One of the main concerns for any eCommerce business is acquiring new customers. When it comes to marketing to customers your plan should be two-fold focusing on both acquisition and retention. Having a plan for both is equally important, as you need to consistently bring on new customers and then put efforts in to maintain those customers.

While the cost of retaining existing customers is far less than acquiring new ones, it’s still important to focus your efforts on customer acquisition as well. Due to the fact that the cost of customer acquisition is estimated to have gone up in recent years, you want to make sure that your efforts are fine-tuned so they don’t waste your business’ valuable resources.

In this blog, we’ll discuss some great tips for acquiring new customers and turn them into long-time customers.

1. Ensure Your Strategy is Sustainable

A sustaining acquisition strategy is one that will work long-term. When developing your strategy you need to not only consider whether you have the funds to maintain it, but also the internal resources. For example, deciding you want to create social media accounts for your brand is a great strategy for acquiring new customers, however if you don’t have the dedicated time or staff to maintain and manage those accounts, your social media accounts can adversely impact your company. If you’re unsure, it’s always a good idea to start on a smaller scale and build up over time.

In this example, instead of creating an Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, choose one platform to start, get comfortable managing the account, and add other social accounts down the road when you’re either more confident in your ability to maintain the account or you’ve grown your business enough to hire staff to manage these accounts.

2. Set Clear Goals

Setting clear goals is a vital component of any marketing strategy. A lot of people think the best approach is to decide on a marketing tactic and plan out your strategy according to your approach. In reality, the strongest marketing campaigns are developed backwards. Start by identifying your goals — in this case acquiring new customers — and then look at various strategies that will help you meet that goal.

When creating customer acquisition goals you should set measurable goals by looking at your existing customer data and identifying your audience. Once you’ve done this you can develop a plan to target these potential customers at the most effective touchpoints.

3. Use an Omnichannel Approach

There are various touchpoints customers may be engaging with your brand. For example, they may be searching on Google, seeing your posts on Facebook, or clicking on your weekly email. When developing your customer acquisition strategy it’s important that you focus on meeting your target customers where they are so you can get the greatest impact out of your strategy. You also want to ensure you’re providing a high-quality customer experience across each channel.

Re:amaze can assist businesses to simplify their omnichannel approach using Re:amaze Inbox. This is a shared inbox that can be used by your entire team to manage customer conversations via multiple channels including email, social media accounts, Facebook Messenger, and even text messages.

4. Create Engaging Content

Content is still king, which applies to your website, blog, and social accounts. With so many brands to choose from, customers don’t want to be sold to, they want to find a brand that they love and trust. To do this, you need to connect with them on an emotional level by creating visually appealing, high-quality content.

Adding a blog to your website is a great tool for creating engaging content. It allows you to discuss topics related to your products or services and build authority and trust with your customers. Just be sure not to make them too “salesy”. Rather you want to create blogs that contain helpful information that customers will come to depend on.

5. Reward Loyalty

As we mentioned previously customer acquisition and customer retention should go hand in hand. Once you’ve acquired a new customer, you want to take steps to retain them as well. One of the best ways to do this is by rewarding customer loyalty.

Create ways for customers to earn rewards for purchases which in turn will incentivize them to purchase more from your business. You can also implement referral discount codes that will encourage your existing customers to share a discount code with a new customer so they both get a discount. Rewarding loyalty is great for encouraging new customers to shop with your brand because they know before their first purchase there is an opportunity to save on future purchases.

6. Identify Your Target Customer

While we touched on this point above, it’s worth mentioning again on its own. Identifying your target customer or audience is vital to ensuring any marketing strategy you put in place is effective. Without this information, you’re essentially taking a shot in the dark and hoping your efforts land with potential customers and wasting resources. Identify your customer profile using demographic and behavioral data to target similar audiences in all of your marketing efforts.

Take advantage of all the data you have available to you from your website, social media accounts, and your own internal customer data. Understand not only who your customers are, but where they are. Without this data, you may be targeting the wrong demographic entirely.