Definition: Customer acquisition is the process of acquiring new customers for one’s business.

It covers the entire Buyer’s Journey – from the moment a person becomes a lead until they convert into a paying customer. Depending on your product or service offering, acquisition can be a long or short process from start to finish. Regardless, your strategy should cover all the steps: you need to engage, convince, close and retain customers.
How can you measure your company’s B2B customer acquisition?
It is important to monitor and measure your success in customer acquisition to determine effectiveness as well as costs. The best metrics to evaluate customer acquisition efforts and identify opportunities for improvement depend on the industry. However, some of them apply across industries and are used by companies to adjust their strategies and achieve better results.
The following are metrics that provide a good starting point for measuring your customer acquisition:

Conversion Rate = The conversion rate is used to measure business growth. It indicates the percentage of people who follow through to the end of a process they started. For this metric to be useful, it is essential that you clearly define the ‘start’ and ‘end’ of the process in question.

Customer Acquisition Cost. This is a commonly used metric that evaluates the effectiveness of your customer acquisition efforts. Among other things, it calculates the marketing expenditure per customer acquired in a certain period of time, as well as the costs of individual marketing methods. This provides an indication of the success of your overall acquisition efforts and helps you determine which strategies will give you the best results. A common method of calculating the cost of acquiring new customers is to divide the marketing spend by the number of customers acquired.

New customer acquisition rate = You can use this to compare your acquisition rate over different time periods to see if your results improve over time. To calculate this rate, you need to divide the number of customers acquired in a given period by the length of time.

Visitor rate = With this method, you can record early interactions with potential customers in numbers. This allows you to assess the effectiveness of these product pages or landing pages and identify any opportunities for improvement.
Customer acquisition can still be divided into two categories here, cold acquisition and warm acquisition.
In cold calling, there is no contact with the potential customer, whereas in warm calling there is already contact.

7 tips to improve your cold calls:

1. define market, industry and target group = define exactly which buyer personas you want to address and build an effective customer journey for your customers.

2. define USP = Unique Selling Point. This defines your company and shows how you stand out from the competition.

3. online marketing = make sure that you are not only represented offline, but also online! Especially in these times of the Corona Pandemic, it is extremely important for customer acquisition that your company is represented online.

4. inbound – outbound marketing = decide on a strategy that best suits your company.

5. social selling = social networks are an important channel for customer acquisition in B2C and B2B alike.

6. operate SEM = You can’t do without SEM (Search Engine Marketing). If you focus on inbound marketing, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is an important SEM discipline. If you would rather have short-term success, you should rely on SEA (Search Engine Advertising), for example by placing Google Ads.

7. Recommendations = Your existing customers are important multipliers. In order for them to recommend your company and its products via word of mouth, you need a Customer Success Management (CSM).