Strategy for Customer Acquisition: Plan and Reduce Costs

A customer acquisition plan is an aspect of marketing that takes time to cultivate, and you’ll want to give it a little room to develop so that you can collect data and then apply it strategically.

However, throughout the process, you’ll also want to refresh or write an action plan over when you start to notice a few areas are growing stale. Here are a few steps that you can take to refresh your customer acquisition plan without disrupting your current efforts.

Acquisition Costs - Step 1: Factor in new customer segments

As your small online business grows, you’ll discover that you have customer segments that you didn’t even realize. And chances are, you haven’t put much thought into marketing to them.

For example, if you run an e-commerce store and learn how to improve sales dedicated to fishing supplies, you may target retired men that are in a particular financial bracket. However, you may discover that women (who don't fish) actually purchase a big percentage of the equipment for birthday and holiday gifts.

Now that you know women who aren’t as familiar with fishing are the ones buying a certain percentage of your products, you can design a customer acquisition plan with them in mind. You could promote free gift wrapping on your San Diego web design or gift card incentives in your email campaign.

Reduce Cost of Customer Acquisition - Step 2: Consider a Site Re-Design

If you find that certain landing pages on your San Diego web design have a higher bounce rate, then do some A/B testing. Testing is an excellent way to get a real idea of what your customers like and what they don’t.

And don’t think that you have to be drastic. You can simply change the placement of your social media icons or adjust the top navigation to showcase certain products or services.

When you begin with the small changes on your San Diego web design, you’ll have a better idea of what elements have made an impact on traffic engagement. And when you do everything at once, it’ll be tough to pick out what truly made the impact.

Examples of Customer Acquisition Strategies - Step 3: Intertwine current marketing strategies

While you don’t want your efforts to be identical, you do want to give them united aspects. This makes marketing much more effective because you can pair things like social media and email marketing without duplicate efforts. Plus, your reach will be further.

Step 4: Reach out and communicate with customers

Before you tell yourself that you already complete this step, really ask yourself if you engage with your customer base. You should be responding on social media, as well as to comments on your site. You should also be corresponding with customers via email to ensure that they’ve had a good experience with you.

It's easy to send out automated emails and posts on your social feed, but you can't stop there. You have to stay in the conversation to really get to know your customers and what they want. And this step will help put you ahead of your competitors because many businesses that think they are engaging with patrons are really just offering formulated responses that don't get much attention.

Cost of Acquisition - Step 5: Write a current e-book to generate leads

Even if you already have a free book on your site, you want to make sure it’s current. Free e-books are perfect for a lead magnet, but only if they make sense in the here and now. Some industries can get away with having the same book year in and year out, and even if you don't need to make many updates, you should at least show readers the last date it was modified, so you stay relevant.

Plan to Acquire Customers Online - Step 6: Start a referral plan

Referrals are fantastic for bringing in new eCommerce business, and the overhead is low because you've already successfully marketed to the person sending them your way. To sweeten the deal even more, start a referral plan so that you can thank those that send others your way. As well as show the new customers that it's not a one-way street, and you give back for patronage.