12 Customer Acquisition Strategies from Executives at Intercom, Slack & Andreessen Horowitz

Peter Drucker once said the only purpose of a business is to make and keep a customer. In that one sentence, we cut right to the heart of your business. You can spend months working on a great idea, pour tons of time and energy into crafting the perfect marketing, but without customers, your business will cease to exist.

All future growth hinges on one thing – customer acquisition. While this may sound simple, it can be incredibly challenging to find new opportunities for growth and customer acquisition in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

• There are a billion emails sent every day by MailChimp alone.
• There are over two million blog posts published each day.

In today’s world, you’ll only win by acquiring customers in a way that differentiates you from the crowd and builds an enthusiastic customer base that sticks around.

To help you understand and improve your customer acquisition, we asked 7 SaaS leaders to reveal their top customer acquisition tactics.

Why SaaS leaders?

• Because SaaS success and valuation depends heavily on customer acquisition and retention.
• Also because rarely should you only look to your immediate industry for insight and ideas.

SaaS, which is a subset of the technology industry, has seen massive growth over the last decade. All predictions point to it continuing to gain steam. After all, SaaS lowers the barrier to entry for people around the world to do whatever it is they want to do from launching a business to paying taxes to managing inventory.

No task is too large for SaaS, at least how that industry sees it. Their tactics can very well be the inspiration you need to take your sales to the next level of growth.

First things first, however…

What is Cost of Customer Acquisition?

The cost of customer acquisition is typically referred to as CAC, and it is easily broken down into a simple formula.

It is the cost spent on acquiring new customers (marketing expenses) divided by the number of customers acquired for that given period.

For emample, if you spend $100 in a year and acquire 100 customers, your CAC is $1.

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Customer Acquisition Strategies

We provide 12 customer acquisition tactics to help you grow your store’s traffic and improve your conversion rate.

You’ll learn:

1. How to be thoughtful on the channels you choose to pursue

2. Why you should always be testing

3. What current merchants do to drive their growth.

Let’s dive in.

1. Win Hearts and Minds.

2. Understand Short-term Hacks vs. Long-term Strategy.

3. Value of the Customer Must Exceed Cost of Customer Acquisition.

4. After Product–market Fit Comes Product–channel Fit.

5. Every Business Needs a Mechanism for Free Acquisition.

6. Content is Your Most Powerful Acquisition Channel.

7. Acquire Slowly at First, Perfect the Product, Go Mainstream.

8. Acquire the Right Kind of Customers (i.e. the ones that pay).

9. Give ’em a Deal They’ll Never Forget.

10. Design Your Website to be Helpful, Not Sophisticated.

11. A/B Test Everything.

12. Reach Out to Influencers.