7 proven strategies for new customer acquisition

Before you develop your customer acquisition strategy, there are a couple of things you need to roll out across your team and organization.

For example, you need to validate your personas, implement a strong positioning strategy, and find the correct channels for improved customer communication.

But that’s not what you’re here for, because you’ve likely already done this.

If you haven’t and you need more of that, we’ve already gone through the importance of customer acquisition, the customer acquisition funnel, how to refine your current customer acquisition strategy, how to calculate customer acquisition cost (CAC), and more, in our beginners’ guide.

What you’re here for is the next step: finding and leveraging new customer acquisition strategies for your 2023 plan.

After all, this is going to be the natural next step to growing your business, giving your product the recognition it deserves, and increasing your sales.

The seven strategies for new customer acquisition are:

So, let’s stop wasting time, and dive straight into them in more detail.

Improve your user experience

79% of people who don’t like what they find on one site will go back and search for another site. So, if your users have a negative experience, the chances are you’re driving your potential customer straight into the arms of a competitor.

What are some ways you can improve your user experience to acquire new customers?

We’ve put together a few pointers that’ll help you whether you’re a B2B, B2C, physical, or online company.

Make everything nice and easy to look at

How many times have you gone into a store, and gotten frustrated that you can’t find what you’re looking for because there’s no particular layout, the sales items are all thrown together with no rhyme or reason, and the prices aren’t laid out neatly for each product?

Or, how many times have you gone onto a website, only to find the search bar isn’t showing what you need, even though you know they have it, there’s too much text that doesn’t even give you the correct information, and there’s a whole bunch of ads popping up on the screen making it significantly harder to find what you’re looking for?

In both situations, simplifying what a customer is looking at - or reducing their cognitive load - is significantly going to improve their user experience. This’ll enhance the likelihood of a purchase and boost the chances of customer retention.

So, if you have a website:

Improve your user interface by making your site more image-heavy, text light.
Make your content skimmable with easy-to-read headings.
Reduce the number of ads you have so you’re not overwhelming the user. On a single page, give them one product they’ll like to focus on and one call-to-action (CTA).
Be more purposeful in your layout and where you want the eye to be drawn. Strategically using color can direct the eye in certain directions.

If you have a physical store:

Modernize the experience by using QR codes to give your customer more information about your products without cluttering the shelves. With this, keep in mind who your customers are - this won’t be for everyone.
Change locations to make your store more accessible.
Choose the right music for the store, and at the right volume.
Make them feel welcome by greeting them at the door, and making sure there are enough employees on the floor that they can find someone for help at any given time.

Simplify the purchasing process

The buying cycle differs depending on whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, and whether you’re online or in-store. But when it comes to actually purchasing the product, you want to make this as smooth a process as possible, regardless of what it looks like.

Why?

Because this is the final hurdle. They’ve gone through the whole cycle and have made a decision to buy from you.

But, if actually purchasing the product is a convoluted process whereby your sales guy is taking too long to send them the contract, or your employee on the till is asking them 100s of questions on whether they want to sign up for different store cards or giving their email address at checkout, they could easily back out last minute.

And this doesn’t work for acquiring the new customer but for keeping them a customer as well. The next time they’re thinking about buying a product, the purchasing process is going to factor into their decision on who they go to.

Provide rapid customer service

Regardless of your company and your product, you want your customers to feel supported along the customer journey. This accounts for before they’ve bought your product, and after.

So, ensuring your customer service is streamlined for maximum support is going to ensure a bigger return on your investment.

Targeted ads and cart abandonment/email recovery campaigns

What are targeted ads?

Targeted ads are an online marketing technique that is extremely effective and popular. You know when you’re absolutely convinced that your phone is listening to you? Well… it’s not far off the truth.

Marketers and advertisers collect their target audience’s information through cookies - a term you’re very likely familiar with, given the number of websites that now ask you to accept or decline its usage before continuing on with your experience.

Cookies are small online files that get sent from the individual’s browser to the server. So, if you’ve accepted cookies on a site, a company might be able to remember you, your preferences, and your purchasing habits. Then, they might use this information to follow up with you through email or specifically targeted social media ads.

Though relatively creepy if you’re not familiar with it, it’s actually a super handy marketing trick to understand what your potential customers are looking for on your site, giving you the opportunity to retarget them with email campaigns or specific ads to motivate them to finalize their purchases.

What are cart abandonment and email recovery?

Cart abandonment is a term that refers to when your potential customer puts a product in their online shopping cart, and then ends up leaving it there and not finalizing the purchase. This is a relatively common experience, which you’ve likely done yourself.

