Reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC) can be a key to outpacing the competition. If you’re looking for ways to lower customer acquisition costs without compromising on quality, you’ve come to the right place.
CAC is a crucial metric that reflects how much you spend to acquire a single customer. Understanding your business’s CAC is vital for optimizing your marketing and sales efforts and to get the maximum ROI. Also, when you bring in new customers at a lower cost, it significantly improves your business’s profitability.
In this blog we will give you practical and hands-on strategies on how to lower customer acquisition costs.
So, let’s get started.
The rising problem of marketing: Increasing CAC
The CAC is on the rise across various industries. This trend poses significant challenges for businesses, especially startups and small businesses with limited marketing budgets.
One of the primary reasons for the rising CAC is the increasing competition in digital advertising. As more businesses shift their marketing efforts online, the cost of online ads has peaked in recent years. Take Google ads, Instagram Ads, or even Facebook ads – almost all ad platforms are becoming more expensive. This has made it more difficult for businesses to reach their target audience without breaking the bank.
Another factor contributing to the rising CAC is the growing customer expectations. Today’s customers are more informed and have higher expectations than ever before. They demand personalized experiences and high-quality products or services. Meeting these expectations requires businesses to invest more resources, thereby increasing the CAC.
Moreover, the variety of choices available to customers has made customer loyalty more elusive. Customers can easily switch to competitors if they find a better offer, making it harder for businesses to retain their customers and get a return on their acquisition cost.
To navigate these challenges, we have come up with a set of tactics that most B2B businesses can adopt.
8 Proven tactics to lower customer acquisition costs
These days, both B2B & B2C buyers are more informed than ever.
They have more available options to pick from and most importantly, they have more information relating to the product/service offerings. So, brands are putting significant effort into market analysis, strategic product positioning, and sales optimization techniques.
Here are some tactics that all size of enterprises can adopt to lower customer acquisition costs. They are comprehensive and applicable to both b2B and B2C environments.
#1. Target the right Audience
Effective marketing is about directing resources toward the most receptive audiences. Identify the demographic that resonates with your offerings. This will enhance customer engagement and encourage more meaningful interactions.
Use data-driven insights to target the right businesses. Take a second look at your ICP. Study your customers – their age, professional, average spending, location etc. Based on those characteristics, run your ad campaigns and outreach sequences.This can significantly improve your conversion rates and lower your CAC.
#2. Customer retargeting
Retargeting is an effective strategy for maintaining visibility among potential customers. It’s common for customers to abandon actions on websites and apps. Sometimes, a subtle reminder can prompt the customer to complete a previously abandoned transaction.
Visitors who spend time on your website (especially checking your pricing page or product pages) are likely interested in your offerings. Retargeting these visitors via ads (e.eg., Google Ads) or email sequence can result in a significant increase in customer conversion rates.
Retargeting enables you to create highly targeted campaigns for potential customers. To retarget leads successfully, gather comprehensive data about your customers. Retargeting always uses a data-driven approach based on your ICP.
#3. Develop customer loyalty programs
Develop customer loyalty programs to retain existing customers. Satisfied customers often contribute more to MRR revenue than newcomers. It’s been observed that loyal customers tend to spend 67% more in their third year of association with a business compared to their initial stages.
To lower customer acquisition costs, you should focus on improving essential factors such as customer loyalty, purchase frequency, churn rate and average order values.
Additionally, you should implement strategies such as NPS, customer feedback loop, social listening and customer education through content to actively understand, educate and nurture your customers effectively online.
#4. Build affiliate programs
Affiliate programs can help you to lower customer acquisition costs of your business. Affiliate programs are thriving these days, especially for SaaS businesses.
You only need to pay ceratin percentage of commission for the new customers the affiliate partners bring to your business. This approach is really helpful because it doesn’t need any upfront costs to generate sales.
Check out SmartReach’s affiliate program.
Similarly, you may try influencer marketing programs to promote your products or services via relevant social media influencers. Although B2B social media influencers are significantly less in the numbers.
#5. Create helpful content based on the ICP
Creating helpful and engaging content based on your ICP is a great customer engagement strategy. Create videos, blogs, glossary pages, whitepaper etc. to address different problems your customers tend to face. It makes their decision-making process simpler and help you nurture them softly with information.
For instance, to make B2B sales process more easier and simpler for sales teams, we at SmartReach.io create blogs, glossary pages Youtube videos and newsletter. (Make sure you check them out)
By delivering insightful content, we educate our customers and foster trust in SmartReach as a brand.
