from someone you know goes a long way. People trust those they know, so when a friend tells them to check out a new product or brand, they listen.

In order to use referrals as a new customer acquisition strategy, it is up to the business owner to make it easier for those loyal customers to recruit their friends.

This can be achieved by setting up a referral program in which your existing customers are rewarded each time they get someone new to purchase from your business. 

Apps like ReferralCandy , LoyaltyLion , and Smile.io all offer ways to encourage customers to refer friends through marketing emails, discounts, and incentives for both the customer and their new recruit.

For example,  Skin O2’s referral program encourages customers to refer friends to receive coupons.

• Low cost. Since personal referrals are so effective, using a referral program is usually seen as a low-cost form of new customer acquisition. The fees associated with setting up a program include a subscription to a referral program app and the discounts given to the new customers who are recruited. 
• Repeat purchases. Often when a customer refers a friend, they are rewarded with a small perk, like a discount code off their next purchase. This creates the added benefit of encouraging repeat purchases from existing customers—an extra boost in revenue that can help make your referral program even more profitable. 
• Low engagement.  There is no guarantee your customers will want to participate. If your customers haven’t received good service from your business or aren’t in love with your products enough to recommend them, a referral program might not be the right customer acquisition channel for you.
• Organization and tracking. Since referral programs can involve creating customer rewards, tracking who has referred customers, and even loyalty points for each customer, staying organized is an essential part of making the program run smoothly. 
• Businesses with existing customers. It goes without saying that to run a successful referral program, a business needs to have an existing customer base to work with. If you have a low number of existing customers, their referrals may not even cover the cost of setting up a referral program.
• Businesses with loyal customers. While every business wants to have loyal, engaged customers who would love to share your products with their friends, not all are strategically designed to do this. Having good customer service, quick delivery, and easy returns all help create more loyal customers who are willing to refer their friends. 

5. Invest in traditional advertising 

Harvard Business Review  reports that consumer-facing companies are leading the shift to traditional advertising, predicting an 11.7% increase in spend over the next 12.

With the ubiquity of display ads, digital marketing efforts have become easier for consumers to ignore or opt out of through ad blockers. Traditional media, from small scale efforts like printed flyers to billboards and even TV ads, can be a good way to diversify your customer acquisition channels to reach a new, targeted audience.

At the same time, technology has made significant improvements to both the costs and accessibility of traditional advertising methods for small businesses. There are now apps like Touchcard that can connect to your online store and use customer data to send out physical postcards to your leads or customers.

• Consumer trust. The trust that consumers have in digital ads has increased over time, especially as more well-known brands begin running online campaigns. However, print and TV ads still top the charts when it comes to advertising channels that consumers trust most.
• Tracking. The flipside of having such a broad reach with traditional advertising is the lack of precision tracking that exists with digital channels. When running a print or TV campaign, it is likely not possible to always know the precise ROI from a campaign, since those who view or take action after seeing your ads aren’t “cookied” like they are when they visit your website directly. 
• Upfront investment. The budget commitment and lack of flexibility inherent to traditional advertising are often seen as risky. Digital programmatic advertising allows businesses to pivot and reinvest based on real-time results from their campaigns and learn what works on a smaller-scale budget. If you haven’t tested your marketing message in a more flexible environment first, the upfront investment of traditional media could leave you with disappointing results.
• Local businesses. With traditional advertising bearing a heavy upfront fee, efficiencies in these channels might be found with local print, TV, and radio ads. If your business can only ship to a specific state or is designed for a local audience, like celebrating a city’s sports team, advertising in local media can reward you with low-cost reach while still being highly targeted. 
• Businesses with high-priced products. Average order value plays a significant role when it comes to high-priced media. If your order value is high and your profit margins strong, the risk of spending on big-budget traditional ads can be offset by the need for fewer purchases to be profitable. 

6. Improve your search engine visibility

When looking for a product or service, many consumers begin their search with Google. Creating website content that helps your brand show up in Google search results for relevant queries is known as SEO, or search engine optimization .

Doing keyword research and implementing your findings into a content strategy for your website pages and blog can help you climb Google’s rankings, bringing search traffic filled with potential customers to your website.

Inkbox ranks first for “temporary tattoos,” a term that has more than 246,000 monthly searches. You can imagine the passive, intentional traffic this generates for its website every day.

• Passive, organic traffic. Every second, more than 99,000 queries are entered into Google’s search engine, making it the most visited site on the web. If you can optimize your website and content toward this goal, you can capture a small percentage of those searching for products in your niche and successfully acquire them as customers. 
• Evergreen. SEO is often referred to as a source of “evergreen” traffic, since content created and posted months or even years ago can continue to rank on the first page of Google and drive traffic to your site. A good piece of evergreen content can bring your website new traffic without the need to continuously pay for every new visitor. 
• Slow growth. If you want to show up first on Google’s search results, you can pay with Google Ads to be the first sponsored link visitors see. However, if you are aiming to show up organically on the first page, it can often take time and patience for Google to recognize your website as an authoritative source.
• Competition. Even though the term “temporary tattoos” has more than 30,000 monthly searches, Google displays over 237 million results for it. Certain niches are highly competitive when it comes to search rankings, which can make ranking on the first page more difficult. Tools like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs can help you understand the level of competition for different search queries and keywords and provide ideas for less competitive alternatives. 
• Those willing to play the long game. SEO done right is a measurable and reliable source of organic traffic, but being successful requires a consistent effort and constant learning. The Google algorithm is prone to change, and staying on top of the latest strategies on both the technical and creative side of SEO is essential to making this channel work.
• Content creators. While SEO may seem quite technical, it is widely known that the quality of a website’s content to satisfy searchers plays a critical role in its ability to rank in Google search results. The ability to write well and come up with creative content ideas that align with your keyword research can help rank your content above the competition.

By focusing on your SEO, you’ll be able to improve the ranking of your product or service on search engines, which will make you more visible to your prospective and existing customer base. Use industry-related keywords as well as backlinks from reputable websites to increase your brand awareness. Melanie Bedwell, ecommerce manager for Olipop

7. Focus on audience building

With social media and its many platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch, individuals have been able to attract huge online followings of potential customers. 

Companies like Gymshark have cultivated TikTok followings in the millions, becoming influencers themselves.

Gymshark has over four million followers on TikTok and built a community of brand ambassadors who promote it on the platform.

There are several ways to build an online audience on social media. Almost all of them require time, consistency, and content to attract new followers and keep them engaged. Your online following not only lends your brand authority, it also creates an audience of customers you can reach whenever you want to promote a new product or increase sales. 

• Organic traffic. Although there might be costs associated with creating an engaging social media account, it is often seen as a source of organic traffic, since it can help share your content for free. Viral videos can show up on the highly trafficked trending or discover page of different platforms, and your followers can share your content or tag your brand, bringing you more organic followers and potential customers.
• Social proof. Social media has no shortage of visible numbers. Whether it’s the number of likes or comments a photo gets or your total subscribers, all of these metrics lend authority to your brand in the form of social proof . When potential customers decide to check your brand out online (which they often do), the size of your online audience and its engagement adds to its legitimacy.
• Slow growth. If creating an online audience was easy, everyone would be an influencer. Building an organic following and turning it into a customer acquisition channel takes time, especially in contrast to paid advertising. 
• Algorithm changes. One of the biggest threats to content creators on any platform is a sudden change in the algorithm that once helped them gain traction. If you decide to build an online audience, your ability to reach that audience and convert them into customers will always be controlled in some part by the platform itself.
• Content creators. If you’re the creative type who is skilled in the area of writing, photography, video, or just generally entertaining people online, building an online audience as a form of customer acquisition might be a good use of your skills. 
• Businesses on a budget. If you’re strapped for cash, creating an online audience organically can be a cost-effective way to attract new customers. Unlike paid ads, there isn’t a fixed cost associated with exposing your brand to new people. Rather than dollars alone, online audiences can be built on your own creativity. 

8. Start a blog

A thoughtful and interesting blogging strategy can build trust with potential customers, nurture customer relationships, and promote your products and services.

Brands like Press , which sells plant-based goods like juice cleanses and kombucha, shares tips for healthy living and educational content through its blog, The Squeeze . 

The blog has a simple yet eye-catching design, with hero images that reflect its products. Posts are full of useful, well-researched information and expert interviews that help readers make healthier life choices. Squeeze also offers resources like a direct line to its in-house nutritionist at the bottom of articles.

• Builds trust with customers. Sharing reputable and useful information helps readers solve their problems. This builds trust between them and your business. If someone trusts you, they are more likely to accept your recommendations. 
• Generates leads. Traffic aside, content marketing helps generate leads for your business. When someone visits a page from your social media account or Google and likes your content, they may click on your call to action and convert. Many ecommerce platforms make it easy to create a blog for your online store.
• It takes upfront investment. Running a blog is not cheap. You need a team of strategists, writers, editors, and project managers to make it happen. It may also take time for your content to show up in search results. Regardless, you can always share it on social media for free. 
• It needs to be done right. Adding a blog is a good investment if you publish high-quality material. Poorly formatted, researched, and written content can deter visitors from your website. 
• Those willing to invest in quality content. Blogs can provide many benefits for your online business, but only if it’s done with care and effort. Simply publishing a few posts each month won’t get the traffic or conversions you hope for. 

Calculating customer acquisition cost (CAC) 

Almost every new customer comes with a cost that can be calculated based on the marketing effort put forth to acquire them. To know whether your customer acquisition efforts are working, you will need to understand how to calculate your customer acquisition costs (CAC) .

Your customer acquisition cost is the total cost of marketing divided by the number of customers acquired.

For example, say your Instagram page brings in 50 customers a month and you spend $500 creating content. Your customer acquisition cost would be $10:

marketing spend ($500) / new customers ($50) = CAC ($10 per customer)

The reason businesses calculate their customer acquisition cost is to understand if their marketing approach is profitable. Using the above example, if each customer is spending $50 on average on their first purchase from your business and your gross margin on each order is 50%, your profit would be $15 on each order.

average order value ($50) x gross margin (50%) - customer acquisition cost ($10) = profit ($15)

For brands with a higher customer lifetime value (LTV), it may even make business sense for their customer acquisition cost to not be profitable on the first purchase. If your customer data tells you that the customers you acquire will likely continue buying from your brand after their initial purchase, you may be able to afford to spend more to acquire each new customer.

By using Google Analytics , Shopify Reports , and other tracking/reporting tools, it’s possible to know your customer acquisition cost for each marketing initiative. Experimenting with different customer acquisition and retention strategies, and attributing the results, is the key to unlocking new ways to grow your business.

Customer acquisition tools

Referral candy .

Referral Candy is a tool for building referral programs for your store. More than 3,000 Shopify merchants use it to reach new customers, grow their brand through word of mouth, and create fun and engaging customer loyalty programs. It works across any industry: fashion, athleisure, nutrition, electronics, and more. 

Referral Candy offers tools to automate your referral programs and acquire new customers, like post-purchase pop-ups and VIP rewards. It also connects with your favorite marketing tools like Klaviyo, Facebook, Google Ads, and more. 

Pricing starts at $59 per month for the service. 

Shopify Inbox

Shopify Inbox is a free Shopify app that helps you turn browsers into buyers through the power of chat. Right from your Shopify admin you can customize your online store chat, create automated messages, and get insights to understand how your chat is performing. 

With Shopify Inbox, you can:

• Save time managing customer conversations from online store chat and social media, all within one app
• Send products and discounts from your Shopify store directly inside chats with just a few taps, turning conversations into checkouts
• Know when customers add or remove items from their shopping cart
• Assign chats to your staff and team to scale customer conversations

It also connects with popular messaging platforms like Messenger and Apple Business Chat, so you can help more people, in less time, on their preferred channel. 

Shopify Email

Shopify Email is the email marketing app made for ecommerce stores. You can easily design emails in minutes with a drag-and-drop editor, creating beautiful, branded emails to send to your list. No coding experience required. 

The best part? You can manage all campaigns in your Shopify admin. Shopify email also lets you:

• Choose from a growing collection of templates, like product collections, sales, restock, newsletters , holidays, events, and more 
• Personalize your content with customers’ information for a more engaging experience
• Schedule emails to send at a specific time
• Segment emails to send the right message to the right person
• Track metrics such as open and click-through rates, products added to carts, and purchases

You also get 2,500 emails for free each month, then pay $1 for every 1,000 emails you send after that. 

Privy is a popular Shopify app, with more than 24,800 reviews. This plug-in is trusted by businesses large and small to improve conversions, grow subscriber lists, and make more sales. Privy offers tools for conversion, email marketing, and website widgets like:

• Spin-to-win wheels
• Cart savers
• Free shipping and sign-up bars
• Embedded forms

Privy offers a free 15-day trial. Paid plans start at $30/month.

Booster SEO & Image Optimizer

SEO isn’t easy to manage for many small businesses. Fortunately, Booster SEO & Image Optimizer is here to make it easier.

The only SEO app built exclusively for Shopify stores, this app ensures your store is optimized for search engines 24/7. Use it to optimize image alt tags, create effective meta tags, create enriched listings, and fix SEO issues on autopilot. 

Paid plans start at $39/month. 

Creating a successful customer acquisition strategy

While reducing churn and repeat purchases are an important element to the overall health of your new business, attracting new customers through customer acquisition can help you grow beyond your current base.

Customer acquisition is about demystifying how customers discover your brand and why they buy from you, so you can improve the customer experience. This will allow you to spend your marketing dollars more strategically, improve customer lifetime value, and grow your business steadily over time.

Knowing which channels will work as a customer acquisition tool for your business involves continuously testing new channels and approaches, letting you find out what works best for your unique business and preventing you from being too reliant on a single source.

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Customer acquisition FAQ

What are the three parts of customer acquisition.

• Bottom funnel

What are the types of customer acquisition?

What is an example of customer acquisition, what is the difference between customer acquisition and customer retention.

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People Management

10 customer acquisition strategies to drive business growth.

Sudarshan Somanathan

Head of Content

January 17, 2024

New client acquisition strategies are like the superheroes of successful marketing and business growth. They help you unleash the power of effective client acquisition to attract potential customers and skyrocket your long-term retention.

This guide has everything you need to know about the basics of client acquisition strategies. Plus, we’ve spiced things up with a look at different client acquisition methods, inspirational success stories, and how to overcome potential challenges. 📈🏆

What is Client Acquisition?

The role of customer acquisition funnel in business growth, types of customer acquisition methods, common customer acquisition challenges, effective & successful customer acquisition strategies in 10 steps, how to measure customer acquisition, real-life examples of successful customer acquisition strategies.

Client acquisition refers to attracting and gaining new customers or clients for a business. Likewise, a client acquisition strategy is designed to obtain new paying customers and drive business growth.

Here are the three basic steps found in the most effective customer acquisition strategies:

• Lead generation : The business attracts potential customers from their target market using market research and tools like customer profile templates
• Lead nurturing: The business nurtures leads and builds trust with careful email marketing and implementation of tools like lead management software
• Lead conversion: The business converts potential customers into new customers, at which point it may implement the use of tools like customer retention software

While there are other specifics to consider within each step, that’s the basic process.

Of course, you’ll see several variations on each of these steps depending on the marketing strategies a company or professional chooses to use. It’s all about leveraging the best new client acquisition strategy for your goals, audience, and product or service. 

The customer acquisition funnel, aka sales funnel, refers to the journey potential customers take on their way to becoming paying customers.

It’s marketing specifically designed to drive action. 🏃

A person enters the customer acquisition funnel when they become aware of the product or service and leaves it the first time they make a purchase. From there, they enter the post-purchase experience, but we’ll save that topic for another guide.

Here are some of the benefits of a quality customer acquisition funnel:

• Improved brand awareness to expand reach and recognition
• Increased company growth
• Revenue to invest in new ideas and existing resources
• Demonstrated value and traction for external stakeholders (e.g., investors, partners, or influencers)

Long story short: Client acquisition strategies reach your target audience and improve your bottom line.

The strategies and tools required to reap these rewards will vary from business to business. Likewise, there’s a wide range of different customer success software and tools that marketing professionals may use to improve the customer acquisition process.

There are several customer acquisition methods—you don’t have to choose just one. Sometimes, including two or more methods in your new client acquisition strategy is more effective.

You’ll find both in-person and digital options highlighted below; the effectiveness of each depends on your business, industry, and audience. 

Now, let’s look at some of the most common ways to attract and convert new customers, plus which types of businesses they might be best for. 

Digital content marketing  

Best for the following industries: Service, manufacturing, technology, financial, education, energy, retail, e-commerce

Focus on publishing and distributing content that is relevant to and useful for your target audience. High-quality content attracts and engages potential customers, creating an emotional connection that will ultimately drive potential customers to make purchases.

Here are some digital marketing ideas to get you started:

• Social media: Publish social media posts that’ll engage your audience, whether that’s memes, industry news, something in between, or all of the above
• Videos: Create video content that provides education, entertainment, or product highlights on platforms like YouTube 
• Podcasts : Host an ongoing podcast with valuable information that’s relevant to your target market; bonus points if you collab with influencers while you’re at it
• Infographics : Produce informative infographics; customers often like and share high-quality infographics to revisit them later 
• Blog posts: Publish trustworthy, practical content on your company blog or news section

Search engine optimization  

Best for the following industries: Service, food and beverage, technology, real estate, construction, transportation

Search engine optimization (SEO) improves how your business appears on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO professionals do this by optimizing landing pages, blog content, and social media posts to rank content higher when your audience searches for related keywords. 

For businesses, this translates to appearing in organic searches more often, generating organic traffic, building credibility, and increasing brand awareness. 

Paid advertising 

Best for the following industries: Technology, transportation, education, retail, service, food and beverage, manufacturing, financial, hospitality, automotive

Paying for traditional, display, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has the potential to increase visibility for any business. 

By choosing the right marketing channels for your industry and audience, you’ll increase the number of customers entering your customer acquisition funnel. And that’s always a good thing. 

If you need help getting started, we’ve highlighted some potential places to pay for ads below: 

• Traditional: TV, radio, and print media 
• Display: Social media platforms, websites, and apps 
• PPC : Search engines and social media platforms 

Email marketing  

Best for the following industries: Retail, financial, entertainment, nonprofit, service, retail, e-commerce

Sending targeted emails to potential customers on your email list nurtures leads and encourages them to take action. 

Sure, we all get a lot of marketing emails that we delete every day, but email marketing is a low-cost way to increase opportunities to engage with your audience. You never know when one of your subject lines will set a potential customer in motion to make a purchase! 💡🤑

Influencer marketing 

Best for the following industries: Food and beverage, hospitality, entertainment, automotive, retail

Partnering with influencers in your industry builds credibility and extends your marketing reach to larger audiences. It also increases your chance of going viral, which has enormous benefits, all with minimal work on your end. 

The right influencer can help you build credibility, increase your social media following, generate sales, and elicit feedback to help your company improve.

Affiliate marketing 

Best for the following industries: E-commerce, hospitality, financial, technology, entertainment, marketing

Working with third-party affiliates who promote your products or services for a modest commission generates sales, expanding your reach to a broader audience. 

Some businesses choose affiliate marketing over PPC marketing and other avenues because it’s another effective strategy that doesn’t interrupt your cash flow. Affiliates get paid when a customer makes a purchase, so you only pay if it works. 

Events and sponsorships

Best for the following industries: Manufacturing, education, entertainment, energy, food and beverage

Participating in or sponsoring events increases brand visibility and the number of potential customers who connect with your business. These events don’t have to be in-person; webinars and other online events are effective, too.

You’ll want to choose events that are actually relevant and interesting to your audience to see results. That might mean conducting some surveys with existing customers to get an idea of where to start or if it’s a good idea for your brand. 

Partnerships and collaborations

Best for the following industries: Food and beverage, hospitality, entertainment, automotive

Collaborating with other businesses or organizations is a straightforward way to cross-promote and reach a wider audience. 

Working with another organization to achieve a common goal doesn’t just boost visibility. It increases the chances of reaching your goal in a timely manner while divvying up finances and tasks to benefit both (or all) parties.

