9 Customer Acquisition Strategies Your Boss Wishes You Knew!

Even the people who were born to work in sales fail to close deals sometimes.

If you’re a sales representative, you probably struggle with dealing with different kinds of mindsets every day. Some prospects are cautious, some are confused and some even skeptical!

However, a good sales rep knows how to make a customer fall in love with his product or service. The goal is not just to acquire, but to retain customers for a long time.

In fact, it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than retaining an existing one.

So, if you want to generate valuable returns in your company, reduce its acquisition costs, and bring in more customers, you need to revisit some of the customer acquisition strategies.

We’re talking about the marketing strategies you are already using – SEO, mailing, social media, and more.

So, what is it that you’re missing out on? Or maybe there’s something that can be done in a better way? What are the big sharks doing to gain millions of customers?

In this article, we will enlist some unique strategies that you can use to outperform your competitors and gain customer loyalty!

Ready to get some customers? Let’s go.

1. Make One Customer Loyal to Gain Ten!

Many companies focus on bringing in large amounts of customers.

“The goal is to acquire 20% more customers in January” “

Track the number of customers that increased in the last quarter”

You must have heard these lines a lot! This is where you can differentiate yourself from others.

Focus on bringing one loyal customer to your business. When he/she is satisfied with your service, they will refer you to their friends and family who will again refer you to their friends.

This way, gaining one loyal customer can make you ten, or even a hundred, who knows?

This is the power of Word Of Mouth Marketing or WOM. In fact, 84% of people trust recommendations from their loved ones than any other form of advertising.

Moreover, a customer you acquire from WOM has 16-15% higher Lifetime Value (LTV) than other customer acquisition channels.

In this world of click baits, WOM stands as a classic way to acquire more customers and gain brand awareness.

2. Follow the Textbook Customer Acquisition Process

When people start working in a field for a long time, they forget the basics of it.

A literature professional does not forget the alphabet, so why should a sales rep not follow the set process of customer acquisition?

But, according to a marketing report, only 2 out of 5 companies apply the customer journey map in their acquisition strategy!

Probably because drafting a customer acquisition process that is both comprehendible and efficient is a tedious task. From target market research to sales pitches and training material, there are just too many documents to create and organize.

Fortunately, Bit.ai speeds up this entire documentation process and makes things a walk in the park for you. Bit helps you create, collaborate, share, and manage not just your customer acquisition documents, but all company knowledge in one place.

Using Bit, you can document your entire customer acquisition process with rich media, images, PDFs, excel files, and basically anything that you need to get your team on board with all things sales.

All in all, Bit turns your text-heavy, unorganized customer acquisition process documents into accessible, understandable, and engaging documents that are a downright joy to read.

Yes, every customer demands a unique approach to close the deal. But, following an organized set of steps will not directly land you more clients, it will show you the way how to.

If you do it any other way or miss out on a step, the desired results would be affected. This is because each step of the process brings your prospect one step closer to becoming a customer.

Here are the four golden steps of acquiring new customers and the level of conversion with each step:

Identify potential clients: Prospects are converted to potential clients by identifying the target audience.
Research and qualify: Potential clients are converted to leads by qualifying interested and genuine people.
Build a relationship: Building a relationship and trust takes place in this step. If all goes well, the lead becomes a customer.
Give value: Last but not least, make that customer stay. Give value and satisfaction.

3. Retarget your Audience Using Paid Acquisition Strategies

Most companies track their churn rate but fail to do anything about it. It means a particular customer stopped using your services after a while and you never questioned why or tried to win them again.

Retargeting previous customers, reminding them of their interest in your product, and staying in touch gives you a high chance of bringing them back as a customer again.

This can be done efficiently using paid acquisition strategies. They include ads, inorganic SEO practices, and using premium tools to capture clients.

A popular customer analytics tool, Segment used this approach and increased their conversion rate significantly.

4. Build a Strong Blog

No matter what product or service you’re selling, creating a powerful blog with SEO-optimized content will surely help you gain more leads.

Content marketing is not a new acquisition strategy. However, it is rarely used to the best of its potential.

Zapier, a platform that connects all your digital tools and creates a single virtual roof, used this strategy to get 6,000,000 readers in just three years from scratch!

Zapier wrote informative blogs and how-to guides for every application it connects. For instance “How to generates charts and reports in Google sheets?” and “How to connect Asanas projects with Toggl’s time tracker?”

Zapier used content as a main weapon to focus on its target audience and acquire more customers. And guess what? You can too!

Just a tip – create specific content for a narrow audience rather than a generalized one!

5. Remember, Customer is King!

Yes, ethically we know that the customer is king, and demands and expectations must be met.

However, did you know that every lost customer relationship costs you an average of $289 per year?

Now that’s a motivating statistic!

Provide quick, valuable responses, design custom solutions for their unique needs, and always employ customer-centric acquisition strategies.

In a study, it was found that 82% of the customers left a company solely due to bad customer support. What’s worse is that 52% of them tell their friends and family about it and even post on social media.

Thus, don’t forget to give a ton of value to your customers so that they never consider leaving your business. Give offers, discounts, and even goodies once in a while to keep your customer engaged and impressed!

6. Always Collect Feedback

Are you offering what your customers really want? Are they satisfied with your service or they want more?

You’ll never know if you never ask!

Customer preferences change with time and trend. So what they liked 2 years ago, might not be satisfactory to them anymore.

Thus, as a sales rep, you should always keep up with your consumer’s opinions and behavior. The ideal way of doing so is by establishing two-way communication between you and the customer.

Make it a habit to always ask for feedback. If it is positive, then take the appreciation as a reward for your hard work, and if it is negative, take the criticism as motivation to improve!

7. Create a Trackable Support System

Are you still handling customer queries and calls, all by yourself?

It might suffice you in the beginning but is not a sustainable option in the long run. Your goals are bigger than handling customer queries!

If you get stuck with such operational asks, that can easily be delegated, your time and energy will be wasted which otherwise can be employed towards innovation.

Thus, any money you put into offering quality support is an investment for innovation.

An ideal system is one that is in your budget, easy to navigate for your customers, and trackable to measure growth or failures.

8. Learn How to Deal with Distraught Customers

If you’re running a business, you will encounter negative feedbacks and angry customers.

Setting up a plan to deal with such customers is crucial for your brand image and identity.

What will you do if a customer says he’s dissatisfied with your services?

You should prepare a set of actions that you’ll take to make things right. It could be offering a refund, change of product or maybe repairing.

The end result of these steps should be customer satisfaction.

Apart from this, a little empathy and active listening go a long way. Let your customer know that you understand their concern, deeply regret that they had to face such an issue and that you’ll fix it.

Understand, solve and satisfy!

9. Be Transparent With Your Operations

Last but not the least, you should employ the strategy of transparency with your audience.

Now, it does not mean that you have to disclose company matters and insights. Try and maintain a balance between spilling details and hiding the truth!

Companies often employ this strategy to disclose some of their failures. It propagates that everyone goes through rough patches and the company considers its customers worthy of telling this information.

It might get some criticism but mostly, it is followed by customer empathy and support.

Buffer, a popular social media tool posted publicly that their referral traffic had drastically plummeted. This action increased customer trust for the brand and evoked a lot of sympathy and personalization between the company founder and customers.

Before you go!

Our team at bit.ai has created a few awesome customer service templates to make your processes more efficient. Make sure to check them out before you go, your team might need them!