To drive growth, customer acquisition must support the entire customer journey.
If you’ve been a marketer or sales professional for some time, you know lead generation is only half of the customer acquisition battle. Leads need to be qualified and then nurtured to convert, and you might not have the staff, budget, or tech to nurture every lead.
Through a well-developed customer acquisition model, you can better prioritize what happens once a lead is generated. Our tips to develop a customer acquisition model that drives growth draw from recent Capterra surveys and insights from Gartner research, so you can feel confident using them to build your own customer acquisition model.
What is a customer acquisition model?
A customer acquisition model (CAM) tracks everything you do to acquire new customers, from generating leads to closing your first sale. This way, you can determine which strategies are and aren’t a good fit. Whether you’re focusing on content marketing, hosting giveaways, or bringing in new customers through social media, your CAM gives you and your team a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not worth the cost.
Tip #1: Identify the best channels to reach your target audience
One of the best ways to prime your CAM for success is to identify the best channels to reach your target audience. In fact, brand messages that appear on the “wrong” channels can be off-putting to a potential customer, according to Gartner[1]. This is because prospective customers often expect less-intrusive messaging from brands they haven’t yet purchased from.
How do you determine the best channels to reach your customer base? Start with demographics—in particular, their age. The table below displays how differently-aged respondents from Gartner’s 2022 Cultural Attitudes and Behaviors Survey[1] ranked their top three preferred messaging channels.
Generation | First preferred channel | Second preferred channel | Third preferred channel |
|---|---|---|---|
Gen Z | Website | Social media | |
Millennials | Website | Social media | |
Gen X | Website | Direct mail | |
Boomers | Website | Direct mail |
Note: Respondents had a "none of these" option; those responses were excluded from this table for clarity.
With these survey results in mind, here are some best practices to increase the chances of your brand’s messaging landing favorably with a prospect:
Enhance customer experience on your website. According to the survey results, brand websites are the most preferred channel for prospects across generations. This is because they feel more in control when they choose to visit your brand’s digital home as opposed to receiving messages elsewhere. Website optimization tools can help you out here.
Invest in email and mobile apps to capture a range of customers. Digital marketing leaders are paying more attention to digital channels in their customer acquisition strategy because that’s where many consumers finally convert. Younger cohorts, in particular, show a stronger preference for receiving messaging from a mobile app.
Avoid direct mail. In Gartner’s 2020 Consumer Brand Engagement and Sentiment Survey[1], direct mail emerged as a surprisingly favored marketing channel. In 2022, however, direct mail fell by several ranks for each generational cohort and ranked in the top three preferred channels for only boomers.
Log on to TikTok. According to Capterra’s 2022 TikTok Marketing Survey*, well over half of small retailers and restaurants that market themselves on TikTok say their organic and advertising content on TikTok is extremely valuable to their overall marketing performance, and 78% say they’ve realized a positive ROI with TikTok ads. This is, of course, a more viable option if your target audience is mainly Gen Z and millennials.
A customer data platform collects and organizes customer data from sources such as web forms, email, and social media. It helps you better understand your audience through first-party data and unifies cross-channel customer acquisition efforts by consolidating data from various sources. It also offers customer segmentation, which divides your contacts into various groups based on attributes such as age and interests. Here are vendors that offer free trials.
Tip #2: Track the right customer acquisition metrics
It’s difficult to know how your new customer acquisition strategy is performing without tracking the right metrics. But different organizations use different benchmarks to track performance. For example, B2B marketers are more concerned with marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads, while B2C companies may prioritize reach, engagement, and purchase metrics such as conversion or cart abandonment.
Whatever metrics you decide to track, make sure they specifically provide insight into the number of new customers you've acquired as well as what you’re spending to acquire each new customer. A few that we recommend include customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, lead conversion rate, and customer churn rate.
Customer acquisition cost
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the average sales and marketing expenses required to achieve a first sale with customers. To calculate CAC, take the amount you spent on marketing and sales, and divide it by the number of new customers you acquired.
