One key to a successful business is amassing a base of customers who are likely to become loyal supporters (aka repeat purchasers) of your products or services. The process of growing this group is called customer acquisition.
When you successfully build a customer acquisition funnel, your business will benefit from a reliable stream of new customers who, over time, contribute to steady business growth. Customer acquisition strategy often involves a number of different marketing channels to attract customers where they are. The best customer acquisition model for your business depends on your product, your customer, and your goals.
Here, discover every step of the customer acquisition process, explore strategies like optimizing your brand expression, launching a popup store, or collaborating with another brand, and learn from examples from Nike, Casper, Parade, and more.
Here’s a pretty standard customer acquisition definition: It’s a way to drive revenue by building a systematic process that turns potential customers into new—and then loyal—supporters.
Customer acquisition is essentially the first three stages of the customer lifecycle journey: awareness, reach, and conversion. This is often referred to or depicted visually as a funnel, so you can clearly see how the customer acquisition process plays out.
What are the three parts of customer acquisition?
Attracting new customers is just the beginning. To truly grow your business and optimize your marketing funnel, it’s essential to do so profitably. Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, represents the cost of converting a prospect into a paying customer. Managing and lowering CAC while maintaining high-quality customer leads is a critical part of a successful marketing strategy.
Customer acquisition optimization involves experimenting with different promotional offers, such as buy-one-get-one (BOGO), percentage discounts, and gifts-with-purchase (GWP). Each offer has a unique effect on customer behavior.
Using customer acquisition data analytics, including return on ad spend (ROAS) and segmentation and cohort analysis, you can make informed, strategic decisions that benefit your bottom line, ensuring sustainable growth in an ever-changing market. Plus, Triple Whale’s AI-integrated ecommerce intelligence platform helps your business grow faster and more confidently.
Acquisition marketing refers to the strategies you use to promote your brand to new audiences, thereby acquiring new customers. In order to attract the right potential customers, you should first have a clear vision for who your ideal customer is and defined goals you’d like to hit in terms of acquisition.
You’ll also want to establish a way to track how your campaigns perform and a regular review process that allows you to learn from and tweak your initiatives. Triple Whale’s combination of trusted measurement tools, full-funnel analytics, flexible BI, robust data enrichment, and ecommerce-specific AI agents give you clear guidance for acquiring customers.
Then, you can implement various strategies on different customer acquisition channels (more on those below). Consider some of these customer acquisition strategy examples.
If you don’t truly understand what it is your brand stands for, you can’t expect anyone else to. Brand expression optimization involves making sure all of the external touchpoints for your business are in line with your brand's values and overall identity. Your website, product, and advertising should be consistent and match your customer’s expectations while highlighting what you stand for.
Ask yourself these brand strategy questions:
With your answers in mind, you can create a brand personality, voice, and visual identity that feel authentic and therefore attract more customers.
Need some customer acquisition marketing strategy inspiration? DTC brands like Obvi, Create, and Ogee are up-and-coming branding superstars with excellent control, ownership, and expression over their brand.
You’ll be better able to attract potential customers if you know who they are. It’s worthwhile to gather some information about their:
You can do this via:
One example of this customer acquisition strategy is Sephora’s Beauty Insider forum where consumers post tips and questions. Not only does this foster brand connection, it also gives the company opportunities to gather information about their customers.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can also help: Chatbots can quickly and efficiently analyze the data you gather and summarize the findings into actionable insights that help you make decisions on your creative and your marketing channels, according to Florida International University (FIU).
Once you’ve gathered the info above, it’s time to dig into the initial creative ideation process. You (and your team) will come up with a creative angle for your ads and release them in various customer acquisition channels.
But this process isn’t one-and-done: You can get loads of helpful information from your ads that allows you to keep iterating on custom solutions for clients. Set up a robust, regular reporting structure so you’re able to quickly see what’s working and what isn’t, as evaluated against your established benchmarks for measures like click-through rate. Use these findings to inform the overall strategic direction for your next campaign. You can repeat this cycle indefinitely to continue generating more conversions and reap the benefits of customer lifecycle marketing, where you focus on building a long-lasting relationship with your customers.
