Your ecommerce business needs customers in the same way that we need water to live. Without customers, there seems to be little to no point in running an online business. Because of this, customer acquisition should be a primary strategy that you need to focus on throughout your ecommerce venture.
For your online store to succeed and grow, you’re going to need to have a pretty solid understanding of customer acquisition and to develop a plan of your own that converts your target audience into paying customers.
In this article, we are going to talk about the relevance of customer acquisition, customer acquisition cost, and how content marketing can help you get new customers to your online store.
Let’s start by talking about what customer acquisition means to you and why it is important to your ecommerce business:
What Is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition is the process of acquiring new customers for your online store, and it is vital to every business, no matter its size or stage.
It’s a no-brainer that customers are the very foundation of your business’s success. Customer acquisition is important because customers are what make your online business profitable.
Your patrons help you:
- Make money for the overhead cost of running your online store.
- Pay your employees or team.
- Show evidence of your growth to your customers, investors, and partners.
Acquiring customers helps businesses boost sales and to do this, you will have to engage in conventional marketing strategies. Also, keep in mind that in the course of your business you will lose customers. Customers move on and maybe they only needed to purchase from you once and never again.
A customer acquisition strategy will help you keep the ball rolling with the help of new customers streaming in. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t work on customer retention, because it’s generally agreed upon that acquiring new customers can be more expensive than retaining them. But in order for you to garner loyal customers, you must acquire new ones first.
Speaking of cost, let us move on to CAC or customer acquisition cost.
Cost of Customer Acquisition
Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC is the price it takes to acquire a new customer. To get the word out about your store, you will have to market your store and maybe even pay for ads.
Calculating your CAC helps you figure out how much each customer acquisition is costing you. Your CAC is the cost of marketing expenses divided by the number of customers that you acquired through your paid efforts.
In other words: CAC = Marketing Costs/Customers Acquired
For instance, if you have allocated $100 in 6 months for online ads, and acquired 50 new paying customers during that time, your CAC amounts to $2 per new customer. If you are just starting and planning your CAC ahead of time, you won’t be able to get a good sense of how much your cost per customer will be, but having an estimate of how much you are willing to spend on customer acquisition is a great way to be prepared.
If you have already been running your marketing campaign across different channels, then this is where calculating and knowing your CAC will come in to give you some valuable data. If you know which marketing channel is giving you the lowest CAC, then you’ll know exactly where to double down on your marketing efforts.
Now that we have talked at length about the concepts behind customer acquisition, let’s talk about how to improve and lower your CAC.
Get the Right Customer
One of the most important steps to take in running your ecommerce store is to define your target audience. If you want your customer acquisition effort to be worth your while and effective then you should clearly define the target market that will ultimately be more receptive to purchasing your products.
A target market is a group of consumers who share similar characteristics, whether it be age, gender, hobby, lifestyle preference, etc., that make them more likely to need and want certain products because it caters to their specific needs, desires, and lifestyle.
When you have established who your target audience is, then you can begin building an effective and well-targeted customer acquisition plan.
Read our article on How to Define Your Target Market to learn more.
Leverage Content Marketing for Long Term Wins
Content marketing is the gift that keeps on giving. No matter what type of marketing tactics you use, great content marketing wins because you are providing relevant and valuable content that attracts your prospective customers to your business.
Creating great content as a part of your marketing strategy is also considered a long-term approach to build a strong connection with your target audience, because you are delivering something valuable and relevant to them, and not just mindlessly pushing your products.
Since content marketing is considered a long-term approach, think of it as building a library of content that will continue to reach your prospective buyers and reduce your CAC over time.
Here is how content marketing can give your customer acquisition plans a big boost:
SEO- Search engines favor businesses that publish quality content regularly. So if you are running a blog alongside your online store, content marketing can help you rank higher on search engine results pages, allowing new customers to discover you more easily and organically.
Social Media- Social media marketing should not be set apart from content marketing. When you engage in social media marketing, you are sharing valuable and entertaining content that is targeted at an audience with the goal of acquiring new customers, retaining them, and growing your business.
Paid Ads- For your paid advertising to work, you need great content behind it. Failure to achieve good content may result in people clicking on your ads, only to click the back button in less than a minute. This won’t help your conversion rates and CAC at all.
When you create great content, you are creating a mutually beneficial relationship between you and your target audience. When you share good material, more customers will want to connect with you and trust you based on your authoritative content.
Key Takeaway
Customer acquisition is everything for your ecommerce business, no matter how small or large and no matter the stage your business is in. It is a process that you must prioritize throughout the entirety of your e-commerce venture.
The key to growing your customer base rests in marketing and delivering your marketing message to the right customers. So the first thing you must do is define your target audience so that you can place your marketing effort down where it counts the most. Not only will this help you target the right customers, but it will also help you lower your CAC in the long run. You can also leverage content marketing to reach more customers through SEO, Social media posts, and paid ads.
Get in Touch
At Ecommerce Pro, we help entrepreneurs and business owners build better and more successful ecommerce businesses. Have a question or a project in mind? Get in touch with us today!
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