Even the best businesses in the world lose customers. That’s why having a strategy to steadily bring in new customers is essential for survival and growth.
Without a customer acquisition strategy, you might continue doing what seems to work without truly evaluating its effectiveness. Conversely, you could be under-investing in channels that have the potential to attract many more customers than they currently do.
The best way to improve your customer acquisition is by having a clear strategy. This includes knowing how you’ll generate demand, what you’ll spend on these efforts, and how you’ll convert visitors into paying customers. For that crucial last step, tools like live chat and chatbots can be incredibly effective.
What is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition refers to the set of activities businesses use to attract new customers. It involves creating a sustainable acquisition strategy that can evolve over time.
Investing resources and time into customer acquisition is crucial because you can’t assume your customers will always stick around. There are three primary reasons for B2B customer churn:
- Marriage:
When one of your customers acquires another or two merge into a new company, it might mean more money for them but the loss of an account for you. - Divorce:
Some customers will leave for a lower-priced competitor or revert to a more familiar product. - Death:
Some customers may not be able to pay you, usually when their company goes out of business or faces financial hardship.
Since some level of “marriage, divorce, and death” is inevitable, it’s vital to have plans in place to fill the gaps left by lost accounts and sustain your business long term.
Customer Acquisition Starts with Your Product
The first step in your plan should be your product roadmap. The best marketing can’t help if your product or service isn’t up to par.
At Intercom, many of their customers come after experiencing their products on other websites. When visitors see the power of receiving instant answers through live chat on a website using Intercom’s Messenger, they notice the small “We run on Intercom” message that links to more information. This is why Intercom prioritizes high product standards – it helps their product market itself.
Paid vs. Organic Customer Acquisition Strategies
Intercom supports the product experience with other customer acquisition activities, typically falling into two categories: paid and organic.
Paid Customer Acquisition Strategies:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) Ads:
Small, text-based ads on search engines to drive direct response or brand awareness. You pay every time someone clicks your ad. - Display Ads:
Similar to PPC ads, but these run on websites. Typically used for brand awareness, you can choose to pay per click or view. - Affiliate Marketing:
Paying other website owners to recommend your product or service. - Referrals:
Programs where you pay existing customers to recommend your product or services. - Promoted Social Media:
Promoted posts in your social media feeds. Some platforms charge based on views or clicks, while others charge only if they help you acquire a customer.
Organic Customer Acquisition Strategies:
- Content Marketing:
Creating blog posts, guides, infographics, videos, podcasts, and more to answer questions, solve problems, and introduce readers to your business. - Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Optimizing your website content to boost its rankings on search engines. - Email Marketing:
Sending emails to potential customers. - Social Media Marketing:
Engaging with people on social media platforms to drive loyalty and awareness. - Events:
Face-to-face marketing to attract, convert, educate, nurture, and delight your audience.
Early Customer Acquisition Strategies at Intercom
Intercom started with content marketing. Co-founder Des wrote two to three blog posts per week and ran regular webinars. Today, they invest heavily in evergreen blog posts, books, podcasts, guides, and videos.
Email Marketing:
Des initially wrote around 100 emails daily to potential customers. Now, they run scalable email marketing campaigns and send automated follow-up emails, along with a weekly “Inside Intercom” newsletter.
Live Events:
Intercom started hosting small events in 2015 to build relationships. These events have grown into larger Intercom World Tours. With live events now tricky, Intercom plans to host a global virtual launch event, “New at Intercom,” inviting professionals to hear trends, gain insights, network, and see new products.
Determining the ROI of Acquisition Tactics
To identify the most effective tactics, look at your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), which is the budget required to acquire a new customer.
How to Calculate Your CAC:
Choose a time period and divide the total money spent on acquisition efforts by the number of customers acquired. This gives your average CAC.
Optimizing for CAC:
Knowing your CAC helps you calibrate your investment in different channels. For example, if PPC is costly but effective, you might reduce ads to a few high-converting keywords. If content marketing is cost-effective, invest more in your content team.
Turning Acquired Visitors into Customers
Getting visitors to your website is just the first step. You need a way to convert them into paying customers. Intercom’s chat window can help by proactively engaging visitors with the highest purchase intent and accelerating lead generation.
Once a visitor engages with the Messenger, you can use chatbots to automatically qualify people who respond and instantly route the best leads to the right salesperson.
More and more businesses are seeing improved customer acquisition using live chat and chatbots:
- Housecall Pro saw a 35% lift in lead to paid conversation rate for live chat versus other channels.
- By using live chat software instead of forms, Copper saw a 13% increase in capturing their leads’ details.
- Showing visitor auto messages helped Unity increase their visitor to paid conversion rates by 45%.
Acquire more customers with cost-effective marketing strategies
You may already be acquiring new customers at a steady clip, but there’s always room to improve your customer acquisition strategy. Sit down, take a hard look at your CAC, and decide what to scale up, scale down, or stop. Doing this will make a big difference, not only in the cost of your marketing, but also in how effective you are at driving long term business growth.
