The best customer acquisition strategies for your eCommerce brand.

Last updated on 07/13/2022

This article will address 2 audiences—experienced people and beginners. The best strategy for you will depend on your skills and resources.

What are the best customer acquisition strategies for your eCommerce brand?

Where are you now?

In order to determine the best acquisition strategy for your business, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

• How big is my existing customer base?

You should set aside money to keep your current clients by lowering churn and improving customer lifetime value. These initiatives are 5 times less expensive and profitable than gaining new consumers.

Depending on the things you sell, recurrent transactions, monthly subscriptions, and other factors, this budget can range from 15% to 50% of your entire marketing budget.

• Do I want to go fast and test things or slow and steady?

Each acquisition channel has advantages and disadvantages. 

If you want to scale quickly and have a budget that can be adapted according to your generated revenues, social ads provide a solution that allows you to scale quickly.

Google ads will allow you to target the right people already intending to buy and generally achieve a better conversion rate than social ads (except display) on a conversion campaign.

SEO and content marketing will be acquisition strategies that will take time to bring you money and do not allow you, except for a big increase in the trend, to have 10x more traffic overnight.

• Do I know who my clients are?

The acquisition strategy must be focused on the clients who will purchase your items in order to be effective. Before you can define your own acquisition strategy, you must first define your personas and customer journey.

• Where are the competitors positioned?

You must look at where your competitors are most present during your competitive research and positioning.

Are they more focused on social media or on Google Adwords?

Is there a blog that they update on a frequent basis?

Are there any external sites with a backlink and net linking strategy?

Is it true that they are active on social media? What platforms do they use and which ones do they avoid?

If you manage to position yourself on acquisition channels where they are not yet very present and strengthen your positions on them, you will be able to find customers with a lower cost per customer acquisition than your competitors, which will give you a real competitive advantage.

Choose your main marketing channels

• Beginner: Focus and test one acquisition channel at a time

If you’re just getting started with online consumer acquisition, don’t create a blog, Google ads, Facebook advertisements, and a YouTube channel all at once.

1. You won’t understand what works for you

2. You will probably have too little budget to make it work

3. You won’t know what to analyze to optimize

Unless you hire an acquisition expert or an agency to do it for you.

Even if you delegate, you need grasp how it works so you can understand your provider’s work and judgments.

The learning curve for any acquisition channel can be lengthy, especially given how quickly platforms change and provide new offerings.

• Experienced: omnichannel strategy 

You can work on a complete acquisition strategy with a marketing mix of Facebook/Instagram Ads, Social Media content, Google Ads search, shopping, and display if you have some experience in customer acquisition.

By reviewing the advertising management data, you can thoroughly evaluate the acquisition channels and learn what is not working and what is working.

With multi-touch attribution, you may identify the sources that create the greatest income and their contribution to sales in Google Analytics.

In this case, the acquisition strategy must be optimized on 3 levels:

1. Optimize the profitability of your existing acquisition sources by improving your cost per acquisition, by going after hidden audiences, setting up negative keywords, etc.
2. Focus on your email lead base to turn people in the consideration phase into customers.
3. Position yourself on new secondary acquisition sources such as social media like Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, depending on the demographics of your target audience and your products.

• Experts: Advanced Sales Funnel

You’ll employ more intricate techniques that necessitate a large amount of data and a thorough examination of the user journey from brand awareness through acquisition. You want to focus on the 20% of marketing activities that provide 80% of your outcomes and raise the budget for these activities.

To avoid oversaturating your audiences, you’ll need to regularly test and create new methods of acquisition in tandem.

To create an optimal sales funnel, you will examine acquisition channels for cold audiences and others for warm and hot audiences.

Every company has its unique acquisition strategy. However, consider the following scenario.

1. You target similar audiences on Facebook and Instagram ads with a short video format.

Because you have noticed that 80% of the first impression to convert your customers comes from this source.

2. You use google ads in search and shopping for the consideration phase 

By analyzing, you notice that a lot of traffic that performs conversion actions on your website comes from Google ads.

3. You use Facebook ads with a carousel format and collection ads in retargeting conversion with personalized audience retargeting visitors.