Free trials and samples

Best for the following industries: E-commerce, SaaS, entertainment, subscription boxes, education, hospitality, financial

Free trials and samples aren’t just marketing tactics; they’re bite-sized appetizers and interactive showcases of what you’re offering. 

It’s like giving potential customers VIP access to the magic of your product or service before they commit, effectively sparking curiosity and excitement to become paying customers. 🎉

Loyalty and referral programs

Best for the following industries: Service, e-commerce, hospitality, financial, subscription boxes

You’ll often see loyalty and referral programs in customer retention strategies, and with good reason—they work! 

Most of us have made an extra purchase or taken action to get rewards from a favorite brand at least a few times. So try rewarding existing customers for repeat business and referrals with incentives like discounts on future purchases, plan upgrades, or exclusive products. 

Customer reviews and testimonials

Best for the following industries: E-commerce, healthcare, transportation, construction, subscription boxes, financial

Encouraging or incentivizing satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and testimonials influences and builds trust with potential customers. 

So many savvy shoppers spend hours scouring reviews and testimonials from different brands before spending their hard-earned cash. You want your company to be the one that stands out with delighted customers, honest feedback, and high ratings. 

You’ll likely encounter some speed bumps on your path to effective customer acquisition, and that’s okay! 

It’s how you respond to each challenge that matters. We’re here to help with that. Below, we’ve highlighted common challenges you might face and potential solutions to get your client acquisition strategy back on track. 

Study them now or bookmark this guide and revisit it when you know what you’re up against.

Identifying target audience

Challenge: Define your target audience, develop accurate customer personas, and tailor marketing efforts accordingly. 

Solution: Execute a thorough market research campaign to identify customer behaviors, preferences, and demographics. Analyze this data to identify your target audience. 🔍🎯

Competition

Challenge: Stand out from competitors and effectively compete for attention and differentiation.

Solution: Focus on niche markets, highlight what sets your company apart, and develop a unique value proposition. Monitor the competition to stay ahead.

Customer acquisition cost  

Challenge: Balance your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and the lifetime value of each customer to improve your bottom line. 

Solution: Focus on optimizing high-converting marketing channels and implementing strategies to improve customer retention. Regularly assess and adjust your CAC strategy.

Effective marketing channels

Challenge: Identify the best marketing channels to reach your target audience and use your resources effectively.

Solution: Experiment with different marketing channels, analyze data based on your existing audience’s preferences, and invest accordingly. 

Conversion rate optimization

Challenge: Converting more potential customers into paying customers. 

Solution: Continuously test your website and landing pages using A/B testing and similar strategies to identify what resonates with your audience. Provide clear calls-to-action (CTAs) and refine your customer journey.

Building trust

Challenge: Creating an emotional connection and sense of reliability with potential customers (a common challenge for small or new businesses).

Solution: Establish a robust online presence, use social proof (e.g., customer reviews), provide transparent communication, and offer guarantees or trials to reduce perceived risk for potential customers.

Scaling strategies

Challenge: Scaling customer acquisition efforts while maintaining efficiency.

Solution: Implement scalable marketing tools for small businesses , expand successful strategies, and invest in technology capable of handling increased customer volume. 

Adapting to market changes

Challenge: Adapting to ever-changing customer behaviors and preferences. 

Solution: Keep up with industry trends, review customer feedback, and adjust your strategies when needed. Be willing to evolve your approach and innovate as needed.

Now, for the part we’ve all been waiting for! Allow us to introduce you to our step-by-step guide to successful customer acquisition strategies. 

1. Define your target audience

Identify your ideal customers based on demographics, behaviors, and preferences. Use this data to create customer personas and adjust your marketing to their interests and needs.

Comprehensive client management tools like ClickUp simplify this step, providing extensive data and analytics on current customers.

2. Create compelling content

Compelling content that offers value while resonating with your target audience is marketing gold. Use blogs, videos, infographics, and other content to showcase your expertise and attract potential customers. 

3. Implement an SEO strategy

Create an SEO strategy to improve visibility and organic web traffic. Use relevant keywords and build backlinks to enhance your search engine rankings.

4. Leverage social media marketing

Engage your target audience and existing customer base on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Share engaging content, interact with followers, and use targeted advertising to reach more people.

Want to make social media marketing easier? ClickUp Automations takes the work out of scheduling and tracking social posts. 

5. Launch email marketing campaigns

Engage and nurture relationships with potential customers via targeted email campaigns that provide valuable content, exclusive offers, and personalized communication. Bonus points if you use a tool like ClickUp!

ClickUp and similar tools allow you to leverage project management features to better strategize customer acquisition. You’ll also get access to handy features like marketing and sales funnel templates .

6. Invest in paid advertising

Allocate a budget for marketing costs on channels like Google or Facebook ads. ClickUp for Sales Teams improves your marketing campaign success rate thanks to integration with today’s top marketing tools, detailed analytics, and budgeting tools.

Targeted ads based on demographics, interests, and online behavior are effective, especially when you include retargeting. Retargeting refers to paid ads targeting customers who have previously visited your social media profiles or website.

7. Encourage referrals

Implement referral programs to motivate loyal customers to refer family, friends, coworkers, and social media contacts. 

Offer incentives like discounts, giveaway entries, loyalty points, or exclusive access to unique content or products.

8. Offer free trials or samples

Let potential customers experience your product or service with free trials or samples. This reduces the perceived risk and provides a firsthand look at the quality of the goods or services you offer, which entices potential customers and leaves them wanting more.

9. Focus on customer relationship management

Customer relationship management (CRM) improves retention and trust. Effective CRM for startups often includes loyalty programs, personalized offers, and quality customer service.

ClickUp CRM makes it easy to message clients and improve customer experience. It has everything you need to manage customer relationships, letting you:

• Update and organize customer data
• Track leads 
• Improve customer interactions
• Automate workflow management
• Boost success using data and analytics

10. Monitor and analyze data

Use metrics and data analytics tools to get insights from customer behavior to make informed decisions, refine strategies, and identify areas for improvement.

ClickUp’s capabilities to monitor and analyze customer data make everything easier. It has what you need to:

• Collect and organize data
• Track tasks and activities
• Automate workflows
• Monitor performance metrics
• Protect customer data

Once you’ve launched a client acquisition strategy, it’s time to see how effective it is. With the ever-changing consumer landscape, making improvements based on current metrics is an ongoing necessity for continued success. And we’re here to help. 

Here’s a breakdown of some metrics you might want to track:

Customer acquisition cost

CAC refers to the total cost of one new customer based on marketing and sales team costs.

Here’s a simple formula to calculate your CAC:

• CAC = (total costs of marketing and sales) / (number of new customers acquired)

Conversion rates

Conversion rates measured at different stages of the customer journey enable you to identify what’s working and what isn’t. 

You’ll track how many leads or website visitors progress to the next phase of the customer journey from each source (e.g., website visits to newsletter signups).

Here’s a quick formula to calculate your conversion rates:

• Conversion rate = (number of conversions / number of visitors or leads) x 100.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (LTV) refers to the revenue a customer is expected to generate from the beginning to the end of their relationship with your business.

Here’s a basic formula to calculate customer LTV:

• LTV = (average purchase value x average number of purchases)

Return on investment

Return on investment (ROI) measures the profitability of your new client acquisition strategies.

Here’s a simple way to calculate ROI:

• ROI = (net profit from customer acquisition – cost of customer acquisition) / (cost of customer acquisition) x 100

Customer churn rate

Customer churn rate refers to how many paying customers stop purchasing your product or service within a given period. The lower the churn rate, the better the impact on the success of your client acquisition strategy.

You can calculate your churn rate using this easy formula:

• Churn rate = (total customers lost during the given period / total customers at the beginning of the given period) x 100

Customer acquisition channels

Tracking the performance of different customer acquisition channels highlights the effectiveness of each method in your client acquisition strategy.

Comparing conversion rates and ROI from each acquisition channel makes it easy to identify where you’re finding the most (and the most valuable) customers.

Another way to refine your strategies is by learning from case studies and success stories. 

Below, we’ve highlighted some of the best real-life examples of successful client acquisition strategies to inspire your marketing team. Ready to get inspired (and maybe a bit envious)?

Highlighted method: Referral program

Airbnb significantly boosted its growth with referral programs, setting a new standard. The brand incentivized existing users to refer friends by offering travel credits they could use to reduce the cost of booking a location, and it worked. 

Their winning strategy encouraged existing users to promote the platform, providing word-of-mouth advertising that attracted new users, built trust, and sparked excitement.

2. Dollar Shave Club

Highlighted method: Viral video

Dollar Shave Club gained international attention, boosting its customer base and skyrocketing its success with a viral video that did a great job of highlighting the benefits of its product. 

In other words, they made a fun and frank video that showcased unique selling points while making customers laugh. In doing so, it generated millions of new customers and even more views.

3. Warby Parker

Highlighted method: Home try-on program

E-commerce giant Warby Parker disrupted the eyewear industry by bringing the try-on-and-buy experience to online shopping with a new home try-on program.

It might not sound like much now, but it was a bold move that let the company compete with designer brands. Warby Parker sweetened the deal with free shipping and the option to try on several frames before committing—all without customers having to leave home.

Highlighted method: Content marketing

This now famous mattress-in-a-box company rose to fame by investing in good ol’ digital content marketing. Their success is a testament to the power of useful, relevant content. 

Casper published entertaining, lighthearted content that educated consumers about the benefits of quality sleep and (of course) their mattresses. This positioned the company as an authority in the industry and built trust with consumers. 

The brand even had a print magazine called Woolly for a while before shifting focus back to digital content.

Attract New Customers for Better Business Growth

Whether you’re just starting or you’ve been at it for a while, every company can benefit from a solid new client acquisition strategy to bring customers in.

The secret sauce is happy customers. That means nailing your customer relationship game and delivering top-notch products or services.

  Pro tip: When you find something that works, double down! ✅🙌

Ready to boost your business, slash your CAC, and boost your customer LTV? We’ve got you covered with the best tools in the game!

What are you waiting for? Jump on the ClickUp train —it’s free! 🚂

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Customer acquisition in 2023: Everything you need to know about acquiring new customers

Everything you need to build and implement a solid customer acquisition strategy for your SaaS business. Attract the right customers, price competitively, and convert them into users with a seamless checkout and onboarding experience.

What is customer acquisition?

• The most effective way to grow?
• When is it important?
• The costs of acquisition
• How to create your strategy 
• How to measure success
• Real-life-examples

Customer acquisition FAQs 

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Successful SaaS businesses implement  SaaS growth strategies  across customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. They learn how to: 

• Acquire more of the right customers 
• Retain them for longer 
• And expand their accounts or broaden the pool of customers they can serve. 

This guide is all about part one of that journey, customer acquisition. 

Consistently acquiring new customers is crucial for all SaaS businesses. For new startups, it’s the difference between claiming a stake in the market and fading into the background. Here's a rundown of the core considerations and requirements for succeeding with your customer acquisition strategy. But first, a quick definition.

Customer acquisition is the process of gaining new customers. Acquisition is one of the most popular growth levers because it is the most immediate way to grow your customer base. It covers the new-business part of your  go-to-market strategy , like where and how you market your product, and how you shape your pricing strategy . It also covers how you drive the conversion of prospects in your buying cycle, or turn non-paying users into customers.

Customer acquisition is a finicky growth strategy because it gets harder and more expensive as your customer base grows and your potential, untapped market shrinks.

Additionally, acquisition only refers to the act of getting a customer to join. Effort is shuttled into the signup event, but often not beyond. That means that acquired customers may discontinue ( churn ) at any point. If these customers were acquired by brute force acquisition techniques and aren't actually interested in your product for long-term use, they're more likely to churn. You'll have to be extra careful with your  marketing efforts , to make sure you are reaching  potential customers  with profitable  lifetime value .

When your acquired customers churn out, you'll have to  replace that lost revenue in order to grow . If you're planning on acquiring more  new customers  to replace lost ones, you'll be pulling from that ever-diminishing potential market. This will leave you feeling like you're trying to fill a leaky bucket with a limited water supply.

What is a customer acquisition strategy? 

A customer acquisition strategy is the plan of action and all the tools a brand needs to attract new customers and convert them to paying customers. Using data, you can identify key consumer behaviors and available marketing opportunities. The information guides on the marketing channels you need to reach them. The right strategy can deliver a smooth customer experience leading to referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. 

Why is customer acquisition essential? 

You need loyal customers to grow your revenue. So, the number one benefit of effective customer acquisition is increasing your customer base and profits. Also, acquisition efforts are key in developing and maintaining strong brand awareness. In addition, business growth and expansion depend on acquiring new customers. 

Is customer acquisition an effective growth strategy? 

The SaaS community is obsessed with acquisition. We talk about it a lot. By studying 25,679 blog posts—to see what the SaaS community is interested in—we found that  nearly 8 out of every 10 posts were about acquisition .

But even though acquisition is a vital growth lever, it is often overplayed at the expense of other growth opportunities.  Retaining customers (getting them to continue using your product) and monetizing customers (improving the way you earn revenue by upselling or improving customer LTV) are other important and hugely effective ways to grow your SaaS business.

A 1% improvement in customer acquisition results in a 3.32% increase in bottom-line revenue. Meanwhile, a 1% improvement in  customer retention  results in 6.71% bottom-line improvement. Improving monetization by 1% results in a  12.70% increase in your bottom-line revenue .

Customer retention  and monetization cannot be overlooked when you're building and expanding a SaaS company, so monetization and  retention analysis  should be used in tandem with acquisition strategies to achieve maximum growth.

When is customer acquisition important?

Though acquisition is important throughout all stages of growing a SaaS company, it's most important at the beginning when you can't take advantage of other growth levers like retention and monetization.

In the early stages, you can give acquisition a little more attention. It's especially essential because at this point you need to focus on acquiring the right  first-time  customers and developing sustainable acquisition strategies. These early strategies will compound and iterate as your business grows. Setting up a good foundation of early customers will make acquisition, retention, and monetization easier later on.

According to SaaS VC Jason Lemkin,  the first 10 unaffiliated conversions  is an early indicator that your SaaS company will be successful. This is because these first early adopters have all come to the conclusion on their own that your product solves their problems.  Your first conversions give you validation that  your problem/solution fit is a viable business idea .

These early acquisitions are important in their own right, but they also provide a valuable learning opportunity to set your business up for future success. It's important at this stage to measure the  lead generation channels  and demographics (company type, job title, age range, etc.) of your acquired customers. By recognizing early patterns, you can develop an idea of your  target audience  to create a strong long-term acquisition strategy.

Understanding your market, even in these early stages, will also help you retain and monetize customers because you'll better understand what value propositions are important to them.

What are the costs of customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is important to your SaaS company and should be used strategically—but focusing  too much  on acquisition has high costs.

Here is a video that explains CAC Payback and important benchmarks, originally created for Paddle Studios :

Takes focus away from other, cheaper growth methods

On a qualitative level, a blind focus on acquiring logos  prevents you from focusing on more sustainable growth methods . Acquisition is the SaaS growth equivalent of using a sledge hammer—it often isn't precise or strategic, and you don't have that many chances to do it effectively. The most reliable way to grow your business steadily and over a long period of time is by identifying and capitalizing on the value that your customers want from your product.  This happens by talking to your customers, collecting data on your market, and analyzing the data for patterns about what your customers value and what they're willing to pay.

This is how you'll  redesign your pricing strategy to better monetize your customers .

Depend too much on acquisition

On a quantitative level, focusing too much on your  customer acquisition process  can lead to your company becoming a “ CAC fiend. ” Customer acquisition cost, or your company's spend on each customer, is essential in acquisition. That's why you need to know your fully-loaded CAC to fully understand the unit economics of your business. It breaks down to dividing the total expenses to acquire customers by the total number of customers acquired:

Customer acquisition cost formula Customer acquisition cost = total expenses to acquire customers / total # of customer acquired

The numerator has to include all acquisition-related expenses in order to calculate a fully-loaded CAC. This includes monthly spend on paid advertising, sales and marketing costs, and the salaries for sales and marketing team members. It can add up quickly and may be higher than many companies realize. To minimize these costs, your acquisition needs to be strategic and targeted—not expansive and haphazard.

How to create a customer acquisition strategy 

On average, SaaS companies spend a mere 6 hours on pricing strategy.  This might seem like enough time to price your new product, but in reality, pricing should be far more than a "set and forget" strategy. 

If you don't  optimize your pricing  and review it regularly, the impact can be more detrimental than you think. It ultimately affects the rate at which you scale. 

If the price is too high, you'll outprice your customers and charge more than their perceived product value. Too low, and you sell yourself short. This risks your product looking like a "cheap" or, even worse, less effective option compared to competitors. 

In addition to the price point, you need to think about how you package up your product offering. This might be on a subscription basis, as a one-time purchase, or you might have different tiers with different features available at different price points. 

Time to spin the wheel (or read on) and find out how to ensure the price is right. 

Optimize your prices regularly 

Pricing should not be left to chance, nor should you blindly follow your competitors' pricing tactics. You need to understand your target audience, market and product value to optimize your pricing for profits. These steps should help. 

• Rely on hard data 
• Define your company goals and boundaries 
• Have clarity on your value metric 
• Create pricing tiers business model 
• Regularly monitor your pricing 

Clear a path to the checkout page 

Your pricing is right on the money, and your prospects are ready to convert into paying customers. Result. 🙌

Now all you need is the checkout and purchase flow to secure that all-important initial payment. Right? 

Not quite. A lot goes into maximizing these workflows for optimum conversion and goes back to decisions about how you want to sell. Let's get into it. 

• Determine your digital marketing channels 
• Spread the word 
• Optimize for maximum conversion 
• Secure that first payment 

Deliver on your promise 

A prospect has converted into a paying customer, and the initial transaction has been approved. Now it's time to fulfill your end of the bargain and give them access to your product (also referred to as provision). 

In a traditional retail business that sells physical goods, this is where you'd be packaging and shipping those goods out to the customer. With SaaS and digital goods, this process looks a bit different. 

Let's take a look at what it involves. 

• Decide how you will deliver your product. The onboarding must be seamless.
• Track whether the users are using the product effectively 
• Revoking access after it's been granted in case of delinquent accounts, trial completion, etc. 

Keep financial obligations above board 

You must take into account sales tax and financial compliance at every point across your customer and payment journey. 

First up, sales tax. For acquisition, specifically, this includes making sure you are collecting the right amount of sales tax at the checkout - this will be different depending on the type of software being sold and where your customers are based. So for this, you need access that tells you exactly where your customers are coming from to avoid getting caught out. 

Other financial compliance regulations also exist worldwide - each with its nuances. For example,  the rules regarding 3DSecure on one-time and recurring purchases are different in India than in many other countries . You'll need some dedicated resources to manage compliance and look forward, so you're prepared for any new regulations or changes to existing ones that come into play. 

How to measure customer acquisition success 

Understanding how the different parts of your acquisition strategy are performing will help you see what's working and where there's room for improvement. 

Below are several different  SaaS metrics  to track. 

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) : Total cost for the business to acquire each new customer. 
• Conversion rate : The percentage of prospects that convert into customers (or take a desired action on a page): This could be customers who complete the checkout and make a purchase or those who sign up for a free trial (or who moved from free to paid). For sales-led businesses, it could be the number of prospects who sign up for a demo or ask to speak to sales. 
• New Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) : The monthly amount you receive from new subscription customers. You can combine this metric with CAC to determine the profitability of your new customers. 
• Daily active users : The number of users who log in and use your product daily. 

Customer acquisition strategy pays off 

Framer case study .

Design software, Framer's pricing and plans page is a masterclass for SaaS businesses. If you look at the screenshot below ( or check out the live page ), you can see how Framer use pricing to effectively: 

• Cater to different customer segments, with different packages for individuals and teams 
• Display the value from each package clearly, and concisely 
• Hook customers in with a demo and trial period 
• Offer flexibility in how customers bill, with monthly and annual options (and discounts!). 

Read more about Framer's story here.  

iMobie case study 

iOS and Android transfer, manager, and maintenance software,  iMobie  is a great example of optimizing your checkout and payment processes that can boost conversion. 

