What Is Customer Acquisition? 9 Strategies To Acquire Customers

By testing, adapting, and scaling wisely, brands can turn short-term campaigns into a long-term, sustainable user acquisition strategy that drives lasting impact. In conclusion, implementing effective user acquisition strategies is crucial for business growth and success. Carrying out tasks such as tracking, analyzing, and optimizing results will also help you to manage your strategies better. User acquisition strategies refer to businesses’ methods and tactics to attract and convert new users to their products, services, or platforms. These strategies are critical for driving growth, expanding market share, and ensuring the long-term success of a business. In today’s competitive market, having a well-defined user acquisition strategy is essential for any organization looking to scale and maintain a solid user base.

By creating and publishing blog content on Strikingly, businesses can attract more website traffic and improve search engine rankings. Strikingly’s blog platform has features such as custom URLs, image optimization, and social sharing buttons, which can help businesses increase the visibility and reach of their blog content. To implement a successful social media advertising strategy, you can use Strikingly to create optimized landing pages for conversion. Strikingly’s landing page builder makes it easy to create beautiful, high-converting pages to convert visitors into customers.

And to foster a sense of community, you should always respond promptly to comments and messages. Creating user personas is one of the best ways to understand your target audience. User personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on demographic information, behaviors, motivations, and goals. By developing these detailed personas, you can gain insight into your target audience’s needs, desires, and challenges. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) measures the total cost of acquiring a new paying user, including all sales and marketing spend, divided by the number of customers won. CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) is broader and refers to the cost of a specific action, such as a form fill, trial signup, or demo request.

This allows you to scale what actually works, rather than what only looks efficient at first glance. Next, look at how users move from click to install, and from install to your value moment. It’s usually the store page, onboarding flow, offer clarity, or a mismatch between creative promise and product reality. From a performance perspective, paid social often drives higher install volume but more variable user quality.

They get you listed in ecosystems where users actively look for solutions like yours. You offer a free plan where users can create and share polished proposals with clients. The higher you go up on the Product career ladder, the more strategic skills matter.

Revenue usually comes from a small portion of players, so acquisition decisions are made based on how well early cohorts retain and monetize. In games, scaling UA before early retention is proven typically leads to rising costs and unstable performance. Paid user acquisition channels determine where your ads appear and how users reach your app store page. Choosing the right mix is less about being everywhere and more about matching channels to your goals and app type.

Hims launched social media ad campaigns and search PPC campaigns to reach new audiences and protect its high-intent traffic from competitors. The brand paired its paid media with a mobile-first, SEO-optimized blog, Good Health, to attract men Googling health issues. For example, beauty brand Tower 28 grew its user base with authentic, organic social media content. Tower 28 built credibility with customers on social media with user-generated content (UGC).

As your app matures, more sophisticated techniques become available. Burst campaigns can dramatically increase visibility by pushing your app up the charts in a short timeframe, potentially leading to sustained organic growth afterward. For new apps, the most successful user acquisition strategies are the ones that can be tested and adjusted quickly, before budgets and channels are fully scaled. That’s why many early-stage teams rely on web-to-app funnels to validate pricing, messaging, and conversion paths on real users instead of sending all traffic straight to the app stores.

This allows advertisers to engage audiences at every stage of their interaction. A/B testing allows you to compare different versions of ads, landing pages, or in-game features to determine which performs better. This data-driven approach helps refine strategies and improve user acquisition outcomes.

Seo And Content Marketing

CAC payback period tells you how long it takes to recoup the cost of acquisition through the revenue a customer generates. Calculate it by dividing CAC by average monthly revenue per customer. Payback periods above 24 months signal a capital-intensive model that strains cash flow and requires external funding to sustain. Webinars fell out of favor for a few years as audiences grew tired of sales pitches packaged as educational content. They’re slowly becoming more effective again, but the format that converts has changed significantly from what worked a few years ago.

In summary, content marketing is not just about creating content; it’s about strategically crafting user support and product support content for every step of the user journey. By doing so, you not only attract users but guide them seamlessly from awareness to advocacy, establishing a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship. Customer acquisition will always be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be unpredictable. A data-driven strategy transforms it from a marketing expense into an investment engine. By connecting every campaign, channel, and cohort to measurable profit, teams gain the confidence to scale responsibly. As a result, you can convert your satisfied customers into micro-channels.

Mapping the location of your target consumers will allow you to make better recommendations, take appropriate actions, and incorporate relevant keywords based on their location. Marketers can use referral marketing software and track customer referrals via referral codes, rewards cards, or referral links. When creating content, it should become intuitive to consider delivering value to potential consumers, building trust, and persuading visitors to choose you.

Selecting the right acquisition channels can make or break your user acquisition strategy. Not all channels will work wonders for your business, so it’s crucial to dive into their performance, align them with your target audience, and keep testing and tweaking. Paid user acquisition is all about quick results through investment in advertising campaigns on platforms like social media and ad networks.

These days some of the highest-converting traffic is coming from less obvious social networks — places like Pinterest, Quora, and even TikTok-alternative Lemon8. When done right, this strategy doesn’t feel like you’re even trying. It lets you validate, promote, and scale your product within real user conversations. It’s like SEO, but interactive — and potentially deeply tied to your product vision. Let’s say you’re part of a team building a new project management app designed for freelancers. Your product is solid, and you’re confident it solves a real problem.

Owned channels leverage direct relationships with existing audiences, offering the highest ROI and strongest control over messaging and data. Traditional advertising, such as out-of-home (OOH), print, and direct mail, can still be effective, particularly for local businesses. As leads began to increase, Sandler also used HubSpot’s tools to hyper-personalize interactions with prospects.

