Acquiring new customers is the lifeline of any business. This is why every business strategist needs to dedicate the appropriate amount of energy to their customer acquisition strategy. It is an essential part of every business and without a solid approach, you will fail to grow as a company in any market. One of the most difficult parts about creating the right method for your company figuring out which channel is the most sustainable for bringing through new customers.
Finding the Right Acquisition Channel
There is a huge variety of different frameworks that have been published that seek to help any business identify the right channel to engage with, but ultimately this comes down to a bunch of trial and error, especially if you have no historical data to work with.
I am not going to delve into the details of a framework, per se. Instead I am going to give you a host of customer acquisition tactics, as well as a way to test them out, in order to enable you to get a feel for which channels have the potential to bring the most value to your company. You could also work with someone like LeadJig to learn how you could further improve engagement from your marketing efforts.
Before you start experimenting, make sure that you have set out clear and concise goals that you would like to achieve, even if you do not have much data to base them on. Simply going off your hunches will do at this point. Because then you can put that against the data you gather and develop an informed understanding of what does and does not work.
Customer Acquisition Tactics
As I previously mentioned, the tactics that I am going to share with you are designed to test something very specific within an individual channel. The idea here is that it can help you either discover new opportunities for growth within an existing channel you are pursuing or it can open up new ideas to help you diversify you approach to get more data which is give you a better picture of how your new customers are responding to your efforts. I will now layout a few approaches below that should get you started.
Increase Engagement from Unopened Emails
Objective: Increase the number of people reading and engaging with the emails that you send to your list of subscribers by specifically targeting those that have failed to open them.
How: 48 hours or so after sending an email to your subscribers, go into your email marketing software, I use Epsilon, which is similar to Mailchamp, and find all the subscribers that got the email but did not open it. Resend your email with a completely different email subject just for these people. This gives you a chance at increasing the number of opens of your campaign without looking like you are drowning your subscriber’s inboxes with the same email.
Here are the stats broken down:
- Original Email Open Rate: 22.9%
- Original Email Click Rate: 5.9%
- Unopened Segment Open Rate: 10.8%
- Unopened Segment Click Rate: 3.1%
- Total Open Rate: 31%: 31.01% (35.41% increase)
- Total Click Rate: 8.24% (39.66% increase)
Update and Republish Old Content for a Ranking Boost
Objective Generate more organic search traffic to already content that lives on your blog to boost keyword rankings.
How: Within a lot of websites that publish content regularly on their blog, there are often a bunch of posts that are sitting deep in their website’s architecture. This is primarily due to time-based blog feeds. For example, the older the blog post is, the lower down in the blog feed it will probably be, until it goes even further down into the various archived pages of the blog.
In general, pages deeper in the architecture of a website will get a lower share of internal PageRank. Unless the page has a significant number of backlinks from external webpages, it is unlikely to rank very well in the search engines. These backlinks can be supported by making sure that they are a ‘follow link’ to make them relevant and useful. If you are wondering – “what is a follow link?”, then you may want to visit websites like boostedlab.com as well as other SEO-based webpages, so you can gain as much information as possible about this area.
One quick solution here is to update the date of the blog post to the current day and republish it. This often fires it to the top page of your blog feed and gives it a big PageRank boost. Not only that, but you can actually add a little bit more content to the blog post and update any old information that is either out of date or now irrelevant, then you can fully re-promote it through your usual channels and earn more backlinks from external websites.
I have used this tactic, and continue to do so, across pretty much every campaign I Have ever worked on that revolves around content production and have had great results.
To summarize, customer acquisition one of the main pillars of business growth so do not be afraid to try something different out to appeal to your target demographic. Every audience is different so understanding what your ideal customer does and wants will massively inform your content acquisition strategy.