Growth hacking or customer acquisition–whatever you call it, you know it’s important to do it and do it right. You need to use the best methods of ensuring customer loyalty and retaining it – even with a set of loyal customers, growing and reaching out to new ones will always be on your mind as part of your business growth strategy.
These 7 hacks will help you grow your cliente while keeping your customer acquisition cost to a minimum.
1.Use the right channels
Targeting the right people at the right place is key. Email marketing is a great way to reach the masses as well as target specific demographics and keeps your brand fresh in the customer’s mind. If you’re running a back-to-school campaign, you can target parent groups on Facebook and find your target audience at parent networking events.
Many B2B companies find it useful to connect with customers through LinkedIn, relevant conferences and trade events. If you have a pet store, you can frequent pet-friendly venues! Know your audience and find them in their natural habitat to capture them at their most comfortable self.
2.Tap into their emotions
Happy customers are loyal customers, and they’re the ones who will spread the word about your business for you. Give your customers a product and service they love, and let them feel an emotional connection with your brand. Wish them on their birthday, give them an anniversary discount, remember the birth of their child. Customers who have an emotional connection to a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value than those who are merely satisfied.
3.Listen to feedback and encourage it
Positive feedback is always good to hear, but negative feedback can be used to your advantage as well. Listen to the complaints, encourage your customers to share their experiences and find ways to improve what they were unhappy about.
Look at what complaints your customers have about your competitors to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes and be sure to follow up with complaints in a professional and timely fashion so customers know you care about them.
3.Give them great content
Provide original and engaging content that is relevant and share-worthy to keep your customers informed and entertained. People enjoy visuals, so provide them with videos, memes and imagery that they can share within their network and come back to you for more. Content marketing done well will yield customers for the long run.
4.Keep learning, keep innovating
Always look for ways to improve your products and provide a better service than before. Keep up-to-date with your industry trends so you can build on something before your competitors do – it is likely that your customer will remember who did it first, giving you a boost for the long-term.
Your brand needs to be seen as a thought leader and pioneer for customers to respect and trust you throughout their buying cycle with your business.
5.Use referrals to your advantage
Consider a referral scheme or loyalty program that provides a win-win situation for you and the customer.
Offer incentives for each customer who manages to get you three more successful customers, for example. This is a low-cost method of customer acquisition that brings you high-quality customers, as referred customers are also more likely to spend more and return with a higher lifetime value than non-referred ones.
6.Run competitions and giveaways
Everyone loves a free gift and a sure way to win over even the most stubborn leads is to promise them something for free and follow up with it. Run competitions that are easy to enter and also guarantee you some marketing out of it; ‘like, share, tag’ campaigns on social media are quick ways to increase your following in the name of a competition. You give customers a chance to use your product first hand, increasing the chance of them coming back for more.
No method has a 100% guarantee of generating a steady flow of customers to your business, so use a mix of these and see what works. Trial and error during different times of the year is essential to spot a pattern. When done right, these 7 hacks should get you out of a slump and with a good set of new customers to build on.