In summary, user acquisition is a multifaceted process that requires careful planning, execution, and ongoing optimization. Unlike app store search, users are not actively looking for an app — you are introducing the product into their feed and creating demand through messaging and creative. Organic user acquisition focuses on helping users discover your app inside the app stores, where most install decisions actually happen.

On top of that, creative strategies that work for app campaigns don’t always translate to the web, so you have to invest in creative production and tests to find what works.
The average lifetime value of your customers (CLV) describes how much revenue they can bring you over the next few years if they don’t churn.
Web-to-app helps boost LTV by letting you tweak, test, and optimize every aspect of monetization.
By testing different creatives, messages, and audiences, you can quickly understand who responds to your app, which value propositions resonate and which markets or segments perform best.
Retention metrics are now baked into the initial mobile app user acquisition strategy.

The effectiveness channel of each depends on a range of factors, such as the product itself, your target audience, and the competition. A successful user acquisition strategy involves a combination of channels tailored to the product and audience. While both strategies leverage third-party promoters to acquire users, they serve different purposes and audiences. Referral marketing typically incentivizes existing customers to invite friends or colleagues, relying on trust and personal relationships. Affiliate marketing, on the other hand, partners with publishers, influencers, or content creators who promote your product to their audiences in exchange for performance-based commissions. Choosing the right approach depends on your goals, audience, and resources.

If you launch web-to-app with FunnelFox, you can select multiple providers and switch between them when needed. A leading Health & Fitness app reached an 80% ROAS increase in just 3 months with web-to-app funnels. Some hesitate to try web-to-app because they assume web funnels are more expensive — and sometimes, they are. Let’s find out why that happens and how it impacts ROAS in the long run. If you’re just getting started with web-to-app, download our guide on setting up, optimizing, and scaling high-converting web-to-app funnels. Creative testing isn’t just about changing colors or CTA copy; it’s about identifying the emotional triggers and visual cues that resonate with your highest-value users.

Oren worked with us at DAD to help establish our search marketing and user acquisition strategies. His insight and experience took what we were doing before his arrival to a whole new level. His test and learn approach fits nicely into an agile / lean workflow and brings a scientific rigour to what can easily otherwise become a spray and pray activity. I learnt a lot working with Oren and would be very happy to do so again in the future. The percentage of visitors to your website or landing page who become paying customers.

LTV is the total revenue you expect to earn from a user over their entire time using your product. It’s often the most important metric—because it tells you how much you can afford to spend on acquisition. Paid ads are great for speed and scale—but they’re not always sustainable long-term, especially if your product doesn’t monetize early or if you’re working with a tight budget. If you’re just optimizing for installs, you might get cheap traffic that doesn’t convert. Optimize for events like sign-up, tutorial completion, or even purchase—whatever your real KPI is.

What happens after install determines whether acquisition is sustainable. At the National Retail Federation Big Show in 2021, speaker Mitch Joel described the many ways in which retailers could turn pandemic lemons into lemonade. One of his suggestions was adding services on top of existing products and services to get people excited about a wider range of offerings. Using Walmart as an example, Joel pointed to how the retailer started offering pet insurance. With a rush on pandemic pet adoptions, this was a logical customer acquisition opportunity given the many pet products the company already sells. In the awareness stage, people discover your brand and decide if it’s relevant.

Build A Sustainable Strategy

It involves various strategies and tactics designed to reach potential users, capture their interest, and encourage them to act, such as signing up, downloading an app, or purchasing. For organic UA, ASO Intelligence shows how users discover apps, which keywords drive visibility, how competitors rank, and how store page creatives and localization impact installs. This makes ASO a measurable, long-term acquisition channel rather than a one-time setup. Key customer acquisition metrics include customer acquisition cost (CAC), conversion rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and payback period. These metrics help you evaluate efficiency, profitability, and scalability. Together, they show whether your acquisition strategy can support a predictable pipeline.

SEO is all about targeting people who are interested in your company based on the keywords they used to discover you. PPC allows you to create a search result and pay to have it shown alongside organic results, increasing your chances of being seen by searchers. Blogging is an organic marketing approach that allows you to reach out to potential consumers in concert with strategies such as email marketing, link-building, SEO, and other options. Even if your product is a mobile app, you should create a website to convert the readers of your articles into a registration funnel and help in user discovery and acquisition. I founded Content Powered, a content marketing agency where I partner with businesses to help them grow through strategic content.

UA is the process of attracting new users for your app or game, primarily through marketing efforts. If you’re not in mobile gaming and your product has a web component—think SaaS, finance apps, productivity tools—content marketing is a powerful long-term channel. When you get your user acquisition strategy right, everything else gets easier—retention, monetization, and long-term growth. To demonstrate the success of these strategies, let’s examine a few examples of successful user acquisition campaigns. Jimmy Rodriguez is the COO of Shift4Shop, a completely free, enterprise-grade eCommerce solution.

Test your assumptions through campaigns and refine your segments based on performance. Your ideal customer profile should evolve over time and guide messaging, channel selection, and strategy. Making sales is not the only reason everyone in a company should have visibility into customer data. After Zappos learned that existing customers were frustrated with having to pay for returns, they made returns free. This further encouraged people to shop with them for the first time. Here, a customer-centric business decision had a direct impact on customer acquisition.

Strikingly offers a range of SEO tools to help businesses optimize their website and improve their search engine rankings. Form strategic partnerships with affiliates or influencers who can promote your product or service to their audience. Set up affiliate programs that provide commissions or incentives for each successful referral or sale generated by the affiliate. Select affiliates who align with your target audience and can effectively promote your offerings.

What Is Customer Acquisition? 9 Strategies To Acquire Customers