To tackle its low conversion rate, iMobie: 

• Localized the process with geo-specific pricing, currencies, and the correct sales tax calculations. 
• Implemented flexible subscriptions with a one-click upgrade, downgrade, pause, and cancel options. 
• Optimized its checkout and payment page design. 

And the result? 

iMobie's conversion rate improved by over 20% in Germany and France, and over 10% in Japan. 

Read more about iMobie's story here.  

Take the headache out of growing your software business

We handle your payments, tax, subscription management and more, so you can focus on growing your software and subscription business.

What does customer acquisition mean? 

It means gaining new customers and encompasses the acquisition channels and all activities involved. It is the most immediate way to grow your customer base. 

It is a plan of action and tools for how a brand will acquire new customers. A solid strategy requires using hard data to formulate the necessary steps to an effective customer acquisition strategy. 

Why is a customer acquisition strategy important? 

A customer acquisition strategy is critical for establishing your hold on the market. As a result, you can bring in new clients and grow your revenue. 

What are the types of customer acquisition? 

Types of customer acquisition techniques include: 

• Social media marketing 
• Content marketing 
• Referral program 
• Search engine optimization(SEO) 
• Mobile marketing 
• Paid advertising 
• Email marketing

Related reading

Customer Acquisition Strategy – The Complete Guide

Last Updated On : May 12, 2024

Customer acquisition strategy is all about gaining new customers. Isn’t that what business is about?

Customer acquisition is key to creating leads that could possibly become customers. It’s even more important to acquire quality, long-term customers.

In this guide, I’ll take you through all the steps and strategies of customer acquisition.

What is Customer Acquisition?

The process by which you bring new clients or customers to your business is customer acquisition. 

The goal, for any company, is to create sustainable and systematic acquisition strategies that keep up with industry trends.

Why is Customer Acquisition Important?

Regardless of the size of your business, this is a very important aspect of running a business besides helping you turn a profit. 

It also acts as evidence of traction for your business to the outside world of partners, investors, influencers, and prospects.

But what’s the catch?

Mind you, customer acquisition shouldn’t be confused with lead generation. 

In the world of business, we often visualize the customer journey in the form a funnel, as shown below.

As part of their journey through the customer acquisition funnel, consumers:

• Gain awareness about your brand and interest in your offerings
• Add your products or services to the list of alternatives they’re considering, and
• Decide to become a paying customer of your business

Lead generation makes up the top part of the sales funnel. Lead acquisition is the middle section. 

And lead conversion is all the way at the bottom. Customer acquisition, however, is the entire end-to-end process that involves all of these stages.

How to Create a Customer Acquisition Strategy

Creating a strategy for acquiring customers is important. Any goals that you have, whether they are customer related or not, need clear, mapped out steps to succeed.

Here’s how to create a customer acquisition strategy:

1. Find Your Target Audience

To start your customer acquisition strategy, you’ll first need to know who your potential customers are.

A great way to figure out who your audience is, is by using tools like Semrush .

Semrush can offer you customer insights that can help you create a better profile of what a potential customer looks like. This can be gained from location, age, time spent on page, and gender.

Some other important things to remember when defining your target audience:

• Day-to-day problems your customers have to deal with
• The reason your potential customers will purchase your product or service
• Where most of your potential audience will find out about your business
• Peak shopping hours of your target audience
• Reasons they might not purchase your product

2. Set Clear Goals

You cannot achieve a successful end result without having achievable goals to get there. 

That’s why it’s important to constantly assess your goal, make sure that it’s realistic and that you are working towards it at a steady pace.

If it seems that a goal is unachievable at the current time, figure out why and if there is a solution to speed up the process.

When it comes to customer acquisition, setting goals isn't too difficult. 

There is plenty of measurable data you can use to assess whether goals are being achieved. 

You can measure weekly or monthly metrics of your customer lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, and monthly recurring revenue.

3. Define Which Channels You Want To Use

There’s a plethora of different channels you can utilize related to customer acquisition.

It will be easier to choose the right channels to use if you already have the ideal customer in mind. Simply ask yourself which channels they most frequently use.

Here are some examples of channels you can use to acquire new customers:

Organic Lead Generation

Organic leads come from search engines. It’s the purest way of getting new customers but is also the most difficult to master. The good thing about it is that it’s free, in a way.

Getting organic traffic to your website through search engines requires your website to rank high in the search results of search engines like Google. 

To get Google to rank your content higher, it needs to be optimized for search engines.

While it’s true that potential leads searching for a term on Google and finding your article costs nothing, creating an article and website that ranks high on a search engine can still be costly.

You’ll need to hire SEO specialists, writers, and UX teams to help create articles that are SEO-friendly, and even then, it could take a while before you get a high traffic volume.

Paid Search Marketing

This is done through advertising on search engines.

Some PPC (pay-per-click) platforms will allow your ads to be displayed on partner websites as well. 

Instead of trying to optimize your page to get a high SEO score, you pay for your ad to be displayed on search engines and websites that use a PPC platform.

Social Media Organic/Paid

Social media is by far one of the best customer acquisition channels you can use. 

59% of people worldwide use social media, that’s over 4 billion people.

There are 2 channels to choose from when trying to acquire customers on social media. Either organically or paid.

Organic traffic is gained directly from your brand’s social media accounts. This could be through posting content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. 

There are various content marketing strategies for social media to get users interested in visiting your website or store.

Paid social media content marketing is when you pay to promote a post or video about your brand on social media platforms.

If you need help with channel alignment or picking the right KPIs, you should get in touch with Selling Revolution . They build selling systems that can help you get more quality leads.

Want a pro tip?

If you exist in a hyper-competitive market like real estate, harness the power of paid channels to increase your lead volume. 

An experienced Google AdWords agency can help you acquire better leads than organic channels like Google Search.

4. Create Strategies Unique To Each Channel

It’s important that you don’t create one blanket customer acquisition strategy. Each channel will not only have different goals to attain and keep track of, but also need a different strategy to achieve those goals.

For social media marketing, you will most likely track likes, shares, number of comments and the click-through rate of each separate post, to gauge which posts perform better.

A lot of social media posts will have their own special landing page, specifically created to help lead users down a funnel towards a purchase. This social media landing page will also be part of your customer acquisition strategy. Organic traffic will be about optimizing your website and articles for SEO. There are plenty of tools that can help you improve your website’s SEO.

5. Collect Feedback

After all is said and done, and you’ve gained new customers, make sure to collect their feedback and opinions.

Customer feedback can be collected through surveys after purchase, email contact forms, social media comments, in-person interviews, and even review sites like Trustpilot, Amazon Customer Reviews, and Google Reviews.

6. Assess and Improve

All successful businesses and brands are constantly striving to improve every part of their business. This includes customer acquisition. 

Once you’ve implemented your customer acquisition strategy, it’s time to assess whether your goals have been achieved, or whether it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

There are plenty of small things that could be working against your customer acquisition goals, which is why feedback and assessment are important parts of your strategy.

Things to bear in mind when assessing and improving your strategy are:

• Where customers heard about your product or service
• How satisfied they are about your product or service
• Reasons why they were/weren’t happy with your product or service
• Other factors like gender, location, and age

For instance, according to Invesp, SaaS companies can double their paying customers by simply offering a free trial without asking them for their credit card info.

Such knowledge can only be gained by doing your due diligence in market research. It forms the foundation without which any of your other customer acquisition strategies wouldn’t work.

The Best Customer Acquisition Strategies

Now that we’ve touched upon how to create a customer acquisition strategy, let’s take a look at some of the best customer acquisition strategies. 

1. Leverage Video Content

Video marketing is on the rise. 81% of businesses leverage it, up from 63% from last year. That’s because 97% of marketers have found video content useful to increase customer understanding of their offerings. Another 76% have found it helpful to increase web traffic and sales.

People tend to be visual learners, and videos are one of the best ways to inform prospects about your brand and your products. 

You should try to find a good balance between informative and interesting videos. Leverage influencers to create such videos, and share on social media, and on your website.

What’s more, you ask?

Explainer videos and customer testimonials are another good way to go about this. Not only are they engaging, but also provide users the information they need to make that final purchase decision.

Companies like Okta have benefited a lot from customer acquisition strategies like video marketing.

2. Do Giveaways

Often, customers need more than just words or promises to convince them to pay for your products and services. Some of the more persistent consumers won’t even be swayed by influencer or word-of-mouth marketing.

In order to win over these consumers as loyal customers, you should consider doing giveaways. Offering them a chance to experience your products, first hand, is a great way to give them that extra push they need to seriously consider you as an option.

The easiest way to implement such customer acquisition strategies is to run giveaway campaigns on social media.

So, how can you launch giveaways?

To create a giveaway, you can use tools like VYPER . It lets you create stunning landing pages for your giveaways using its drag-and-drop page builder.

All you have to do is select one of their templates and customize it. Once traffic starts coming to the page, it provides you all the details that were entered in the forms as well. Thus, helping you ramp up your lead generation efforts.

Here’s what Forever21, the women’s fashion apparel brand, does in order to drive users through the sales funnel. This way they even to gauge the market, if any, for any new styles they want to try selling.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Forever21 (@forever21)

3. Create High-Quality Content Regularly

Content marketing is easily one of the most effective and evergreen customer acquisition strategies there are. 

Let’s think of it this way: it helps you establish your thought leadership in your industry or niche. Getting consumers to trust your brand is half the battle and content marketing helps you win that battle.

From a lead generation perspective, content marketing is thrice as effective and 62% less expensive than typical outbound marketing. 

Starting a blog for your business, sharing content on social media, and publishing white papers are all great ways to establish yourself as a trustworthy expert in your industry.

Consumers are more and more informed these days. By empowering your prospects to make informed purchase decisions, you’ll gain their trust and in all likelihood convert them. 

Creating valuable, informative, insightful, and engaging content will, ultimately, help drive your customer acquisition.

But coming up with high-quality content regularly, especially for social media, can be a challenge.

So, what can you do?

You can leverage tools like ProWritingAid . 

This tool helps you write or rewrite your content with ease. All you need to do is key in a few words that describe your content, and the tool will create the article for you. 

Alternatively, you can paste the text from your content and the tool will rewrite it for you.

4. Focus on SEO

After you've established your online presence by producing insightful content, you need to work on SEO. Doing so will help improve the rankings of that very content on search engines. Thereby making your content more visible and discoverable by your target audience.

Improving search rankings and your brand’s visibility has a lot to do with the first stage of the customer acquisition funnel. Some of the more basic SEO tactics include using industry-related keywords, backlinks from authority websites, etc.

Another effective SEO tactic you can use to gain more customers is to optimize your site for mobile devices. Close to 50% of the internet traffic last year came from mobile devices.

Providing prospects with an excellent mobile experience can prove to be the trick in converting customers, especially for social media platforms.

So, how can you manage your website’s SEO?

For this, I recommend using Semrush . This all-around SEO tool provides everything you need for your website’s SEO.

Starting from keyword research to on-page SEO and competitor research, this tool has got it all. It even helps you track your keyword rankings and has a built-in link-building tool through which you can build backlinks for your website.

5. Run a Referral Program

Referral programs often serve as the basis of many acquisition strategies to find new customers, especially when you’re a fledgling company. 

You can offer current users incentives like extra features or discounts to incentivize them to refer your services to others. 

And you can also offer these new customers similar discounts to give them an extra nudge to leverage your services.

So, how can you launch your referral program?

To create and run a referral program, you can use InviteReferrals . 

This easy-to-use tool lets you create a referral program for your website, app, and social media platforms and can help you track its progress with ease.

It provides detailed analytics that can help you filter your traffic based on different channels. From shares to sales, you can track it all using this tool.

Dropbox runs a pretty sweet referral program where they offer users an extra 500mb of storage when they invite a friend to sign up. 

The deal is sweetened by the fact that your friends also get an extra 500mb of storage. They maximize the value to be gained from the referral by offering both parties something.

6. Create Optimized Landing Pages

Among other customer acquisition strategies, optimizing your landing pages is definitely one of the most effective ones. 

Landing pages help direct consumers to your product or service. An effective landing page doesn’t just offer up valuable information but also includes a compelling call-to-action that facilitates conversions.

Running an A/B test can help you optimize your landing pages and improve them drastically. 

It goes back to knowing what your customers expect from you. You need to be able to anticipate their needs and then deliver on those.

You can use tools like Unbounce to create and test your landing page designs. 

Using its simple drag-and-drop page builder, you can seamlessly create your landing page without the need to know to code. It also allows you to create sticky bars and popups that can help you convert visitors with ease.

Try pages with no navigation bars, ones that do, try different fonts, CTAs, and elements. This is an iterative process, and you should keep experimenting to figure out what is helping win more customers.

7. Improve Website and Email Engagement

While this may be a tactic that’s as old as the internet, it’s still one of the most effective customer acquisition strategies there is.

It helps you stay in front of your target audience, promote your content, discounts, and product information. It’s also the easiest way you can connect with and acquire new customers.

A great way to go about this is to send customized emails to people depending on which stage of the customer acquisition process they are. 

So, someone in the first two steps is probably better suited for content that might initiate that customer engagement.

What about the others?

Ones in that have you in their consideration pool would be more interested in emails with product information. 

This enables them to make a more informed purchase decision. Similarly, people in the final stages can be tempted into making that purchase with a promotional email that offers them a discount.

Amazon, for one, does a good job of this. They’re always sending out customized emails to their audience. 

Be it to remind them about the items on their wish list or an abandoned cart. Or perhaps something like this when you’ve just made a purchase.

8. Blogging

Blogging is an organic form of customer acquisition since it mostly involves articles written on a blog on your website. 

Blogging is an excellent way for your website to show your expertise and create authority among your readers and customers.

That’s not all.

You’ll also be building a large library of content that can be linked to from other websites that might use your articles as a source. This is especially true if you spend time creating custom graphs and sourcing original data.

A lot of blogs use information, pictures, and graphs from other sources. If that other source is your website, search engines will quickly notice and rank your website as a higher authority, bumping you up the search rankings significantly.

Blogs will also help you with customer acquisition by increasing your keyword search volume, in turn increasing your visibility in the search engines. 

That means that your website will show up for a larger number of searches and that more people will see your website in search results.If you’d like to know more about blogging, read how to start a blog .

9. Customer Spotlight

Nothing beats good old word-of-mouth when it comes to marketing.

72% of people get word-of-mouth news from family members and friends, making it highly likely that if a family member or friend really likes something, they’ll tell them.

What’s even more impressive is that 74% of those people believe word-of-mouth is a key influencer when deciding whether or not to purchase a product or service.

So, how do you, as a business, take advantage of word-of-mouth?

It’s quite simple, actually.

Turn your customers into promoters!

Oracle has some of their biggest and most famous customers do customer spotlights. In these videos, people talk about their experience using Oracle, their story as to why they chose Oracle, and what makes Oracle their preferred choice.

Q1. How do you acquire customers?

A. You can acquire customers using:

– Social media marketing – Video promotions – Giveaways – Content marketing – SEO – Referral program – Landing pages – Email marketing

Q2. What should you include when creating a customer acquisition strategy?

A. When creating a customer acquisition strategy, you should consider:   – Audience demographics of your ideal customers – Your business goals – Products and services you want to sell – Discounts or giveaways you can afford – Marketing budget

Q3. How do you find your first 100 customers?

A. To get your first 100 customers, you should:   – Ask your friends and family to see if they need the products or services you’re selling. – Ask people to spread the word about your business. – Design and print business cards. Give them to potential clients you may visit during events and other networking sessions. – Create social media accounts for your business. – Set up an online store on Shopify, Instagram Shops, and your own ecommerce website . – Offer referral discounts to encourage customers to help you get more orders.

Q4. What is a good customer acquisition cost?

A. Customer acquisition cost varies based on your industry and the strategies you use to market your business.   The best way to evaluate if your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is good is to compare it with customer lifetime value (LTV). 3:1 is considered an ideal ratio for LTV:CAC.   The value of a customer should be three times the cost of acquiring them.

Q5. What is a customer acquisition process?

A. The customer acquisition process is the process of bringing in new customers. It includes everything from generating brand awareness to creating demand and persuading prospects to make purchase decisions.

Q6. How can I advertise without spending money?

A. You can advertise your business without spending money in the following ways:   – List your business on Google My Business and other local business directories. – Create social media accounts for your business and start posting about your products and services. – Build a website using WordPress or other free website builders. – Start a blog on topics related to your business. Include keywords in the title, headings, and content of your blog posts. – Promote customer referrals. – Send emails to tell people about your new products or services.

Q7. Why is a customer acquisition strategy important?

A. The main aim of any business is to find and acquire customers and start making money. That’s why a customer acquisition strategy is very important for every business.   It can help you create a roadmap to reach, attract, engage, and convert prospects and encourage existing customers to bring you more customers.

Q8. What are the best practices for customer retention?

A. The best practices for customer retention include:

– Deliver good customer experiences. – Sell high-quality products. – Deliver orders on time. – Offer great support. – Listen to feedback and respond positively. – Offer discounts to loyal customers.

Ready to Get Started Acquiring New Customers?

There’s no one magical customer acquisition strategy that can guarantee your business a steady flow of new customers. 

While customer acquisition efforts like market research are a must, you need to build from there. It’s an experimental process, trying to figure out which strategies are best suited for your business.

For the most part, though, the nine listed above are evergreen and are guaranteed to work for any business when done right.

What are your thoughts on these customer acquisition strategies?

Let us know in the comment section.

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, product launches, sales funnels, targeted traffic, and website conversions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.

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15 comments.

Thanks for Customer Acquisition Strategies. These are very helpful.

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Customer Acquisition Strategy for Startups: Guide to Acquire First 100 Customers

Updated on December 8, 2021

“What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.”–Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s

Once you have a sell-able product, the first thing you need to do is to make a solid customer acquisition strategy. Having a proper strategy in place is essential to achieving sustainable long-term growth. Without having a plan for new user acquisition, you will undoubtedly struggle and eventually fail.

With that said, why is it important to have a customer acquisition plan from the very start? Can’t you just focus on marketing your startup to achieve exponential growth?

Sadly, just like every other thing, a startup needs proper planning to grow. This requires audience refinement, goal setting, and multi-channel marketing.

What is Customer Acquisition?

• Paid Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Organic Search Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Create Problem-Solving Content for Your Audience
• Integration with Other Products that your Audience Needs
• Build Tools To Market Saas Products
• Event Marketing
• Banners, Billboards and Stickers
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

In this article, we will discuss customer acquisition techniques to attract more customers and retain them while growing the startup. But before we get to that part, it is important to understand what constitutes a customer acquisition strategy?

In the simplest of terms, customer acquisition is a term that refers to getting more customers. Every business, every agency, and every entrepreneur must create a customer acquisition strategy. Useful customer acquisition strategies that a business can employ include referrals, loyalty programs, and various others.

For every business, the meaning of the term ‘customer acquisition’ is different. But it more or less relates to three factors of growth. Get, Keep, and Grow.

Get: When you acquire new customers for your business. This is the first part of the user acquisition process. You market your product or service through multiple channels and then you get a customer.

Keep: How many of these customers can you retain for your business? It depends on the value you provide to the customer. The churn rate of customers varies from industry to industry but on average, it is between 5% to 7%. If you want to keep your customers, you will have to provide them with something new. Take an example of Facebook. Facebook offers new ways of engaging its users. More of it is related to user-generated content, but the whole business model is developed in a way to keep users coming for more.

Grow: How many of your customers actually help grow your business? Or, to how many of the customers can you up-sell or cross-sell your products? Some of them might become your referral, or recommend someone else to your business, some might not.

Collectively, these factors are the building bricks of the ‘customer acquisition’ concept.

Image Source

Once the startup reaches the growth stage, the whole customer acquisition cycle is complete. Now, to repeat the same process, the startup needs to create a loop. This means the old customers/users of the startup can refer new users that will form a growth loop.

Now, as you know what customer acquisition strategy is, let’s discuss what you need to know to get started.

Channels, Goals, and Audience

You need to understand your targeting channels, your desired audience, and your goal before starting the process of creating a customer acquisition strategy. Read below to know what they are and how to set them.

Define your Audience

Suppose your startup offers fitness and gym tutorials on a daily basis for a subscription charge of $1 per month. In this case, the audience of the startup will be:

People who work out on a daily basis.

