For any business, losing customers is similar to losing a good old best friend or parting ways with a long time girlfriend… ah the heartbreak!
Ok, I might have gone overboard with the comparison, but irrefutably, retaining customers is long shot for all businesses hoping to earn a good brand name and stifle competition.
Last I heard was that the cost to acquire a new customer is almost 5 times more, than to retain a present customer. This got me thinking – most firms might be getting it wrong. They are extremely focused on customer retention, and therefore almost completely miss the larger picture.And, what is the bigger picture, you ask?
It is to carve a solid customer acquisition strategy, and make no mistake you can’t be going back to the board with this, every time you hit a roadblock.
In simple words, a perfect customer acquisition strategy necessarily translates into gaining new customers, by persuading and convincing them to purchase your products/services. Therefore, the acquisition strategy includes a set of methodologies and systems that help you manage prospects and customers with a host of tactics.
Let us look into 5 key ingredients to create the prefect customer acquisition strategy, and thereby save big bucks for your company:-
1. Keep an Eagle Eye on Target Market
Initially, your goal should only be to keep an extremely good watch on your target market – the kind of customers you want to attract and do business with. The entire acquisition strategy will only work if you are able to do this right. Therefore, fostering relationships with the target market comes into the picture. Unless you are able to identify your target market, as the money, time and effort you put into forming strategies will be a total waste. Gaining a great understanding on target market will help you to create appropriate products, messages and marketing – all which are important aspects of a perfect acquisition strategy.
2. Build an Awesome Buyer Journey
The acquisition strategy should be perceived as a composition of multiple smaller funnels take should be taken one step at a time. Moreover, a brand should make continuous attempts to explain the journey to customers that they need to cover. Consulting firm McKinsey states – “ are based on how customers feel they are being treated.” Defining and segmenting the buyer journey into many parts will make way for easy monitoring of each level, along with identification of the shortcomings at regular intervals. As a result, brands will be able to tap the areas which provide the most opportunities and where business can be taken to subsequent levels.
3. Go Full Throttle with Omnichannel Customer Experience
Times and technology are changing that it sometimes becomes almost baffling to even comprehend the transformations that take place. With the increased use of social media, mobile, chats, instant messaging, and forums to voice concerns and complaints from customers, you can’t afford to leave any loose ends. This is why a business needs to go all the way with Omnichannel Customer Experience. Essentially customers want the experience to be uniform in all the channels, and Omnichannel helps to bring all of these interactions under a single platform for agents, along with the ability to seamlessly toggle among them.
4. Firm Grasp on Business Metrics
An earnest view – don’t ever take your key business metrics lightly. Some of the significant metrics that brands should be well versed are – customer acquisition cost, retention, attrition, life time value (LTV), revenue, referrals, and others. Trust us when we say that you are bound to lose your way if you don’t have crisp understanding of your business metrics. Furthermore, no one wants to be unsure of the strategies that might work the best to gain increased profits. When you gain a good idea of these metrics, you will know exactly whether a particular campaign is worth pursuing or not – even before you put your money in it. Also, what can be more upsetting in the longer run is to have the wrong metrics, too many metrics, or metrics that are unattainable to track.
5. Get your Marketing Tactics Right
While you will have to use the right social platforms but none of that will make sense if you can’t create and disseminate fresh and exciting content, almost every day. Some of the great approaches that you can adopt for customer acquisition through marketing are – Blogs, Ebooks, Case Studies, Whitepapers, Webinars, and interactive Videos. For Blogs, you can create an editorial calendar for every week/month and update it with fresh topics of interest and trends. Thereafter, make sure you do proper SEO, metadata and keyword tagging, etc. For Ebooks and Case Studies, you will need a good graphics designer to create high-quality pictorials and images that goes well with the content you produce.
What are your thoughts on Customer Acquisition and how successful have your brand been to develop strategies around it? Share your experiences in the comments below.
