Customer acquisition is a long process that leads to your business attracting and gaining new customers. More new customers translate into increased brand awareness, sales and referrals; thus, you can maintain and expand your customer base.
Even with the importance of having a solid plan to acquire clients effectively, many marketing teams fail to create one. That causes a lot of frustration and disappointment for bosses. Most CEOs are less interested in results from the marketing team, such as the number of visitors to a business website, engagements on social media platforms and generated leads.
Company bosses are mostly interested in marketing team information that involves getting new clients and achieving projected revenue.
In that respect, growth marketers can help identify new customers, qualify leads and maintain higher customer satisfaction.
You can meet your revenue target by defining goals that will help you achieve the plan for customer acquisition. Your targets will help justify the loss of customers over a period (customer attrition), newly received customers, and the expansion of the customer base.
Below is how you set goals to add new clients to a business.
Focus on keeping your customers
A strategy for getting new clients is important since it can improve sales and revenue and enables the replacement of customers who stop transacting with a business entity.
The attrition rate, also called customer churn or turnover, measures the number of customers who have stopped using a service or a product. Generally, the average attrition rate varies from one industry to another.
For instance, Zuora, a subscription management and billing platform, established that the average customer turnover for business-to-business companies is about 25%. At the same time, the attrition rate is about 30% for business-to-consumer firms.
You have to consult the business team that deals with sales to understand the churn rate for your business.
Categorize attrition rates according to the groups of related products or services so you can compare and contrast their consumer value. Hence, you can define the best customer acquisition tactics and goals and prioritize the areas requiring a lot of time and money.
If the business has high turnover rates, you will be forced to put more effort and time into replacing customers you lose. However, your business may be in an industry that experiences lower customer churn rates. In that case, the focus should be on retaining the existing customers before planning to increase the customer base.
You need to allocate more budget and time to the process that introduces and integrates new hires into your enterprise and manages customers. Consequently, your business will benefit more from keeping customers and an easier way to achieve the set goals for obtaining new clients. You can learn more about how marketing strategy can help drive the retention of customers through this platform.
Set goals for acquiring new clients
The sales and marketing teams should all be responsible for ensuring a company gets new customers, and thus, they help achieve customer acquisition goals.
The marketing team should set its goal to attract new customers by considering the factors below.
- The revenue generated by the marketing team
For instance, the marketing team must consider its total revenue contribution from last year. A fully configured customer relationship management and marketing automation system can help you determine the marketing return on investment.
However, if you have a system that cannot measure the quality of customer interaction with your business, consider the revenues generated from customers whose first or last interaction or touch came with the marketing staff.
- Consider the general rate of acquiring new customers in your industry
The marketing team can help your business receive about 15% -30 % of revenue growth due to new clients.
Still, the marketing team can contribute up to 60% of new customer revenue in some industries.
Depending on the ability of the marketing team and the current prospects for acquiring new customers, the target for new customer revenue during the first year should be about 15%. And in the subsequent years, the returns should be at least 10% more.
- Collaboration with the sales team
The marketing team must help identify high-quality leads that can help the sales team increase its sales.
It is vital to remember that the marketing team plays a major role in revenue creation, especially through acquiring new customers.
