No matter how you choose to do it, marketing should be bringing paying customers to your door. But if the pendulum of customer acquisition swings from none to beyond capacity, your business is not realizing the full potential of any marketing. What can you do to ensure you have a steady stream of customers ripe for conversion?

Customer acquisition is the ability to convince a potential customer to buy from you. Sounds easy enough but, as any business knows, external issues can make persuading customers to part with their cash a difficult thing.

Investing in the right marketing channels is key, as is persuading people to not only buy from you once but time and again.

It’s a conundrum as old as the hills but if your business swings between no customers to being inundated with customers and back again, something isn’t right.

Why does customer acquisition vary?

There are many reasons why customer acquisition will vary. One reason is that your marketing and customer acquisition activities are ‘not quite right’.

A splurge in marketing, whether that is pay per click ads or an offline marketing campaign, should deliver an upswing in customer numbers, as expected. If, however, customer numbers dwindle fairly sharpish, it’s a sign that the marketing campaign has only been half successful.

The solution is to take a holistic view of marketing activities, which has been delivered over time and how successful they have been.

Figuring out what works – taking a holistic view of customer acquisition

Looking back over a period of time – six or 12 months – you should list all the channels by which you have promoted your business and tally up the cost. Divide this number by the volume of paying customers that these campaigns resulted in – and there you have customer acquisition cost, a metric that sheds some light on the success of marketing and promotion.

But you need to qualify this number. The more paying customers you get for each paid marketing campaign, the more successful it is deemed to be.

Placing this figure in context, however, casts another light on your findings. These customers are buying from you once, taking advantage of a too-good-to-be-miss offer. What happens after this initial purchase? Do they come back?

Hence, you are stuck in a pendulum swing. You know what works, so you put out a brilliant offer that disrupts the market and brings people flocking to your door.

Once the offer ends, so too does the queue of paying customers.

It feels vacant. And that’s because customer acquisition is not delivering a constant stream of paying customers. Your business needs to leave the pendulum behind. You need a strategy.

Stop the pendulum swing with a customer acquisition strategy

You have your niche product or service, now you need to aim it at your niche audience. Essentially, a customer acquisition strategy is all about building customer relations.

When a customer feels invested in your company, they are more likely to stay. When you bombard the marketplace with ‘offers’, customers see this as a singular action because why would they buy again? The encouragement isn’t there to do so.

Marketing and promotions, online and offline, paid and organic *should combine to create an emotional link between you and your customers. And that’s why a customer acquisition strategy is a must.

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

There are four strategic goals that your customer acquisition plan should drive towards…

#1 Build relationships

Shared values between you and your customers is the basis of loyalty. You have proved with one-off fantastic offers that you can attract a paying customer. The reason why they are not returning or making the purchase decision on the first visit to your website when they stumble upon it is that they don’t know you, what you stand for.

How to engage…

• Utilize social media and react and respond when customers engage with you
• Be part of a wider conversation within your field
• Offer advice and suggestion via your blog or forum, and do so freely without expectation of anything in return (i.e. a customer to buy from you)

#2 Spend wisely

For some businesses, the solution to a dwindling customer base is to throw money at a marketing campaign. This can work… sort of. A swell in customer orders temporarily and in response to a campaign or offer is all well and good but you’re in this for the long term.

Throwing money at promotions to scale up your business is a foundation built on sand. When customers fall away, so too does your growth.

As well as finding the marketing channel that brings in the most customers, you also need to know the average customer lifetime cycle and the costs involved.

Starbucks in the US, for example, calculates that their average customer buys from them over a 20 year period, spending an average of $14k at their stores. The profit margin, after the costs of marketing and so on, is around 21% per customer.

Even just a cursory glance and ballpark customer lifetime value metric can help drive a marketing strategy that delivers more customers and repeat custom.

#3 Trusted partner

The modern consumer is not just looking for more than a transaction. The advent of the internet and our ability to find out information and detail about a product, service or brand at the click of a button has changed how someone chooses to buy, what they buy and from whom.

Become a trusted partner in this process. Collaborate with customers rather than assuming that buying from you is the only reason why they are visiting your site.

#4 Collaborate with partners

Seeing your marketplace as a place of cut-throat competition won’t be doing you any favors either. Collaborate with non-competitive partners and you’ll find a whole new avenue stream opens up.

In summary

Customer acquisition is about zeroing in on long term opportunities, rather than focussing on the short term fixes that fix nothing, but possibly break your business a little more each time. Build relationships and build engagement to stop the pendulum swing of customer acquisition for your business to really start to grow.