You can also use our free downloadable CAC calculator.
Customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the average revenue brought in by a customer relationship over its lifetime. A client who makes multiple purchases from your business over their customer lifespan will have a higher CLV than a one-time customer.
To calculate CLV, multiply your average sales per customer by the average number of times a customer buys something per year by the average lifetime of your customers.
Lead conversion rate
Lead conversion rate (LCR) is the percentage of leads that are converting into customers. It helps you understand how your sales funnel is performing and which marketing campaign is resulting in the most qualified leads. This helps you decide which customer acquisition efforts to prioritize and which to rethink to boost conversion rates in the future.
To calculate LCR, take the number of leads converted within a certain time frame, divide it by the number of leads generated in that time frame, and then multiply by 100. FYI: If you’ve purchased a Google ad, Google Analytics offers free conversion rate tracking[2].
Customer churn rate
Customer churn rate (CCR) is the percentage of customers lost within a given time frame. We recommend tracking this metric because the more customers you lose, the more you'll have to spend to acquire new ones. To calculate CCR, take the number of customers you’ve lost within a given time frame, divide it by the number of customers you had at the start of that time frame, and multiply by 100.
To gauge whether your scores are where they should be, measure CAC and CLV in tandem to get your CLV-to-CAC ratio. A ratio of 3:1 means your business is making three times the amount you pay to acquire customers and is a healthy score to aim for.
As for LCR and CCR, these vary by industry. The global average conversion rate for eCommerce websites, for example, is around 4.31%, and in the U.S., it’s close to 2.63%[3]. And for CCR, around 50% is average for retail, according to our 2022 Holiday Retail Preparation Survey**. Travel and hospitality is around 45%, while media and professional services is 16%[4].
Tip #3: Optimize your nurture journey by investing in tech
Our third and final tip is to optimize your nurture journey by investing in the right technology. As we mentioned earlier, it’s not enough to simply generate leads. Successful lead nurturing requires more than what your sales team can do on its own.
Here’s where the right tech stack can do wonders for your customer acquisition model. We’ll drop a few of our recommended software categories as well as features to look out for.
Lead management software
Lead management software helps capture and track sales leads throughout the sales lifecycle. It automatically adds leads to the sales funnel and lets you monitor and track them until they’re successfully converted or dropped. These tools offer a centralized platform to manage lead details, score and segment leads, analyze and report performance, and record communication between leads and your team.
Lead nurturing software
Lead nurturing software, a subset of lead management software, has many similar features and functionality. However, lead nurturing software is designed specifically for building a relationship with leads through every stage of the sales funnel.
Details of deals in lead nurturing platform Pipedrive
These tools allow sales and marketing professionals like you to set up a series of trigger-based communication modes via email, SMS, social media, or call reminders throughout a buyer’s journey. They also help score and filter leads as well as access a lead’s response to your sales and marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation software
Marketing automation software already makes the lead generation process more efficient by integrating with your CRM. But we especially recommend marketing automation tools that offer lead nurturing as a feature. These platforms allow you to engage with leads throughout the sales process by providing relevant information at each stage of the buying cycle.
Because we’re focusing on turning already captured leads into customers, we recommend lead nurturing software to help develop your customer acquisition model. But since lead generation and lead nurturing software are correlated, you may want to consider investing in either one tool that offers both features or two different tools, one from each category.
Next steps to maintain your customer acquisition model
Knowing the right channels to reach your leads, the right metrics to track your performance, and the right tech tools to do all of the above will keep you firmly in the driver’s seat of a customer acquisition model that grows your business.
But there are a few more things to keep in mind to maintain your customer acquisition model:
If you’re not meeting the benchmarks you set for your customer acquisition model, either adjust your goals or redefine your model.
Reevaluate your customer acquisition model on a regular basis—at least every six months. Leads don’t always act in ways we expect them to, and it’s important to reassess your model in case their preferences change.
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