Three steps to optimizing your customer acquisition efforts

Acquiring new customers is the life blood of most businesses and with today’s limited budgets, this quest has never been more challenging. That is why we developed a three-step process to help companies optimize their marketing programs and improve their acquisition efforts.

The number of media options for engaging prospective customers can be overwhelming. Most media planning tools do not bridge the traditional, digital and social options available nor do they help rationalize the trade-off between “upper funnel” familiarity-building tactics and “lower funnel” in-market buyer activation tactics. We believe companies should do four things in order to optimize their media mix.

1. Align on the marketing objectives: Be clear about whether you are trying to convert active buyers who are in the latter stages of consideration or trying to build familiarity among potential buyers who may not have much affinity for your brand. If trying to do both, allocate resources to each objective and optimize to the primary objective within each budget.
2. Determine the criteria for how those objectives will be measured: Brand interaction rates can be a useful measure for upper funnel objectives while lower funnel objectives tend to be directly attributable cost-per-response or cost-per-sale. Decide what specific measure will be used for plan optimization.
3. Develop a model for evaluating media options using this criteria: After aligning on the primary criterion, various media can be evaluated relative to each other. By making key behavioral assumptions, such as read-rates and interaction rates, old criteria, such as CPM, can be replaced with new measures, such as cost per brand interaction or cost per action.
4. Implement a feedback and optimization system based on measuring actual results: Ultimately, optimization comes from reacting to real market experiences and not planning assumptions. Therefore, implementing a process for reviewing results and adjusting your plans is essential. While many staffs are strapped for time, resist over-simplifying the process by putting a plan into effect and waiting until the end of the quarter to make changes.

Step Two – Improve your message impact

Once you have secured the opportunity to deliver a message through your media plan, getting the maximum impact is critical. We believe the best way to do that is with contextually relevant, highly impactful creative. So ask yourself these questions before you set the creative wizards off to do their thing:

1. What are the issues or problems on the minds of your prospects right now?
2. What expression of your value proposition resonates with them the best?
3. Are you offering them a reason to take the next logical step in engaging with you?
4. Is there information you can provide them that will improve the likelihood that they respond to your offer?
5. What creative tactics have worked well in the past and why?

One of the virtues of digital marketing is the fast feedback on results, which makes it a great environment for continuous creative testing and refinement. Whether it is copy testing with Google AdWords or A/B testing of online display ads, avail yourself of the optimization benefits of a “test and learn” approach. The days of picking a concept and running with it should be in the past.

Step Three: Optimize your prospect’s Web experience

Let’s face it. Most consumer and business purchases have a degree of buyer consideration that extends beyond reading the retail packaging. Consumers are using the Internet to help them make more informed decisions. This includes using information portals with professional review staffs, sites that offer user opinions, blogs written by enthusiasts, social sites to hear from their friends and brand websites. Serious prospects will eventually visit your site and, based on their experiences, decide whether or not to engage with you further. To improve the conversion from a visit to a lead, registration or purchase, we would encourage you to do the following:

1. Design your site to make a visitor’s navigation experience easy and intuitive. Test to make sure it is.
2. Direct visitors clicking on a digital ad to a landing page that reflects the product or offer that made them click in the first place.
3. Bring relevant information forward that will improve a visitor’s experience and improve the likelihood of converting.
4. Recognize that some people like to read and some like to watch, so factor in the role of video as an important form of content.
5. Incorporate the reviews of other customers to give prospects confidence to take the next step. After all, they trust other users more than they trust you.
6. Make the call to action prominent so it is easy to take the next step.
7. Consider alternative methods of acting, such as chat or click-to-call.
8. Test landing page options continuously. The results can be both surprising and dramatic.
9. If you have an e-commerce option, simplify the shopping cart experience.
10. Test up-sell and cross-sell offers to improve margin dollars per transaction.
11. Consider alternative payment methods.
12. Test. Learn. Act. Repeat often.

Other considerations

Improving the effectiveness of your customer acquisition marketing efforts comes from optimizing your media plan, your messaging and your Web experience. In many organizations, each of these functions can be managed or influenced by various departments that may not fully appreciate the impact of their activities on this formula. As simplistic as it is, this three-step framework can be useful in aligning your team to make better decisions and improve your results.

Also, recognize that not all new customers are equal. Applying some degree of customer segmentation to this framework is important. Make sure that your measurement system accounts for lifetime value and doesn’t inadvertently lead to chasing high-volume, low-value customers.

Finally, begin to evolve your test and measurement system from its dependency on last-click attribution. This will tend to inflate the effectiveness of your pay-per-click campaigns and deflate the value of other program elements. Over time, this may cause you to miss out on effective options for growing your customer base. That challenge is hard enough already, so don’t limit your success unnecessarily.