The customer acquisition process is the foremost business activity that drives brand growth. While its primary objective is to augment sales, it also sets up a cyclic process of building brand presence and further strengthening the customer base.
A sustained customer acquisition effort in the right direction ensures a favorable flow of these cyclic events. This makes it critical to marketing success, and the tools that aid in customer acquisition, an imperative to business planning. In fact, a marketing strategy that pivots on suitable customer acquisition marketing tools stands to build sustainable growth for the business.
Customer acquisition tools are the software that provides actionable data and insights, facilitates interaction with customers to augment customer experience, and builds valuable customer relationships.
Read this article to find out the best customer acquisition channels, best practices to measure customer metrics, and top 10 software that will help you achieve results in acquiring customers for your business
What is customer acquisition?
Customer Acquisition is a process that helps you acquire new customers for your business with the help of marketing and support strategies. So, sustainable business practices that bring about positive results should be the focal point of your plan. Moreover, It is imperative to have a defined marketing strategy to drive the company’s growth by increasing sales conversion via defined channels.
A new customer acquisition strategy is unique to a business, curated specifically by judging the industry and the target market. An appropriate strategy will help the business cost-effectively acquire customers. Online businesses which are selling less established brands on their platform need to invest more in custom acquisition than customer retention.
Technology plays a crucial role in customer acquisition, leveraging innovations to reach out to customers, interact with them and create opportunities for gaining new customers.
Which Acquisition Channels to Use & How to Get New Customers Onboard?
A customer acquisition channel is a medium that allows interaction with the customer. By analyzing all customer touchpoints, appropriate channels can be devised.
Identifying appropriate channels for your business that can bring better results, giving direction to your customer acquisition strategy. Moreover, you will derive better value from the costs entailed.
Data available can be examined to determine channels that can produce real-world results. Accordingly, the best channels can be selected for sustainable growth of the business and can be incorporated using custom eCommerce development services.
The more popular customer acquisition channels are as follows
Social media marketing: Popular social media channels present enormous opportunities with the vast community they have as a regular audience. Presenting your brand in front of them can get substantial brand awareness.
Email Marketing: A well-targeted email marketing campaign can help you reach out to customers. The internet connects the world sans any boundaries. Innovatively curated email content that aptly reflects your brand ethos and instigates leads is a tried and trusted form of marketing.
Live Chat: Around 41% of customers choose live chat to communicate with the business, making it an important tool to reach your target audience.
Affiliate marketing: Partnering with businesses, independent websites, social media influencers, and others who have an audience that you aim to target can reap in benefits, and give your brand the necessary impetus.
Paid search: Search advertising (PPC) and display advertising are two popular ways to attract customers. Google and Microsoft's bing run an advertising channel that can be utilized.
How to measure customer acquisition success?
Quantifying the results achieved by your customer acquisition campaign is paramount to drive the analysis that will help ascertain the pragmatism in applied marketing strategies and will help you devise the future course of action.
Customer Acquisition Cost CAC, Customer Lifetime Value CLV are popular metrics that will help measure the value addition of customer acquisition strategies. The data acquired from these metrics can be useful for the companies themselves as well as their investors. Let’s discuss these metrics in a little more detail
CAC: This metric is calculated by dividing the resources spent by a company in a specified period and the total number of customers acquired during that period.
CAC =Amount spent on marketing activities
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Number of customers acquired
This metric can establish the cost of acquiring a new customer for a business. With this information, the business can measure the performance of the marketing strategies currently utilized by the company.
CLV: This metric is used to calculate the value a customer brings to a business. It is calculated by multiplying the average total sale of the order with the number of sales over time and the average retention time.
CLV = Average Total Sale X Number of Sales over time X Average Retention time
By measuring the value a customer brings to and comparing it with the cost of acquiring new customers you can gain valuable insights into your business strategies.
How to lower customer acquisition costs?
CAC is the sales and marketing costs associated with the customer acquisition process. Analyzing and lowering these costs is essential to drive more value out of marketing effort and reduce overheads.
Enlisted below are five strategic ways that will help lower acquisition costs
1. Focus on the target audience
A marketing effort focused on the target audience your product or service is ideally suited for will bring in more value. Sales channels that precisely target these audiences should be prioritized
2. Retarget
It makes great sense to pay attention to customers who have visited the site. They are an important part of the sales funnel. Retargeting is paying attention to these customers. This channel is significant, important, and cheaper to run.
