In the race to be the best, it is important to have the support of customers. Here’s how to get it right.

Important Tips to Help You Find and Keep the Best Customers

For any business, whether big or small, customer acquisition is the foundation of the building. If your business does not have customers, there is a strong possibility that the survival of your business will be threatened.

Michael Dell, founder of the computer company that carries his name, once remarked that, “It’s customers that made Dell great in the first place, and if we’re smart enough and quick enough to listen to customer needs, we’ll succeed.”

As a business, one of the universal main motives is to produce a product or offer a service that turns a profit. Higher profits are a direct outcome of lower costs. Customer acquisition costs are the highest and most recurring expenses that a company incurs.

First, a company spends money to acquire, direct, and subsequently, convert customers. Then, the company incurs retention as well as further acquisition costs to maintain each customer. As a marketer, a key objective is to implement methods that reduce customer acquisition costs. This can be done by formulating a proper and systematic customer acquisition strategy.

Here are a few tactics to consider:

1. Engagement through emails

Most companies maintain and update an email database of current and prospective customers. While many argue that emails are increasingly becoming obsolete, email marketing remains one of the easiest and most effective ways to market to customers. An effective way to ensure a healthy response and ROI on your email campaigns is to increase the engagement rate.

First, send out a promotional email to your customer database. Then, after 2 days, visit the email automation software and check the open rate and click-through rate. Most of these platforms also provide a list of email addresses that have yet to open your original email. Resend the email to these contacts using a different, more enticing subject line. Keep repeating the process with new emails, and soon, you will notice a significant return on your efforts.

2. Offers and availability

The channel of distribution you use for product or service offerings should be both effective and engaging. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban of ABC’s “Shark Tank” once advised, “Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.” Follow a solid distribution channel to acquire and sustain more customers.

3. Niche marketing

Target markets can easily be segmented into many verticals based on various attributes including geographical location, age group, gender, and job role. Conduct a detailed segmentation procedure for your target market. Every segment you classify will become a vertical. Marketing for every vertical using different strategies is known as niche marketing. This is the most conventional and highly effective technique for customer acquisition.

As Rod Nichols said, “If you deal with every customer in the same way, you will only close 25 to 30 percent of your contacts, because you will only close one personality type.  But if you learn how to effectively work with all four personality types, you can conceivably close 100 percent of your contacts.”

4. Create a connection

Renowned author Dale Carnegie writes, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.” Align your customer acquisition and marketing strategies with a social purpose. The more people relate with your mission, the more they will want to associate with your company.

5. Keep reviewing your customer acquisition strategies and efforts

Bill Gates once said, “In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance…you thrive on that.”

If you do not continuously check and revisit your customer acquisition strategies, you will most likely not be able to understand what works best and what does not work at all – both of which are keys to the successful acquisition of customers.