What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of attracting new people to your brand and turning them into customers. 

A strong customer acquisition strategy focuses on:

  • Identifying potential customers interested in your products or services.
  • Generating brand awareness through targeted marketing efforts.
  • Converting subscribers into loyal customers to expand your customer base and drive revenue growth.

Why customer acquisition is important for B2C businesses

You can’t retain customers and encourage them to buy more until you acquire them first. B2C brands are high-volume businesses that need to expand their base to see success. More customer acquisition means more opportunities for word of mouth and more repeat purchases. 

B2C customer acquisition strategy is all about establishing an emotional connection with your audience. They buy a couch because they just moved to a new place and want it to look nice. They buy a new dress because they want to feel good about how they look. They buy new running shoes because they fell in love with long-distance running and they want to step up their training.

All of these choices are driven by a personal need or desire, which is how consumers typically approach their B2C purchase decisions. 

This means your brand’s customer acquisition strategy has to strike the right balance between efficiency—to keep customer acquisition costs (CAC) low—and personalization. When you strike that balance, you can expect to see: 

  • Higher top-of-mind brand awareness
  • Boosted revenue and profitability
  • Higher likelihood of repeat purchases
  • More return on investment (ROI) on marketing dollars 

The 3 stages of customer acquisition

While the customer acquisition journey can vary widely from person to person and brand to brand, 3 overarching stages characterize in the process:

1. Awareness

This stage is about getting your brand in front of your target audience, whether that’s through organic or paid efforts.

Here’s where you can start to boost your brand’s visibility: 

  • Test the right channels. This is especially relevant if you’re just starting out. Customers expect brands to reach them on multiple channels, but you’ll need to know what works so you can deliver with the resources you have. Test content where your target audience spends the most time, whether that’s email, SMS, Instagram, or TikTok. 
  • Adopt a consistent omnichannel approach. It’s not enough to have a presence on multiple channels—you also need to deliver a cohesive, consistent experience. If you run an offer campaign on one channel, make sure it’s available on others, too. Consumers expect omnichannel consistency and multi-channel access.
  • Create lookalike audiences. Collect first-party data from existing customers and use it to target similar groups of people with lookalike audience ads on social media. This will increase the likelihood that the right people will see your ads and engage with them. 

2. Interest

This stage is about engaging with consumers to nudge them closer toward making a purchase. Here are a few tactics we recommend to generate interest:

  • Build your email and SMS lists. Data is at its most powerful when you own it. Use high-converting forms to gather email addresses and phone numbers, so you can build a real relationship with people who show interest in your brand. 
  • Personalize your messages. Use behavioral data and stated preferences to segment your audience and personalize your messages based on what you’ve learned about people. Recommend products they’ve browsed, send them offers after they’ve abandoned carts, and deploy automated email and text messages after they’ve taken certain actions on your website. 
  • Educate your subscribers. If what you sell is novel or expensive, you’ll want to spend a lot of time educating people about your products. Send messages that tell people how your products are made, how they might use them, and how they can get the most value from them. Or, if your product comes in many variations—like makeup, hair care, or clothing—send a quiz that can help people decide which product is right for them.

3. Conversion

This stage is about converting subscribers to customers. Here are some ideas for increasing the likelihood of conversion:

  • Develop a discount strategy. It’s no secret that a well-timed discount, limited-time offer, or free shipping can be the nudge someone needs to finish their transaction. But to keep CAC at a minimum, you’ll want to use a discount strategy. The best time to offer a discount is often when someone joins your list and during seasonal sales.   
  • Send automated messages. To convert subscribers at scale, B2C businesses need automated messages. These are messages like browse abandonment flows, which remind people about the products they were browsing, and abandoned cart messages, which encourage people to complete their purchase in your online store. 
  • Offer exceptional customer support. This is the stage when potential customers have the most questions. Offer access to customer support across multiple channels so that people can quickly get the information they need to make a purchase.

Klaviyo B2C CRM: your platform for customer acquisition

Klaviyo is the only CRM designed specifically for B2C businesses—combining deep personalization, speed, and scalability into one platform.

As the single source of truth for customer data, Klaviyo B2C CRM gives your business a real-time, 360-degree view of each customer’s browsing behavior, purchase history, message engagement, customer service needs, and more.

By integrating data, automation, service, and analytics into a single platform, Klaviyo B2C CRM helps brands automate and scale personalized outreach across thousands—or even millions—of customers, across the entire lifecycle.

Additional resources