If we refine it further, this can be people including gym subscribers, home gym users, fitness enthusiasts, and athletes.

Define your goals

Now, let’s suppose you want 10,000 members in the first three months. This is your quarterly goal. Your yearly goal is to reach 50,000 subscribers who pay $1 per month. Now let’s turn our imagination one notch up. Your customer’s LTV is $12. Means each of your customer will only remain with you for a year.

Define your channels

Let’s see what types of channels are available to you for customer acquisition. Online marketing channels that are most often used include:

• Search Engine Marketing and SEO

Let’s see which customer acquisition techniques you can use the following marketing channels.

Customer Acquisition Strategies for Startups

Now the question is: What types of use acquisition strategy you can use to step up the startup’s marketing on both online and offline channels.

Online Marketing

In online marketing, we have multiple channels available for customer acquisition. First one is paid marketing. It is a refined channel to get customers because it offers targeted marketing to an audience.

The second customer acquisition method is email marketing. It helps target visitors who had engaged with your ecommerce store before. You have their email addresses and you can target them through emails.

The third customer acquisition technique is organic marketing. It is completely free and long lasting. Organic marketing is further divided into social and search marketing.

The fourth channel of customer acquisition is affiliate marketing. For startups, the best way to penetrate a competitive market is through affiliate marketing.

1. Paid Marketing

Most startup founders tend to highlight the importance of paid marketing because it leads to high conversions. Here are some customer acquisition strategies that you can use for paid marketing.

• Seed Engagement Metrics to Drive Down Ad Spend

One proven way to get more conversions through paid marketing campaigns is by boosting an already engaged post to your targeted audience. First, create posts for your social media platforms and then boost them with ‘engagement’ ads to get more comments and likes. You can even get engagement through low-converting countries like the Philippines.

We have taken the above two pictures from Growth pilot . They compare two identical posts and show how higher engagement can lead to more conversions.

1. Promote marketing content in social media groups and communities.

2. Run engagement ads that can lead to higher engagement and then to sales

3. Target countries with low CPC costs just to get initial engagement. Some countries to target include the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, and a few others. You can test the ads to target even more users.

• Remarketing

Remarketing is another customer acquisition strategy that works when you show ads to the same audience that initially liked your content. This content can be on social media, website, or even in emails. Remarketing ads can also be shown to visitors who visited your website and have an account on Facebook.

For remarketing strategy to work, first, create a remarketing advertising campaign for your startup. Take leads that you have collected through social media and lead funnels. Now, add them to paid marketing platforms for remarketing.

You can run remarketing on all paid channels including search and social.

Take this ad from Whistler. It is a remarketing ad. As you can see, the caption includes ‘time is ticking…’

It was shown to the person who opened the Expedia website and searched for planning a trip to whistler . The ad searches for cookies of Expedia within the browser. When it detects those cookies, it then shows users the ad.

You can develop similar remarketing strategies, by testing various ad sets. Remarketing ads have a higher conversion rate because the leads are already warm. They have either visited your website. Or, they know about your business in some way. By remarketing them with the offers they were interested in, you can increase conversions for a much lower cost.

Tip : Segment remarketing audience based on their journey. For example, those who were on the checkout page might be interested in discounts or trial offers.

• Similar/Lookalike Audience

Another customer acquisition strategy to grow your startup and on board customers is by searching for similar or lookalike audience. First, identify those customers who have already bought from your website. Now, create their lookalikes. This means you now have a potential customer base. Target them with relevant ads. Another better way is to do Micro Split Tests (MST) – a strategy that was introduced by Jason Wardrop .

According to this strategy, you first select a target audience and then test your ads. Once you have conversions rolling in, split the test with a lookalike audience. You then have to repeat the first step again and see if it leads to conversions. Keep drilling down to see which type of ad set is bringing in the most leads.

See how we found a winning ad set using this strategy. Our cost per lead was $15.85 and we gained 50 leads this way.

• Segment your ads by demographics and geographics
• Test strategies for a week and ignore those that don’t perform well
• Those that are performing well, keep their audience and then create their lookalikes.

Why Startups Should Focus on Paid Marketing?

2. Email Marketing

Most ecommerce store owners tend to opt for an email marketing funnel to create email marketing campaigns . These campaigns are helpful in reminding people about a product or a service that they have forgotten. Email marketing is also a clever way of remarketing. Here are a few customer acquisition strategies you can use with email marketing.

• Give Value to Your Subscribers

Email marketing is an outdated method. But the reason we have added it to our startup customer acquisition strategy is that it still works! People buy products if they are reminded through emails. That’s why landing your message in their inbox is important. It makes them feel that you went an extra step to reach them and this makes all the difference.

Moreover, you can monitor their behavior through email analytics. You can track when they open your email, when they click a button within the email, and when they land on your website through email marketing. You can track almost every action they take and this helps with retargeting.

• Increase Engagement from Unopened Emails

When you have the data available, you can target only those who didn’t open your previous email with another subject line. This trick was first introduced by Noah Kagan. He experimented by sending one email message twice to customers who had not opened it earlier.

From his first email campaign, the open rate was around 70 percent. Almost 30 percent of people had not opened his email. So, he took the same email, waited for a week, and then sent it to those who had not opened it earlier.

The process is simple:

• Take the SAME email you sent and CHANGE the subject line to something new
• Email it out a week later JUST TO YOUR NON-OPENS ( Source )

By adding a completely new subject line, the users who have not opened your previous email will never know if you are re-sending them the same email. This gives you a chance to increase the open rate of your emails without looking like a spammer.

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3. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is one organic way of gaining customers for your website. Some strategies to acquire customers using social media are mentioned below:

• Q&A Websites

Quora is a social Q&A website that allows users to answer questions about almost all topics. You can make a profile and start promoting your brand by answering relevant queries of the users. For example, if you provide SEO services, then simply start answering SEO related questions with a link back to the services page of your website.

You can use a paid tool like SEMrush to search for top questions on Quora. For example, go to SEMRush and select organic traffic for Quora . Now, filter the results by adding your own search term i.e. Cloud hosting. Or, go to Google search and type ‘quora.com: cloud hosting’ to search for top ranking pages related to this query.

• Collaborate with Influencers

Another way to get more customers through social media is by bringing influencers onboard.

Who are influencers? Anyone who has a large following on a social media platform and is willing to sponsor your content is an influencer.

Influencers will charge you a small fee to promote your product or service to their audience. But the benefit of bringing them onboard is that they can easily increase your credibility and help convert more visitors. You can read more about influencer marketing and how to improve conversion through it.

• Capitalize on User Generated Content

Another clever acquisition strategy to increase your reach is by promoting user-generated content. Look how Wendy’s is doing it.

Wendy’s twitter account is highly active. Whenever a user posts something related to Wendy’s, its official account is the first one to talk about it. This not only gives Wendy’s users a sense of being heard, but it also promotes the company’s goodwill.

User-generated content doesn’t guarantee customer acquisition, but it will surely increase your brand’s reach to people who didn’t know about it before. Moreover, the person whose content you shared will then share your post in his or her circle.

Find out how to use social media for lead generation for your business

4. Organic Search Marketing

In organic marketing, you don’t pay anything to market your products and services. For example:  When you post something on social media and get traffic. Or, when you rank posts on the search engine and you get traffic through it.

Here is how you can get customers organically.

• Rank for Paid Keywords

The best way to beat the competition is by searching for keywords that you want to target through paid marketing. Now search for opportunities to rank for those keywords organically. This way you will reduce your ad spend and get more conversions. Keep looking for new converting keywords and rank for them organically to boost conversions at a lower spend.

See the above example. Amazon is trying to rank for the paid keyword that costs some price. For us, it is completely free to rank for this keyword organically. However, it did cost us some hard work to rank using search engine optimization tactics .

• Improve User Experience on Your Website

Another way to acquire more customers is by improving the user experience on your website. This means, make your website more attractive to visitors. Start tracking user-journey and find out why visitors are leaving your website.

You can also check the same by tracking the bounce rate and average page session duration. If you want more data, then integrate heat maps on your website.

• Republish and Repurpose

Most of the content you publish today will become old in the next few months. This means Google will reduce its ranking and you will receive less traffic. To increase its ranking again, simply update it with newer facts.

Similarly, you can increase its reach even further by repurposing the content to other formats. For example, you have written a blog post. Now turn this post into a slide and share it on Slideshare and other slide sharing websites. Turn it into an infographic and share it on Flickr and Visual.ly Also, you can turn it into snackable images using Canva and share it on Pinterest and other image sharing social media platforms.

A Complete Guide for Optimizing Your Startup’s Website

5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another solid way of acquiring new customers. Amazon is one company that grew its business completely through affiliate marketing. Many other companies are now using affiliate marketing to get a solid edge in acquiring more customers. Here is how you can use affiliate marketing as a startup to get more customers.

• Build a Small-Scale Influencer Referral Program

You can easily set up an affiliate program for your website using an affiliate tracking software. One of the best affiliate tracking software is Affiliatly. It integrates with WooCommerce. You can use it instantly after signing up for the service.

Once you have the affiliate program setup, convince bloggers to promote your products on their blogs. You may have to offer them better commission rates. Therefore, you must keep the LTV of your customers in mind and then offer commissions accordingly.

• Introduce Incentive Based Slabs

We at Cloudways have an incentive-based slabs system for our affiliates. This means we increase the commissions of affiliates who provide us with more customers. You can also introduce this for your startup.

First, craft a strategy that works for you and then make slabs for various sales numbers. You are welcome to get more ideas from Cloudways web hosting affiliate program .

6. Create Problem-Solving Content for Your Audience

The content you put out should focus on offering solutions to the audience you’re targeting.For instance, you can create product guides and personalized tutorial information that highlight how your business is relevant to resolving your target audience’s issues.

Create Lead Magnets that Attracts Your Audience

Start the Lead Magnet 101 course to learn how to create invaluable content to build your audience.

Personalized, solution-oriented content will help you reel in incoming prospects. To understand how to create this sort of effective content, you need to find out the pain points of your audience, and what their online search intent is.

7. Integration with Other Products that your Audience Needs

If you already have a thriving user base for one product, you can capitalize on it for other products and services as well. Integrate one product with another to improve the overall user experience; this will help you expand your user base further.

You can also identify and connect with other businesses that could use your products to fill an existing gap. For instance, you could connect with an ecommerce store owner to integrate a customer centered live chat application on the store store. In this case, both the owner of the live chat app and the ecommerce store owner mutually benefit from the integration. Both are able to add more value for the customer with the integration than without.

8. Build Tools To Market Saas Products

One of the most effective ways of improving lead generation is by providing the targeted audience a tool that they can use to make their life easier. With the help of different tools, you can provide value to your customers and promote goodwill simultaneously.

Offline Marketing

One of the best ways to get new customers for your startup is via offline marketing. While all online marketing ways are great, startups need multi-channel marketing to prosper.

When Facebook was first launched, it started an activation drive. It went from school to school to get more people to sign up on the website.

Here are a few offline marketing tactics you can use to acquire customers for your startup.

1. Local Event Marketing

Local event marketing is one of the best ways to acquire more customers. If your startup is targeting a local community, it is better to host an event in the area. You can also entice users to use your product/service through prizes and free credits. Giving promo codes is also a good idea. It helps you track the user acquisition count and user’s journey.

2. QR Codes

Most ecommerce stores now use QR codes for websites to take visitors directly to their websites. If your startup sells products or services, then promote your QR codes through offline marketing.

3. Banners, Billboards, and Stickers

You can also go for startup promotion through banners and billboards. They are hard to track but great for awareness and building credibility . Most digital companies resort to offline marketing to build credibility and trust among their users.

Customer Acquisition Strategy FAQs:

How to improve startup customer acquisition strategy?

We have highlighted a few ways to acquire more customers for your startup. There are many other ways available, but to improve the customer acquisition process, the best way is to test these ways and then stick to the one that works. For example, you get 70% conversions through paid marketing, 10% through email marketing, 7% through affiliate marketing and 3% through organic marketing. You can now double on paid marketing and decrease organic and affiliate marketing because you are getting more conversions through paid marketing. You will have to keep monitoring your success and switch to new customer acquisition strategies from time to time.

How to retain customers for longer, or increase their Life-Time Value (LTV)?

First of all, you must decide what do you want to achieve? How much do you want to scale your success? You also need to calculate the LTV per customer and then track what the majority of the customers are buying. Here are a few ways you can increase the LTV of each customer:

• Develop a loyalty program. You customers need some incentives to come back to your website or ecommerce store. What are you offering them? Discounts? Memberships? Think of something that works.
• Cross-sell and Upsell. If they bought web hosting, you can offer them a page speed tool, VPNs, Content Management System (CMS), and even paid themes from partners.
• Retarget. Retarget them with the products that they searched for on your website but never bought.

What’s next?

This is the complete list of new customer acquisition strategies. You can use it to step up your growth. The best way to use these strategies is by testing them all. See which of these works for your startup and then stick with it.

Have something to add to this article? Comment below.

230+ Customer Acquisition Tactics to Scale Your Business [Ebook]

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Arsalan sajid.

Arsalan, a Digital Marketer by profession, works as a Startups and Digital Agencies Community Manager at Cloudways. He loves all things entrepreneurial and wakes up every day with the desire to enable the dreams of aspiring entrepreneurs through his work!

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Customer Acquisition Plan Template

What is a Customer Acquisition Plan?

A customer acquisition plan outlines a strategy for attracting and acquiring new customers. It typically contains defined goals and objectives, and the steps necessary to reach those goals. It is an essential tool for any business looking to grow their customer base and increase sales.

What's included in this Customer Acquisition Plan template?

• 3 focus areas
• 6 objectives

Each focus area has its own objectives, projects, and KPIs to ensure that the strategy is comprehensive and effective.

Who is the Customer Acquisition Plan template for?

This customer acquisition plan template is suitable for marketing and sales leaders, managers and teams of all sizes and industries. It provides a framework that enables you to create a plan to acquire and retain customers.

1. Define clear examples of your focus areas

A focus area is a broad area of activity that you want to focus on to help you reach a goal. Examples of focus areas could include customer acquisition, digital marketing, customer service, or product development. It is important to identify the focus areas that are most important to the success of your business.

2. Think about the objectives that could fall under that focus area

Objectives are specific goals that you set for each focus area. These should be actionable and measurable, so that you can track progress over time. Examples of objectives could include increasing customer acquisition, improving lead generation, and developing loyalty programs.

3. Set measurable targets (KPIs) to tackle the objective

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are measurable targets that allow you to track progress towards an objective. Examples of KPIs could include lead conversion rate, customer retention rate, website visits, and social media followers.

4. Implement related projects to achieve the KPIs

Projects, or actions, are specific activities that you implement to achieve your objectives. Examples of projects could include optimizing SEO, creating promotional campaigns, and implementing feedback systems.

5. Utilize Cascade Strategy Execution Platform to see faster results from your strategy

Cascade is a strategy execution platform that enables you to track, measure and visualize progress against your goals. With Cascade, you can quickly identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to ensure the success of your customer acquisition plan.

Top Strategies to Score Big in the Customer Acquisition Game

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Customer acquisition is like playing chess. In chess, you need to think ahead to capture your opponent’s pieces and win the game. Similarly, when adopting a customer acquisition strategy, you must carefully plan your moves to acquire new customers and ultimately win the market.

Here’s when effective strategies become irreplaceable.

This blog post will help you with three important tasks. One is to pick the best customer acquisition strategy for your business. Two, learn real-world examples of customer acquisition strategy. Three, clearly understand how to apply a customer acquisition framework to your business.

But before we dive in, let’s get on the same page about a key definition.

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

View your business as a digital playground and your customers as players. You should attract and engage the customers to keep them coming back for more. But how?

Correct! You bring into play your strategy for customer acquisition. Simply put, a customer acquisition strategy is a plan designed to attract and convert potential buyers into paying customers. This strategy involves identifying your target audience, understanding their needs and preferences , and creating a roadmap to reach them.

Here’s a way to visualize the customer acquisition process:

In other words, your customer acquisition strategy is your plan for capturing the hearts and minds of your target audience.

Now, let’s cover two questions that may quite naturally arise.

Customer acquisition vs. marketing: What’s the difference?

These are related concepts but aren’t the same.

In essence, marketing is about getting your brand out there and generating interest , while customer acquisition is about transforming that interest into actual purchases.

Here’s an example. You own a coffee shop in a busy downtown area and aim to attract more people to your shop. You start by placing ads on social media, promoting your shop’s unique atmosphere, high-quality coffee, and delicious baked goods. In addition, you sponsor local events or host your own events to create buzz and raise awareness of your brand. That’s marketing.

However, this may not be enough to convert potential customers into actual customers. To do that, you might offer special promotions to people who recommend your brand or sign up for your loyalty program. These customer acquisition strategies aim to turn potential customers into paying customers over time.

Lead generation vs. customer acquisition: Understanding the difference.

Although related, lead generation and customer acquisition are two different aspects of the sales process.

Leads have expressed interest in what you offer, but they aren’t yet ready to make a purchase. So, the goal of lead generation is building a database of potential customers who’ll later become actual customers.

Conversely, customer acquisition involves guiding leads through the sales funnel until they’re willing to pay for what you offer.

For example, a software company might generate leads by offering a free trial of its product. Afterwards, they might use targeted email marketing campaigns to eventually convert them into paying customers.

Customer acquisition strategy: A framework to apply

The customer acquisition framework refers to a broad approach to customer acquisition that involves a set of strategies and processes. Mainly, it represents the tactics for both acquiring and retaining customers .

Basically, a customer acquisition framework means making sure everything in your business works together to get more customers. It’s like putting all the puzzle pieces in the right places to create a picture.

Four steps to creating a new customer acquisition strategy

A customer acquisition strategy is a key component of any successful business. By identifying your audience and choosing the right channels and tactics, you can attract and convert potential customers into loyal customers.

Step 1: Identify your ideal customers.

The first step in crafting a customer acquisition strategy is identifying your ideal customer. Who are they? What are their pain points? What motivates them to buy? The moment you clearly understand your target audience, you can tailor your efforts to appeal to them specifically.

Also, you need to know what sets your business apart from the competition. Maybe you offer a unique experience, a variety of products, or innovative elements that your competitors don’t have. By highlighting these strengths, you can attract customers who’re looking for something new and exciting.

Step 2: Choose your customer acquisition channels.

Once you know who to target, it’s time to plot your course. Will you set sail on the sea of social media, where the waters are choppy, but the rewards can be great? Will you trek through email marketing, where the path is treacherous, but the payoff can be huge? Or maybe a combination of these and other channels?

Step 3: Nurture your relationships.

Remember that gaining a new customer is only the beginning of the relationship. The real work comes in retaining and engaging that customer over the long term.

Whether it’s through personalized content , special offers, or exclusive access to events, consistently provide value to your customers. Say loudly and clearly that you care about their needs, and you’ll build trust and create a sense of loyalty.

Another tactic is to encourage feedback and actively listen to your customers’ concerns. This shows that you value their input. Responding to their feedback in a timely and thoughtful manner will help customers feel seen and heard.

Furthermore, focus on creating a sense of community around your brand. True, it’s a customer acquisition strategy that requires time and commitment. But it’s one of the best strategies to drive engagement and a deeper connection to your brand.

Step 4: Measure and adapt.

As you journey forth, you’ll need to stay nimble and adaptable. The terrain may change, and your target audience may shift. That’s why it’s important to adjust your strategy for customer acquisition accordingly.

Track the effectiveness of your new customer acquisition strategy attentively. The advantages and drawbacks of your tactics will quickly jump out. Next, you’ll be able to make adjustments and optimize your approach over time.

Two quick formulas to jumpstart your customer acquisition strategy

How to define customer lifetime value (ltv).

Customer lifetime value (LTV) is a critical metric. It helps businesses understand the total value of a customer over time. In other words, it indicates the net profit that someone will bring throughout their lifetime as a customer.

To calculate LTV, you need to determine three parameters:

• the average value of a purchase made by the customer,
• the number of purchases they make over a given period, and
• the average duration of their relationship with the business.

