Mastering Customer Acquisition Strategy
Learn proven frameworks to acquire—and keep—new and repeat customers who reward your brand with their business again and again.
How to form your acquisition strategy
Understanding acquisition channels—where potential customers discover your brand—and knowing which are right for your business are essential to reaching the right audiences, the ones where you’ll find your future active customers. This is a cost-effective way to move the metrics that matter most, such as new sign-ups, and ensure the best return on your spending.
Defining acquisition channels
- Owned channels: Channels you create and control, such as web, email, content, and social media
- Earned channels: Channels where partners promote you, including events, user-generated content, and referral programs
- Paid channels: Channels where you pay for visibility, such as social media advertising, affiliate programs, and search engine marketing
Prospects can find your digital properties through various owned, earned, and paid acquisition channels. You can use them in tandem to reach multiple audiences, as well as the same audience on different channels. This helps you amplify your brand awareness and create a seamless customer journey.
Acquisition channels cheat sheet
Owned channels
Earned channels
Paid channels
Be mindful of spreading your resources too thin. Consider focusing on the most effective and relevant channels instead of using as many as possible.
Where you invest your marketing dollars depends on various factors, including the time and resources you have. The following matrix guides you through this decision, highlighting priority channels with the biggest reach. Later in this chapter, we’ll offer more insight into evaluating your acquisition channels.
Product-led acquisition channels
With a product-led growth (PLG) motion, your product is an important owned channel for acquiring customers. The following are some of the most effective and widely used PLG tactics for this early customer journey stage:
- Virality loops: A mechanism that drives continuous referrals
- Word-of-mouth: Loyal users spread the word thanks to delightful product experiences
- Incentives: Rewards or bonuses for users who invite their friends or teammates
- Collaboration invitations: Built-in sharing mechanisms to help users bring others into the product to collaborate with them
- Sharing experiences: Easy ways for users to share their in-product creations with people outside the product
- Network effects: Products that make the most of connections between users—offering more ways to communicate and collaborate—becoming more valuable as more customers adopt them
- Product artifacts: Byproducts of software development that include diagrams or tools that give prospective customers a sense of what the product is like
- Content
- Editorial or support: Blog posts, guides, white papers, and other written material that showcases the product’s value or helps customers get started
- Programmatic: A method for generating multiple web pages from one set of core content, using data and pre-programmed rules that dynamically transform the content based on the reader or goal
- User-generated: Content shared by customers about your brand, such as blog posts, social media posts, surveys, and testimonials
- Benchmark reports: Trend analyses that spotlight data related to your business
- Product education: Content that solves reader problems while illustrating how your product can help, such as calculators and demos
Learn more about these and other tactics from over 30 industry experts in Product-Led Growth Guide Volume 2. Discover product-led acquisition tactics >
Evaluating your acquisition channels
Today, there are myriad channels for reaching prospective and existing customers. The challenge is finding the right combination to acquire your ideal customers—the ones who will drive sustainable growth. The following five-step framework uses your behavioral data to help determine where your marketing dollars will reach the best prospects.
Step one: Identify which acquisition channels drive the highest volume of new customers. Use this data to inform how you prioritize your channels. For example, you may ramp up your Instagram strategy over Twitter.
Use Amplitude’s user composition chart to analyze which acquisition channels bring the greatest number of new customers.
In this example, Google is the top acquisition channel, followed by Instagram.
Step two: After evaluating acquisition channel performance for all new customers, drill down to see which channels drive the most active, engaged ones.
Use Amplitude’s channels and data tables chart to identify which channels go beyond sign-up and bring users to their first value moment. Attribute sign-up and activation to specific channels with multi-touch attribution.
In this example, organic search brings the highest volume of active users who reach the value moment—playing a song.
Explore more examples of using acquisition channels and multi-touch attribution to evaluate the effectiveness of paid and organic marketing investments.
Step three: By now, you can assess which acquisition channels drive the most new customers and the most active ones, but what about which channels yield the greatest ROI—and which might not be worth the spend? Identify which acquisition channels have the highest ROAS and the lowest CAC, cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and other ad metrics.
Use this data to determine how you spend your paid media budget. For example, you may reduce investment in underperforming channels.
Use Amplitude’s ad network integrations and custom formulas for ROAS, CAC, CPC, and CPM to evaluate paid acquisition channel performance.
In this example, Instagram has the highest ROAS at $3.02.
Step four: Send targeted campaigns to customers from top-performing acquisition channels. Create a cohort of these customers, then push it into marketing automation tools for easy activation, personalization, and targeting.
Use Amplitude Audiences to create a cohort of customers from top-performing acquisition channels. Send this cohort to one of Amplitude’s marketing automation partners like Braze to build a targeted campaign.
Step five: Use experimentation to iterate on your top and underperforming acquisition channels. A/B test your channel landing pages with new headlines or by gating different sections, then examine how variant A performs versus variant B for the same channel. Use the seven-step experimentation framework described later in this playbook to guide your experiments.
Analyzing your marketing campaigns along with your acquisition channels provides a more holistic picture of your acquisition strategy and how you can improve it. To do this, use the same five-step framework and Amplitude analyses, but input campaigns instead of channels. Once you know which campaigns are the most cost-effective and draw your ideal users, you can put more resources toward them.
After establishing your channel-customer fit, you can consider the appropriate content for those channels. “Thinking about the right fit helps with acquisition and activation. It’s not just about spending money or creating content on these channels to drive traffic,” says Drew of TheProductLed.
With internet searches being one of the most common routes to your business, your website is perhaps your most critical owned channel for acquiring new customers. At Amplitude, we use our digital analytics platform to ensure our website offers enough value to prospects that they’ll want to sign up.
“You can't build brand trust or brand equity without a give and take,” Amplitude Acquisition Marketing Manager Katie Geer says. “People are only going to sign up after we've shown them value or after we've sparked their curiosity—after we've given them something that makes them want to engage in that relationship.”
Katie and her team use Amplitude insights to improve the website experience in the following ways:
- Using funnel analysis to identify friction, such as a video in a critical user flow that impeded conversion
- Changing the global navigation to surface the most-clicked links, leading to a lift in pages per session
- Redesigning the sign-up flow to eliminate stumbling blocks preventing users from signing up
Take action
- Ensure your acquisition channel strategy remains finely tuned to your target audience with the two-part Perfect Pair: Map Your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) to the Ideal Acquisition Channels worksheets.
- Use Part One to outline your ICPs using insights gathered from the chapter on how to identify your ideal customer.
- Next, evaluate acquisition channel performance in Part Two to determine where your target audience is most receptive and you can invest more resources.
- How do specific marketing campaigns relate to new sign-ups, product outcomes, and revenue?
- How are acquisition channels contributing to key conversion goals?
- Which campaigns or channels drive activation—and which don’t?
- How does product or subscription revenue vary by campaign?