One of the most expensive parts of running a startup is actually acquiring your customers. Marketing is expensive, and how much you spend per customer you gain determines your return on investment. While there is no universal and objective measurement for a good customer acquisition cost, you can still take measures to reduce it for your own small business. Here are five ways you can keep customer acquisition costs low:
1. Test Your Advertisements
If you want to keep customer acquisition costs down as an entrepreneur, you need to make sure your advertisements are working. The best way to figure that out is to test your advertisements. Take a look at which of your advertisements are working and which ones are not. See if you can figure out any differences, then using that knowledge, change the underperforming copies. Do that regularly and you should get more out of your marketing investment.
2. Put Emphasis on Customer Retention
Retaining the customers you get out of your customer acquisition campaign is the best way to increase your return on investment. The good news is there is much you can do to retain the customers you gain. What methods apply to your exact situation will come down to data. Take a look at customers who do not convert. Are you generating the wrong kinds of leads? Do they bounce off your business website? Do they leave their carts at checkout? Knowing the answers to those questions and more will help you figure out how to keep them in your grasp.
3. Use Retargeting Campaigns
No matter how accurate your campaigns are, you will lose some of your customers, for whatever reason. Fortunately, that does not mean they are a lost cause. Retargeting campaigns are attempts to recapture any lost leads by reminding them of what got them to your site in the first place. For example, you could have a system set up that automatically reminds customers of their abandoned carts, which can prompt them to complete their purchase. The point is you got their interest once. Retargeting simply gives them one last push.
4. Test Landing Pages
One of the greatest barriers to converting the customers you attract is simply keeping them from bouncing off your website. Even an interested customer can click off your website if the page their first see is not to their liking or interest. That’s why it is critical to test your landing pages. In general, two to four weeks of A/B testing will give you enough results to improve your website. Run it longer if you find the amount of data lacking.
5. Automate Your Campaign
There are many ways to make your campaign more efficient, and one of the best ways to do so is by automating what you can. Content should always be left to real creators and not algorithms. However, the same cannot be said of scheduling posts, uploading them, and other logistical tasks. Automating those tasks can greatly streamline your process, lowering costs and increasing your startup’s overall return of investment in your campaigns, reducing customer acquisition costs as a result.
Reducing costs where you can is critical to being a successful entrepreneur. However, the real trick is doing so without crippling your operations or reducing the quality of your offering. Since your startup will want to acquire customers throughout the majority of its existence, it is in your best interests to figure out how to get those customers without breaking the bank.
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