The Customer Acquisition Journey: How To Lower Acquisition Costs

You have invested countless hours in creating a strong customer acquisition strategy, but you're just not able to decrease your overall acquisition costs. Why's that?

Here's the catch, no matter how well you know your customers' pain points, and how wonderful your product is, if you don't understand how and why they buy (aka their customer acquisition journey), and implement your insights in your strategy, the results won't impress you.

The customer acquisition journey is not just a straight line from awareness to conversion. There are twists and detours along the way. In this blog, we’re going to dive into the different stages of the customer acquisition journey for a typical ecommerce store and the best ways you can lower your acquisition costs without losing customers.

What is the customer acquisition journey?

The customer acquisition journey refers to the series of steps a potential customer or your new leads go through before making a purchase decision. It outlines their progression from product and brand discovery, to ultimately becoming a paying (and returning) customer.

For example, the customer journey for an ecommerce company selling thermos water bottles could involve a potential customer first learning about the brand through Google ads search results.

The next step could be them checking out each brand's product pages to shortlist the ones that they like the most. 

In an ideal world, a customer would convert right after landing on the product page for the first time. That, however, is not reality.

The customer journey is not always (never, actuala straight line. More often than not, the customer journey can get interrupted if the customer gets distracted or decides to click off from the website. They might get retargeted ads with discount codes, prompting them to revisit the product page and reassess their choice. Then, they add the thermos to their cart and proceed to checkout. But, they might even abandon their cart (possibly due to high shipping costs). 

So if they buy it, they will receive order confirmations and shipping updates about their order. If they don't, then again the retargeting phase will continue via multiple channels such as ads, or emails! 

Irrespective of that, the brand continues engagement through newsletters, product updates, and exclusive offers to increase acquisitions. 

Optimizing each stage of this journey is a great way for an ecommerce company to enhance the customer experience, increase conversion rates, and build lasting relationships.

What are the different stages of the customer acquisition journey?

Customer acquisition journeys can take anywhere from a few hours to months to complete. To speed up the process, you or your marketing team members must understand how the acquisition journey works. The client acquisition journey consists of three major stages: 

1. Awareness

Building brand awareness is where it all begins – the initial spark of interest in your product. Maybe a customer saw one of your ads pop up on their social media feed for the first time or stumbled upon your website after a quick Google search (with a lot of search engine optimization from the brand's side). It can be anything. At this stage, they're just becoming aware of your existence, so your goal is to pique their curiosity and establish your brand as the solution they’re looking for.

2. Consideration

According to the Rule of 7 marketing touches - on average, it takes at least seven meaningful interactions with a potential customer before they are ready to convert. These interactions, or touchpoints, can span a variety of mediums such as email, social media, or advertisements. It can also be a recommendation they got from a friend. 

The core idea is that repeated exposure to a brand builds familiarity, trust, and confidence — which are factors in influencing someone's decision. So make sure your strategy helps you target your ideal customers on the platforms they hang out with and keeps you on top of their minds.

3. Conversion

After the consideration stage, you've captured their attention, and presented a compelling case – now it's time to close the deal. In the conversion stage, your lead is ready to become a paying customer. It is during the conversion stage, that your prospective customer is actively evaluating your product against competitors. But, you're not done here. Once your customer makes a conversion, it's time to focus on customer retention.

4 Ways To Lower Your Customer Acquisition Costs

Let's face it: acquiring a customer has become increasingly expensive. So while it's important for your marketing efforts to go towards pushing your customers down the three stages of the funnel (awareness, consideration, and conversion), it's equally important to do so affordably.

Let's look at 4 different strategies (and their best practices) to improve your customer acquisition journey and help you decrease your costs.

Strategy #1: Target customers with strategic ad campaigns 

When it comes to social media advertising, success is all about smart targeting and compelling content. To do that, you need to learn and understand your target audience.

• Who are they?
• What do they want?
• Where do they hang out online? 

You're most likely going to run ads on two platforms: Facebook and Google.

Here are small changes you can make right now in your Facebook ad campaigns to get the most out of your ads:

• Run your ads on a broad audience. Letting creatives do the targeting can help lower your cost per acquisition (CPA).
• Focus on creative tests. Test different hooks, bodies, and ad formats. Then, iterate on the winners.
• Run a lead generation campaign that collects emails and phone numbers for you to retarget with less expensive means (SMS and Email).
• Set up a retargeting campaign to re-engage visitors who showed interest but didn't convert.

Here are small changes you can make right now in your Google ads campaigns to get the most out of your ads:

• Create responsive search ad tests testing different messaging and point-of-views.
• Make sure that all the assets in your Performance Max campaign are scored at "Good" or "Best."
• Clean your search term reports, and regularly add new keywords to your search campaigns.

Optimizing your ads strategy will boost your click-through rates and lower your cost per acquisition significantly.

Strategy #2: Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

While you're presumably spending money on ads and other methods to gain more traffic to your website, CRO helps you get the most out of the traffic on your website by optimizing your website (or landing page) towards a conversion.

Alongside the basic CRO best practices, here are some more things that you can test:

• Add more signals of trust, like reviews and security badges on your product pages.
• Test sending your traffic to the product page vs. a dedicated landing page, vs. the homepage.
• Try out CTA variations, as well as the CTA placements on your website.