Here is the formula to calculate LTV:

LTV = (Average Value of a Sale) x (Number of Repeat Transactions) x (Average Retention Time)

For example, let’s say a company has an average sale of $100, and a customer makes two purchases per year. The average customer relationship lasts for three years. Using the formula above, the LTV would be calculated as follows:

LTV = $100 x 2 x 3 = $600

Thus, on average, each customer contributes $600 to the company’s profits over the duration of their relationship with the business.

By understanding the LTV of your customers, you can make informed decisions about your strategies, customer acquisition costs, and customer retention efforts.

How to define customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost a business invests to acquire a new customer. This includes all the marketing and sales expenses, such as advertising, sales commissions, salaries of marketing and sales teams, and other overhead costs. To calculate the CAC, the total cost is divided by the number of customers acquired.

Here’s the formula for calculating customer acquisition cost:

CAC = Total cost of sales and marketing / Number of new customers acquired

For example, if a company spent $100,000 on marketing and sales in a given period and acquired 1,000 new customers, the CAC would be $100.

Calculating the CAC is important for businesses for two main reasons. First, it helps them evaluate the effectiveness of their customer acquisition strategy. Second, it helps to determine the return on investment (ROI) of their marketing and sales efforts.

Best customer acquisition strategies to gain an edge in the market

Discover the top customer acquisition strategies that will take you a step closer to succeeding in today’s market.

Search engine optimization: Boosting your online visibility.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing your website to be loved by search engines.

By improving your website’s visibility in search results, you can drive more traffic to your webpages and potentially convert that traffic into paying customers. This is what makes SEO a top choice for those who’re seeking a new customer acquisition strategy.

Keyword research: For obvious reasons, one of the key elements of SEO is keyword research. This involves identifying the specific words and phrases people use when they go online to search for products or services like yours. By incorporating those keywords into your website’s content, you can improve your website’s relevance. As a result, your brand authority will rise in the eyes of users (and search engines).

On-page optimization: To make your website more search engine-friendly, you need to optimize your website’s structure, content, and metadata. For example, you might ensure that your website’s SEO-related texts accurately describe the content on your site, including title tags and meta descriptions.

Off-page optimization is another critical part of SEO. You should consider building links from other websites to your site. Why? Because this is how search engines understand that your site is a credible hub of information. Off-page optimization includes tactics like guest blogging, influencer outreach, and social media marketing.

SEO as a customer acquisition strategy: Example of a company you can learn from.

The wirecutter.

The Wirecutter is a product review site that was acquired by the NY Times in 2016. They’ve built their business by providing in-depth, unbiased product reviews that are optimized for search engines.

By conducting thorough keyword research, they intentionally target the right keywords that their audience is searching for. Moreover, they have a strong link-building strategy that has helped them earn backlinks from authoritative sites, further boosting their search engine rankings.

Through these efforts, they’ve been able to rank highly in SERPs for a variety of relevant keywords. As a result, Wirecutter manages to consistently drive a large amount of organic traffic to its site.

Blogging: Establishing authority and driving traffic through consistent writing.

Blogging is a customer acquisition strategy that involves creating high-quality content on your website. By consistently publishing informative and engaging blog posts, you see where your opportunities are and how to attract more customers to your pages.

But blogging doesn’t end there. You should also invest resources and efforts to promote your blog posts. For this, a set of tactics are recommended: having a regular calendar for sharing your blog posts on social media channels (more on this in a second), sending them by email newsletters, and guest posting on other blogs.

When you leverage all relevant channels, you increase your reach and attract new potential customers to your site.

Social media marketing: Connecting with your audience where they are.

Building brand awareness, increasing your reach, and driving more sales. These are the key benefits social media marketing can bring. And this is why social media continues to be a big part of every business’s marketing efforts.

To attract new customers through social media, consider an important tactic. Use targeted advertising and audience segmentation to reach people who are likely to have a genuine interest in your brand.

As a rule, social media marketing can be used without tons of resources. That’s why it’s one of the best customer acquisition strategies for startups.

Product pricing: Finding the sweet spot between value and profitability.

Just think of it. The way you price your product can be a strategy for customer acquisition.

Free trial and freemiums: Offering a free trial of your product is a recognized way to attract new customers. Allow people to test-drive your product before making a commitment, and you can easily demonstrate the value of your offering.

For the strongest results, be sure to provide helpful resources and support. Remember, during the free trial, your potential customers should have a positive experience. By the way, even if they don’t become paying customers themselves, they’ll spread the word about your brand and recommend you to those who’re searching for a similar solution.

Be cautious. A free trial can be a significant investment for your business. So, it’s important to put forth much effort in tracking your results and measuring the ROI of your efforts. This way, you’ll refine your strategy over time and optimize your investment to attract the highest quality customers.

Price anchoring: Another common approach to pricing is to use price anchoring, which involves setting a high price point for a premium product and then offering lower-priced options. Reportedly, this creates a perception of value and makes the lower-priced options more attractive to potential customers.

Dynamic pricing: Are you in a field where seasonality has a big impact on your sales? In this case, an effective approach will be to use dynamic pricing. Consider adjusting the price of your product based on demand, supply, or seasonality. This can help you optimize your pricing to attract the highest quality customers and maximize revenue.

Customer acquisition strategy: Examples of using the freemium pricing model successfully. 

In the freemium pricing model, you offer the basic version of your product or service free of charge. But you charge for additional features or functionality.

Many successful companies have used freemiums as a strategy for customer acquisition to great effect.

Who doesn’t know Dropbox? And who hasn’t used the free version of its service? Enter your username and password and get your gigabytes of storage free! But you have to pay for additional storage and advanced features.

The company’s freemium model has been highly successful. Reportedly, it helped Dropbox acquire millions of users and reach a leading position in the cloud storage industry.

The free option of Spotify is a stripped-down version of the full service, with limited functionality and advertisements interspersed between songs.

However, the platform’s free version still provides access to a vast library of music and allows users to create playlists. What’s more, users can upgrade to a premium subscription at any time to be able to download songs and listen offline.

The free trial has been a successful strategy for Spotify. Many users are willing to give the platform a try when there is no upfront cost. Additionally, the company has used various marketing tactics to encourage opting for a free trial. These tactics include offering exclusive content or collaborations with popular artists.

Video marketing: Engaging your audience with dynamic visual content.

Video is the ultimate canvas for bringing your brand to life and igniting the imagination of your audience. That’s why it’s a dynamic medium to captivate and connect with your customers. In fact, a report by Animoto states that 93% of businesses gained a new customer after posting a video on social media .

Video content allows you to offer an immersive experience to your audience and make a lasting impression. It can be how-to guides, tutorials, product review videos, influencer videos, video live streams, behind-the-scenes vlogs, etc.

Creating high-quality videos may require resources and experienced staff. However, if you don’t have a lot of experience with video production, you can make use of technological solutions. Bring in tools like video editing software or animation software to create professional-looking content.

Email marketing: Driving conversions with targeted messaging.

Not only a means to acquire new leads, email marketing is an effective customer acquisition and retention strategy.

Build a quality email list: When using email marketing as a customer acquisition strategy, focus on maintaining a clean and verified email list. By identifying and removing “toxic” emails from your list, you can increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Plus, adopt ethical email-gathering practices and never add contacts to your list without permission.

Use email retargeting: All too often, you’ll come across customers who are somewhat interested in your business but haven’t completed a purchase. Most probably, they need a clearer path to action or a gentle push to make their first purchase. You can achieve this by sending them targeted and personalized emails based on their previous interactions with your brand.

For example, suppose a customer has added items to their shopping cart but hasn’t completed the purchase. In that case, you can send them an email reminder about the items in their cart. You can even think of an incentive to entice them to complete the purchase. Or, if a customer has visited your website but hasn’t made a purchase, you can send them a personalized email with product recommendations based on their browsing history.

Companies that rocked the email marketing strategy for gaining new customers

Without a doubt, email marketing can be a powerful strategy for customer acquisition. The reason is email marketing helps to keep your subscribers engaged, leading to increased sales and revenue over time.

Copyhackers

Copyhackers specializes in copywriting and content marketing. They have a large email list of subscribers (89k and counting) and are known for their effective email marketing strategies.

Copyhackers sends tips and advice on copywriting, as well as promotions for their online courses and resources. Also, they use targeted emails to promote their webinars and events, thus building their brand and attracting new customers.

Airbnb has built a large email list by offering a discount on the first booking for new subscribers. In addition, Airbnb sends emails to subscribers based on their travel preferences and previous bookings. This way, they’re able to keep subscribers engaged and interested in the platform.

Client spotlights and case studies: Highlighting the success stories of your happy customers.

Success stories are invaluable. But, to truly unlock their potential, you need to give your customers a platform to sing your brand’s praises.

To create effective customer spotlights, be sure to choose customers who are delighted by your offering. By the way, spotlights can take a variety of formats: written case studies, video interviews, or social media posts.

Gated content: Using exclusivity to capture leads and drive engagement

Many businesses provide valuable content in exchange for their visitor’s contact information. It’s called gated content – content that promises exclusive access to those who are willing to provide their contact information or perform a certain action. This exclusivity can create a sense of value and prestige around the content, making it more desirable and enticing.

But should you open the gates to all your content? In fact, the proven tactic is to adopt a hybrid approach.

A hybrid approach means that you “gate” some of your content while making other content available to everyone. The key is to ensure that you gate the right content at the right time in your customer’s journey.

Examples of offering gated content as a strategy for customer acquisition

Here are two companies that have excelled at using gated content to acquire new customers:

HubSpot offers a variety of free resources to its website visitors. These resources include ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, and other educational content on topics such as social media, SEO, and email marketing. But to access the content, users must provide their contact information. Afterwards, HubSpot uses this data to nurture its leads with targeted emails and marketing campaigns.

Moz is a marketing analytics company that can boast of its free tools and resources. If you’re in the marketing or content writing field, most probably, you’ve already used one of their tools.

For example, they offer a link analysis tool and a keyword research tool. But to access the advanced tools and content, you must sign up for a free trial.

Events: Creating memorable experiences and excitement

Have you ever attended a business event that left you feeling invigorated, inspired, and excited about a company’s products or services? That’s the power of events as a customer acquisition strategy.

Events can take many forms, from trade shows and product launches to networking events and conferences. However, the key is to create an experience that resonates with attendees and leaves a lasting impression.

By leveraging events as a customer acquisition strategy, businesses can engage with potential customers in a way that goes beyond traditional marketing tactics. They can create an environment where attendees can see, touch, and interact with products or services, ask questions, and receive answers in real time.

Events as a customer acquisition strategy: Examples of companies that have used this strategy successfully.

Many companies excel at acquiring customers through events, but here are a few examples:

Salesforce is a global player in customer relationship management (CRM) software and is known for its annual conference, Dreamforce. Dreamforce brings together thousands of industry professionals, thought leaders, and Salesforce customers for a week of networking, education, and inspiration. The event has become a platform for Salesforce to showcase its products and services and serves as a viable strategy for customer acquisition.

Adobe hosts an annual event, Adobe MAX, which brings together creatives, designers, and developers for a week. The event features keynote speakers, hands-on workshops, and educational sessions. By focusing on the latest trends and innovations in design and digital marketing, Adobe MAX serves as a major platform for Adobe to showcase its products and services. And, ultimately, attract new customers.

B2B customer acquisition strategy

Note that when choosing the best customer acquisition strategy, the B2B world has its peculiarities. As a rule, any B2B customer acquisition strategy is focused on acquiring new business customers. But unlike B2C, B2B customer acquisition is more complex and involves a longer sales cycle.

The reason is B2B customers often require more detailed information, custom solutions, and a higher level of personalization. Therefore, the strategy needs to be well-planned and executed with precision.

To build an effective framework for B2B customer acquisition strategy, consider developing a customer profile . It should include demographics, company size, budget, and decision-making authority. This is essential to understand who makes decisions in a company to be able to speak directly to them.

Secondly, nurture leads . B2B customers often require more nurturing before they make a purchase. You need to create a lead nurturing program that includes regular follow-ups, personalized content, and a clear path to conversion.

Prioritize customer acquisition strategies and make them the driving force behind your business. With this, you not only position yourself for success in the market but also set the foundation for sustainable growth.

A well-executed customer acquisition and retention strategy can help you reach your desired audience, cultivate brand awareness, and foster long-term relationships with your customers.

Don’t hesitate to invest time, effort, and resources into developing a winning customer acquisition strategy. Your business and bottom line will be forever grateful!

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How to Put Together a Business Plan for an Acquisition

Kison Patel is the Founder and CEO of DealRoom, a Chicago-based diligence management software that uses Agile principles to innovate and modernize the finance industry. As a former M&A advisor with over a decade of experience, Kison developed DealRoom after seeing first hand a number of deep-seated, industry-wide structural issues and inefficiencies.

What is Acquisition Planning?

Acquisition planning is when the acquirer identifies and builds relationships with potential targets. More specifically, these targets meet the acquirer’s predetermined, strategic criteria.

‍ The strategy behind acquisition planning leads to stronger outcomes for both sides of the deal and must, therefore, be the foundation of acquisition plans.

Acquisition plan templates often include a summary of this overarching strategy, criteria for potential targets, a list of potential targets, timelines, risk management and due diligence materials, as well as integration planning materials.

We at DealRoom work with many companies helping them organize their M&A process . So let's start with the overview.

How to create an acquisition plan

One of the principal errors that many M&A practitioners make before making an acquisition is not putting together a business plan. The business plan is an invaluable asset when planning M&A.

It creates a roadmap for what you’re looking for from a business acquisition, as well as providing reassurance to those funding the deal that the rationale behind it is solid and that the decision to acquire is not being made on a whim.

The format of the business plan for an acquisition has a similar structure to that of a business plan for a startup and includes many of the same sections.

When writing either of these documents, you should be asking yourself ‘does what I’m writing sell the opportunity?’

If the answer to that question is ‘ no ,’ you need a rethink, maybe not just for the document, but perhaps for the acquisition itself.

Having said all that, here’s a typical outline of how a business plan for an acquisition should look:

1. Executive Summary

Even though it comes at the beginning, most how-to guides on business acquisition plans suggest leaving the summary of an acquisition transaction until you’ve written everything else.

While this is pretty sound advice, a good rule of thumb is that, if what you’re proposing is compelling enough, you should have a rough draft of the executive summary in mind before even beginning.

A good executive summary should cover a page and sell the opportunity as best as possible, covering its target market, your strategy and summary financials. This is often the only page that investors read before skipping to the financial projections, so make sure it’s strong.

2. Target Description

This section of acquisition plan outlines the business you’re acquiring and why it’s worth what you’re proposing to pay for it. Be as thorough as possible here. If there are weaknesses that you see in the business, introduce them and talk about how you can iron them out and generate value.

At a minimum, include details such as

• headline financials
• a breakdown of the company’s long-term assets (factory, head office, facilities, stores, etc.) and liabilities
• a SWOT analysis
• corporate structure.

If the company operates in a different segment to your own, show how you can make this work in your favor.

3. Market Overview

A common error when looking at the market overview is to think globally.

Startup investor Peter Thiel refers to this, whimsically noting that someone owning a restaurant could say that they’re entering a trillion dollar industry, when in reality, their market is a five mile radius around the location of the restaurant.

The more granular the detail here, the better.

• How many customers does the target have, and what kind of customers are they?
• Will you lose their business if the current owner moves on?
• What kind of demand is there for the business outside of its current customer base?

4. Sales and Marketing

This section provides an overview of the sales for each of the target’s products and services. It should show their pricing strategy and how it compares to your own, and how the company currently conducts its marketing.

For example, if it uses mailing lists to contact customers, is that something you could leverage for your own products and services?

Or perhaps you feel it’s not investing enough in marketing and that you could increase sales by investing in this area. In either case, outline the ‘quick wins’ that you can exploit here after acquiring the business.

5. Financial History and Projections

When looking for financing for an acquisition, this section is the one which will make or break the deal. Thus, you should be as thorough as possible here, analyzing the target’s past financial performance.

At a minimum, this should involve three years of financial statements and tax returns but five or more is even better.

The analysis should be comprehensive and honest. It should raise issues that may conflict with your own business - for example, different credit arrangements with customers or a significant difference in capital structure.

Once this has been completed, you can look at projections for the business. These projections should tie in everything you’ve written until now; if you plan to increase sales and marketing, this should show in the income statement; if you’re going to use income from the acquired business to pay down debt, this also needs to be accounted for.

There is no right answer for how much your growth projections should be, but it should be justified by the vision that you’ve laid out until now.

An interesting, if potentially complex, sub-section to add to the financial analysis are the gains from synergies and losses from cannibalism that you see emerging from the deal.

Synergies might come from cutting some admin or sales staff or merging sales channels (for example, online or direct mail) after the acquisition.

Cannibalism arises when you’ve got one of your sales reps selling the new, wider product range, and the customer ends up choosing the target’s product over your own.

It’s easy to fall into the proverbial rabbit hole with this section, but it’s still a useful exercise to make you think about where gains (and losses) will be made from the acquisition.

6. Transition Plan

This is typically a brief section that shows how the business will move from the control of the current owners to your own. This is not purely about ownership, however.

It should also detail how current sales relationships, contracts, and intellectual property are dealt with in the transition.

You can minimize the disruptive influence of the acquisition by getting this section right. If there are complex processes at the target company, know who performs them and how this will be dealt with.

Thousands of acquisitions are botched every year by undervaluing seemingly small processes which generate value right across the business.

7. Deal Structure

The topic of deal structure has been covered well elsewhere [link], and these articles can be of assistance when adding this section.

Having put together a failsafe case for acquiring the target company, now you show the financial structure you will use to do so.  

8. Appendices/Supporting Documents

A major difference between writing a business plan for a startup and one for a business acquisition is the variety of supporting documents attached.

At a minimum, this should include copies of tax returns and licenses, but could go into greater depth and show contracts with large customers, auditors’ letters and any other legal documents deemed relevant.

Using a merger and acquisition proposal sample can provide helpful guidance when determining which supporting documents to include.

Download acquisition plan/proposal templates

• Business acquisition proposal sample template
• Acquisition strategy sample template (m&a strategy template)
• Business acquisition plan template

While there is room for some variation in sections of each business plan, one thing every plan should have in common is its ability to convince the reader of the merits of the acquisition. Each section should be detailed and compelling.

If you’re not willing to put in the groundwork on a business plan, an investor is entitled to ask, ‘ why should I give a million dollars to someone who can’t write 20 pages? ’

By spending time on the business plan, and taking a critical perspective, you maximize the chances of your acquisition finding a funder, and simultaneously creating a strategy for the acquisition that primes it for success.

Get your M&A process in order. Use DealRoom as a single source of truth and align your team.

Customer acquisition strategy

Improve your customer acquisition strategy with our hub page.

Use our hub pages as a reference to get up-to-speed on all the main digital marketing techniques. They will help you quickly understand how to make the most of the technique through definitions and recommendations on our member resources and blog articles covering strategy, best practices and the latest statistics.

A customer acquisition strategy refers to an always-on strategic plan businesses use to attract and gain new customers. Customer acquisition is a crucial aspect of any company's growth and success. As such, Smart Insights offers a wealth of Free Member and Business Member marketing resources focusing on this technique.

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

A customer acquisition strategy defines the best mix of media and engagement tools (lead generation and product offers) to gain new customers through targeting them and reaching them through online and offline customer journeys.

An effective customer acquisition strategy helps businesses reach their target audience, convince them to try their products or services, and ultimately convert them into paying customers.

Recommended Business Member resource : Online acquisition strategy guide .

8-step customer acquisition strategy

To help you get started, here are some key steps and components to consider when developing a customer acquisition strategy:

1. Define Your Target Audience:

Understand who your ideal customers are, their characteristics, needs, and preferences. This knowledge will guide your marketing efforts in reaching the most valuable customers for your business. Business Members can use our Customer persona guide and template to get it right the first time.

2. Unlock customer insights:

Conduct thorough market research to identify trends, competitors, and opportunities. This will help you position your products or services effectively and differentiate yourself in the market. Business Members can use our Competitor benchmarking guide and template to generate actionable insights from this activity.

