Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention: 5 Important Things To Note

Everyone who has ever been involved with Marketing and Sales knows that attracting new customers is as important as retaining customers. Most businesses want to strike the right balance between Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention.

When it comes to evaluating long-term growth strategies, both acquisitions and retentions are necessary. The difference happens in terms of the approach and the outlook for businesses. It is also about allocating the right kind of resources for a business.

With the rise of E-Commerce platforms, the entire landscape of acquisition and retention has changed. E-Commerce has not only opened up newer areas of opportunities and possibilities but also thrown up new challenges.

In this article, we will focus on five important points of view regarding Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention.

5 Important Points to Note for Customer Retention

1. Benefits-

One of the major benefits of Customer Acquisition is creating a new set of customers. This helps in growing the base, exploring new areas, launching new products, and reaching out to new target audiences. It helps in growing the business directly.

Customer Retention is advantageous as it tends to be less expensive than acquisition. It also helps in building brand loyalty, as existing customers recommend you to new ones. It also helps in improving products and services, as repeat customers are more likely to submit feedback.

2. Avenues and Approaches-

Customer Acquisition tends to depend on Social Media, Print Advertisements, SEO and SEM to find and reach out to new customers. You can also include other traditional advertising models like Radio and Television advertisements to the channels used for customer acquisition.

When it comes to Customer Retention, a marketer’s favorite approach is Email Marketing Campaigns. Text/SMS Marketing is also an effective aid for retention. Focussed Loyalty Programs (Cards) are another way of building relationships with existing customers.

3. Problems-

If you are paying too much attention to customer acquisition you would be burning through a lot of monetary resources. You would also be driving away your existing customers who might feel ignored. In addition, your market’s economic condition might not be supportive of new acquisitions.

Focussing on customer retention has its own set of problems. For starters, it might lead to stagnation as new customers fail to come on board. Your business would also never be able to scale up, as new customers are the bedrock of extensive expansion plans.

4. Concentration-

It is important that marketers who are pursuing customer acquisition execute strong Content Marketing strategies. This will help in reaching more people and ramping up your brand building capabilities. You can also look at the trending Influencer Marketing strategies as an area of concentration.

When it comes to customer retention, it is imperative that you invest in data and metrics. This also means setting up a good CRM software, which helps provide all the information regarding the purchase history, payment mode, type of purchase, and so on.

Read more: It’s Time to Change Your Marketing Strategy

5. Quality-

Neither customer acquisition nor customer retention will be successful if you do not have quality. No matter what kind of approach you are taking, maintaining high levels of quality is the key to success.

This translates into maintaining quality data, quality content marketing strategies, quality SMS marketing campaigns, quality social media postings, and campaigns, etc. Whatever you do, ensure that you are satisfied with the quality of the execution.

Conclusion

It is important to remember that while some marketers prefer an aggressive acquisition strategy, others favor retention. It also depends on the stage at which a business is developing. However, what remains the same is that both acquisition and retention are long-term strategies that depend on effective planning and the right execution.