Business, Top Questions to Ask Yourself about Customer Acquisition Costs?


by 10x Marketing - Date: 2007-11-16 - Word Count: 539 Share This!

The cost of acquiring a new customer is the definition of customer acquisition. How is this relevant to your business? What could possibly be the expense for getting new customers? It all adds up fairly quickly when you think about advertising. What is the ROI for all that you are spending money and energy on. This also includes research and marketing costs too. Even if a company is doing well, their customer acquisition costs can be very high with out them realizing it. Think about how much money you spend going out to get more customers? When you do get more customers, will they be buying more from you then you paid out to get them?

If your company is a website and you are looking to invest in technology or services to improve traffic on your site, or keep customers once you get them, do you know how much it will cost to acquire each new customer to your site? Ask yourself these questions:

How many new customers did you have to your website last month? This may in fact relate to customers who made a purchase but it could mean possible leads too. How much money are you going to be spending on website development costs? Are you going to invest thousands of dollars to have a company make changes to your website or develop new ways of reaching out to different markets? How much were the modifications?

What is the average life of your company's website? For example, you may want to say 2 years or 24 months, just to estimate a number. How long do you think this website is going to last as being useful and efficient to your company before you need a fresh look, completely overhaul your site and start again?

What are your monthly promotion costs? What did you spend on advertising and marketing? Online and offline promotions should be added up here. What about the cost of your domain name?

How about maintenance cost? Who do you hire to keep up with maintenance? How much is it a month to pay your staff, for website maintenance, enquiries, bookkeeping etc? How about ISP fees, bandwidth and other fixed costs?

Once you have established answers to all of these questions, you can get a good feel of how you want to budget for the coming year. If your average customer is only spending $50 in their lifetime on your site, but the customer acquisition cost was more than $100, your company will not be in business for long. Think of other ways you can market yourself or other means of trouble shooting development issues on your website so that maybe you can spend more money on the costs of maintaining and marketing your site. What about trades? A lot of businesses will trade services- think about a newly graduated student of design or marketing? They need experience just as much as you need their help. Before spending tons of money on new customer acquisition costs, research your ROI and your outlook for your lifespan of your site and good luck!

About the author: Melissa Peterman is a web content specialist for Innuity. For more information about customer acquisition , go to Zoot.


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