This month, we’ve taken a deep dive into all things customer acquisition. We’ve covered all of the basics with our comprehensive guide for startups, we’ve reminded you of important things to keep in mind as you calculate CAC and we’ve helped you transition from acquisition to retention. But what tangible actions can you take to get new customers? Calculating your customer acquisition cost is just the beginning, after all; you also need to experiment and test your strategies to make sure you’re actually getting qualified traffic and acquiring customers.
To help you find the right customer acquisition strategy, let’s talk about 5 simple ones you can start implementing today.
1. Send follow-up emails
While you may think that most people reply after a first email, numbers show that’s not the case at all. In their own testing, Iko System found an 18% response rate to their first email and more responses based on email positions. The 6th follow-up, in contrast, had the largest response rate at 27%.
How soon should you follow-up? Close.io CEO Steli Efti recommends a second email within about 48 hours of the first.
While your follow-ups may serve the same purpose as your first email, resist the urge to copy-paste your first version and get labeled as a spammer. Instead, create a new one that acknowledges the fact that you’ve gotten in touch before, and provides additional information that may hook or intrigue them.
FEED – a healthcare brand and marketing agency – built a follow-up email funnel using the free Email Templates tool from HubSpot Sales. They made $100,000 in 30 days and their total revenue increased by a whopping 215%.
Here’s the sample email template that they used:
2. Update old blog posts
Always thinking ahead, Hubspot was able to increase its monthly view stats from organic search by 106% by updating their old blog posts.
Thanks to their efforts, Hubspot was able to generate 92% of leads and 76% of views from old posts.
Brian Dean called this strategy “The Content Relaunch”. The gist is to republish old blog content by adding extra context, new information, updated imagery or edits based on reader feedback.
He followed Hubspot’s example and found that an update of his old article about a White Hat SEO Case Study: How to Get a #1 Ranking helped his organic traffic increase by 260.7%.
Though it’s sometimes tempting to start from scratch, building and improving existing assets can be one of the most valuable investments your content and marketing team can make.
Curious to know what other assets you can tweak and improve for incremental growth? Check out this complete list of branding assets we put together for our deep dive into rebranding, you’ll find a lot of ideas about where to start experimenting and iterating today.
3. Create data-rich content
A well-known industry guru, Neil Patel has co-founded big marketing startups like Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics. One of the reasons why he’s become so popular? Because of his data-driven approach to publishing a constant stream of blog posts, which together generate over 100,000 visitors a month from Google.
His original posts have gotten incredible amounts of traffic because they focus on his tangible experiences and statistical findings in the marketing industry. His post on How to Score 100% on Google Pagespeed Insights, for example, aggregates data from a whole range of relevant sources and also includes his own findings.
Writers and publications love finding data-rich sources to use in their own articles, which in turn means his startup’s posts get lots of backlinks and digital credibility.
4. Answer questions on Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer-based social network. They have queries about games, lifestyle, food and even startup-related industries such as tech, blockchain and more.
Some startups answer questions on Quora and include a proposal for their products and services as a solution to the query. Every page on Quora gets lots of views and high rankings on Google, thereby driving growth, user acquisition, and reputation building in the process.
Jason Lemkin, CEO of SaaStr, has answered more than 3,000 questions on Quora and has gained 43.9 million views. This helps position him and his company as a leader in the industry.
5. Republish content on Medium
You’ve read a few blog posts over the years on Medium and their success as a platform primarily because of their canonical tag feature.
This feature lets a backlinks from the republished Medium post get pushed back to the original post. No need to worry about content duplication penalties from Google.
Medium is a big community with 60 million monthly readers. There are also lots of publications with thousands of subscribers. The Startup has more than 430,000 subscribers, the AngelList blog has 130,000 subscribers, and Startupsco has 115,000 subscribers. Some stories are even picked up by The Huffington Post and The New York Observer.
This makes it an ideal platform to publish your content, gain authority in your industry and acquire customers.
Curious to take an even deeper dive into the world of customer acquisition and retention? Don’t forget to check out our Friendly Startup Guide to Customer Acquisition.
Article written by Monique Danao
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