Customer Acquisition Guide: Strategy, Funnel & Channels

In this e-book, you’ll discover the importance of personalization, and how you can create a strategy of your own. Understanding who needs your product, their problems, and how they think guides all subsequent choices in content and messaging. It is how a business grows its revenue and remains profitable over time.

Our research team analyzed customer acquisition cost trends across 27 industries and 8 primary marketing channels. This provides a comfortable buffer on each side, ensuring that you aren’t overspending on marketing. Our team has also analyzed the average customer acquisition costs of 22 SaaS industries to determine the average B2B CAC for each. That metric, along with your Customer Lifetime Value (Customer LTV, or sometimes abbreviated CLV) are your best friends in the world of B2B marketing. When people ask me how to evaluate the ROI of their marketing campaigns, I tell them to start with their customer acquisition cost (CAC). Easily plan campaigns, create content, run ads, and measure ROI from one platform.

Relying on individual platform dashboards creates data silos. Understanding the difference between omnichannel vs multichannel marketing is key for modern brands. This ensures a consistent brand message and a seamless experience for the customer. This ensures you are present on the channels where your message is most likely to be seen and welcomed. Are you focused on brand awareness, lead generation, or direct sales? This includes hosting conferences, sponsoring trade shows, or setting up pop-up shops.

Understanding the customer acquisition funnel

• One customer acquisition strategy example is Tesla’s referral program, which offers $500 in credits to the referrer and a $2,500 discount to the referred customer.
• Diversifying beyond a single paid channel and investing in trusted third-party distribution can also improve efficiency over time.
• By adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to their website, advertisers can match their website visitors to members on LinkedIn for further engagement.

Paying commission on paid conversions rather than signups filters out low-intent affiliates gaming the program for clicks. Where referral programs incentivize customers to bring in peers, affiliate programs incentivize external partners to drive new users in exchange for a revenue share. They paid $20 to both the referrer and referee, with the program helping PayPal grow from 1 million to 5 million users in 6 months. A well-designed referral program systematizes it, and referred customers require less persuasion, have lower CAC, close faster, and generate higher customer lifetime value than customers acquired through paid channels.

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What is customer acquisition cost?

This approach ensures that the message is being seen by a highly relevant audience, increasing the chances of turning those individuals into leads.” While marketers can organically build an audience on social media, these platforms also allow them to run paid ads that help build brand awareness and generate leads in a shorter period of time. These platforms make it easy to guide followers to take action, from the swipe-up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to URLs on X. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. Of marketers use 69.56% Facebook in their marketing strategy, followed by Instagram (60.31%) and YouTube (58.77%). Prospects in this stage are well-informed and have a clear understanding of their needs.

Once you add KYC verification, sign-up bonuses, card issuance, and onboarding drop-off, a neobank reporting a "$50 consumer CAC" is really spending $85-$105 per active customer. Some online payment service providers offer free shopping cart services to businesses. You’ll pay fees to in order to accept payments online, just like accepting credit cards in a physical location. Online payment services typically accept credit and debit cards in addition to other popular online money transfer services. If you sell your product or service online, you could accept payment through your website with an online payment service.

CPCs range from $0.20 to $2.00, with optimized in-feed and Spark ads landing around $0.40-$0.70. Ecommerce brands now lose an average of $29 on every new customer they acquire, after accounting for marketing costs and returns. CAC isn't What is customer acquisition marketing. just high, it's been climbing faster than most brands' margins can absorb. Even within the US, West Coast brands tend to pay 15-25% more than the national average, likely reflecting higher competition density in those markets. For brands that want to own their customer relationships and build long-term value, DTC remains the right model. 69% are increasing their marketing spend in 2025, but 88% of subscription-based brands report higher acquisition costs compared to last year.

Some businesses develop longer-term engagement strategies like personalized content, special offers and regular communication. A focus on retention cannot only maximize the value of each customer but reduce the overall cost of acquisition. They also create marketing campaigns that span from social media copy to a branded landing page and targeted email campaigns. An omnichannel approach helps ensure that customers have a seamless and consistent experience across each platform they interact with. Automation tools have the capacity to surface promising leads based on behavior or automatically optimize SEO and PPC campaigns, reducing the cost of broad customer acquisition strategies. In recent years, many companies have automated some of these tasks to increase efficiency and free customer acquisition specialists to focus on more creative, labor-intensive tasks.

Don’t just close deals—help ensure that your company is the best one to earn a customer’s business. Your ideal customer profile should evolve over time and guide messaging, channel selection, and strategy. Start by analyzing your best existing customers to identify common traits, needs, and behaviors. B2B companies often rely on SEO, content, and outbound sales for long-term demand, while B2C brands may see faster returns from paid ads and social media. Most successful businesses invest in both to create sustainable growth. Acquisition drives new revenue, while retention improves profitability and long-term value.