How to Build Your Business by Understanding Customer Acquisition
You may have a great product or service, but without customers to buy it you don’t have a viable business. Getting and retaining customers is what business is all about. Business is an enterprise that is about exchange – your expertise for customers’ cash.
Customer acquisition is fundamental to success. It is a critical concept to both understand and put into practice. Generally, it is defined as the process of attracting new people to engage with a product, service or brand. It may not sound complicated, but doing it with finesse is not always simple.
How Do You Extract Great Value from a Campaign?
A well-known statistic in business is that the cost of getting a new client is five times greater than keeping a client. Acquiring new customers can be costly, and you will want to see a good Return On Investment, or ROI. The goal is spend as little money as possible to build your customer base – and then keep these customers with terrific products and service.
What Are the Main Methods?
The primary methods of getting new customers generally involve marketing and advertising. Within advertising and marketing there are a number of genres and methods, and these will generate different results, with some more trackable than others.
Above-the-line methods, which include TV, radio, billboards and print ads, do a good job of raising the profile of your brand. However, when it comes to clinching sales, there are below-the-line and through-the-line techniques which can be targeted more specifically. The use of social media and computer search engines has had a big impact in recent years on reaching customers.
How Does a Good Campaign Affect Possible Customers?
Research indicates that customers want personalised service. Online methods are proving to be a valuable resource in tracking customers’ spending habits and connecting via promotions and offers.
Direct mail can also be an effective tool. Direct mail can tailored to customers’ interests and include information that will inform campaign managers of how the material landed with customers. Analysis can include tallying how much direct mail was sent out, how much resulted in a response and how many sales were derived from it.
An effective campaign will not only engage customers but encourage them to share feedback, insights and even allow you to communicate with them directly. This should ultimately lead to more sales and retaining devoted customers.
Important: A Campaign Is Only as Good as Its ROI
You want to see results, largely in the form of data and sales. If using an agency, your campaign manager should correlate the cost of the campaign against important variables such as conversion to sales, the number of responses and the cost expended per customer. The campaign will also ideally yield vital data that can be used in the future and to fine-tune the campaign already in progress. A good agency will be able to test new material against standard material to see if the rate of response is affected. Testing like this, and collecting data in terms of customer spend, elevates customer acquisition to a science where positive results are a matter of research and application.