Customer Acquisition Strategy: 11 Tactics for 2025

Customer acquisition refers to a systematic approach businesses employ to attract and convert potential customers. Here are 15 proven strategies with examples to attract and retain potential customers. Get to know your users to build the right solution for the right audience. It’s cross-functional by design — because winning users today means solving real problems, fast, and getting the right people aligned behind the effort.

Estimate the revenue your program spend can return. Model your expected returns based on documented performance benchmarks. Opening a new location, they reached out to UpSwell for their expertise in hyper-local marketing to fit their budget while producing tangible results.

Understanding both types helps you benchmark your acquisition performance realistically in 2026. Customer acquisition costs vary significantly not just by industry but also by how customers are acquired. CPA is commonly used in performance marketing to track campaign-level efficiency. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) refers to the total investment a company makes to turn a prospect into a paying customer. Are you paying too much to acquire each customer, or just operating in a high-cost industry?

What Is a Good CAC for B2B Companies

If you are a B2B tech leader setting next quarter's budget on blended CAC, you are budgeting blind. If you benchmark against a published industry figure without adjusting for stage, you will draw the wrong conclusion about your efficiency. Two SaaS companies post a $1,200 CAC. LTV here means gross profit generated by a client over their lifetime, not revenue. Ranges below reflect blended paid plus organic CAC for net-new logo acquisition, excluding expansion revenue. They exclude SDR (sales development rep) salaries, attribute pipeline to the wrong channel, or use a trailing 30-day window that hides the lag between spend and closed revenue.

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Head of Growth Elena Verna shared with Lenny’s Newsletter that the AI market required a drastic shift from 95% optimization to 95% innovation. Hims grew revenue from $148M in 2020 to $1.476B in 2024 — a 69% YoY increase. Their top-performing ads featured polished, brand-consistent video creative, often with influencers, that educated and built emotional connections. First, they treated paid media as a revenue engine (not a cost center), investing around 50% of its revenue into marketing. The goal was to acquire customers at scale, destigmatize men's health, and build a profitable, scalable acquisition model in a crowded telehealth space. Slack now has an estimated 52 million users, of which 14 million are paid.

Reports, anecdotal experience, and campaigns that are just a few years old could be completely out of date today. Like other steps in this process, this is a cross-functional (and potentially time-consuming) one. Again, this is a very nuanced step in the process that can take a lot of time and involve multiple teams. Once you've listed your channels, compile performance metrics, so you can evaluate how active you are on these channels and how successful your efforts have been. How do you know which ones are right for you and your potential customers? This helps you define your market, refine your outreach strategies, and meet potential customers where they are.

customer acquisition strategy examples

Once you’ve selected your primary acquisition channel, the next step is turning it into a repeatable system. Your ICP, budget, and product determine which ones deserve investment. A customer acquisition strategy that ignores economics is just wishful thinking. If prospects research heavily on YouTube and you have no video content, that’s a gap. Most companies focus only on the bottom of the funnel—people ready to buy. Customers don’t go from unaware to purchase in one step.

These events serve as platforms for networking, showcasing products or services, and building brand awareness on a larger scale. This user-generated content not only serves as a testament to the capabilities of GoPro cameras but also fosters a vibrant community of adventure enthusiasts. This not only cultivates customer loyalty but also often leads to organic word-of-mouth referrals, which are highly valuable for acquiring new customers.

The challenge I’ve watched grow with every CS team I’ve talked to is scale. Every strategy above Customer acquisition strategy works better when it’s fed by real-time behavioral signals and executed at the right moment, not just on a schedule. Running it consistently means the strategies you’re deploying are calibrated to your users’ actual behavior, not your team’s assumptions about it. The users who participate become advocates precisely because the reward is recognition of their work, not a coupon. Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign gives their most engaged users global exposure and a licensing fee in exchange for sharing creative work taken on their iPhones. It combines user groups, events, certification programs, and shared resources into an ecosystem that reinforces why being a Notion user is worth something beyond what the product itself provides.

• A customer acquisition funnel is a structured path potential customers follow from first becoming aware of a product to ultimately making a purchase.
• This win-win scenario allows your business to benefit from the name recognition and audience of a non-competitor related to your industry while giving them a way to do the same.
• Every strategy above works better when it’s fed by real-time behavioral signals and executed at the right moment, not just on a schedule.
• Understanding both types helps you benchmark your acquisition performance realistically in 2026.
• LTV here means gross profit generated by a client over their lifetime, not revenue.

This customer acquisition strategy example transforms marketing from a reactive to a proactive function, enabling you to engage the right customer at the perfect moment. This advanced customer acquisition strategy uses machine learning and vast datasets to forecast future customer behavior. A well-executed video strategy, from viral ads like Dollar Shave Club's to educational content from thought leaders, can drive massive brand awareness and generate high-quality leads. Video marketing is a dynamic customer acquisition strategy that uses engaging video content to attract, educate, and convert an audience.