3. Define Your Value Proposition:

Clearly communicate the unique value your business provides to customers. Highlight the benefits they can expect from choosing your brand over competitors. You can read more about this in our free blog: What is brand positioning and why aren’t you doing it yet?

4. Optimize Your Marketing Funnel:

Integrate your marketing channels and activities to create a data-driven, actionable, practical, customer acquisition marketing funnel . Our RACE Framework demonstrates how you can take customers from discovery to loyalty in just 5 steps. Read more in our free RACE Framework blog .

5. Content Marketing:

Create valuable and relevant content that engages your target audience and showcases your expertise. Content can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. We offer modular CPD-accredited strategic Content Marketing training .

6. Landing Pages and Conversion Optimization:

Create dedicated landing pages for specific marketing campaigns to increase the chances of converting visitors into customers. Our Business Members' website performance reporting template helps you quickly get to grips with which journeys are working and which need optimization.

7. Digital Experience and Nurturing:

Utilize personalization and automation to track and stay engaged with your potential customers over time. Our Free Member essential digital marketing tools guide helps you prioritize and categorize marketing tech to make this happen.

8. Analyzing Metrics:

Use analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of your customer acquisition efforts. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV) to evaluate the success of your strategies. You can get started with our Free Member Guide 10 essential steps for using Google Analytics 4 to grow your business .

Customer acquisition strategy as part of your customer lifecycle

Remember that customer acquisition is just one part of the overall customer journey.

You can see in this example of a typical customer lifecycle before and after RACE implementation. Here - reach, act, and convert are all key steps to acquisition, while post-purchase engagement fuels retention and loyalty.

You can read more about RACE in our free blog: Introducing The RACE Growth System and RACE Planning Framework: practical tools to improve your digital marketing .

Or, download our free marketing plan template to get started today.

Customer acquisition strategy quick guide

Customer acquisition strategy definition.

Definition: A customer acquisition strategy defines the best mix of media and engagement tools (lead generation and product offers) to gain new customers through targeting them and reaching them through online and offline customer journeys.

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Ultimate Guide to Customer Acquisition Strategies for B2B SaaS

Founder of ProductLed and bestselling author of Product-Led Growth .

Table of Contents

Customer acquisition encompasses everything a business does to get new customers — from generating and converting leads, to designing a great customer experience and turning users into brand champions who recommend the product to others.

Clearly, there are many independent processes, activities, and departments involved in customer acquisition. That’s why you need a solid strategy to ensure everyone’s on the same page.

Your customer acquisition strategy is a high-level plan that determines the tactics and channels you'll use to attract the right customers to your business.

The best strategy for each company will vary depending on factors such as: 

• Who your ideal customers are.
• How much it costs to acquire them.
• How much they spend on your products.
• How fast you’re trying to grow.

However, many companies jump straight into testing acquisition channels and tactics without considering these factors. This often leads to:

• Spending time and money on initiatives that don’t produce results.
• Using channels that attract customers at a loss, while ignoring ones that can be a better fit for your business.

That’s why we’ll start this guide by  discussing the four essential factors for building successful customer acquisition strategies.

Then, we’ll go over 14 customer acquisition tactics and channels and explain how to select which ones you should include in your strategy.

Change is hard, whether you’re shifting your acquisition strategy or simply adopting new channels and tactics. That’s why we created the ProductLed Academy to equip teams with the knowledge, resources, and skills to implement product-led growth . To learn more, take our free workshop to show you how to activate the 3-step system that turns your product into a predictable, revenue-generating machine.

The Framework: 4 Essential Factors for a Successful Customer Acquisition Strategy

The right acquisition strategy for each company is determined by four key factors:

• Its customer lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC).
• The behavior, motivations, and challenges of its ideal customers.
• The business’s long-term goals.
• Its go-to-market strategy.

Evaluating these factors lays the foundation for your strategy since it impacts the channels and tactics you’ll use throughout the entire customer acquisition process.

Factor #1: LTV and CAC

LTV is a metric that shows how much revenue you can expect from a customer during the entire relationship. 

Here’s the formula for calculating it:

LTV = Average Purchase Value x Average Number of Purchases x Average Customer Lifespan

For example, say your average customer makes two purchases worth $500 every year and they stay a customer for three years. In that case you’d have an LTV of $3000 [$500 (average purchase value) x 2 (purchases per year) x 3 (total years)].

The other side of this coin is your CAC. At a high level, you can calculate the CAC for each marketing campaign or activity by dividing your marketing costs by the number of customers acquired.

CAC = Marketing Costs / Customers Acquired

There’s also a more complex CAC formula that includes additional factors: 

CAC = Marketing Costs + Wages for Marketing and Sales + Marketing and Sales Software + Outsourced Services + Overhead for Marketing and Sales / Customers Acquired 

This formula provides a high-level overview of customer acquisition costs, so it should be applied to longer time frames, such as quarters or fiscal years.

So, why does all of this matter? 

Because  your LTV and CAC dictate your strategy by narrowing down the channels and tactics you can use.

For example, cold calling and other sales-heavy tactics require, well, salespeople. If you have a relatively low LTV, you won’t be able to cover the cost of their wages and turn a profit. This means product-led tactics with a lower CAC can be a better option.

Factor #2: Ideal Customers

A simple way to determine who your best customers are is to look at the LTV of each customer segment. The larger it is, the more likely this type of customer can sustain your business in the long run.

CAC can be another factor, as customers who are too expensive to acquire relative to the LTV will make it harder to turn a profit.

Additionally, you can factor in which customers are the easiest to onboard and work with, as well as which ones get the most value from your product.

However, this is only part one of the equation.

To consistently attract potential customers, you need to know who they are, while understanding their habits, needs, and pain points.

Without this, you don’t really know:

• Where your ideal customers hang out (be it offline or online).  This oftenleads to spending money on channels that can’t even reach your target audience.
• What challenges they’re facing,  making it very hard to entice them into trying your product. Plus, not knowing their challenges means you can’t consistently guide them to the  “aha” moment , which will result in poor customer retention and a low free-to-paid conversion rate.

For B2B companies, it’s often useful to develop both an ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona:

• Your ICP is a made-up company that has everything you’re looking for in a perfect fit for your product or service.  An ICP can be defined by the industry, company size, revenue, budget, and other similar characteristics. 
• Your buyer persona is a fictitious (or often semi-fictional) representation of individual users.  Buyer personas take into account people’s goals, motivations, challenges, job titles, and demographics.

If you don’t have this information yet, start talking to your customer-facing teams — they usually have tons of useful insights on this topic. You can also survey your customer base directly.

Factor #3: Long-Term Business Goals

For some startups, the most essential goal is  user growth . 

These businesses aren’t concerned with profitability or massive revenue increases yet. Instead, they’re trying to get as many new customers as possible, refine the product based on their feedback, and reach product-market fit.

For example, say your 3-year-old startup sells software to website owners, and it’s currently installed on 10,000 websites. In the next year, you want to grow that 10x to 100,000 websites. 

This goal impacts the selection of channels and tactics  because you’ll need to focus on ones that can reach a lot more potential customers than the channels you’ve relied on so far. 

Additionally, if user growth is your number one goal, then you can temporarily acquire customers at a loss (i.e., CAC > LTV). Most venture-backed startups do this for years before turning a profit.

However, for other businesses,  profitability and sustainable revenue growth  might be more important than growth at all costs. This is often the case with bootstrapped businesses or late-stage startups that already have product-market fit and are hunting profitability.

In these cases, CAC becomes a crucial factor alongside LTV. Expensive channels and tactics hinder profitability, so they have to be optimized or eliminated from the strategy.

Factor #4: Go-to-Market Strategy

Product-led and sales-led go-to-market (GTM) strategies rely on different methods and departments for customer acquisition.

On the one hand,  sales-led strategies put sales at the forefront of customer acquisition. 

The sales team is the primary driver that generates leads, converts them into customers, and helps them renew or upgrade. Cold calling, cold emailing, trade shows, and conferences are popular channels for sales-led businesses.

One of the biggest benefits of this GTM strategy is the ability to close accounts with high LTV. As a result, being sales-led is often ideal for hyper-niche solutions with a small total addressable market (TAM) and for enterprise companies like IBM, Oracle, and SAP. 

The main downside of this strategy is the large CAC because of the cost of the sales team and the often months-long sales cycle. 

On the other hand,  product-led growth  puts the product at the center of customer acquisition. 

The buyer can try the product for free, experience its value, and upgrade to a paid plan — all without needing to interact with a sales team. This is possible because product-led companies, like Slack, Dropbox, and DocuSign, have additional acquisition tactics at their disposal, such as freemium products and free trials. 

Because customers can self-serve, the CAC is usually much lower compared to a sales-led GTM.

Additionally, investing in a product-led user experience transforms the traditional acquisition funnel into a flywheel.  The flywheel model  builds momentum from one phase to the next, turning beginners and evaluators into loyal customers and champions who tell others about your product.

This is a highly nuanced topic, so check out our blog post on  product-led vs sales-led models  for more details.

14 Customer Acquisition Tactics and Channels to Choose From

Before we dive into the tactics and channels, note that many of the ideas in this section are based on the book  “Traction”  by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.

We’ll do a brief overview with examples, but if you want a more in-depth explanation, consider getting the book or reading  this blog post by Zapier .

1. Freemium Products, Free Trials, and Demos

Freemium products, free trials, and demos are a crucial part of any product-led organization’s toolkit.

Here’s a quick breakdown of all three:

• Freemium products can be used by customers without paying and without a time limit.  The idea is to solve beginner problems in your niche for free while monetizing the more advanced use cases. Some of the biggest SaaS companies have a freemium version, including Dropbox, Slack, HubSpot, and Calendly. And while it's a powerful way to attract customers, freemium should be used with caution. We constantly see startups adopt this model, without making it easy for customers to understand their freemium product, get value from it, and upgrade to paid.  We’ve explained  the freemium business model in-depth in this article .
• Free trials allow customers to try the product for a limited time, after which they have to upgrade or stop using it.  A free trial should make users feel like they can’t go back to how they were solving their problem before they discovered the product. However, many companies don’t provide that experience, because they don’t align their free trial with their users’ goals.  We’ve explained how to overcome this problem and  improve your free trial conversion rate in this article .
• Demos allow prospective customers to book a product tour with your sales team.  Demos are a classic tool for selling enterprise products like Adobe Analytics, Oracle HCM, and SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). However, using demos doesn’t exclude freemium products and free trials, and vice versa. Some organizations employ a hybrid model, where part of their customers self-serve, while others (usually larger customers with complex use cases) rely on demos with the sales team.

Again, this is a complex topic, so check out  Chapter 2 of the Product-Led Growth Book  on the differences between freemium, free trials, and demos.

2. Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs allow product users, bloggers, and other influencers to earn a reward for promoting your product. The reward can be money (e.g. a percentage of each sale they bring in), free credits for your product, or a mix of both.

The most popular example of this is Amazon. Anyone can register for an  Amazon Associates  account, get an affiliate link, and send it to their audience. When someone follows the link and buys the product, the affiliate earns a commission.

3. Email Marketing

Email is one of the oldest digital marketing channels, but it’s still relevant today. Email marketing and automation tools like  Klaviyo ,  Drip , and  ConvertKit  empower teams to:

• Generate new leads.
• Nurture them into becoming customers.
• Re-engage existing customers and much more.

Put simply, email is a powerful way to get customers and boost engagement throughout their entire lifecycle.  You can find many  examples of awesome emails here .

4. Traditional Public Relations (PR) and Unconventional PR

Traditional PR involves reaching out to blogs, magazines, newspapers, and other outlets to get a featured story. 

On the flip side, unconventional PR is about going viral by doing something interesting or even outlandish.

For example, Red Bull produces hundreds of videos — like the one below — in which people do crazy stunts with the Red Bull logo in the background: 

When the videos go viral, so does the Red Bull brand.

Another example from the B2B space is Postman’s 30-page  graphic novel on APIs . 

5. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEM is the process of promoting a business using pay-per-click (PPC) ads that appear on search engine results pages .

For example, when you search for “B2B accounting software” in Google, you’re immediately greeted with four SEM ads :

Google remains by far the most widely-used search engine, so it’s usually the first choice for SEM. However, its popularity has led to fierce competition and rising costs, so alternatives like Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are also viable options for some businesses.

Like SEM, SEO also involves using search engines to promote your business. The big difference is that  with SEO, you’re not paying for placements in search engine results pages.  Instead, you’re trying to rank in the organic search results for terms that your potential customers would be searching for. 

SEO is also one of the most popular forms of inbound marketing — a methodology that aims to attract customers by creating quality content for them , instead using ads and other interruptive methods.

For example,  Hootsuite  — a platform for managing social media marketing activities — targets hundreds of keywords with their content, like  “How to schedule Instagram posts” :

This marketing strategy helps them acquire customers and build authority in their niche.

6. Social and Display Ads

Social ads allow you to put your product in front of people while they’re browsing social media, while display ads can be served on other people’s sites via ad networks like Google’s Display Network.

Unlike search engine ads, which are intent-based, social and display are disruptive, since people aren’t usually looking for products or solutions to their problems. However, they’re still powerful tools for both brand awareness and conversions, thanks to their reach (Facebook ads alone can reach billions of people) and  retargeting capabilities .

7. Offline Ads

While most B2B SaaS companies don’t utilize them, offline ads can be a great way to present your brand differently. 

For example,  Lattice  — a B2B people success platform — experimented with catchy billboard and subway ads:

Their former VP of Marketing, Alex Kracov, shared his learnings from this experiment in  this blog post .

Note:  Measuring CAC, cost per acquisition (CPA), or attribution for offline ads is very difficult or often impossible. If you’re looking for something that produces easily attributable results, consider social ads, SEO, and content marketing.

8. Targeting Blogs

This tactic involves finding bloggers in your niche, building mutually-beneficial relationships, and having them promote your products.

This can be as simple as reaching out to them with ideas for guest posts. Or, you can reference their articles in your content as a way to start the relationship.

Leo Widrich, co-founder of  Buffer , actually used guest posting to help grow his company from 0 to 100,000 users in nine months. He shared some of his ideas in  this interview , which is a great read if you’re interested in this customer acquisition method.

9. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing various types of content — articles, videos, landing pages, etc. — with the goal of attracting customers. 

There are many places this content can be posted, from your blog and social media pages, to digital media outlets and other third-party websites. 

Ahrefs  is a great example of a company that leverages content in different ways. They have a blog, where they publish articles that rank high in Google for important keywords. They also have a YouTube channel and an academy, both of which drive leads and show potential customers how to solve their problems using Ahrefs products.

10. Community Building

Community building includes various online and in-person activities aimed at building a community that helps attract and retain users.

Many companies rely on tools like Facebook, Discord, and Slack to create their community and keep it updated, while also using regular meetups and conferences to strengthen its bond.

For example, the  ProductLed Slack Community  is the largest product-led growth community in the world, with more than 13,600 members. Beginners and product-led veterans alike use the community to learn and share industry best practices and get questions answered by peers and experts. Many of them continue their learning by  enrolling in the ProductLed Accelerator . 

11. Viral Marketing

Viral marketing occurs when your current customers bring new ones to your product, without you having to attract those new customers via ads or other marketing efforts. 

This can take many different shapes, like:

• Inherent virality , also called network effect, where the value for users increases when other people sign up. Social media apps like Facebook and Instagram, and e-commerce marketplaces like eBay and Etsy are classic examples of this mechanism.
• Collaboration , where products benefit from (or simply require) having multiple users. Think Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and other project management tools. 
• Communication , where the product is meant for communicating with others (e.g., Zoom, Telegram, or Skype).
• Incentives (or referral programs) , where users get rewards for inviting their friends (e.g., Uber, Dropbox, and Wise). 
• Embedding , where your product is embedded on other people’s sites, exposing new customers to it (e.g. SurveyMonkey and Vimeo).
• Word-of-mouth , where customers tell their friends about your product. 

It’s important to note products don’t just go viral automatically. Instead, they rely on carefully designed viral loops, which encourage users to try the product and then invite or simply tell their friends about it. 

We have a detailed interview with Mixmax’s CEO on how to master product virality, which you can watch below:

A sales team can do all kinds of activities, including lead generation (e.g. cold calling and cold emails), lead qualification, and turning leads into paying customers. As we said above, this is the primary acquisition method for sales-led businesses, especially those targeting enterprise customers.

13. Offline Events

You can test whether offline events work for you by:

• Attending trade shows,  where you can rent a booth and provide information about your products and services.
• Hosting your own events,  which is more difficult, but can be a powerful way to grow your community and become a thought leader in your industry. For instance, ConvertKit has become famous for their  annual Craft + Commerce event  for online creators.
• Securing speaking engagements,  which is often a useful way for new businesses to get established in their field.

14. Engineering as Marketing

This is another classic tactic for product-led businesses. It involves building mini apps and tools that provide value to your audience for free. The goal is to naturally lead users of the free app to become customers of your paid product.

Moz’s Meet Link Explorer  — a free backlink checker — is a great example. You can use it for free and get link data for any URL. And, since Moz sells various SEO solutions, this link explorer is a natural lead-in to their paid products.

How to Choose the Right Acquisition Channels and Tactics for Your Business

In this section, we’ll show you how to prioritize and test which activities work for your businesses. The goal is to find the right channels and tactics and then focus all your customer acquisition efforts on them.

Prioritize What to Test First

Again, the book  “Traction”  has useful advice on prioritization, based on the Bullseye Framework shown below:

The idea is to list all available tactics and channels in the outer gray circle and remove the ones that you’ve already tried. Then, put the remaining ones in a spreadsheet ( feel free to copy ours ) with four columns:

• Potential:  On a scale of 1 to 5, how much potential do you think there is in this channel?
• Cost per acquisition (CPA):  How much would it cost to acquire leads via this channel? Note:  CPA is not the same as CAC. CPA is the cost to acquire trials, demos, or any other type of lead.  This blog post  offers an in-depth explanation of this topic.
• Customer reach:  How many potential customers can this channel or tactic reach?
• Time to test:  How long would it take for you to test this?

Based on the answers, start filling out the other two circles. The middle black circle is for channels and tactics with potential, while the inner yellow one is for the ones you think will work best.

Here’s an example of a filled-out framework:

Test to See if the Top 3 Picks Produce Results

From here, you can start testing your top three picks. The goal is to perform quick and cheap tests that can answer the following questions:

• How many customers are available through this channel?
• How much will it cost to acquire customers through this channel?
• Are the customers that you are getting through this channel the kind of customers that you want right now?
• What hooks and calls to action work best for getting people to sign up?

It’s also important to  analyze how customers from each channel behave once they arrive on your site and start using your product.

Google Analytics  is a great free option for this, along with more advanced tools like  Smartlook  and  Mixpanel  that provide more insights into the entire customer journey.

Start Testing Again or Double-Down on What Works

After your tests, it may turn out that your top picks aren’t the right ones for you. 

Maybe they produce an unsustainable CAC or don’t bring the right customers for your business. Regardless of the problem, in these cases, it’s time to start testing the next six options. 

But if you find a channel or tactic that works — put all of your efforts into it. 

One of the biggest mistakes we see startups make is not doubling down on activities that produce results. Instead, they try to diversify their acquisition channels too early and end up missing the chance to scale.

As we noted in  our guide to acquiring free trial users , most established companies, including giants like Facebook, LinkedIn, and HubSpot, received  over 80% of their growth  from one channel when starting out.That’s the norm, not an exception.

In short, don’t be afraid to put all your resources into the channels that work for you. Once you’ve maxed them out or hit a plateau where they no longer satisfy your revenue goals, go back to experimenting.

Build a Product-Led Customer Acquisition Strategy Tailored to Your Business

Creating a product-led strategy for your business is just one key part of building a successful SaaS product, but it’s connected to every aspect of your business. In  ProductLed Academy,  we cover strategy as part of the  ProductLed Method,  so you can build a self-serve model that converts.

