Acquiring potential customers is the main goal for many businesses.  It’s the main reason why you continue to create marketing materials, use onsite retargeting, engage in out-of-home advertising, and utilise straight-through processing.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know that getting new customers onto the sales cycle is a long and arduous task, you create a strategy for acquiring new customers, pulling from different places all over the internet (and maybe in real life, too).

Acquisition Channel #1: Content Marketing

Content marketing is an effective customer acquisition strategy that works for all types of businesses. Consumers and professionals constantly search for ebooks, social media posts, videos, and blog posts that are relevant to them. Check out the content trend in fashion, and contextual marketing – being on the money for more ideas.

Sharing your expertise and industry knowledge can help your brand build authority and boost lead generation. Not only that, but it also builds authority on search engines, making them much more likely to recommend your eCommerce business when users are searching for your products.

Content creation is an excellent inbound marketing strategy because it casually invites potential buyers to your online store through search engines and valuable content pieces, such as how-to guides and instructional videos.

Acquisition Channel #2: Live Chat

Interacting with customers through live chat is an effective way to find out what they want and then hand-deliver it to them. Even better, it is all automated, giving your potential customers immediate satisfaction and opening the door to your shop right when they’re most likely to make a purchase.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of consumer interactions will take place without any human interaction at all. Discover a list of the top 10 live chat tools here. Aerie and American Eagle have begun to use live chat to interact with their consumers and narrow down their product searches.

Acquisition Channel #3: Email Marketing

Anyone who says that email marketing is dead is sorely mistaken (and probably advertising an alternative marketing strategy). Though email marketing seems antiquated in the age of videos and interactive content, it can be used to engage with customers, promote free trials, send discounts, and link to quality content. Your email list is also a potentially untapped goldmine of paying customers.

Purchases made through email offers are often 138 % higher in value than purchases made organically. Potential customers who have ended up on your email list, are more likely to come back to your store and make a purchase that is significantly more valuable than if they stumbled across your shop through social media or search engines. You could do it with our email marketing-made simple guide.

This makes it an incredibly powerful marketing tool for both customer acquisition as well as customer retention. Emails are also a non-intrusive way to communicate and engage with your customers. You get to send messages to their inbox, unlike social media or search engines, which rely on algorithms and user behaviour.

Acquisition Channel #4: Hyper-Personalisation

Predictive personalisation software (where an algorithm watches all the buying habits and impressions made for each consumer individually), using predictive analytics technologies to identify consumer’s future behaviour, then ranks every SKU by the greatest likelihood that “that individual consumer” will purchase from all the SKUs you have listed, in order of greatest likely buying propensity.

In other words, the ones they love best. CLV soars and RoR is all but eliminated. We know segmentation is not personalisation.

We have put together an explanation of the distinctions between the leading 30 hyper-personalisation vendors here.

Acquisition Channel #5: Referral Programs

Over 90 % of customers trust word-of-mouth recommendations. Not only that, but we also found that consumers are up to 50 times more likely to buy a company’s products if it’s recommended by close friends, family, or influencers.

Referral programs help drive many new customers to the site and a product page, getting them one step closer to becoming paying customers.

A simple referral program that rewards both the referrer as well as the purchaser can bring in a lot of extra traffic and buyers who may not have considered your eCommerce business beforehand.

Using referrals as a customer acquisition channel puts the work of bringing in new customers on your existing customers, allowing you to invest your time and money in other potential acquisition channels.

Final Thoughts

Creating a customer acquisition process involves having a strong inbound marketing strategy that involves content creation, targeted ads, live chat, and plenty of A/B testing.

But many of these things are already automated in helpful tools and apps that you can easily install in your online store.

If you’re not sure how you should start with your marketing efforts, identify your target audience, and find out how they like to engage with brands. Once you understand how to acquire customers, then it’ll be a lot easier to choose a tool that will help move them along your sales cycle.