CUSTOMER ACQUISITION

How to acquire new customers:

1. Develop a business case for acquiring new customers
2. Develop a targeting strategy
3. Set a budget for acquisition (Allowable Marketing Cost)
4. Plan a customer acquisition campaign

What is Customer Acquisition?

The process of converting prospective customers into customers

• Tends to be costly; brands often lose money at this point.
  BUT successful CA should mean that those customers will go on to make a profit for the brand over time. 

The funnel describes how prospects are converted into customers in a series of steps:
A typical CA journey looks like: 

1.Generating awareness (Generating AWAREness)
2.Making a sale or generating a sales lead; could include signing up to a newsletter (Creating INTEREST) through your message
3.Demonstrating the benefits of the product or service on offer (Converting this into a valid DESIRE or NEED to the product or service
4.Learning more about the consumer to improve future messages and sales. (Promote ACTION, usually to buy)

Can be very quick:  A display ad with discount offter taking the prospect to an ecommerce site.
Or can take months: Selling technology to B2B.

Customer acquistion strategies are: Flexible, Sustainable, Targeted and Diversified.

What improves the efficiency of the funnel:

Customer insight:
Define and understand your target audiences.
Different customer segments or personas will not have the same value to the business.
There may also be different ways to reach them as they will use different channels and be interested in different content, products or services.

Targeting: 
Make sure marketing spend focuses on the target audience. 
Continually measure and monitor the performance of your marketing to improve it. 
Be relevant. 
Use customer behaviour, spend, demographics, and other variables to help choose those audience segments you know will be good prospects.
Use this information to inform how often to contact, when and with what content. 

Content: 
Has to be engaging and interesting to the target audience.
Content strong enough to be shared will increase awareness with no additional cost to the brand, this is 'earned' media.

Key metrics used in AC include:

Cost per lead (CPL):    Total campaign cost
                                     _________________

                                     Sales leads generated 

Response rate: Expressed as a proportion of messages sent. eg. 4 responses to 1000 emails would be 4:1000

Cost per response:     Total campaign…