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Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition refers to gaining new consumers. Acquiring new customers involves persuading consumers to purchase a company’s products or services. Companies and organizations consider the cost of customer acquisition as an important measure in evaluating how much value customers bring to their business.
Customer acquisition is important for businesses of any age and size. It allows your business to make money, meet costs, pay employees,reinvest in growth, and show evidence of traction for outside parties such as investors, partners, and influences.In the business world, we visualize the customer journey typically with a funnel or a similar graphic that highlights the stages in the buying process.Being able to systematically attract and convert new customers keeps companies healthy and growing and investors happy.
How to Improve Your Customer Acquisition Strategy
Every business needs new customers to grow and succeed, so whether you’re a company of five or 5,000, having a road map for customer acquisition is a smart move.A solid customer acquisition strategy should be four things, sustainable, flexible, targeted, and diversified.
Sustainable
A sustainable customer acquisition strategy is one that works in the long run. This means that the investments you make (whether money, time, or human) can be upheld for the foreseeable future. For example, if you plan to acquire new customers through a blog, you should have the tools and resources in place to ensure content production lives past one or two posts effectively bringing in organic traffic for months or years to come. This is why inbound marketing is effective it creates sustainable traffic and, therefore, a sustainable source of new customers. Consider this in comparison to ads, which can be an effective way to acquire customers as long as the ads are live.
Flexible
Your customer acquisition strategy should also be flexible because marketing and sales, and the way people respond to them are always changing. While salespeople were once the gatekeepers of information about a product, that’s no longer the case. Consumers are increasingly skeptical of brand claims and anything said about a product by the company or its reps. In a recent HubSpot Research study, we found that 81% of consumers trust the advice of family and friends over businesses. Creating a customer acquisition strategy that only relies on salespeople would put your company in a tough spot. Keep your strategy pliable, and you’ll always be ready to respond to market trends.
Targeted
All consumers aren’t your best consumers, and customer acquisition can result in a crazy waste of resources if not pinpointed toward the right people. Before you invest in any customer acquisition methods, you must define who you’re targeting with said methods. The process alone of defining your buyer personal can help weed out any unnecessary or wasted acquisition efforts as well as alert you to specific needs or desires that some channels may meet. For example, businesses targeting millennial might consider creating videos as part of a content marketing strategy, given that 91% of adults ages 18-29 use YouTube.
A targeted customer acquisition strategy requires taking a step back and figuring out what’s best for your business, resources, and audience. Then, you can expect to see real responses to your customer acquisition efforts.
Diversified
Ever heard of cross-pollination? It’s when bees spread pollen between a variety of plants, bringing about variations of species that better withstand time and nature. In this case, marketers can be compared to these well traveled bees. When you diversify your acquisition strategy and use various acquisition methods, you have a greater chance of reaching new audiences and generating new leads.
Customer Retention
Customer retention refers to the activities and actions companies and organisations take to reduce the number of customer defections. The goal of customer retention program is to help companies retain as many customers as possible, often through customer loyalty and brand loyalty initiatives.
Customer Retention Program
Is a specific initiative or set of initiatives designed to increase customer value and encourage them to re purchase and evangelize a company’s products or services. Customer retention programs can be company led, such as instituting a customer on boarding process, or customer led, such as downloading and using a mobile app to make a purchase.
The Important Of Customer Retention
They are five reason why customer retention is vital. Customer retention helps increase the profitability of your small business. Build lasting customer relationship by providing personalized quality service, communicating effectively, rewarding loyal customers, and offering innovative products and services.
Customer Retention Strategies
The easy way to grow your customer is not to lose them, the average business loses around 20% of its customers annually simply by failing to attend to customer relationships. In some industries this leakage is as high as 80 percent. The cost in either case, is staggering but few businesses truly understand the implications.
Just imagine two businesses, one that retains 90 percent of its customers, other retaining 80%. If both add new customers at the rate of 20 percent per year, the first will have a 10 percent net growth in customers per year, while others have nothing at all.
Reducing Attraction
Almost every business loses some customers, but few ever measure or recognize how many of their customers become lazy. Most business unluckily, invest an enormous amount of time, effort and expense building that initial customer relationship. Then they let that relationship go unattended, in some cases even losing interest as soon as the sale been made, or even worse, they abandon the customer as soon as easily remedied problem occurs, only to have to spend another small fortune to replace that customer. The easiest way to grow your business is not to lose your customers. Once you stop the leakage, its often possible to double or triple your growth rate because you’re no longer forced to make up lost ground just to stand still.
Vilakazi,s Helen Digital Blog 