On the surface, customer acquisition looks pretty straightforward: attract new customers to your product or service, and convince them to convert.

And if there weren't so much competition or the funnel ended at conversion, it might be that straightforward. But in the real world, customer acquisition is complicated and requires careful planning.

The three phases of customer acquisition

Customer acquisition encompasses three key phases of the customer experience funnel or the entire buyer's journey, depending on which version of the marketing funnel you're looking at.

While it can be helpful (and less overwhelming) to think about each of these phases separately, they are interconnected and not all buyers take a linear journey through them, especially in industries with a longer sales cycle, like B2B.

• Awareness phase

In this phase, your prospective customer is learning about your product or service, often in relation to a problem you could solve for them. At this stage, they are likely inundated with messages from brands with similar solutions and your biggest goal is to stick out from the pack with a memorable messaging.

• Consideration phase

By now your prospect is aware of the problem they have and how you can solve it, but they're weighing up their options. At this stage, they may have signed up for your newsletter or signed up for a product demo, and have therefore become an official lead.

You will be nurturing them through this phase to stay top of mind and help them get better acquainted with your brand, product, and what makes you different.

• Decision or Conversion

At this stage, your lead is ready to make a decision. They may have signed up for a free trial, had a call or product demo with sales, or be actively engaging with your brand through content and your job is to convince them to convert.

While customer acquisition as a phase ends there, the rest of the funnel cannot be forgotten. When your new customer becomes a loyal customer, your LTV:CAC ratio (lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio) will be lowered, indicating a healthier business and more revenue growth overall. When that loyal customer becomes an advocate, they help you acquire new customers at a lower cost to the company — this can lower your business's overall CAC and LTV:CAC ratio at once.

How to build a customer acquisition strategy

Building a customer acquisition strategy is one of the best ways to ensure your customer growth engine is fuelling customer retention and advocacy to build a more sustainable business.

To lay the foundations, start here:

1. Identify your ideal customer

By unifying your data and segmenting your audience, you will start to spot patterns with your top-performing customers. These patterns may be profile-based (demographic, geographic, or business types) and action-based (product actions, time to value, or purchasing habits).

This information, in conjunction with competitive analysis and market research, will help identify your ideal customer, forming a persona with a set of attributes that can be targeted through advertising efforts and organic marketing materials.

Identifying your ICP is a large project, often involving multiple teams and potentially some investment in marketing intelligence tools or agencies, but the clarity it provides and the intentionality it creates make it well worth the effort.

2. Set and track your goals

Yes, you will need to set a goal around new customer acquisition — but this should be just one metric in a larger dashboard that gives you a snapshot of how your acquisition model is performing. You may want to KPI on the following metrics:

• Customer acquisition costs

• LTV:CAC

• Customer lifetime value

• ROI on campaigns

• Time to conversion

At this stage, your goals can be set, but they may need to be adjusted as you identify channels and work through realistic

3. Identify your marketing channels

When identifying your ideal customer in step one, you may have come across some data or anecdotal evidence that helps you generate a list of potential marketing channels. Consider this a starting place, and then do some research and brainstorming to come up with a long list of channels your audience frequents.

These channels may include:

• Content marketing and SEO

• Social advertising

• PPC search

• Native advertising on publications or trade press

• Partnerships with other brands

• Events and conferences

• Influencers channels

• Referral or affiliate programs

• Media channels like Spotify

• Out of home media channels like bus stops

• Emails and newsletters

• Review or listings sites

From the list you generate, start by identifying which are viable. Your budget, bandwidth, KPIs, scale, and regulatory or compliance guidelines could all impact this — be realistic and know that you can always revisit a channel later if things change.

Once you have a long list of viable marketing channels, you'll want to start with just a few and scale up or out from there. Budget permitting, it's usually a good idea to opt for a few 'safe bets' like a social platform and search, then experiment with one or two additional channels like a niche publication or conference.

4. Map out sales involvement

Depending on your business model, sales may be part of the conversion journey for every lead, or a specific type of lead. For example, in a product-led growth model, leads may be divided up with only enterprise-level deals coming through to sales.

Whatever this looks like, you will want to get clear on which leads are direct where, then set up operational journeys in your CRM, CDP, or marketing automation platform to prioritize and round-robin leads.

Doing this now is beneficial because it:

• Aligns sales and marketing processes into one efficient customer journey;

• Improves user satisfaction with a better customer experience;

• Places qualified, sales-ready leads to the front of the queue;

• Evenly distributes workloads across sales teams; and

• Gives sales teams full context for conversations

5. Set up your nurture journeys

Whether you send some leads through a self-serve nurture journey in a PLG model or you are nurturing leads who have not yet reached the 'decision' phase of the journey, automated nurture journeys are essential.

This article details how to build an email nurture campaign in more detail. In brief, you will want to create a series of emails (and capture widgets, push notifications, or SMS messages if relevant) that help educate your lead and show them why you're different.

Below is an example of a lead nurture email from NerdWallet - it clearly and quickly details some of the platform’s most popular features to educate the lead and help drive them to conversion.

Depending on your ICP and sales model, you may want to set up multiple paths within your lead nurture journey to ensure that messaging is personalized and relevant to the customer.

6. Track and optimize towards the metrics that matter

Ensure you have reports and a centralized dashboard to track all the metrics and KPIs you identified in step three to keep an eye on all metrics and optimize any campaigns that are under-performing, or redirect budget into another channel.

This regular monitoring and optimization should be complemented by a more bird's eye view reporting session (e.g. monthly or quarterly) where key learnings are identified and applied to campaigns moving forward. These sessions are also a great time to revisit your ICP, marketing channels, marketing messages, and sales processes to identify what's working and what's not and re-strategize accordingly.

New customers entering the market, new competitors and messaging, algorithm updates, fluctuating CPCs on social platforms — if there is any constant in customer acquisition, it's change. Making reporting, insight generation, and campaign optimization a part of your process will help you stay ahead.

Bonus step: 7. Set them up for success

This is technically not part of customer acquisition, but getting clear on what happens after conversion can help ensure those new customers stick around.

By mapping out the post-conversion steps and marketing messages, you can set expectations around onboarding or support processes, ensure support and success teams have the context they need to deliver exceptional service, and iron out any kinks in marketing messages, contracts, or sales communications

Customer acquisition FAQs

1. What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of generating leads, nurturing them, and converting them into paying customers. While other parts of marketing, like brand awareness, impact customer acquisition, a strong customer acquisition strategy is specifically focused on moving customers down a sales pipeline.

2. What is customer acquisition cost (CAC)?

Your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost your company pays to acquire a new paying customer. A good customer acquisition strategy will focus on lowering this cost by identifying the right audience and messaging and optimizing paid marketing efforts. Learn more about calculating and improving your CAC in our guide to customer acquisition cost.

3. What is the difference between lead generation and customer acquisition?

Lead generation is one of the steps involved in customer acquisition — but it's not the whole thing. When you generate a new lead through paid or organic marketing efforts, they will then move through a nurture phase before they convert.