Customer acquisition is essential to any business’s success — to grow a company, you need to attract new clients. Often-overlooked elements of your website and digital marketing design can make it much harder to acquire new leads, preventing your operation from increasing sales and being able to expand.
These techniques are some of the best a business can use to improve its customer acquisition strategy.
1. Start With Your Target Audience
When developing a customer acquisition strategy, most businesses start with their target audience. This group should include both your current customers and your ideal audience — as well as segments you want to target in the near future.
Picking a target audience that’s too large can create problems, though. When you try to appeal to as many customers as possible, you may find that your marketing becomes unfocused and that it’s harder to provide value or build personas for the people you want to focus on
2. Use Email
Convincing visitors to subscribe to an email newsletter is often a great way to bring them into the sales funnel. If you can convert blog readers and casual visitors into subscribers, you’re likely well on your way to a sale.
Targeted emails can be an extension of a company’s content marketing strategy. Each one can contain valuable information that’s relevant to your target audience, encouraging them to look for them to arrive.
Your newsletter’s contact list can also serve as a lead generator for potential email marketing campaigns.
3. Retarget Your Leads
Retargeting potential leads is a great way to connect with people who have already seen one of your ads.
Retargeting is generally more effective at driving engagement than standard ads and is typically better at driving conversions. Sending ads to people who have already seen your brand before can also help you build awareness and recall.
4. Optimize Your Landing Pages
A good landing page is one of the best ways to draw potential customers who are already likely to be interested in what your business has to offer. However, a less effective landing page may have the opposite effect — and could encourage a visitor to look elsewhere for a solution to whatever problem they have.
Fidelity Life, an American life insurance company, shows off a few design techniques you can use to optimize a landing page. For example, the CTA — in the form of the “Get Started” button — is clear and emphasized with a contrasting color and the use of whitespace. The rest of the page is mostly dedicated to communicating the company’s value proposition — life insurance coverage that’s quick and easy to shop for.
Streamlining your landing pages in this way ensures they encourage visitors to learn more about your business and what you offer.
5. Use Content
Content marketing is one of the most popular customer acquisition techniques. A strong archive can draw visitors, offer them some valuable and relevant information, and encourage them to investigate your brand further. This can help you build brand awareness and generate conversions.
Teamdeck, the developer of a resource management solution for teams, shows how you can draw visitors with valuable and relevant content. The articles on the site’s blog cover a range of resource and team management-related content, as well as some documentation on the company’s solution itself.
Content like this offers visitors something they want — useful information that’s relevant to their interests — and lets them know about your brand, plus the services you offer.
You can also gate your content, which means visitors must offer some kind of personal information — usually an email address and name — to gain access. This information will allow the business to follow up with the visitor, sending them news, additional relevant resources and offerings.
However, content doesn’t need to be gated to be useful. Maintaining a large archive and regularly updating your site’s content is likely enough to draw potential customers.
6. Create a Referral Program
Referral programs work by providing an incentive for existing users to encourage someone else to sign up for your service. It’s typically a discount, digital points or even free stock, in the case of many investment and trading apps.
These programs are often a great way to bring in new users by encouraging existing ones to invite their friends and family.
Dropbox has what is probably one of the best-known referral programs out there. When you refer a friend, the program gives both you and that person an additional 500 MB in storage space — up to 16 GB in total.
The program was a major success, enabling Dropbox to permanently increase signups by 60%. In the first 15 months of the program alone, it generated an additional 2.8 million enrollments.
Not every referral program will lead to that kind of customer growth. However, it goes to show how powerful the right incentives can be.
7. Personalize Your Content
Personalized content that’s tailored to someone’s needs often does better than more general information.
For example, adapting email content based on the customer’s stage in the sales funnel can ensure their particular needs are met. Tweaking your communications in this way will also make it more likely the email will capture their attention or answer questions they may have about your business.
Improve Your Customer Acquisition Strategy With These Techniques
A good customer acquisition strategy can be the difference between success and failure for just about any business. These methods are some of the best ways to improve your conversion rate.
Using content and optimizing your site for scannability can make your website a much more effective tool for acquiring new customers and generating conversions. Other strategies — like referral programs and ad retargeting — can also go a long way in helping your business attract new clients. Use these methods to your benefit and reap the rewards.
Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. She was the director at a marketing agency before becoming a freelance web designer. Eleanor lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.