There are quite a few ways you can reduce cart abandonment, and one of these is through email recovery.

Online clothing stores do this regularly, and it can be an effective way of reminding your potential customer they have something that’d caught their interest and reignites their motivation to purchase.

Below is an email example from the online fashion store Boohoo. Their copy hints at urgency and provides the customer with options to help them complete their purchase (speaking to customer service), or complete their order outright.

Provide incentives

Customer incentives are rewards given to new or existing customers to build the brand and are effective in developing customer loyalty and increasing overall sales.

There are many different types of incentives you can use, and which one will work best depends on factors within your own organization, such as budget, resources, company type, target market, etc.

These customer incentives could be things like:

Reward loyalty schemes,
Discounts, deals, and promotions,
Offering free upgrades or shipping, or
Early or exclusive access to sales.

Customer incentives aren’t always linked to direct sales. Sometimes, incentives can also be given out for things like maintaining a continued relationship for repeat purchases, having your current customers refer other potential customers, upgrading your current customers to a more expensive plan, and getting case studies to include in your marketing.

So, think about what you want from your potential and existing customers, and then think about what incentives they will get the most out of. This is where your customer research techniques will come in handy.

Develop brand partnerships

Developing brand partnerships is a great way to attract new customers to your business for many different reasons. For example, it gives you the opportunity to reach a new audience of potential customers via a different channel, and at a lower customer acquisition cost.

While you might feel apprehensive about partnering with a company, especially if they’re within the same industry as you, you’re opening up your company to more avenues for recognition and adding more value to your product.

After all, your competitor is a competitor for a reason - they have something within their brand that you don’t! Adding this value to your own brand via a partnership is only going to help your sales.

Brand partnerships can occur in different ways. For example, integrating your platforms to streamline the process, collaborating and co-branding to create a new feature or product, or even going through the route of sponsorships and affiliate marketing.

Each of these methods is going to have a different impact on your business, but each one is going to help you reach a new audience, in a unique way that’ll bring in more sales and more profits.

Build and develop a blog

70% of consumers learn about a company through its blog rather than ads. So, it’s in your best interest to create a blog that’s going to capture and maintain interest to help lead them through the customer journey.

Write a blog on a relevant topic
Highlight how your product or service relates to this and can help them
Capture their interest in becoming a customer
Lead them through the sales cycle
Profit

If your blog is relevant to the industry you’re in, it’s more likely that your company will become a thought leader in the field.

As you continue to establish yourself as an authority figure, your customers will begin to see you as that as well, and will be more motivated to purchase from you, as you’ve developed that trust over time.

You’ll be proving to them that:

1) You know what you’re talking about,

2) You understand their customer needs and pain points because you’re actively writing about how to solve them, and

3) Your product is the real deal, and buying it will help them succeed. going to help them succeed.

Make use of video content

In this day and age, making use of video content is pivotal to business success. In fact, video helps persuade 73% of people to buy a product or a service.

We won’t go into this one in too much detail because we already have a guide written by Michael Prione, Co-founder and Account Director at Vidico that takes a deep dive into:

How to keep your audience engaged,
How to map out a video marketing strategy by use case,
How to use product video marketing for customer retention, and
A video content checklist that’ll help you succeed.

While video content supports the marketing of your product, it’s also a tried and tested technique for onboarding customers. After all, a video is always going to be more digestible than a long list of instructions.

Improve your site’s SEO practices

While SEO won’t directly affect your customer’s purchasing decisions, it does play a part in ensuring your customers actually see your site.

Our very own Chief Marketing Officer, Bryony Pearce, wrote an article on how to improve your product’s organic visibility. Have a read and begin thinking about how you can start implementing this into your own approach to increase site traffic, increase your potential customers, and work toward converting them into actual customers.

Streamline your customer research process

Understanding who your customers are, what their pain points are, and how to connect with them are three fundamental parts of customer acquisition.

You can’t afford to overlook what your customers are saying, thinking, and asking for. If you ignore these things, chances are they’re going to look elsewhere for a company and product that actually answers and compliments their needs.

Our Customer Research Certified: Masters course is taught by one of the leading experts in understanding your customer: Lauren Culbertson, Co-founder, and CEO of LoopVOC.

It covers the essential knowledge and audience research tools needed to gather, synthesize, and analyze customer research, and transform those insights into actionable outputs that drive revenue, explaining the key steps on how to conduct market research for a business plan.

Get certified, gain fundamental skills, and get to the heart of what your customers really want.

Grow your customer acquisition