Use analytics tools to track user behavior from ad click to conversion. Identify where prospects are dropping off and optimize those stages. This might involve tweaking your landing pages, simplifying your checkout process, or adjusting your pricing.

Hopefully, after a bit of trail and error, you'll be left with a landing page that has an increased conversion rate, meaning you'll be spending less money retargeting your customers after their initial drop-offs.

Strategy #3: Email and SMS Marketing

With SMS and email campaigns you can create targeted, segmented, and personalized campaigns that deliver messages directly to the prospect's inboxes or phones. Here's how you should leverage these channels to bring down your acquisition costs:

• Place email or SMS sign-up forms strategically on your website, especially on high-traffic pages. 
• Use exit-intent popups to capture visitors before they leave. 
• Divide your list based on factors like purchase history, browsing behavior, or demographics.
• Set up flows like welcome series, abandoned cart reminders, and post-purchase follow-ups.
• Offer exclusive offers for your subscribers. For example, you can send an SMS or an email regarding special discount codes and offers, case studies, or simply remind them of their abandoned shopping carts. 

This helps build relationships with potential customers, and old customers. It keeps them engaged and increases your conversions in both cases - new lead conversions and repeat purchase rate.

For new lead conversions, both email and SMS are very affordable strategies and cost almost nothing when compared to other paid ad advertising, like paid social and PPC advertising.

Strategy #4: Get Influencers to talk about your brand

Influencer marketing is a powerful customer acquisition channel where businesses work with people who have loyal followers and a strong influence over them. Here's how it works: 

• Brands team up with influencers who promote their products through authentic content.
• They leverage the trust and rapport influencers have built with their followers to enhance their reach and impact, fostering deeper connections with potential customers. 

Whether through blog posts, social media updates, videos, or other formats, influencer marketing seamlessly integrates the brand message into the influencer's content, creating a more natural and persuasive experience.

For example, Latico Leathers—a boutique leather goods brand—used Social Snowball to streamline the entire process of launching and managing their influencer program. And the results speak for themselves: they saw a significant increase in referral revenue and an impressive 17.3x return on investment.

Here are the successful features of a customer referral program:

1. Gamify your program. Create different program tiers for your customers to work their way through. The more customers they refer, the more commission they get.
2. Onboard them seamlessly after they make a purchase. This can be done by showcasing a code or link on the Thank You page (Social Snowball does this for you).
3. Send them reminders about their program. Email marketing, for a referral program, is your best friend. Remind them about their new role as an affiliate for your brand, send them inspiration from other successful affiliates, and teach them how (and where) to share their codes and links.
4. Track performance & pay commissions. Make payouts easy, desirable, and regular. Let your affiliates know when they should expect a payout. Social Snowball's bulk payout feature allows you to send cash to your affiliates in one click.

What happens after the customer acquisition? 

After investing so much of your time and resources to win these customers over, how can you make the most of that investment? There are two things you can do:

1. Turn your customers into affiliates

Think about it: who better to promote your brand than the people who already love your products or services? That is, your customers.

They are your biggest advocates, and by incentivizing them to spread the word, you're tapping into a highly effective and cost-efficient acquisition channel.

Take Tailored Athlete, for example. This fitness apparel brand was struggling with rising customer acquisition costs until they implemented a customer affiliate program with Social Snowball. The results?

• $18,000 increase in referral revenue
• 17.3x return on investment

All while reducing their overall customer acquisition costs.

Another big reason is, affiliate programs offer you a level of predictability and control over your costs that's lacking in other acquisition channels. For instance, with paid advertising, you're at the mercy of ever-increasing costs and algorithm changes. But with affiliates, you set the incentives and rewards for each successful sale, giving you complete control over your acquisition spend and a scope to lower it as per need.

Social Snowball makes it incredibly easy to set up and automate your customer affiliate program, eliminating the need for manual efforts and tedious tasks. From instantly generating unique codes for new customers to automating communication flows through integrations with platforms like Klaviyo and Postscript, the entire process is streamlined for maximum efficiency.

2. Conduct post-purchase surveys to understand why a customer bought from you

Wouldn't it be incredibly valuable to know if a particular marketing campaign or product feature was the key selling point that sealed the deal? Or maybe there was a specific pain point you addressed that really resonated with your target audience or customer base? 

That's where post-purchase surveys come into play. Ask specific questions about their experience, product satisfaction, and areas for improvement. For example:

• "On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?"
• "What's one thing we could do better?"
• "What feature would you like to see in our next product?"
• “Where did you hear about us?”

Use this feedback to identify the channels which are working best for you, and which ones are draining your budget. Make data-driven improvements to your strategy accordingly and avoid unnecessary costs! 

You can use KnoCommerce for the same. It is an excellent post-purchase survey tool that'll help you collect responses from your customers. 

Conclusion 

By implementing these strategies, your marketing team can leverage a seamless customer acquisition journey that builds trust, educates prospects, and ultimately converts them into loyal brand advocates, all while keeping your acquisition costs within the budget. But that's not it.

Ready to take your first step and start making the most of your customer acquisition and marketing efforts? 

Schedule a demo with our team at Social Snowball, and let us demonstrate the value of focusing your campaigns on word-of-mouth marketing and how it may drastically boost your customer acquisition strategies.