Martech solutions are the best way to deliver exciting customer experiences at scale. Today we’re going to shine a spotlight on customer acquisition technology.
Customer acquisition technology makes it easier to identify, attract, and motivate buyers across all direct and indirect marketing and sales channels. But how does it achieve this? Let’s look at the basics of customer acquisition and how technology creates a stronger foundation for high-level acquisition strategies.
Customer Acquisition Strategy Basics
Define Your Audience
This typically involves diligent research into demographics and the competition so you can create personas to define your audience. From there, you can segment your customers and develop specific tactics for each group.
How customer acquisition technology helps. Customer data comes in from so many sources that it can be hard to track. Martech helps you automate the process and find the data insights you need to create and gradually enrich a single 360 degree view of the customer.
Use the Right Channels
Today there are a lot of channels – from the in-store experience and live events to the digital channels of social, email, and search. And since 74% of customers do online research before visiting a store, brands need an omnichannel strategy to ensure a seamless experience.
Customer acquisition technology unifies omnichannel experiences. Marketing and sales teams often lack a common framework for consistent collaboration. This leads to a disconnect in messaging, which makes your brand inconsistent. Tracking can show where your results truly lie and which areas need support. Just because your company saw a 2% sales uplift during your campaign, doesn't mean every channel is working. To achieve effective omnichannel customer acquisition, you need martech that can manage every channel simultaneously.
Contests & Promotions
Sweepstakes, contests & promotions, and other forms of contest marketing are long-established customer acquisition tactics. They help brands push sales for specific product lines, promote upcoming events, and create excellent brand partnerships. And they can be particularly successful when a purchase is a key component of participation.
Use customer acquisition technology to enable activity at scale. Managing national or even worldwide contests and promotions is all but impossible with just Excel. If you want to engage your customers at scale, you need a solution that connects to every store, every channel, and every customer. This also allows you to unlock valuable insights from all the first- and zero-party data that you’ll capture along the way.
Referrals
Word of mouth is still one of the most powerful marketing tools in our arsenal. Customers referred by a friend are four times more likely to buy than those who come in cold. So, a referral program that rewards customers who spread the word helps you leverage the power of relationships.
Customer acquisition technology makes it easy. Today’s referral programs use tech to track successful referrals and automate rewards. It generates a unique code or link for each referrer that they can use to spread the word. Once a new customer uses the code, the referrer will automatically earn a reward. This level of automation makes it easy for brands and customers to use.
But this article isn’t just about why you need customer acquisition technology. Now we’ve laid down the groundwork, let’s talk about how this tech can boost your customer acquisition strategy.
Successful Customer Acquisition Strategies Are…
Omnichannel
Omnichannel customer acquisition strategies use the benefits of many acquisition channels, increasing the scope and success of generating new customers. Today's customers expect consistent omnichannel experiences, whether they're interacting with you on TikTok, in-store, or online. This tactic requires a balance of risk and reward as well as visibility and the ability to pivot.
Snipp Tip: Don’t neglect the real world. In a recent survey, CPG retail companies said sales from their physical retail stores and sales from their eCommerce website are nearly equal, with physical retail generating 18% of revenue and eCommerce generating 19%. Most customer acquisition tactics focus exclusively on online activities. But truly diverse strategies blend online and offline channels. Test, monitor, iterate or re-orient to optimise your strategy.
Individualized
Personalization through basic demographics isn’t enough anymore. Customers expect brands to know them inside out before they make a purchase. Your customer acquisition strategy needs to capture behavioural, intent, preferential, and purchase data to use it in content within the buyer’s purchase cycle. This demands highspeed capture and content delivery mechanisms that delight the user.
Sustainable
Marketing teams continue to be held to high ROI standards so demonstrating long-term value is key. For example, if you plan to acquire new customers through a gift with purchase sweepstakes, you should have the means to maintain engagement and garner loyalty. You also need solutions such as look-alike modeling, and deep real-time predictive analytics to turn customer data into future success.
Flexible
Successful customer acquisition strategies are flexible because the landscape is always changing. Customers' expectations, competition, economic variations, and new purchase habits are in constant flux. This is where modular customer acquisition technology comes into its own. You can keep control of your costs and your tech stack, safe in the knowledge that you can plug in or unplug a module as circumstances demand.
Targeted
Customer acquisition is wasted if you target the wrong people, which is why defining your ideal buyer is so important. A targeted customer acquisition strategy requires a holistic view and figuring out what’s best for your brand, resources, and audience.
Snipp Tip: Some marketers run into the problem of not analyzing the data to see if their audience has changed.
Level Up Your Customer Acquisition
So, there you have it, everything you need to know about customer acquisition technology and how best to integrate it into your strategies. Technology lets us reach customers in ways never before seen – and it’s driving demand for better and better brand experiences. If you want to maintain your competitive edge, you need to master the leading martech solutions and deploy them better than the rest.
And once you've acquired your customers, you'll need a great CRM to manage them...
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