During the journey of growing your business, you might be struggling hard to target a new audience. Whereas, if you have launched a new startup, getting your first customer will be a breakthrough for you.
You have to focus on grabbing attention from the audience, especially in the initial stages. Along with these, you also have to fulfil the end goals and look for growth tactics.
Ultimate Guide On Customer Acquisition Funnel For Beginners
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In such cases, customer acquisition comes into action. It has become one of the common aspects that every business tries to focus expecting great outcomes.
Strong Customer acquisition helps to generate new customers for your business or convince the customers to revert after their first purchase through various strategies.
Are you a novice to business and struggling to bring new clients? If yes, then no worries. You have reached the right place. This blog will walk you through the customer acquisition funnel.
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About Customer Acquisition
As mentioned above, customer acquisition is an effective process of finding and increasing the potential customers to approach your products and services.
The ideal customer acquisition process will result in effective lead generation and increase the conversion of an audience to customers.
Do customer acquisition and customer retention have similarities? No, Customer acquisition is all about strategies to bring new customers. However, customer retention is the process carried out after persuading a customer.
Is customer acquisition important in the modern era of business? Yes, customer acquisition plays a crucial role in increasing brand awareness and persuading sales.
Every company tries to follow a well-structured customer acquisition funnel to build effective strategies to acquire new customers and increase the revenue of the company.
You can consider email marketing or high-quality customer services as examples of customer acquisition.
In addition to these, blogs, paid ads, websites, etc are some of the customer acquisition platforms that would help you to connect with potential customers.
You will get a clear idea about the customer’s journey in each stage through an effective funnel.
“I look at customer acquisition holistically. It’s not a marketing metric: it s a way the company breaths”, said Jeff Samuels– Cisco.
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Customer Acquisition Funnel Stages
Awareness
How to boost sales if people are not aware of your brand or company? Your business needs to be familiar with the target audience for the growth of your business. So, awareness is considered the top of the funnel and the first step in the customer acquisition funnel.
It is the crucial step through which the company educates and makes the target audience aware of the products and services.
Reaching out to a large audience would help the company generate high-quality leads and help the customers make better decisions.
As a marketing expert or a business owner, you can try various marketing strategies such as content marketing, referral marketing, and even social marketing.
These acquisition strategies will enhance brand awareness and give a better understanding of your brand to the audience.
Interest
What are your thoughts on developing customer interest in the brand? Along with providing brand awareness, you should also grab attention and thrive interest in people’s minds.
It will eventually push the audience to make the first purchase. Every business and startup should focus on addressing the problems of the target audience, and provide solutions to them.
In the customer acquisition funnel, generating interest is a crucial stage through a wide range of customer acquisition channels such as direct mail, social media marketing, etc. Along with these, content strategies such as how-to guides and case studies.
Consideration
When the audience recognizes your brand as a solution, they will start considering your brand and products. The audience may have various options, one of which is your brand.
This stage of the customer acquisition funnel is the first active stage where the customers start considering your products and services.
If the customers develop an interest in and consider your brand, they start visiting your blogs, reading blogs, service pages, and more.
You can even create comparison posts with your competitors, conveying how your brand is different from other brands. If your business can stand out from the competition, then it will easily grab the attention front the audience.
Intent
Do you know what is buyer intent? The signs shown by the customers to buy the products are called buyer intent. If your customers frequently visit your web pages, you can indicate it as buyer intent and a higher chance of buying your products.
Adding products to the wishlists or carts could also be considered a sign that the customers are close to purchasing. Higher engagements through emails and campaigns are other examples of buyer intent.
Conversion
It’s not easy to convert customers from the audience. It takes multiple steps for a business to convince its customers, especially in B2B business.
If the target audience finds the solution to their queries through your brand or business, they will be more likely to get converted into customers. This might take a bit more time for customers to choose and learn about your products and brands.
It will help the customers to understand the pros and cons of the products and services, which will push them to make the final decision. Providing free trials and demos will assist in generating more leads and conversions.
Retention
Finally, retention is the last stage of the customer acquisition funnel. Your business will be considered successful when the one-time customers come back and purchase again.
So, it is important to convert one-time customers into loyal and lifetime. As you know it is crucial to retain customers than acquire new ones.
You can build more trust and maintain a good relationship with existing customers by providing personalized customer support and after-sales services. This also includes discounts based on various events.
A great customer experience will develop customer loyalty and result in returning customers. So, it is important to focus on retention in the customer acquisition funnel.
The above-mentioned stages are divided based on the function parts of the customer acquisition funnel.
- TOFU
- MOFU
- BOFU
You might be wondering how to create a beneficial customer acquisition funnel. You should focus on the three functional parts of customer acquisition that play a significant role and different purposes.
The steps to create an acquisition funnel is being divided based on TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. Let’s dive more into the steps.
TOFU- Top of the Funnel
Here, your business should reach out to the target audience and focus on brand awareness. People have to know the importance of your brand and how it would solve their problems.
So, you have to collect the basic information from the audience such as gender, age, and other factors which will help you create personas and to target them.
MOFU- Middle of the Funnel
In this part of the customer acquisition funnel, you have to educate the audience and convince them to purchase your products and services. Here you are free to use various strategies and effective customer acquisition channels like newsletters, campaigns, surveys, etc.
BOFU- Bottom of the Funnel
BoFU is the final stage in the customer acquisition funnel, where your audience makes the decisions and gets converted as your customers.
Marketing experts or business owners could send push notifications, offering timely discounts based on events, etc. It will boost sales and initiate a final push to the customers.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do I create a customer acquisition funnel?
With appropriate research, you should discover your target audience and their needs. Based on your target audience, identify and choose the right acquisition channels and strategies and create a plan to reach them. After determining your acquisition cost and budget, you have to launch the acquisition strategies.
What are the main components of the customer acquisition funnel?
The three main components of the customer acquisition funnel are TOFU for lead generation, MOFU for lead acquisition and BOFU for lead conversion.
What do you mean by acquisition plan?
An acquisition plan is a plan that consists of all the documents related to costs, schedules, business management, and even technical aspects that are necessary for an acquisition channel and strategies.
Know More About Customer Acquisition Funnel
Focusing on the customer acquisition funnel is crucial in this era for generating interest in new and existing customers.
Following a well-structured funnel and organized system will help in boosting more clients to your company. So, eventually, it will lead to business growth, giving desired results.
I hope this blog helped you understand more about customer acquisition. Share your views in the comments below.