Acquiring new customers can be a costly endeavor, especially when compared to customer retention costs. In fact, it generally costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. There are many customer acquisition channels that companies and organizations use to acquire new customers, including websites, email, social media sites, direct mail, SEO and PPC, web banners, and mobile devices, among others. Yet, statistics show that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%.
What does all of this mean for your organization? You need to be smart about your customer acquisition marketing to achieve a desirable return on investment (ROI). It also means that you need to put the data you have about your prospects and customers to better use for smarter acquisition and retention. NGDATA has exactly what you need to be competitive by utilizing the power of Big Data to help you better understand your customers: NGDATA’s AI-powered CDP.
Cost of Customer Acquisition
The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) means the price you pay to acquire a new customer. In its simplest form, CAC can be worked out by dividing the total costs associated with acquisition by total new customers, within a specific time period. CAC is an important component for any business, along with the lifetime value of a customer, because your company needs to be profitable by getting a return on investment from all of your marketing and sales campaigns. You need to be savvy with your customer acquisition strategy so that you acquire new customers in a cost-effective way.
Customer Acquisition Strategies
New customer acquisition requires knowing what drives your customers and investing in more intelligent inbound marketing strategies such as better targeted content, email newsletters, and search engine optimization (SEO). With inbound marketing, your customer acquisition plan draws in new customers with value-generating resources. The resources provided by your targeted content will drive customers for the life of your business, as opposed to outbound marketing strategies, which require companies to continually spend money on scatter campaigns that deliver less response acquiring new customers.
Your customer acquisition plan may include a mix of content marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, copywriting, social media marketing, conversion rate optimization, and analytics.
- Content marketing – Content marketing is any marketing that involves creating and sharing media (blog posts, videos, white papers, etc.) and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. Knowing your customers’ interests can help you better create and target your messages
- Search engine optimization (SEO) – As you create quality content, all of the shares and links will help you to naturally rank in search engines; when potential customers search, they will find you in their organic search results and you can begin to track their habits and behaviors for better targeting as they revisit or you target outbound campaigns.
- Email marketing – Understanding your visitors via inbound marketing content and SEO help you to create smarter email lists, so you can better reach the appropriate visitors with the right messages when they subscribe to receive newsletters and email updates from you.
- Copywriting – The message you send to potential customers matters, and copywriters know how to choose the right words to sell your business and your brand online with their wordsmithing skills based on the interests of your customers.
- Social media marketing – Spread your online content through social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
- Conversion rate optimization – As your website gets traffic, you need to know what to do with it; by tracking and comparing their behaviors with others, and through conversion rate optimization, you can improve various components of your site to increase leads and sales with the traffic you already have.
- Analytics – You need to know your customers, what’s working and what’s not working, where people are visiting your site, reacting to offers, and how your programs are performing. As well as how your prospect or customers is forming preferences, etc. You can build that understanding through the tracking of their Customer DNA.
- Action – Continuously building and learning from Customer DNA as prospects and customers connect, and react to your offers, programs, etc. is key to acquiring and keeping customers for the long run. Putting the information to work by making the information available to marketing automation systems, call centers, etc. will ensure that your findings are put to the best use for the greatest Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).
John Rampton, a Forbes contributor and entrepreneur who is a top online influencer, blogging expert, and PPC expert, outlines his customer acquisition marketing strategy in “Content Marketing Funnel: 5 Steps to Customer Acquisition” for Forbes.
- Micro-Content (Tweet) – Potential customers see your Tweet or blog post and follows you as they begin to pay attention to your content and information; the key is to become the expert and promote your industry with practical, useful content to increase your chance of acquiring new customers.
- Blog post – Potential customers get to see your industry knowledge and personality as you explain and share information in your blog posts.
- Authority article – While reading your blog posts, potential customers notice the authority article you wrote with a call to action to download your free white paper; they enter their email to request the white paper and you have a new business lead.
- White paper – If you fill your white paper with important industry information, potential customers begin to trust you and see you as an authority, so they are more likely to click on the sales page and convert into a lead.
- Sales page – With all of the work you put into your content to acquire new customers, your sales page needs to include the same level of effective text and visual content that shows the benefits of your products and services, includes customer testimonials, and provides a clear call to action to ensure successful customer conversion.
Target Your Content with NGDATA’s AI-powered CDP
None of your content marketing efforts or customer acquisition strategies will matter if you are not delivering a better customer experience. NGDATA’s AI-powered CDP helps companies build Individual Customer DNA Profiles in real time to deliver more personalized customer experiences. With the NGDATA CDP, you can leverage your big data by connecting all of your data sources in real time to better engage customers for more effective marketing campaigns and greater customer lifetime value.
Why Choose NGDATA’s CDP to Aid Customer Acquisition Marketing?
Simply put, the NGDATA CDP helps you know each of your potential customers at an individual Customer DNA-level to help you convert them and change your business for the better. Specifically, NGDATA’s CDP unlocks data silos to create a single customer view that builds a detailed record of each individual customer’s behavior. With thousands of built-in industry-specific metrics, the NGDATA CDP’s Customer DNA helps you gain a complete understanding of your prospects and customers and leads to more effective acquisition targeting and results.
Customer DNA, and therefore, insights you gain with NGDATA’s CDP are updated in real-time and trending scores for each customer. These can also be compared with sets of customers that you define. Plus, the NGDATA CDP’s automatic trend calculation allows you to track and see evolving metrics over time. These real-time customer metrics also can alert you to proactively address individual customers before they churn. Best of all, the NGDATA CDP’s Preference Learning capabilities help you to know which customers are likely to buy today and how best to connect with customers at each moment, in real time.
Get unprecedented knowledge of your customers at every step of the customer acquisition process with NGDATA’s AI-powered CDP.