5 Easy Customer Acquisition Tactics for Startups
At the start of last week, we put out a poll across our social media platforms asking founders what their prime concern was in the first year of launching their startups. The options were customer acquisition or profit and surprise, surprise, profit lost this round.
This proves how crucial customer acquisition is to the growth of any business, from the moment it launches and beyond.
If there was a C in startups, it would stand for customers because without them, no startup can survive.
With that in mind, here are a few tricks and tactics for customer acquisition that startups could easily implement in their first year and afterwards..
- The good ol’ mailing list
Every customer loves customization and a great way to get up close and personal with your customers is to get in their inbox. Through newsletters, you can share company updates, exclusive resources and other relevant information with your customers. With the recent outage of some social media platforms, there has never been a better time to explore other alternatives to interact with your customers, both old and new. Email marketing is a great place to start.
At Oui capital, we share monthly newsletters to keep our subscribers up to speed with what we’ve been up to each month. Subscribe here to join the family!
2. Create valuable resources for free.
This point works hand in hand with the abovementioned point. An easy way to get new customers to join your mailing list is to share resources that your target audience will be interested in. It could be ebooks, audiobooks, access to live sessions, etc.
3. Offer referral rewards
Turn your early adopters into your brand evangelists by offering them exciting incentives when they recommend your product or service to their spheres of influence. Many businesses have implemented this tactic with their products/services because it works!
Customers are already going to share what they enjoy, so why not reward them for doing so? Such incentives vary depending on the nature of your startup, but be as creative as you desire. Some examples include discounts on their next order, exclusive access to closed door events, and many others.
4. Partnerships! Collaborate with other brands.
The beautiful thing about collaboration is that it can be done in several ways. As a startup founder, you can collaborate with other players in the ecosystem through live sessions, podcast episodes, featured articles, masterclasses and much more. Before you collaborate, it is important to first identify your goal and ensure that the collaboration aligns with your brand’s image and values.
5. Excellent Customer service
Nothing gets you more customers like treating the ones you already have like gold! 90% of customers are influenced by positive reviews when buying a product. No matter how great your product or service is, if your customer service is consistently bad, no one will get to know. Bad customer service can literally toss all other acquisition strategies in the trash because you’ll not only not get new customers, you’ll reduce your chances of reaching potential customers and even possibly lose your current ones.
We may all agree that profit is not the first goal but it’s definitely the end goal. We believe that these tried and tested tactics will serve as a means to the end goal of building a profitable startup.
What other tactics will you add to this list? What tactics have you tried in your startup? Which one has worked well so far? Kindly share in the comments. Thanks for reading!