One customer acquisition idea that can attract loyal customers is to fill the gap with a product or service they can’t find elsewhere. The skincare brand Topicals sold out of their first shipment to Sephora. The brand created a product that spoke to, and worked for, an unserved market: women of color with dermatological issues like hyper-pigmentation and eczema.
Any PR is good PR, as they say. And “troll” products, or products designed specifically to go viral, can attract shoppers who want to hop on the trend. Case in point: The internet exploded when Nordstrom was selling a pair of dirty men’s jeans for $425. It’s unclear if Nordstrom placed the buy on purpose, knowing it was likely to rile people up. But what is clear is these types of products often end up selling out.
Think: Doritos and Taco Bell or Rihanna and Puma. A collaboration is a great way to introduce a new, sometimes completely different audience to your product, especially if you can launch at an entry-level price point without diluting your brand.
If you’re not able to launch your own collaboration, another customer acquisition solution is getting in on someone else’s. In 2021, two existing bars in Soho, London and Soho, New York were transformed into “Palace Atrois Pubs” for three days only. Palace Atrois is a collaboration between a skate brand and a beer brand. The transformation brought new awareness and new customers to both venues.
Popup stores are temporary brick-and-mortar locations that help build awareness in a new market or test out the IRL potential in areas where your ecommerce customers live. And you don’t have to be experienced in retail spaces to pull it off: There are vendors and services who can help you handle the logistics.
You can also try a popup on a smaller and more mobile scale: Mattress brand Casper built awareness in new locations with a mobile truck where curious passersby could test out the brand’s products. This is a relatively low-overhead way to enable sampling, especially for products where traditional “free samples” aren’t feasible, like mattresses and pillows.
Bring your potential customers together over their shared interests in a space sponsored by your brand. Art supply company Happy Medium operates an Art Cafe where visitors can sit and work on their creative projects. Relatively little of the square footage is dedicated to merchandise, but customers can purchase supplies.
Instead of a popup store or vehicle, you can also launch an activation. In an inspiring example of DTC acquisitions, intimates brand Parade turned a New York neighborhood into a meadow of wildflowers. Activations grab the attention of your target market and create a halo of awareness via social media posting. It also gives you the opportunity to collect emails and phone numbers, hand out samples, and make sales.
Speaking of samples, this tried-and-true tactic is almost as old as modern marketing itself. Today, major brands like Costco and Sephora have built their reputations on their free samples. The idea is that potential customers who are unfamiliar with your brand will enjoy the freebie and want to purchase more, especially if you can provide a one- to two-week supply that turns your product into their habit.
If your product serves a specific need or is part of a beloved hobby, you can find customer acquisition opportunities through education. There is a natural pipeline from learning about a hobby, interest, or need, then purchasing a product to help. For example, Moz sells SEO software, but they are also synonymous with SEO education and content.
Here’s a smart customer acquisition tactic for brands with strong narratives and charismatic founders: Look for press opportunities that can create a compelling case for readers to become customers. For example, the co-founder of aperitif brand Haus, Helena Price Hambrecht, shared about her own relationship to alcohol in interviews around the launch of the brand’s bottled low-ABV cocktails. AI can help you draft ghostwritten blog posts by your founder that you can share on your website and social media channels.
A relatively new way for customer acquisition is leveraging ambassadors, who are essentially micro-influencers. These engaged members of a niche community rep your product out and about, introducing new potential customers to your brand in the process. Consider jewelry brand Kendra Scott, which went viral due to the groundwork laid by the brand’s Gems campus ambassador program.
Referral programs reward your most loyal customers and encourage them to introduce your brand to potential new customers. Rideshare companies have put this strategy to good use. Lyft, for example, provides users with unique invite codes to share with their contacts. The new riders and the referrers get discounts after the new customer takes a ride for the first time.
