Have you ever stopped to think how much it probably costs you to attract each and every paying customer of yours? Your approximate customer acquisition costs, or CAC, are a straightforward enough thing to work out; you just divide your expenditure on promotion and marketing by the number of new customers you attract in the same timeframe.
The amount of money it costs to attract a customer can differ hugely from one store and industry to the next. One thing that should be clear for every e-tailer, though, is the importance of keeping CAC as low as possible. Any wastefulness in this area – whether with regard to time or money – will effectively hold back your ecommerce firm’s growth, or even threaten the survival of the business.
Here, then, are some handy pointers for keeping your store’s customer acquisition costs down – thereby giving you a less testing challenge when it comes to recouping those costs through sales.
1. Target the people who are genuinely likely to buy from you
It sounds like an obvious point, but the online stores with the lowest CAC are consistently those that have a very fine-tuned sense of who their target audiences are.
That way, they can make sure they only channel their efforts into marketing their brand, products and services to the people who are likely to buy from them – and even better, become repeat customers in the long run.
2. Optimise your store with conversion in mind
It matters little how effective you are in driving relevant traffic to your e-tail store, if what those people then see is a site that is unattractive, difficult to navigate, and lacking the information they are seeking. In that situation, they’ll soon hit their browser ‘back’ button and disappear.
Our ecommerce website design and related digital marketing services at Piranha Designs can greatly help ensure the ‘new arrivals’ on your site get the right impression of your brand, to the point of becoming paying customers. That’s what a conversion-focused approach is all about.
3. Invest time and money in retaining customers, too
Let’s assume that it costs you about £200 on average to acquire a customer, and that your average sale is around £50. In this situation, you can see that it will take quite a number of purchases by one customer, if you are to fully recover what you spent attracting that customer in the first place.
So, a customer retention strategy – not just a customer acquisition one – is vital. You might start by consulting our previous blog post on how e-tail stores can bolster their customer retention rates.
4. Publish content that is attractive and relevant for your target customers
If you’ve ever presumed that a company blog is a mere luxury or “just there for SEO”, it’s time to think again. The fact is, producing alluring and useful content is a key weapon in your arsenal when you are seeking to attract new customers and maintain the interest of existing ones.
There are various ways in which you might do that. However, one evergreen tip is to make sure you keep your online store’s blog updated with fresh and interesting content that your target audience is actually likely to read. Such content could take the form of ‘how-to’ guides involving your store’s products, general advice of relevance to your industry, your take on important news… you name it.
With the consistent production of blog content being another service we can provide here at Piranha Designs, we can help keep you covered in this area, so that you continue to acquire more of the right customers – thereby growing your ecommerce brand.
For a more detailed discussion of how we could work together, why wait any longer? Simply send our experts in Gibraltar, London, Edinburgh or Spain an email now, or give us a call.
