Digital customer acquisition best practices

Digital customer acquisition is essential for any online business to survive. Without a physical shopfront to lure in paying customers, you need to employ other tactics to attract the right leads to your company online.

An effective customer conversion strategy is measurable and can be repeated. It attracts leads, looks after them until they are ready to purchase, and converts them into customers.

With so much competition in online, you cannot sit and wait for customers to come to you. Instead, you need to find a way to attract customers to your business repeatedly.

In this article, I will go through the best practices in digital customer acquisition to result in online sales for your online business.

Always know the cost of digital customer acquisition for your business.

Digital customer acquisition cost is critical to an effective strategy.

Calculating your customer acquisition cost (CAC) will let you know if your efforts to attract new customers are working. This is the cost of marketing divided by the number of new customers acquired.

If your marketing spend is $500, and you bring in 50 new customers monthly, your CAC would be $10. This helps businesses to determine if their approach is profitable. If each customer spends $50 and your gross margin on each is 50%, your profit would be $15 per order.

Average order value x gross margin – CAC = profit.

With that in mind, how do you go about acquiring customers online?

Create Buyer Personas

To successfully attract new customers to your website, you need to know who you are targeting and why. This is why creating a research-based buyer persona from real customer data of someone who represents your target audience is important.

Data you should look at when looking to bolster your digital customer acquisition efforts include market research, surveys with existing customers, Google Analytics, social media analytics, and trends.

A detailed buyer persona allows you to tailor your content and marketing strategies and better understand your customer’s needs. These potential customers are more likely to convert into paying ones and get the most out of using your products.

A buyer persona should include:

  • Basic demographics
  • Buyer needs
  • Buyer goals from buying your product
  • Buyer pain points stopping them from buying your product
  • What triggers a purchase

You should aim to build a few different personas to cover the different aspects of your audience. By focusing on a specific type of customer, you will stand a greater chance of converting leads into sales.

Improve your digital customer acquisition by using the right channels, at the right time.

When you have identified your buyer personas, you need to contact your customers through the right channels. That means going to where they are instead of waiting for the customer to stumble across your website. Here are some important ways of reaching out to potential customers that will convert.

Email Marketing

Emails are powerful for digital customer acquisition as you can directly contact your target market through them.

Sending newsletters and promotional emails can pique a potential customer’s interest in your brand, and offering exclusive discounts to tempt them can finally push them over the sales line.

Recommended: Email Marketing 101

Social Media

Posting on relevant social media platforms that your buyer personas use, whether Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok,  is a surefire way to build your audience and brand awareness as you encourage people to like, share, and comment on your content.

Engaging posts will drive traffic to your site and result in increased sales. Social media giveaways are a great marketing tactic to grow your customer base and attract relevant customers to your brand.

Paid Advertising

You can create pay-per-click (PPC) ads for search engines and social media to boost your digital customer acquisition. You only pay for these adverts when someone clicks on your advert, making it cost-effective and measurable.

Ads on search engines enable you to appear at the top of search results for the terms you are targeting. Think about the best keyword matches before running your ads, and create a negative keyword list before you run it to avoid wasted budget. Four options affect when your adverts are shown:

  • Exact match – only shown when someone searches the exact term you’re targeting
  • Phrase match – shown if the exact term is searched for with the inclusion of extra words before and after the phrase
  • Broad match – ads are shown if the target is searched for in any order or synonyms are used
  • Modified broad match – if the phrase is shown in any order.

Paid social advertising is another technique that can really ramp up your digital customer acquisition. With these, you can target your audience based on selected demographics, which means that you are more likely to attract leads to your site that will convert into paying customers.

Organic Search

Most online transactions start with a Google search. For this reason, it is important to have content on your website that helps your store to rank highly on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Investing in search engine optimization (SEO) and doing valuable keyword research based on search intent will help you to devise a content strategy for your site that will help you get to the top of Google’s rankings and convert organic traffic into customers.

Unlike paid search, which provides almost instant results, organic search requires patience and continued commitment to reach the top spots. However, when this converts into sales, it is well worth the effort. 

Related: 5 Best Keyword Research Tools

Customers Relationships

Nurturing your relationships with existing customers can be a great way to attract new ones.

Offering refer-a-friend programs and encouraging your customers to share content about your store online is a great way to attract new digital customers. This is actually the very strategy that DropBox used when they were starting out, and with great success!

Any time you can give your customers something for free that helps improve their lives in some capacity, you will earn their trust. This can be done a few different ways:

  • Give them a free report download
  • Produce a podcast interviewing experts
  • Write helpful blog posts (like this one!) to give them tips

The goal is to give away your best content. This will build trust the quickest and help you to foster a relationship with prospective customers.

Just be human and your digital customer acquisition will improve.

In the online world, it is easy for customers to ignore you or hesitate before making a purchase. This is known as the consideration phase, an important time for you to build a relationship with your potential new customer.

You need to create a personalized experience that makes your customer feel valued, but that is just one of many conversion optimization tips that you should use.

Another is by offering discounts to new website visitors or subscribers who haven’t made a purchase, or sending deals to those who have abandoned their shopping carts before checkout. This added touch shows customers that you care about them and noticed their visit to your website.

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Justin Ferriman
Justin Ferriman
Justin is the founder of GapScout, the easiest way for solopreneurs and small businesses to find profitable gaps in their market. Follow Justin on Twitter→

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