Customer Acquisition: A Guide for Shopify Store Owners

Your customer acquisition approaches may need a revamp if you’re experiencing low patronage in your Shopify store.

As a leading marketing agency for Shopify stores, we help business owners like you grow their bottom line using tried and tested strategies. This article on “what is customer acquisition” will cover all you need to know on this topic. You’ll also learn strategies that can help you boost sales.

What Is Customer Acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of finding potential customers and converting them into paying customers. The customer acquisition process features three major phases—also known as the customer acquisition funnel.

The first phase focuses on creating awareness about the product, while the second focuses on encouraging consideration. The final phase focuses on facilitating a purchase. Let’s look at these phases in more detail below:

Awareness (Lead Generation)

The first step of the customer acquisition process involves generating brand awareness using a carefully designed marketing strategy. Spreading the word about your business across as many channels as possible increases your brand reach and the number of potential customers you can attract.

Consideration (Purchase Intent)

This phase focuses on providing more information to customers who are now aware of your brand and considering making a purchase. Businesses use a mix of strategies (case studies, product descriptions) and user testimonials to present potential customers with as much information as possible about their products. Well-informed customers are more likely to complete a purchase.

Purchase

This stage is the culmination of every customer acquisition process. Here, businesses focus on offering customers enough incentives (loyalty programs, discounts, etc.) to push them into the paying customer bracket.

How Does Customer Acquisition Affect Your Shopify Store? 

Customer acquisition affects your Shopify store because every e-commerce business needs a steady flow of paying customers to survive. Even when you have a healthy base of repeat customers, you can only grow by attracting new customers and replacing any old customers who don’t return. It’s the best way to ensure the long-term sustainability of your business.

Unfortunately, customer retention is difficult. According to data from Smartinsights, the best online retailers in the world only have a 2.8% conversion rate. This means that for every 100 customers that land on the page, less than three will complete a purchase.

If that’s the case for leading brands and household names, Shopify store owners need to work hard to maintain a steady flow of customers through the funnel. You can’t close out the two purchases if you don’t bring in 100 people to the store. The big names continue to survive because they know how to attract thousands of potential customers.

For example, if you bring in 100,000 potential customers to the first stage of the customer acquisition funnel in any year, that’s 2,800 completed sales for your brand.

How to Develop a Customer Acquisition Strategy

Now that you know the answer to “what is customer acquisition,” here are the steps to develop a customer acquisition strategy for your Shopify store:

Define Your Perfect Customer

Before starting a customer acquisition journey, you need to work out your target customer profile. What market are you trying to reach? To build a properly targeted campaign, you also need a clear picture of the demographics (age, gender, education level, geographic location, and more).

Decide On a Budget

Before deciding on a sum, you need to work out the average customer acquisition cost (CAC) in your niche. Businesses use the CAC and customer lifetime value to know how much it costs to acquire one paying customer. With an estimate, you can work out how many customers you can expect to acquire with your budget.

Stick to a Few Customer Acquisition Channels

It’s easy to spread your budget too thin. Chasing leads across all viable channels and pursuing leads using every lead generation tactic in the book isn’t always the best approach for small e-commerce businesses like yours. You need to identify the channels that hold the most promise for your niche and drill down on a few of them to maximize your return on investment (ROI).

Set Clearly Outlined Goals

How many customers do you want to attract in a month? How about in six months?

Having a clear goal for your customer acquisition drives is the only way you can track and review results. Consistent tracking will show you what works and what doesn’t.

Ensure Consistency with Your Customer Experience 

Customer experience begins as soon as a customer encounters your business. Ensuring consistency with your brand messaging will help keep the customer focused on the brand.

While on this topic, you need to check the user experience on your Shopify store to ensure it’s not countering your efforts.

Can customers find what they need immediately? Do you have detailed product descriptions? How simple is the check-out?

Top Customer Acquisition Channels for Shopify Store Owners

Some of the top customer acquisition channels to consider when building your strategy include:

Paid Advertising

Online advertising is one of the most common ways to find new customers. Facebook ads and Google ads are the two main drivers of paid traffic for e-commerce businesses. However, you can consider paid ads on other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest if your target audience spends their time on these platforms.

Influencer Marketing

If your customer acquisition budget allows it, paying someone with a relevant audience is a good way to spread awareness about your brand. Influencer marketing involves paying social media users with a significant following to discuss your business with their audience. Many people trust the recommendations from influencers as much as referrals from family and friends.

If you choose to go this route, focus on micro-influencers. It’s nice to have Miley Cyrus or Zendaya promoting your fashion brand (if you can afford it). However, more people will trust a recommendation or positive review from Instagram user @pokemon13 with 20k followers.

On the surface, it doesn’t add up. However, that’s the reality. People are less likely to listen to an influencer if they already know they are working a gig.

Email Marketing

Email marketing remaining a viable customer acquisition channel in the social media era is a good indicator of its efficacy. A survey by Campaign Monitor showed that 59% of marketers saw the most ROI from email.

Referral Programs

Word-of-mouth referrals from loyal customers remain one of the most influential forms of marketing. As previously mentioned, people are more likely to listen to recommendations from people they know (both in real life and on social media).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

Customers start searching for a product with a Google search. You need to create SEO-optimized content around your Shopify store to increase your chances of landing organic search visitors. Your blog, product descriptions, and images should feature relevant keywords if you want to appear in the search results.

Learn More About Customer Acquisition 

Do you need more help growing the customer base at your Shopify store? Contact Bear North Digital. We provide small businesses with all the support they need to grow with content such as this post on “what is customer acquisition” and this guide to optimizing for Google My Business.

If you need more hands-on help, we have a team of experts ready to guide you through building a working customer acquisition strategy.

Call (715) 319-4822 to book an appointment with Bear North Digital today.