Summary

All too often, restaurants, retailers and other businesses hear the siren song of “focusing only on your best customers” to drive growth and sales. While loyalty marketing is certainly an important part of your overall strategy, so is the relentless focus on growing your customer base through a well thought-out customer acquisition strategy.


Consider these three steps for your customer acquisition strategy:

1. Find new customers that “act” like your best customers

If you have the data in-house or through data partners to really find out what your best customers look like and how they act, you are definitely ahead of the game. No longer can demographics alone define your best customers. To truly define them, find out how they act both online and offline. Find out where they live, work and go throughout their day. What other businesses do they visit? What are they passionate about? How do they spend their free time? What media do they prefer?

2. Implement a multi-media approach with consistent branding and messaging

Once you have a complete profile of your best customer, find a media partner to help identify potential new customers and deliver the right message at the right time with the right media in order to activate them. We all know that various types of media activate consumers differently, but we sometimes forget that the same consumer is activated by multiple media at different times throughout their day and life. Having a consistent message and branding across all your media touch points greatly improves consumer recall and increases activation.

3. Start defining your “next” best customer

You already know what your best customers look like and how they act. Now it’s time to develop your “future best customer” profile. What smaller groups of your best customers have great potential? Are millennials without kids today’s good customer, then when they start a family, do they become tomorrow’s best customer? What about the baby boomers enjoying retirement? And when their kids start having kids and they suddenly become grandparents? Not only should you be finding more of your best customers, you should also spend time thinking about the next best customer and what changes could catapult them to the top of your list.

4. We all have the leaky bucket challenge

to constantly bring in new customers while keeping as many of our current ones as possible. As with so many things in life, balance is key. Make sure you maintain balance between loyalty marketing to keep your best customers and a sound acquisition strategy to constantly add new customers.