To create effective and engaging content, review your content tonality, emphasize features and benefits, and provide clear calls to action. Experiment with various factors to enhance your content’s performance and decrease CAC naturally.
#6. Implement A/B testing and regular optimization
It’s almost a necessity today to A/B test couple of factors such as different components of landing pages, email copies for outbound sequence and even UI and UX of your website.
An improved UX and UI = better user experience + better user satisfaction + SEO advantages.
A/B testing will help you understand your customers’ preferences. Optimise your product titles, forms, buttons, layout, and more elements on your website to make the purchase journey easier for your customers.
To catch the latest changes, always track metrics such as click-through rates, new users, session duration, scroll depth, session heatmaps, etc.
#7. Optimise the sales funnel
A well-structured sales funnel is a strategic roadmap that guides potential customers from the initial stage of interest to the final stage of purchase. It’s a crucial component to lower customer acquisition costs.
Various data analytics are used to find out why customers abandon a purchase. Identifying the underperforming stages of the sales funnel of your business can help you optimize the various touchpoints in the purchase journey of your prospects.
This optimization process can involve analyzing customer behavior, identifying common drop-off points, and implementing strategies to address these issues.
#8. Automate marketing operations
Automate your menial and repetitive marketing and sales tasks using various marketing automation platforms. A CRM can be a useful tool in this case. It streamlines marketing processes, reduces the need for manual intervention, and allows for more personalized and targeted marketing efforts.
Marketing automation can help you improve conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs by automating routine tasks, allowing the team to focus on more strategic initiatives. It also allows for more personalized and targeted marketing efforts, which can lead to increased customer engagement and loyalty.
Lower CAC using SmartReach.io
SmartReach.io is a great tool to lower customer acquisition costs especially for B2B businesses. It automates and optimizes your sales outreach, ensuring your message reaches the right people at the right time.
Here’s how SmartReach.io can help you lower customer acquisition costs :
✅ Multichannel outreach
SmartReach.io allows you to automate your sales outreach using multiple channels such as Email, Calling, LinkedIn, Whatsapp and text messages.
This means you can reach wider potential customers without increasing your workload or adding more team members.
For example, you can set up automated sequences that send follow-up emails to prospects at predetermined intervals. This also provides the flexibility to your prospects to respond via their preferred channel, without any additional cost.
✅ Optimized timing for outreach
With SmartReach.io, you can ensure your emails are sent at the optimal time even when your prospects are based in multiple geographic locations. This increases the likelihood of your emails being opened and read.
This optimizes your per email cost for outbound sales.
For instance, you can schedule your emails to be sent when your potential customers are most likely to be checking their inbox.
✅ Personalization at scale
SmartReach.io allows you to personalize your emails using spintax, merge-tags, custom columns and more features. These features combined together make each email into unique personalized one, which reduces the chance of getting caught by the spam filter.
This can significantly improve your response rates, conversion rate and lower your CAC.
✅ Unlimited sender email accounts and LinkedIn accounts
With SmartReach you can add unlimited sending emails and unlimited LinkedIn accounts for email and LinkedIn outreach. You don’t have to buy a new seat for a new sales rep in your team, you can add all of them in any campaign at ease at any time.
This saves a lot of your monthly subscription costs for sales outreach.
Overall, SmartReach provides an all-in-one solution for all your outbound sales activities. It makes your B2B sales process easier and sales management more efficient.
Keeping the growing needs of small businesses and agencies in mind, SmartReach provides a pay-as-you-go model for pricing. You can pay for the subscription based on the level of automation you want in your outreach setup and the number of contacts you want to reach out to every month. So, you only pay based on your usage, thus saving your finances.
Check out the SmartReach pricing for more details on plans and pricing.
F.A.Q
What is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?
CAC is the total cost of attracting a new customer. It includes expenses like advertising, promotions, and any other costs associated with marketing efforts.
Why is it important to lower customer acquisition costs?
Lowering CAC means you’re spending less to attract each customer, increasing your overall profitability. It’s a crucial metric for any business, but especially for B2B companies where the sales cycle can be longer and more complex.
What two actions can you take to lower customer acquisition costs (CAC)?
Two things you’d do to lower customer acquisition costs would be to: 1. A/B test and optimize your landing pages and 2. Start an affiliate program depending on the nature of your business. Check out our “8 Proven tactics to lower customer acquisition costs” section for more information.