When your customers not only value your product but also the experience they have interacting with your brand, they’re more likely to stick around (and tell their friends!). Improving customer experience generates more revenue by minimizing customer churn, according to Harvard Business Review.
In its early years, Zappos was famous for doing just this. The online retailer found ways to invest in the customer experience such as free shipping on all returns, a generous return policy, and personable customer care representatives willing to go to great lengths to resolve problems that paid off in customer acquisition and retention. And this doesn’t have to require a lot of personnel: AI chatbots can provide personalized support and streamline the customer experience, according to FIU.
As you can see from the customer acquisition examples above, finding and retaining loyal customers is often a multi-channel process. You don’t need to limit your efforts to email, social media, or display ads alone. Instead, consider experimenting with several of these channels to increase brand visibility and build awareness.
AI in marketing has come a long way from the simple customer service chatbot. While that application is still valuable in offering support and encouraging purchases or other actions, AI can now be leveraged at a number of other points during the customer lifecycle, including throughout many of the other channels below. You can use AI to create email, social media, or website copy that attracts new customers, as well as creative for ads placed in many different mediums.
Some digital marketing platforms even use AI to automate the iteration process. Albert, for example, “autonomously targets audiences, mixes and matches creative assets, buys media, runs campaigns, measures performance, applies insights from one channel to another, and then makes adjustments,” according to Harvard Business Review.
TikTok’s algorithm surfaces short videos that match a user’s interests and engagement on their “For You” page—the perfect opportunity for customer acquisition because users are already expecting to encounter something new there. Create content that will resonate with your desired customer, or partner with an influencer who already has a large following for even more reach, according to Lamar University.
TikTok is home to younger, engaged social media users, but don’t sleep on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, depending on your brand and audience. Facebook remains the largest social media network, with more than 3 billion users as of April 2024, according to market research firm Statista.
On any of these platforms, you can tailor how you share news about customer acquisition strategies you’re trying. Experiment with memes, photos, or videos to boost brand awareness and engagement and links to other content you’re creating, such as blog posts or interviews with your founder.
A content strategy gives you a platform where you can promote various customer acquisition strategies you’re employing and also create authoritative, engaging articles or blog posts that attract new customers or improve your standing in the eyes of existing customers.
While it’s not the flashiest channel, email marketing remains a mainstay in communicating all sorts of information with current and future customers. You can share announcements about any of the customer acquisition strategies listed above with your email list, and you can encourage those customers to share the email as well.
When your brand serves an unmet need, you want your future customers to be able to find you. And that means showing up in search results as they scour the internet looking for a product like yours to help them. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your website, blog, and any other digital content so you have a better chance of appearing at the top of search results pages, where customers are more likely to click. This involves using specific keywords in the headlines, metadata, and body copy of your digital content. Software like Moz, ahrefs, SEMrush, and Keywords Everywhere can help. You can also leverage paid search, which is essentially purchasing an advertisement on the search engine itself.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system will help you automate some of your customer acquisition strategies and track and analyze their performance.
Local businesses in particular can benefit from more traditional channels like website, newspaper, television, radio, and podcast ads that introduce new customers to your brand. You can also use these ads as opportunities to promote specific acquisition strategies, such as a new referral program or a limited-time collaboration.
Customer acquisition is the process of turning potential customers into loyal supporters of your brand or business. Depending on your service or product, you might implement strategies such as free samples, ambassador programs, collaborations, content marketing, and more utilizing various channels, including social media, traditional media, SEO, and AI.
Regardless of your customer acquisition strategy, it’s crucial to have a way to measure your success so you can fine-tune your approach as needed.
Triple Whale provides a real-time source of truth across your entire business, with AI agents that analyze, monitor, and optimize every stage of your funnel. To unlock faster, more confident decisions, sign up for a demo today.
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