ProductLed Academy is a 12-month coaching program, where you'll work directly with Wes Bush to master each of the nine components of a successful product-led business (we spend around six weeks on each of these):

• Vision:  What is your company really good at?
• User:  Who do you serve best?
• Model:  How do you create a ton of value for your users to win?
• Offer:  Have you crafted an irresistible free offer for your ideal users?
• Experience:  Have you created an effortless path to value for your users?
• Pricing:  Is it easy for users to upgrade without talking to anyone?
• Data:  Do you know where users are getting stuck in your product?
• Process : Do you have a growth process that enables your team to build out experiments, prioritize the high-impact ones, and launch the ones that are easiest?
• Team : Is your team full of A players capable of taking you to the next level?

While you can have one or more of these dialed in perfectly, if you’re missing one of these key players, you’re going to have a hard time with growth.

If you're ready to break through to the next level and create a winning product-led strategy, be sure to check out  ProductLed Academy .

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How to build lasting relationships with customers.

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Florence Chikezie, Founder at ReDahlia & Entrepreneurs.ng . I help new entrepreneurs start businesses in 30 days & guide companies to scale.

Business sustainability is heavily hinged on building longstanding relationships with clients. This can be achieved by upselling and cross-selling. Given the competitiveness of business, new customer acquisition can be tough, so repeat business from already paying customers should be the goal.

The process of getting new clients daily, weekly and monthly is tough. You are quickly going to burn out and beg for your 9-to-5 if you do not have a strategy. I know this because I have been there. The way to avoid that is by building long-term relationships with customers and clients and through cross-selling and upselling to them so that you can make more money from each client.

Customer excellence should be ingrained in the DNA of your business because while people can copy your products and services at the speed of light, it's much harder for them to replicate your customer service.

Customer service is all about how you make your customers feel. A huge percentage of our business comes from repeat customers and referrals because we take customer service management at ReDahlia seriously. We go above and beyond to provide that "wow" factor to clients.

Meet The Billionaire Owner Behind The NBA Champion Boston Celtics

Wwe raw results winners and grades as bray wyatt stable debuts, fujifilm introduces new instax wide 400 camera after ten year wait.

Because we excel in this area, we can confidently upsell and cross-sell to clients. So before you think about upselling and cross-selling, ensure that your customer service management is airtight.

This is a strategy to sell a more expensive version of a similar product or service to your client. For example, Client X subscribes to the open floor plan of our workspace business, which costs N50,000 per month and can be offered a private office plan that costs N150,000 as the team expands. The upgraded plan is an executive office with perks that include boardrooms and privacy for meetings. For Client X, this boosts the company profile and translates to more business while for us, more revenue accrues from an already paying client. Everybody wins.

Cross-Selling

This is a strategy to sell products and services related to each other. This is what we do for companies that register their businesses through us and then go on to purchase the compliance services, branding asset package and email set-up package; enroll in business training; subscribe to ReDahlia Workspaces; and buy advertising slots on Entrepreneurs.ng. As a company, we are able to meet varied business needs through our diverse offerings.

Advantages Of Upselling And Cross-Selling

Upselling helps build deeper relationships between your business and the client because they believe they are getting a good deal which makes them happy to continue doing business with you.

The key for you is to continue to offer real value without any motive to fleece your customers. Give them good deals and they can become long-standing sources of repeat business for you. Also, keep in mind that word-of-mouth can travel very far and can do just as much harm as good if the word is bad. Be transparent and professional with every client or potential customer.

Upselling and cross-selling are easier means of growing revenue compared to finding new customers. Our study at Entrepreneurs.ng has shown that the probability of selling to a new customer ranged between 5% and 20% while that of reselling to an already buying and satisfied customer was 60% to 70%. Numbers, they say, do not lie. This should inform where you dissipate effort. Upsell and cross-sell your existing client base while you grow your new customer base.

The peculiarity of service-based industries like consulting demands that you deliberately distribute your time since you constantly need a stream of new clients. Perhaps allot 30% of your time to serving existing clients and the other 70% to getting new clients for your business.

Upselling is a widely used strategy, and it has been found to be quite effective for many businesses. Take Apple, for example; they add a few upgrades to an existing product and review the pricing to reflect the changes.

The key here is to build long-lasting relationships with your clients, and this can take months or even years. However, if you can put in the work, the reward can be immense.

How To Develop Upselling And Cross-Selling Strategies

So how do you go about this tactfully? Here are six ways to develop your upselling and cross-selling strategies.

1. Identify Upselling Opportunities

Analyze your current products or services and identify potential upselling opportunities. Consider what additional features or upgrades you can offer to existing clients.

2. Design Cross-Selling Packages

Create cross-selling packages that bundle related products or services. Follow our example—we offer business registration services, and we include tax services, branding assets, email setup and workspace subscriptions as part of a comprehensive package.

3. Role-Play Upselling And Cross-Selling

Engage in role-play scenarios with a friend, family member or fellow participant to practice your upselling and cross-selling techniques. Focus on delivering value and addressing the needs of the client.

4. Prioritize Customer Relationships

Emphasize building long-lasting relationships with your customers over short-term gains. Provide exceptional customer service and focus on delivering value.

5. Implement Upselling And Cross-Selling

Apply your upselling and cross-selling strategies during interactions with existing customers. Emphasize the benefits of additional products or services that align with their needs.

6. Request Feedback

Seek feedback from your clients to understand their satisfaction level with your offerings and the overall customer experience. Use this feedback to make improvements and strengthen your relationships.

How To Set Upselling And Cross-Selling Targets

Now that you've developed your strategies, you can start identifying goals.

1. Establish Targets

Set specific upselling and cross-selling targets for your business. Determine the percentage of revenue you aim to generate from upselling and cross-selling activities within a certain period.

2. Track Progress

Regularly monitor your sales data to assess the effectiveness of your upselling and cross-selling strategies. Make adjustments as needed to achieve your targets.

Final Thoughts

After implementing your upselling and cross-selling strategies, assess the outcomes and reflect on what worked well and what could be improved.

Commit to continuous improvement by adapting your strategies based on customer feedback and market trends. Stay flexible and open to refining your approach.

Best of luck.

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How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business [+Free Persona Template]

Learn how to create buyer personas for your business with the help of this research guide and persona template.

BUYER PERSONA TEMPLATES

Easily organize your audience segments and make your marketing stronger

Updated: 12/05/23

Published: 12/05/23

As marketers, we know that marketing according to data points alone isn’t enough to get meaningful engagement for your business—that’s the job of a buyer persona.

And, while demographic survey results are great, there are many factors of customer behavior that are needed to create a well-rounded and detailed buyer persona.

Combining different research methods to form a detailed buyer persona is my shining recommendation, and in this post, I’ll show you a research-driven method for creating buyer personas. With just a few thoughtful steps, you’ll walk away with consumer stories and profiles that represent your customer base.

Why Are Buyer Personas So Important?

Different Types of Buyer Personas

How to Create Buyer Personas

How to Find Interviewees for Researching Personas

Buyer Persona Examples

According to our research , most marketers lack crucial information about their audience, so they struggle to make personalized content.

Before diving into the buyer persona creation process, let’s pause to understand the impact of well-developed buyer personas on your business (specifically, your marketing efforts).

Why are buyer personas important to your business?

1. Buyer personas help you personalize your marketing.

Personalization is the main reason buyer personas are essential, and it’s only possible when you truly understand your audience. Customers appreciate personalization, as 96% of marketers say it increases the likelihood of buyers becoming repeat customers and 94% say it increases sales.

I don’t know about you, but those stats definitely represent my experience as a consumer. I’m more likely to be a fan of and give repeat business to brands that know what I like and cater to my interests. For example, a brand that sends me an email to tell me that a product on my wishlist is on sale will, more likely than not, turn me into a loyal and repeat customer who even promotes them to my friends.

2. Buyer personas inform product development.

Extensive research into your target customer doesn't only help your marketing functions — these insights have a place in the research and development phase of your product development process.

Understanding what your ideal customer experiences on a day-to-day basis can inspire innovative improvements to your product.

Say, for example, you run a company that sells kitchen utensils and your buyer persona research tells you that your ideal customer lives in the South where grilling is common throughout the year. This could present an opportunity to develop and offer grilling utensils or improve your kitchen utensils so that they work in both indoor and outdoor cooking environments.

Buyer Persona Templates

Organize your audience segments and make your marketing stronger.

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• Conduct persona research.
• Create targetted content.
• Build your own personas.

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3. Buyer personas enable the optimization of demand generation, lead generation, and lead nurturing content.

Do you know your buyer persona wants to hear from you? One way to find out is through buyer persona research. Understanding how your ideal customer prefers to receive communication can influence your demand generation strategies.

For example, a preference for SMS communication among your target audience can mean you create SMS lead nurturing campaigns instead of emails. You can even justify website changes based on the data you discover from your research.

4. Buyer personas help you tailor your product's messaging its target audience.

Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, making it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet your target audience's specific needs, behaviors, and concerns.

For example, you may know your target buyers are caregivers, but do you know the type of care they provide most often? What is the typical background of your ideal buyer? To fully understand what makes your best customers tick, developing detailed personas for your business is critical.

Case in point: marketers who offer customers a personalized experience are 215% more likely to say their marketing strategies are effective than those who don’t.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research and insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). The most common information marketers gather from their audiences is about their interests and hobbies, basic demographic information, and products they’re potentially interested in buying.

Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas or as many as 10 or 20. But if you’re new to personas, start small. You can always develop more personas later if you need them.

What is a negative buyer persona?

While a buyer persona represents your ideal customer, a negative—or exclusionary—persona represents who you don’t want as a customer.

For example, this could include professionals who are too advanced for your product or service, students who only engage with your content for research/ knowledge, or potential customers who are just too expensive to acquire.

The potential customers may be too expensive because of a low average sale price, their propensity to churn, or their unlikeliness to purchase again from your company. This knowledge is valuable because it helps you narrow down your strategic execution so that your inputs directly contribute to your results.

How can buyer personas be used in marketing?

At the most basic level, developing personas allows you to create content and messaging that appeals to your target audience. It also enables you to target or personalize your marketing to different audience segments.

For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and leverage marketing software solutions, like Marketing Hub , to tailor your messaging to what you know about those different personas. You can then set up various automated email nurturing campaigns — each targeting a specific audience segment.  .

Furthermore, when combined with lifecycle stage (i.e., how far along someone is in your sales cycle), buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content. (You can learn more about how to do that by downloading our Content Mapping Template .)

And if you take the time to also create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of segmenting out the "bad apples” from the rest of your contacts. This can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer and, therefore, increase sales productivity.

Buyer personas are also an excellent tool if you target a niche audience. I run Breaking the Blueprint , a blog column for minority business owners and entrepreneurs, and the target audience is more specific and granular than that of the general HubSpot Blog (Black entrepreneurs vs. entrepreneurs as a whole, for example).

Sure, I could publish posts based on what I think my target audience would look for and benefit from, but I can create much better content that actually makes an impact and better serves them if I hear from them about their specific interests, needs, and pain points.

Free Buyer Persona Templates

Fill out the form if you want the free kit., types of buyer personas.

While developing your personas, you may ask yourself, "What are the different types of buyer personas?" From there, it'd be simple to adjust one for your business — right?

Well, that's not exactly how it works. Yes, there are standard buyer personas for common demographics, like age groups. Let’s go over some basic examples using data from our State of Consumer Trends Report .

Here are some key stats about Gen Z:

• 64% of Gen Z have discovered a product on social media in the past three months.
• Recommendations from influencers have a stronger impact than those from friends and family.
• Gen Z cares, more than any other generation, that brands stake a stance on social issues, especially about racial justice (47%), LGBTQ+ rights (46%), and climate change (41%).
• Gen Z likes to gather information themselves when researching a product or service (64%)
• Gen Z’s favorite form of content is short-form video. (61%)

Based on their overwhelming desire for brands to take a stand on social issues, I’ll call this example buyer persona Socially Conscious Sam. Here’s how I’d use those stats to create a basic marketing buyer persona based on what she likes and how she wants information.

• Sam spends a lot of time on social media, and it’s where she wants to discover new products or services.
• She’d prefer to research a brand on her own instead of talking to someone from a business, and she’d most likely look for this information on social media.
• She wants to see engaging short-form videos that showcase your brand, especially TikToks and Instagram Reels.
• Sam trusts the influencers and creators that she follows, and the product recommendations and endorsements that they give are a strong influence when she buys products.
• It’s extremely important to Sam that the brands she supports stake a stand on the social issues she cares about, and she wants to know about the causes they support.

Here are some key stats about Gen X.

• Gen X prefers discovering new products on social media and surfing the internet.
• Gen X enjoys and engages the most with images/photos/infographics.
• Overall, Gen X prefers to purchase products from online retailers that sell a variety of brands.
• The quality of a product has the highest influence on Gen X's decision to make a purchase.
• Gen X doesn’t think companies should take a stance on social issues.

I’ll call this person Techy Ted, as he does most of his shopping online. Here’s how I’d turn that research of his preferences into a basic persona.

• Ted prefers to discover new products online through social media and browsing the internet.
• Visually appealing images, photos, and infographics capture his attention, and he spends the most time engaging with them.
• Ted likes the ease of buying from an online retailer (like Amazon) that features a variety of products from different brands.
• Ted values the quality of his products over all else, and he wants access to detailed information about features and benefits. Marketing messages that emphasize this are the most helpful.
• He prefers brand-specific content and doesn’t think his favorite businesses need to take a stance on social issues.

Even with these standard profiles, there is still variation. For example, my mom's generation overwhelmingly prefers images, photos, and infographics, but she loves Instagram Reels more than anyone I know.

Because of this, there isn’t a set of universally recognized buyer personas to choose from, nor is there a standard for the number of personas you need. Every business (no matter how many competitors they have) is unique, so their buyer personas should be unique to them, too.

That’s why identifying and creating your different buyer personas can, at times, be slightly challenging. This is why I recommend using HubSpot's Make My Persona generator (as well as HubSpot's persona templates ) to simplify the process of creating different personas.

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Just like buyer personas are unique to each company, so is their name for them. You may see buyer personas referred to as “customer personas," "marketing personas," "audience personas," or "target persona.” Each carries the same meaning but will look unique within your company.

Companies may generally have the same (or similar) categories for their buyer personas (e.g., a marketer, an HR rep, an IT manager, etc.). But your business’ personas and the amount you need will depend on your target audience and what you offer your customers.

What goes into persona development?

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of buyer personas and the different types, let’s explore the nuances of developing your buyer personas.

Before you begin creating your buyer personas, you need to identify the people on your team who will have a role in development. Every team has unique experiences with customers that will serve as valuable information for understanding your target audience.

I recommend you involve any customer-facing team member in the process. If you have too many cooks in the kitchen, you can choose one representative from each group or relevant department.

A great place to start is sales and marketing. Sales employees directly communicate with customers, and marketing staff can create data based on information about your customers. Your persona development team should also include an executive leader who will ensure your brand mission and values are upheld through every step of development.

What type of business needs to create buyer personas?

With all that we’ve covered, you might be wondering what types of businesses need to create buyer personas.

The answer is all of them. Every business needs customers or clients, and as long as this is true, buyer personas should be a staple in every business, regardless of the industry.

While developing buyer personas is crucial, reviewing and updating them regularly is equally important. I’d recommend doing this annually. I know this sounds tedious, but staying on top of your target audience and how their preferences may evolve ensures you’re always ready to meet their needs and helps you secure them as future repeat customers.

Do you feel ready to start creating your buyer personas? Let's dive in.

How to Create a Buyer Persona In 4 Steps

You can create buyer personas through research, surveys, and interviews — all with a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside your contacts database who might align with your target audience. In any case, your buyer personas must be based on concrete evidence regarding your audience’s interests, behavior, and demographics. 

While creating personas for Breaking the Blueprint, I discovered some helpful and practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas (you can also further your knowledge on this topic through the free HubSpot Academy course):

• Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
• Use form fields that capture important persona information when creating forms to use on your website . For example, if all of my personas vary based on company size, I'd ask each lead for information about company size in the forms.
• Check your website traffic analytics to identify useful information about your existing audience, like demographics, which pages attract the most visitors and why, or what marketing campaigns drive the most traffic.
• Consider your sales team's feedback on the leads they interact with most. What generalizations can you make about the different types of customers you serve best?
• Interview customers and prospects to discover what they like about your product or service.

Now, how can you use the above research to create your personas?

Once you've gone through the research process, you'll have a lot of meaty, raw data about your potential and current customers. But what do you do with it? How do you distill all of it so it's easy for everyone to understand all the information you've gathered?

The next step is to use your research to identify patterns and commonalities from the answers to your interview questions, develop at least one primary persona, and share that persona with the rest of the company.

You can use our free, downloadable persona template to organize the information you've gathered about your persona(s) and share it with relevant stakeholders so everyone can develop an in-depth understanding of the people they’re targeting at work.

Let’s work through the steps involved in creating a buyer persona in more detail.

1. Fill in your persona's basic demographic information.

Ask demographic-based questions over the phone, in person, or with online surveys. Keep in mind that some people are more comfortable disclosing personal information in private, or some might not want to at all, so it’s a best practice to make this optional unless it’s a pivotal part of your buyer persona.

If you're having conversations, I find it helpful to include descriptive buzzwords and mannerisms of your persona you may pick up on to make it easier for people on your team to identify certain personas when talking to prospects.

Download this Template

2. Share what you've learned about your persona's motivations.

This is where you'll distill the information you learned from asking "why" during those interviews. What keeps your persona up at night? Who do they want to be? Most importantly, tie that all together by telling people how your company can help them.

3. Help your sales team prepare for conversations with your persona.

The personas I’ve created are more helpful and impactful when I include real quotes from interviews that exemplify what my audience is concerned about, who they are, and what they want.

You can also create a list of the objections they might raise so your sales team can prepare to address those during conversations with prospects.

4. Craft messaging for your persona.

Tell people how to talk about your products/ services with your persona. This includes the nitty-gritty vocabulary you should use and a more general elevator pitch that positions your solution in a way that resonates with your persona.

This will help you ensure everyone in your company speaks the same language when conversing with leads and customers.

Finally, make sure you give your persona a name (e.g., Finance Manager Margie, IT Ian, or Landscaper Larry), so everyone internally refers to each persona the same way, allowing for cross-team consistency.

And if you're a HubSpot customer, you can easily add your persona to Marketing Hub by following this step-by-step setup guide .

How to Find Interviewees for Researching Buyer Personas

One of the most critical steps to establishing your buyer persona(s) is finding people to speak with to understand, well, who your buyer persona is.

But how do you find these interviewees? There are a few sources you can tap into.

1. Use your current customers.

Your existing customer base is the perfect place to start your interviews because they've already purchased your product and engaged with your company. At least some of them are likely to exemplify your target persona(s).

Don't just talk to people who love your product and want to spend an hour gushing about you (as good as that feels). Customers who are unhappy with your product will show other patterns that will help you form a solid understanding of your personas.

For example, you might find that some of your less happy customers have bigger teams and need greater collaboration functionality from your product. Or, you may find they find your product too technical and difficult to use. In both cases, you learn something about your product and what your customers' challenges are.

Another benefit of interviewing current customers is that you may not need to offer them an incentive (e.g., gift cards). Customers like being heard, and interviewing them gives them a chance to tell you about their world, their challenges, and what they think of your product.

Customers also like to have an impact on the products they use. So, as you involve them in interviews like this, you may find they become even more loyal to your company. When you reach out to customers, be clear that your goal is to get their feedback and that you highly value it.

2. Use your prospects.

You can also interview people who have not purchased your product and know little about your brand. Your prospects and leads are great options because you already have their contact information.

Use the data you do have about them (i.e., anything you've collected through lead generation forms or website analytics) to figure out who might fit into your target personas. Tools like Enlyft can help you create custom buyer persona profiles and match your prospects to them to make it easier to find the people you need to talk to.

3. Use your referrals.

You might need to rely on referrals to talk to people who may fit into your target personas, particularly if you're heading into new markets or don't have any leads or customers yet.

Use your network (coworkers, existing customers, social media contacts, etc.) to find people you'd like to interview and be introduced to. Getting a large volume of people with this method can be tough, but you'll likely get some very high-quality interviews out of it.

If you don't know where to start, I suggest searching on LinkedIn for people who may fit into your target personas and seeing who you share connections with, and reaching out to them for introductions.