Moreover, in the case of dissatisfied customers, this channel can reduce instances of negative reviews and ratings on the internet.
3. Marketing automation
Marketing automation software boosts lead generation, reporting and analysis, email targeting, and more. The scale at which eCommerce operates effectively rules out manual tasks, making automation imperative. Tools such as email drip can produce great results.
4. Partner Collaborations
Social media influencers, websites of authority, established publications, and others present, an audience that trusts the channel. Collaborating with such partners can be very productive and fast-track customer acquisition.
5. A/B Test of landing pages
A process to test two versions of your landing page concerning CTAs, forms, buttons, layout, and more, with the help of data gathered from analytics tools such as Google Analytics, A/B testing lets you identify the combination that drives maximum sales for your business.
Having understood the value of customer acquisition and the various nuances attached with it, let us have a look at the 10 best customer acquisition tools.
Top 10 customer acquisition tools you can use to increase your sales
1. Proprofs Chat
ProProfs Chat is a top online chat software. It is the best way to positively engage with direct traffic on your website, providing faster resolution to queries, and ultimately creating opportunities for higher sales conversions.
The software can reduce tickets with 24*7 support, and enhance the knowledge base of the customer resulting in lead generation. Additionally, valuable customer feedback can be obtained to drive crucial business decisions.
Key features
Branding Customizations.
Third-Party Integrations.
Keeps track of website visitors.
Pros:
Delivers measurable results.
Support for mobile phones.
Rich featured and intuitive to use.
Cons:
Owing to high demand, the time with which you get up and running with your software might be a little slow.
Pricing structure
ProProf Chat’s pricing is as follows:
ProProfs Chat pricing starts at $80 for the essentials version, $160 for the premium version and there is an enterprise version, the price of which depends upon the features opted for.
2. Qualaroo
Get real-time responses from your customers with well-timed surveys directed to generate actionable insights with Qualaroo. You can customize the surveys to appear at specific instances to target select customers performing certain actions that can generate data of value for your business.
Understand customers based on specific actions, behavioral patterns, events, locations, browser cookies, or data streamed from applications.
Your customer acquisition effort can benefit significantly from feedback received directly from the customer.
Key features
Data Analysis Tools.
Third-Party Integrations.
Reporting & Analytics.
Pros:
Includes a popup tool called Nudge, which assists in A/B testing.
Cons:
Owing to high demand, it might take time for you to get Qualaroo for your website.
Pricing structure
Qualaroo pricing is as follows:
Starts at $80 for the essentials version, $160 for the premium version and there is an enterprise version, the price of which depends upon the customizations opted for and is available on request.
3. Outgrow
Outgrow is a tool that lets a business create interactive quizzes and calculators to keep the website visitors engaged. Interactive content leads to user engagement, perpetuates better opt-in rates for email subscriptions, and eventually facilitates building a database of leads for your business.
Key features
Contemporary features to facilitate ease of content marketing.
Leads management.
Data analysis tools.
Pros:
Outgrow offers enhanced ease of use.
Multiple options for integrations.
Excellent customer service.
Cons:
Getting all features can get a little expensive.
Pricing structure.
Outgrow’s pricing is as follows: (All plans are billed annually)
Freelancer: $25/month; Essential: $95/month; Business: $600/month; and there are Enterprise and Agency versions, the prices for these depend upon the customizations opted for and are available on request.
4. ConvertKit
Convertkit is an affordable creator email marketing platform that helps a business to grow its audience by interacting with them via interactive emails.
ConvertKit can be used to create sign-up forms for your website, create email lists, send personalized emails, and more. Tasks can be automated to function round the clock.
Key features
Building emails with the option to personalize them.
Leads management. Data analysis tools
Pros:
Landing page analysis reporting
Customizable
Nifty features to manage your contacts.
Cons:
Pricey and learning to use it takes a little time.
Pricing structure
ConvertKit pricing is as follows:
The pricing depends upon the number of email subscribers. There is a free version, creator for $29/month, and creator pro for $59/month. All listed prices are for the first 1000 subscribers.
5. ProProfs Project
ProProfs Project is a project management software with an intuitive dashboard that will help manage and keep a track of the success of the business.
It helps to work collaboratively with the team with sync calendar and discuss important project matters thereby, planning tasks more accurately and meeting deadlines faster, delivering efficient results for complete customer satisfaction
Key Features
Tools to facilitate collaboration.
Expense tracking features.
Tasks and resources management
Pros:
Ability to view in 一 Gantt Charts, Kanban Board, Calendar View, and more.
