Customer Acquisition: A Practical Guide

Learn about the strategies, metrics, and tools you need to improve your customer acquisition

Whether you want to grow your business as fast as possible or focus on sustainability while combating the forces of churn, you can’t afford to overlook customer acquisition. Bringing in new customers is essential for any business to survive and thrive, and as competition builds and costs rise, it becomes increasingly risky to rely solely on what’s worked before.

Before you can start improving your approach to customer acquisition, you need to know the fundamentals: what it is, how to measure it, and what pieces are indispensable for building the ideal strategy for your business. Let’s break it down piece by piece.

The Basics of Customer Acquisition

Bringing in customers is an effort that must extend across every aspect of your business — and that effort has become increasingly intensive in recent years. Therefore, each part of your business must have a solid grasp on the part it plays in your customer acquisition process. With that in mind, here are the four main stages of customer acquisition:

• Awareness: The first stage of the customer’s journey. This is where they’re introduced to your brand and learn what you offer. Awareness is your opportunity to make a good first impression by supplying information for potential customers to consider rather than by pressing them with hard sell tactics.

• Consideration: Your potential customer is thinking about making a purchase, and your product or service is one of several options they’re weighing. At this stage, you should focus on supplying them with more detailed information about your brand, in particular how it can solve their problem better than your competition.

• Conversion: The potential customer has decided to make a purchase, and your brand is at the forefront. It’s time to push them toward direct action that will capitalize on their interest: Download the app, complete the purchase, sign up for the newsletter, and so on.

• Loyalty: No more “potential,” they’re a customer now! But just as important as acquiring them is retaining and upselling them. Keep appealing to their interests and reinforcing the strengths of your company, and you may even be able to turn them into a brand ambassador. Thus retention feeds right back into your customer acquisition process.

If you’re eager to improve your customer acquisition as soon as possible, here’s a quick way to get started: Learn about one of the most efficient, dependable, and transparent means of reaching new customers in our CTV Advertising Playbook.

To find out more about how to bring customers into your business, read What Is Customer Acquisition.

Customer Acquisition Metrics to Prioritize

Now that you know the basics of customer acquisition, how can you measure the success of your efforts to improve it? Using industry-standard metrics will help you put your improvements (or room for improvements) in the proper context. Better yet, you can return to these measurements again and again to see how they’ve changed in response to your strategies. Here are some key customer acquisition metrics to start tracking ASAP:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): This metric reflects how much money you spend on average to bring in a single customer. It accounts for all the expenses paid across your entire acquisition funnel, including generating awareness, finding and nurturing leads, and conversion.

• CAC = (Total cost of advertising + Total cost of sales) / Total number of customers acquired

• Conversion rate optimization (CRO): This measures the percentage of potential customers who perform a particular action, such as downloading a free resource, signing up for your newsletter, or making a purchase. It’s an essential figure for determining how effective your campaigns are at converting leads.

• CRO % = (Leads / Visitors) x 100

• Churn rate: This figure reflects how many people who were once customers stopped buying your products or using your service. While it’s helpful to lower churn rate, from a customer acquisition standpoint, churn is the “replacement rate” you must meet or exceed by bringing in new customers to ensure a baseline of stability for your business.

• Churn rate % = (Lost customers / Total customers) x 100

To learn more essential measurements for your business, read A Guide to Customer Acquisition Cost and 7 Customer Acquisition Metrics and Analytics You Should Know.

Essential Components of a Customer Acquisition Strategy

No two businesses are the same, and your customer acquisition strategy should be just as unique as your product or service. That said, building certain key considerations into your overall strategy will help you see more reliable results and efficient operations. Here are some of the most critical components to bring on board:

• Audience research: It’s more cost effective to reach out to a handful of people who are likely to convert than to massive crowds of folks who have no particular interest in your product. That’s why audience research is the baseline for any successful customer acquisition strategy: When you know who you’re looking for, you know how to find them.

• Content personalization: Seven in 10 modern consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. Getting these interactions right means improving your creative materials to suit their tastes and demographics. And there’s no replacement for A/B testing when fine-tuning the details.

• Retargeting campaigns: Even the ideal advertisement won’t convert 100% of the people who see it — attention is a hotly contested commodity these days. But that doesn’t mean the value is gone. By using channels that allow you to follow the customer journey across the internet, such as CTV, you can deliver perfectly timed ads to ensure promising prospects come back and convert.

Find out more essential measures for bringing customers into the fold in 7 Key Components of a Winning Customer Acquisition Strategy.

Customer Acquisition Platforms to Reach Your Goals

Setting your business apart from the competition requires omnichannel efforts and peak execution. It could be a full-time job by itself. Thankfully, a selection of customer acquisition tools makes finding the results you need effective and efficient across multiple channels. Here’s what to look for:

• CTV advertising: More than 9 in 10 U.S. households can be reached by CTV ads, and the channel also allows for remarkable acquisition rates. Look for a CTV advertising platform built on performance marketing principles to optimize and deliver transparent results for your brand.

• Social media marketing: Nearly 6 billion people regularly use social media. If you want to grab their attention through organic channel growth, promoted content, or a combination of the two, look for a platform that supports centralized controls for multiple services, a smart calendar for optimal post timing, and deep reporting capabilities.

• Content marketing: Content you publish on your own company’s blog can serve as a potent means of customer acquisition, both through SEO and by being genuinely helpful for interested consumers. Make sure your content management platform includes a modern framework for publishing multimedia articles that can track the conversions they engender.

• Customer relationship management (CRM): CRM software presents a centralized hub for managing interactions between your company and your customers. It helps make each customer experience contribute to your company goals. Look for CRM software that supports flexible data storage, integrated email marketing, and automated sales activity logs to set your relationships up for success.

Find more helpful tools for expanding and managing your customer base in 5 Customer Acquisition Tools for Growing Businesses and Why CTV Drives Digital Customer Acquisition.

The Relationship between Customer Acquisition and Retention

It may be tempting to focus solely on bringing in new customers or holding on to the ones you already have, especially with a limited marketing budget. But this kind of lopsided approach can’t last for long. Fortunately, several popular techniques exist for balancing and benefitting your acquisition and retention efforts.

• Center customer experiences: Market research shows positive experiences with your brand contribute directly to acquisition, retention, and loyalty. For example, businesses that work to improve their customer experience typically boost sales by up to 7% and shareholder return by up to 10%.

• Segment your audience: Market segmentation allows you to match acquisition leads to their shared market segments and then deliver targeted ad creative. For retention campaigns, segmentation allows you to compare sales histories within segments and make personalized recommendations that appeal to similar customers.

• Track new customers’ “revenue multiplier”: Retention is most important for long-term revenue, but acquisition spurs revenue growth in the short-term: Satisfied new customers may spread the word about your business, attracting more customers in turn (especially when offered promotions to refer their friends). Loyalty programs and newsletters are great ways to encourage these new customers to stick around.

Learn more key techniques in Customer Acquisition and Retention: How to Have Your Cake (and Keep It Too).

How tvScientific can Help with Customer Acquisition

You have many potential strategies and channels to pursue as you work toward improving your customer acquisition. But few of these methods present as cost-effective, reliable, and transparent a path forward as CTV advertising.

At tvScientific, we’re proud to offer the most sophisticated performance TV platform for reaching and converting new customers. Our all-in-one platform helps you target the right audience at the right time and lets you confidently see the entire customer journey. This insight allows for fast and effective real-time optimizations for even better campaign performance.

Set up a customized demo today to learn more about how tvScientific can help you meet and exceed your customer acquisition goals.