This 3-step funnel is simplified. You need to A/B test your landing pages depending on the acquisition source and where the visitor is in the customer journey.

Secondary acquisition sources should be fed equally to support the funnel entry. 

• Influencer marketing to boost social proof and convert on product promotion actions.
• PR and media coverage for brand authority
• Post and engage on social media to maintain a relationship with your community of social customers and fans 
• A blog for proof of authority, expertise, and SEO makes you acquire customers with different buying behavior.

To properly analyze your data, you will need the right tools. 

Example: 

https://segment.com/  Analytics API and customer data platform

https://heap.io/ analytics and automated data insights 

Facebook & Instagram Ads

Good for:

• Test offer quickly
• Define your target audience with interests and demographics
• Understand what marketing message works for your product
• Scale and generate a lot of revenue quickly
• No minimum budget to launch a conversion campaign
• Test many ad formats
• Create personalized retargeting and similar audiences

Drawbacks:

• Request budget for the creation of video ads, image ads
• Many options on the ad manager, you need to be trained
• It takes a few days for the algorithm to test things
• Depending on the country and industry, this is the most expensive platform in CPM and CPC
• Not good for those of you who make decisions on emotions

You have to be analytical and make decisions after analyzing the data.

Google Search Ads

Good for:

• Be on the first page of Google when user search for terms
• Test landing pages
• Targeting people with purchase intention
• No minimum budget
• No visual assets needed

Drawbacks:

• Keyword research 
• Scalability limited to the number of searches
• Learning phase of the algorithm from 7 to 10 days
• Requires testing of keywords, ads, bids to find a good combination

Google Shopping Ads

Good for:

• Targeting
• To be positioned on the first page on google
• Display a product image in a google ad
• Display product reviews to strengthen social proof
• Display limited offers

Drawbacks:

• Google Merchant Center configuration is sometimes complex.
• Sometimes there is no expense.
• You need to change the bidding strategy and wait.
• It takes time to optimize 10 to 14 days.

Google Display Ads

Good for:

• Retargeting
• Reach over 90% of Internet users worldwide
• Inexpensive CPC 
• Consideration phase

Drawbacks:

• Limited conversion 
• Need images in different formats
• keyword search
• Requires testing of keywords, ads, bids to find a good combination

SEO 

Good for:

• Free organic traffic source
• Rank in the google results 
• Detach yourself from paid

Blog content: 

• Asserting your authority in an industry
• Reaching out to different people behavior on the web

Drawbacks:

• Changing algorithm 
• Time-consuming to set up
• Time/investment is sometimes not profitable

TikTok Ads

Good for:

• Targeting Generation Z
• Build an engaged community
• Be present on a growing social media
• Increase the reach of TikTok posts
• Lower CPM and CPC than other social ads platforms

Drawbacks:

• Creation of native ads
• Algorithm is still perfectible few conversions
• Approximate targeting

Snapchat Ads, Pinterest Ads, Twitter Ads, Bing Ads are interesting acquisition channels to test depending on your products and your targeting.

Snapchat Ads

• Generation Z and Millennials
• Video content 
• Minimum spending budget 

Pinterest Ads

• Targeting keywords or audience
• Creative, inspiration, sharing platform
• Limited audience size 

Twitter Ads

• Targeting by interest and #.
• Niche community very present and easily reachable with targeting

Spend some time on social media and get to know it before launching ads on it.

If you don’t know it, but feel that there is potential for you, outsource.

Prepare your resources

It is preferable to have a well-defined consumer avatar and budget, as well as an inventory of what you will be able to use as content, to aid in the development of your customer acquisition plan.

Indeed, Facebook Ads or Tiktok Ads are content-intensive in terms of advertising in order to test things and get good results.

To assess and optimize your Google Ads campaigns, you’ll need fewer resources but a lot of time.

A briefing from you is required if you work with a graphic designer or video motion designer to generate visuals.

To have what you expect and that they go the right way, you must first create your brand identity with tones, colors, fonts, and characters.

Go ahead and test it!

Success requires trial and error to target the right people at the right place at the right time.