Ease of use.
A single dashboard view to manage all functionalities.
Cons:
Task prioritization is missing.
Pricing structure.
ProProf Project pricing is as follows:
The pricing depends upon the number of email subscribers. There are 2 models 一 Essentials for $2/user/month and Premium for $4/user/month.
6. Unbounce
Unbounce is a powerful AI copywriting platform that helps create beautiful landing pages to enhance customer engagement and ultimately lead to higher conversion rates.
Landing pages are at the forefront of a website giving the first impression to the users that will, in turn, establish the brand image for the business.
Key features
All elements feature drag and drop builder.
Domain Integration.
Free images accessible inside of Unbounce.
Pros:
Simplicity and efficiency of drag and drop as well as entire page editing.
Speed boost Customizable
Cons:
UI/UX could be better.
Pricing structure
Unbounce Pricing is as follows:’
Unbounce is available in multiple pricing models 一 Launch: $72/month; Optimize: $108/month; Accelerate $180/month; Scale $270; and Concierge $270+
7. Buffer
Buffer is a social media tool that is an intuitive and affordable way to reach more people via popular social media platforms. It comes with Analytics that will help to analyze the performance of the social media strategy of a company.
The software is affordable, easy to use, and enhances collaboration. Moreover, it will let you react faster to social media posts, enhancing interaction with the target customers, building on customer engagement, and ultimately helping with customer acquisition.
Key features
Custom scheduling per platform and per profile.
Analytics and reporting
Native support for videos and animated Gifs.
Pros:
Nifty social media tools such as scheduled sharing
Integrations with third-party apps
Customizable
Cons:
Limitations to integrations with some social media channels.
Pricing structure
Buffer Pricing is as follows:
Buffer is available in two pricing models 一 Free: $0/month with the capping of 3 social media channels and Essentials: $5/social channel/month. The price of these plans is dependent on the number of social channels chosen.
8. Hunter.io
Hunter.io is a nifty tool that will help in finding professional emails and verifying existing ones, thus enabling a business to generate valuable data that can be used to identify and connect with target customer profiles.
Key features
Contact, Company, Industry data availability
Data segmentation
Integration possibilities with CRM
Pros:
Hunter. io returns a high quantity of data.
Beautiful UI/UX Affordable
Cons:
The search is limited to websites and domains and is dependent on an accurate search string.
Pricing structure
Hunter io Pricing is as follows:
Hunter.io is available in multiple pricing models 一 Free: $0/month; Starter: $49/month; Growth: $99/month; Pro: $199; and Enterprise: $399/month
9. ReferralCandy
ReferralCandy helps a business to run a successful referral program that is one of the best ways of building customer loyalty and at the same time spreading the word about the business.
Instant payouts, enhanced ROI with emails, and actionable analytics all help with customer retention and acquisition.
Key features
Seamless Contact and Campaign Management.
Tracking of Referrals.
Rewards Programme.
Pros:
Customizable.
Intuitive.
Good Customer Service.
Cons:
Limitations to integrations with some social media channels.
Pricing structure.
ReferralCandy Pricing is as follows:
ReferralCandy is available in two pricing models 一 Premium: $49/month + commissions and Enterprise: $3999/month (Billed Annually).
10. Trustpulse
TrustPulse is a marketing platform that automates notifications to provide the customer with social proof that engages your audience and enhances customer trust leading to higher conversions.
Customer trust is the foremost differentiating factor in eCommerce and social proof will help a business in establishing brand value.
Key features
Run a live-stream video in real-time to garner customer interest
Actionable analytics
Ability to display social proof to augment conversions
Pros:
Flexible design options.
Easy to set up
Works with all popular eCommerce platforms
Cons:
The search is limited to websites and domains and is dependent on the accurate search string.
Pricing Structure.
Trustpulse Pricing is as follows:
Trustpulse is available in multiple pricing models 一 Basic: $5/month; Plus: $10/month; Pro: $19/month; Growth: $39; and Enterprise: $399/month
Fuel Business Growth with Customer Acquisition Tools
Customer Acquisition Tools help identify and engage with the target audience and provide actionable insights & data.
Moreover, they leverage the use of social media communities to build a brand image that can give a business the necessary impetus to stand out from the competition and also boost its customer base.
For best results, ensuring seamless integration of software with the eCommerce platform is imperative. This makes it essential to utilize custom eCommerce development services from a top software development company with proven eCommerce expertise.