10 Powerful Ways to Increase Customer Acquisition
By Michael Jess on March 1st, 2016
In a crowded marketplace, successful businesses broaden their marketing efforts to find new ways of acquiring and retaining customers. While buyers might only transact with your organisation once or twice, customers transact with you numerous times.
The best acquisition strategies go beyond a focus on the initial engagement to build enduring customer relationships that maximise per-acquisition revenue. Over the long term, these types of strategies reduce your customer-acquisition costs relative to growth achieved because it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one – and happy customers tend to share their good news.
These powerful strategies will assist you with building enduring relationships with customers and acquire more customers.
1. Leverage digital marketing
Without a strong digital marketing strategy, it’s difficult to build a strong brand presence and attract new leads. Coordinate your digital marketing strategy with your offline efforts, and address mobile users and optimise for organic search for success in any inbound marketing strategy.
- Design for mobile – Many online transactions are now started or completed on mobile devices. Websites and social media content should be optimised for mobile users.
- Great content – Generating and sharing good content attracts traffic to your online channels and engages your target audience.
- SEO – Organic searches are an inexpensive way to acquire customers. When you share good content, you’re more likely to be ranked higher by search engines, which means it’s easier for visitors to find your site and social media accounts.
- Email – Build an email list with the traffic that you attract to your site. This lets you engage in a dialogue with your visitors with the view to turning these leads into long-term customers.
2. Build and use your list
Whether it’s for leads or customers who’ve already made a purchase, build a comprehensive database that lets you keep track of all your customer engagements from initial contact to conversion. Your customer database will be an invaluable resource each time you reach out to the customer and as you automate your processes or develop personalised marketing strategies.
The customer database is critical also because many leads simply aren’t ready to transact right away. When you first connect with a lead, you can seek permission to drip them information or to re-engage at another time. When they’re ready to transact again, you can engage with them and formally acquire them as a customer.
The customer database is also important for successfully acquiring customers through a continuous, personalised strategy that’s based on a single view of the customer. Having a single view – the customer database as the single information source and authority for all team members – means your organisation has a full picture of the lead’s story from the start of the customer lifecycle. This means you’re in a position to offer a seamless cross-channel experience that is truly responsive and personalised, and therefore much more likely to successfully acquire and convert the customer.
3. Personalise and automate
Research has shown that personalised strategies are most effective, and can multiply the ROI on your marketing budget. As your business grows and your customer base expands, you can scale up in cost-effective way by using automated tools that help you track your leads’ behaviours (from website visits to emails) and deliver reminders, emails, or even personalised calls based on these activities.
4. Tell a compelling story
While digital marketing has taken over traditional marketing channels as the main point of contact for many potential leads, the approach remains similar: tell acompelling story to engage leads. Whether you’re sharing content or generating your own articles and videos, understand what your target audience’s problems are and offer relevant content that builds strong stories about your brand.
Telling stories allows you to develop deeper connections with your audience and can enhance trust and conversion.
5. Share on social media
Sharing your content and brand stories on social media encourages shares, allowing you to attract more traffic to your sight and boost brand awareness. With a strong presence on social media and higher visibility, your organisation appears to be more credible to new leads. Additionally, social media can be an easy way to keep new leads updated with news and offers.
6. Tailor the approach to the channel
A lot of your marketing efforts will probably be online, so experiment with different types of content and messages for each channel. For example, the same content shared on Facebook might not work as well on Instagram as the latter is a much more visual platform. Explore different types of messages and track which one works the best for converting leads into customers.
7. Use freebies and promotions
Used in the right way, freebies and promotions can be a powerful way to generate interest and transform leads into buying customers who return again and again.Research has shown that freebies encourage consumers to buy more and make customers more willing to pay more for the same item later.
Freebies are viewed more favourably than discounts and rewards encourage people to talk about the product more than otherwise. With a wide selection of rewards including products such as convenient digital gift cards and movie tickets, it’s easier and more cost effective than ever to run a promotional campaign based on freebies.
8. Set up a customer reward program
There’s a reason why so many businesses have loyalty or reward programs: membership-based reward programs are powerful incentives for both customer retention and initial acquisition. For example, rewarding customers with gift vouchers at specified purchase milestones can attract the interest of leads and build the perception of value.
Receiving rewards – such as a gift card or experience voucher – can create a strong, positive association with your brand, in turn strengthening loyalty, encouraging customers to return and refer your business to others.
9. Engage regularly
Once you’ve connected with a lead or a transacting customer, engage regularly to ensure there are no long gaps in communication. Vary the type of engagement depending on the type of permission you’ve obtained from them. From customers who have simply liked your Facebook page to those who’ve explicitly asked to be called for more information about a product, make sure you engage with leads regularly in a suitable way.
10. Analyse and adjust
Data is vital for customer acquisition, so leverage your customer list and use all the analytics tools available to collect and analyse data on your leads and customers. This data will range from visitor behaviour and types of engagement, to feedback and the level of permission you’ve successfully obtained from the lead. Review and adjust this data on a regular basis to make sure you continue to engage with leads and customers in the right way.
Michael Jess
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