4. Use third-party networks.

For interviewees completely removed from your company, you can recruit from third-party networks. For example, Craigslist lets you post ads for people interested in any job, and UserTesting.com lets you to run remote user testing.

You'll have less control over sessions run through UserTesting.com, but it's a great resource for quick user testing recruiting.

Now that you know how to find interviewees, I'll go over some tips for recruiting them.

Tips for Recruiting Buyer Persona Interviewees

As you reach out to potential buyer persona interviewees, here are a few ideas to improve your response rates.

1. Use incentives.

Incentives give people a reason to participate if they don’t already have a relationship with you. You probably don’t need them in every scenario (e.g., customers who already want to talk to you), but a simple gift card is an easy option.

2. Be clear that this isn't a sales call.

Be clear that you’re not making a sales call. This is especially important when dealing with non-customers who might be wary of getting stuck on a sales call. Explain that you’re doing research and want to learn from them, not committing them to a sales call. You're getting them to commit to telling you about their lives, jobs, and challenges.

3. Make it easy to say yes.

Take care of everything for your potential interviewee. Suggest times, but be flexible so they can pick what works best for them.

4. Decide how many people you need to interview.

How many people do you need to interview to create a well-rounded persona?

I wish I could give you a set number, but my answer is that it depends. Start with at least three to five interviews for each persona you create. That may be enough if you already know a lot about your persona.

You may need multiple interviews with each category of interviewees (customers, prospects, people who don’t know your company). You’ll naturally notice patterns throughout your conversations, but a good rule of thumb is to call it if you start predicting what they’ll say.

5. Determine which questions you'll ask interviewees.

It's time to conduct the interview! After the normal small talk and thank yous, it's time to jump into your questions. You’ll want to ask several categories of questions during persona interviews to create a complete persona profile, from personal background questions, to questions about goals and challenges in their current role.

Let's go over some examples of completed buyer personas to get a better understanding of what they look like.

B2B Buyer Persona Example

The image below is a B2B buyer persona for someone who works in HR. The persona paints a clear picture of the target customer's struggles and how the business can best meet those needs. In this case, HR recruiting tools streamline processes, make recruiting easier, and help HR expertly manage their overall job duties.

B2C Buyer Persona Example

The image below is a B2C buyer persona for a music streaming service.

Based on this persona, a streaming service would want to ensure that it has a user-friendly mobile app, sends new music notifications, and makes it easy for users to discover new music related to their interests and share content with friends.

Create Your Buyer Personas

Creating buyer personas helps you understand your target customers on a deeper level and ensures everyone on your team knows how to best target, support, and work with your customers. When you use your personas to guide decisions, I don’t doubt that you’ll see improvement in your reach, boost your conversions, and increase customer loyalty.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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SAP Enters into Agreement to Acquire WalkMe, Driving Business Transformation by Enhancing the Customer Experience and Enriching SAP Business AI Offerings

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and WalkMe Ltd. (NASDAQ: WKME) announced today that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which SAP will acquire WalkMe, a leader in digital adoption platforms (DAPs).

WalkMe’s solutions help organizations navigate constant technology change by providing users with advanced guidance and automation features that enable them to execute workflows seamlessly across any number of applications. This results in higher adoption of the underlying application and as such drives value realization.

The Executive and Supervisory Boards of SAP SE and the board of directors of WalkMe have approved the transaction for US $14.00 per share in an all-cash transaction, representing an equity value of approximately US $1.5 billion. The offer price represents a 45% premium to WalkMe’s closing share price on June 4, 2024.

The envisioned combination complements SAP’s Business Transformation Management portfolio around SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions to help customers on their transformation journeys.

“Applications, processes, data and people are the four key elements of a successful business transformation,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.”

WalkMe: Focus on Analyzing Adoption and Business Transformation

“We are thrilled to join forces with SAP. This acquisition marks a significant milestone in our journey, providing us with the resources and customer base necessary to enhance our product offerings and expand our market reach,” said Dan Adika, CEO of WalkMe. “By leveraging SAP’s extensive ecosystem, we are poised to unlock substantial growth opportunities and deliver even greater value to our customers. Together, we look forward to a future filled with innovation and exceptional service.”

WalkMe helps organizations boost enterprise productivity and lower risk by enabling consistent, effective and efficient use of software and the workflows it enables. Its DAP works on top of an organization’s application landscape, detects where people encounter friction and provides the tailored support and automation they need to complete the job to be done, right in the flow of work, across any application. Importantly, WalkMe will continue to fully support non-SAP applications.

Soon, WalkMe will launch the WalkMe X copilot, which will use WalkMe’s contextual awareness and AI to suggest the best next step for any workflow, anywhere. WalkMe X has the capability to always be on, serving as an overlay to any application, including copilots from different vendors that companies use in their landscapes. Integrating the strength of WalkMe’s adoption capabilities with SAP’s copilot Joule will boost AI assistant and productivity gains for all SAP customers. Additionally, integrating distinctive e-learning features in the SAP Enable Now solution with WalkMe will form the center of SAP’s people-centric transformation approach going forward.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of WalkMe shareholder approval and necessary regulatory clearances, and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2024. The impact of the transaction on SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share for fiscal 2024 is expected to be immaterial.

Visit the SAP News Center . Follow SAP at @SAPNews .

About WalkMe

WalkMe (NASDAQ: WKME), headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, pioneered DAP innovations and solutions so companies can effectively navigate the constant change brought on by technology. With WalkMe, organizations drive enterprise productivity and reduce risk by ensuring consistent, responsible, and efficient adoption of software and the workflows it powers. Our AI-driven platform sits on top of an organization’s tech stack, identifies where people experience friction, and delivers the personalized guidance and automation needed to get the job done, right in the flow of work. Customers like IBM, Nestle, ThermoFisher Scientific, and the U.S. Dept. of Defense trust WalkMe to create the people-centric experiences required to boost the effectiveness of their workflows and maximize software ROI.

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE:SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit  www.sap.com .

Note to editors: To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos . On this platform, you can find high resolution material for your media channels.

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products: Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24 United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

For more information, financial community only: Anthony Coletta, +49 6227-7-60437, [email protected] , CEST

For more information, press only: Joellen Perry, +1 650-445-6780, [email protected] , PT Daniel Reinhardt, +49 6227-7-40201, [email protected] , CEST SAP Press Room ; [email protected]

For WalkMe Investor Relations: John Streppa, [email protected]

Additional Important Information and Where to Find It In connection with the proposed transaction, WalkMe will prepare a proxy statement to be delivered to its shareholders and furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS ARE STRONGLY ADVISED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT WHEN IT BECOMES AVAILABLE AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS FILED OR FURNISHED TO THE SEC IN CONNECTION WITH THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION OR INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE THEREIN, BECAUSE THE PROXY STATEMENT AND SUCH OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION AND THE PARTIES TO THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION. This press release is not a substitute for the proxy statement or any other document that may be filed or furnished by WalkMe with the SEC.

The proxy statement and other related documents filed or furnished to the SEC regarding the proposed transaction may be obtained for free from the SEC’s website ( www.sec.gov ), WalkMe’s website at www.walkme.com or by directing such request to WalkMe’s Investor Relations.

Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other applicable securities laws. All statements other than statements of historical fact, including statements regarding the proposed acquisition of WalkMe by SAP, the expected timing for completing the proposed transaction and the terms thereof, future financial and operating results, benefits and synergies of the transaction, future opportunities for the combined businesses and any other statements regarding events or developments that may occur in the future, may be “forward-looking statements” for purposes of federal and state securities laws. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could significantly affect the financial or operating results of SAP, WalkMe or the combined company. Words such as “expects,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “seeks,” “targets,” “would,” “will,” “should,” “may” and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on management’s expectations as of the date they are first made, are not guarantees of future performance and involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Neither SAP nor WalkMe can give any assurances that the expectations in such forward-looking statements will be attained and, therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in such forward-looking statements. For example, these forward-looking statements could be affected by factors including, without limitation, risks associated with the ability to consummate the proposed transaction, the satisfaction of the conditions to the consummation of the proposed transaction, including the receipt of certain regulatory approvals, and the timing of the closing of the proposed transaction; the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the proposed transaction; the potential that WalkMe shareholders may not approve the transaction; the ability to successfully integrate operations and employees; the ability to realize anticipated benefits and synergies of the proposed transaction as rapidly or to the extent anticipated by financial analysts or investors; the potential impact of the announcement of the proposed transaction on operating results, business generally and business relationships, including with employees, customers, suppliers and competitors; unanticipated restructuring costs may be incurred or undisclosed liabilities assumed; actual or threatened legal proceedings that have been or may be instituted against SAP or WalkMe in connection with the proposed transaction or otherwise; the ability and costs related to retaining key personnel and clients; risks related to diverting management’s attention from ongoing business operations; delays, challenges, costs, fees, expenses and charges related to the proposed transaction; actions by competitors; general adverse economic, political, social and security conditions in the regions and industries in which SAP and WalkMe operate, including relating to Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas and other terrorist organizations in the Middle East and general hostilities; exposure to inflation, currency rate and interest rate fluctuations and risks associated with doing business locally and internationally, as well as fluctuations in the market price of SAP and WalkMe’s traded securities; natural catastrophes, any pandemic, epidemic or outbreak of infectious disease, warfare, protests and riots, and terrorist attacks; and those additional risks and factors discussed in reports filed or furnished with the SEC by SAP and WalkMe, including SAP’s and WalkMe’s most recent Annual Reports on Form 20-F and in any subsequent reports on Form 6-K, each of which is on file with or furnished to the SEC and available at the SEC’s website at  www.sec.gov . Reports filed or furnished with the SEC by SAP are also available on SAP’s website at www.sap.com/investors and by WalkMe on WalkMe’s website at www.walkme.com . Moreover, other risks and uncertainties of which SAP or WalkMe are not currently aware or may not currently consider material may also affect each of the companies’ forward-looking statements and may cause actual results and the timing of events to differ materially from those anticipated. The forward-looking statements made in this press release are made only as of the date hereof or as of the dates indicated in the forward-looking statements, even if they are subsequently made available by SAP or WalkMe on their respective websites or otherwise. Neither SAP nor WalkMe undertakes any obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, new information, future events, changes in its expectations or other circumstances that exist after the date as of which the forward-looking statements were made.

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Adobe Reimagines PDFs by Integrating Adobe Firefly into Acrobat and Adding Support for Chat Across Multiple Documents in Acrobat AI Assistant

• Adobe brings new Firefly-powered features designed to be commercially safe into Acrobat – allowing customers to easily generate and edit stunning visuals directly in PDFs
• Acrobat AI Assistant supercharges productivity with support for multiple documents and enables customers to ask questions, get insights and create content across PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, text documents and more
• Adobe is offering free, full access to Acrobat AI Assistant features June 18 - June 28, 2024

SAN JOSE, Calif. — June 17, 2024  —   Today, Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) unveiled major AI innovations in Adobe Acrobat, bringing unprecedented creativity and productivity to digital documents. Starting on June 18, Acrobat customers can create and edit images in the nearly 3 trillion PDFs currently in circulation using text prompts, powered by Adobe Firefly. Acrobat is the first PDF solution to offer in-app generative image capabilities. New features in Acrobat AI Assistant , a conversational engine deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows, will allow customers to ask questions, get insights and create content from information across groups of PDFs – and other document types – including Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, text files and more. Adobe also announced enhanced meeting transcript capabilities in AI Assistant. 

“From Edit and Share to Protect and Export, Adobe has consistently innovated PDF, transforming it from a static page into a collaborative workspace,” said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president, Adobe Document Cloud. “With generative AI we can advance the category again with image creation and insights across a new range of document types, empowering every customer with a deeper understanding and ability to transform information into compelling content – with the ease and speed of a simple prompt.” 

Bringing Adobe Firefly Generative AI to PDFs for the First Time

The new Acrobat features enable customers to easily enhance existing images and generate stunning new images in their PDFs with generative AI – all without leaving the app. Features include: 

• Edit Image in Acrobat offers easy-to-use tools like the Firefly-powered Generative Fill, Remove Background, Erase and Crop to add, remove and revitalize content in document images in a snap. From erasing unwanted objects to removing backgrounds or adding new images, customers have full, easy control over the visuals in their PDFs.
• With Generate Image in Acrobat, customers can effortlessly add stunning new images to their PDFs, powered by Adobe’s Firefly Image 3 Model. Customers can quickly adjust the size and style and add images to any part of a document. The easy-to-use yet powerful design tools enable customers to add a professional, creative polish to their documents with images. 

Edit Image and Generate Image will provide everyone with a fast and easy way to create compelling visuals in Acrobat – no creative expertise required. Sales teams can use Generate Image to add images to text-heavy business plans, making it easier to read and more impactful. Entrepreneurs can use Generate Image and Edit Image to update existing visuals in investor pitch decks, customizing presentations for each specific opportunity. Small business owners can easily update promotional materials, using Generate Image and Edit Image to instantly change backgrounds to reflect different seasons or cultural moments. 

Delivering More Productivity and Value with Acrobat AI Assistant

When doing research, studying for an exam, analyzing data or catching up on meeting notes, information rarely lives in a single document or file type. New Acrobat AI Assistant features remove obstacles and make it quick and simple for everyone to get insights and format and share content from the information in their documents. New capabilities include: 

• Insights across documents : From quick answers to thorough research, users can now identify key themes, trends and relationships from a group of documents they select and synthesize and format information from different sources into impactful content. For example, a marketer is researching ways to reach Gen Z customers from the information across a group of PDF, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint documents. The marketer can drag and drop those documents into Acrobat AI Assistant, which quickly generates suggested questions like “ Give an overview of the key themes presented in these documents.” The marketer can also ask their own questions, “ What are the social media habits of Gen Z? ” AI Assistant generates answers based on the information in the group of documents and includes intelligent citations , allowing the marketer to easily verify the source of the answer or quickly navigate to a specific location for deeper exploration. The marketer can also ask to have the information formatted into compelling content for a specific purpose. For example: “Convert key points of these document into an email ,” which they can easily share with the broader team to inform their marketing campaign.
• Enhanced meeting transcripts : Virtual meetings are a staple for today’s knowledge workers and whether they’re leading a meeting, participating – or miss it altogether – new enhanced meeting transcript capabilities automatically create generative summaries for a quick understanding of main topics, key points and action items, empowering meeting participants to stay up-to-speed and keep teams moving in the same direction.

Building Trust in AI

Adobe does not train the company’s generative AI models on Adobe customer data. Adobe AI features, including Firefly and Acrobat AI Assistant, are developed in alignment with Adobe’s AI Ethics principles  of accountability, responsibility and transparency. Adobe Firefly is trained on licensed content, including moderated Adobe Stock content and public domain images where the copyright has expired and is designed to be commercially safe. To provide transparency around the use of generative AI in the creative process, Content Credentials are automatically attached to digital content created or edited with Firefly-powered features in Adobe Acrobat, providing a digital nutrition label that builds trust with audiences. Adobe has created standardized processes from design to development to deployment, including training, testing and a review process overseen by a diverse AI Ethics Review Board so customers can use the features with confidence. These include: 

• Data Security Protocols : AI Assistant features in Reader and Acrobat are governed by data security protocols, including testing and evaluation methodologies in engineering processes and pre- and post-processing.
• Enhanced Reliability:  Adobe supplements LLM technologies with the same artificial intelligence and machine learning models behind the award-winning Liquid Mode to provide a highly accurate understanding of document structure and content, which enhances the quality and reliability of Acrobat AI Assistant’s outputs.
• Guardrails for LLMs : When working with third-party LLMs, Adobe takes an agnostic approach, selecting best-in-class technologies that address a range of customer use cases. Adobe contractually obliges them to use confidentiality and security protocols that match Adobe’s own standards and prohibits third-party LLMs from manually reviewing or training on Adobe customer data.
• Streamlined AI Data Governance : Acrobat AI Assistant keeps companies in control of their information, delivering insights based on documents users provide versus insights from broad enterprise information, helping guard against other types of data being analyzed and used for unintended purposes. 
• Keeping Humans in the Loop : Acrobat AI Assistant includes attributions in generated responses, making it simple for employees to confirm where the information came from; an in-app message reminds them to double-check the source of the answers AI Assistant provides.
• A Shared Responsibility : The generative AI output of AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat is based largely on documents provided by users themselves. When users leverage Acrobat AI Assistant they agree to use the features responsibly.

For more information about the steps Adobe is taking to protect enterprise customers' data,  visit this blog.

Pricing and Availability

Adobe is offering free, full access to all Acrobat AI Assistant features June 18 - June 28, after which time free Reader or paid Acrobat customers have the opportunity to purchase an AI Assistant add-on subscription. Early access pricing for the AI Assistant add-on subscription starts at US$4.99 per month and is available until September 4. Acrobat AI Assistant subscription plans are available on desktop, web and mobile in English—other languages to follow. Starting June 18, 2024, all individual Acrobat Standard and Pro customers will receive 250 generative credits per month at no additional cost for a limited time to use with Edit Image and Generate Image features. Edit Image and Generate Image will initially be available in English on desktop. 

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FTC says Adobe hid key terms of “annual paid monthly” subscription plan and set up roadblocks to deter customer cancellations

Given the injury and irritation inflicted on consumers by buried terms, hidden charges, and complicated cancellation procedures, it’s no wonder they’re called “negative” options. A federal court complaint the Department of Justice filed upon notification and referral from the FTC alleges that Adobe and corporate executives Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani have hidden fees associated with the company’s most popular subscription plan and made it hard for consumers to cancel. It’s the latest action challenging allegedly illegal conduct in the subscription space. 

The complaint charges that Adobe steers consumers toward its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default and displaying the “monthly” cost in the enrollment process. But according to the complaint, Adobe doesn’t clearly disclose key conditions – for example, that cancelling the plan in the first year will result in an “Early Termination Fee.” In fact, if consumers cancel during that period, Adobe charges them 50% of the remaining payments for that one-year term, which could total hundreds of dollars. What’s more, the complaint alleges that on Adobe’s website, the company has buried that information in fine print or requires people to hover over small icons to find the disclosures. 

Did the resulting consumer confusion about the terms of the transaction come as a surprise to Adobe? No. According to the complaint , Adobe has known about it. 

How Adobe buries the details of the deal is only part of the story of how consumers are allegedly injured by the company’s practices. The lawsuit also charges that Adobe designed its procedures to make it difficult for consumers to cancel and even uses the Early Termination Fee as a way to deter them from stopping their subscriptions.

When consumers have tried to cancel on the company’s website, they’re taken through an obstacle course of screens and clicks. When consumers try to cancel by contacting an Adobe customer service representative, they face other roadblocks and resistance – for example, dropped calls, interrupted chats, and multiple transfers. According to the complaint, some people who thought they had successfully cancelled their subscription report that it wasn’t until they checked their credit card statement that they learned Adobe had continued to charge them. 

Count I of the complaint alleges that Adobe, President of the company’s digital media business Wadhwani, and Adobe Vice President Sawhney violated the  Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA) and the FTC Act by failing to clearly and conspicuously disclose material terms of the transaction – for example, the subscription’s billing and renewal terms, the length of the subscription, how and when cancellation fees will apply, and the amount of those fees – before getting the consumer’s billing information. According to Count II, Adobe, Wadhwani, and Sawhney violated ROSCA and the FTC Act by failing to get the consumer’s express informed consent before charging their credit card, debit card, or other account. Count III of the complaint – which names Adobe – alleges that the company failed to provide “simple mechanisms” for a consumer to stop recurring charges on credit card, debit card, or other account, in violation of ROSCA and the FTC Act.

The action is pending in a California federal court. If your company uses a subscription model, the filing of the lawsuit should signal to you that the FTC is continuing the fight against buried terms and conditions, hidden fees, and convoluted cancellation procedures.

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Adobe also kept charging me after canceling. I had to have my bank block the payments and Adobe would use a different biller to continue to pull money out of my account even though I told them numerous times that I didn’t even sign up for that service.

How can I file a claim? Adobe overcharged me after cancellation for almost 2 years. When I finally canceled, it was a total nightmare to get someone to help me. They owe me hundreds of dollars.

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