By esantiago@hubspot.com (Erica Santiago)

As a marketer, you know you have to spend money to make money. This is particularly true when you’re trying to generate leads and acquire new customers. However, if there are ways to cut the cost of lead generation and customer acquisition without undercutting either metric.

To help refine your marketing strategy to lower the costs of acquiring leads and customers, here are some helpful CPL and CAC benchmarks from a recent HubSpot survey of hundreds of marketers.

Most Effective Strategies for Lowering CAC

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is how much a company has to spend to get a new customer. In our survey we found that CAC varies a lot between companies and industries — that said, almost half (48.9%) of the marketers we surveyed said CAC has increased in the past year. Another 48.9% reported their CAC has stayed about the same, and only 2.2% said CAC has decreased.

When we asked marketers what they found to be the most effective strategies in lowering CAC, the majority (67.6%) reported improving customer retention among the most effective. Other strategies reported to be effective are:

• Implementing a customer referral/affiliate program (62.5%)
• Optimizing sales funnel (57.6%)
• Conducting market research to better understand the target audience (55.8%)
• Using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software) to streamline their sales cycle (53.8%)

Marketing Channels with the Highest and Lowest CAC

Being mindful of the channels you’re using and how much those channels cost is another way to lower the cost of acquiring customers.

Marketing Channels with the Lowest CAC

In our survey, 59.8% of marketers listed social media as one of the channels with the lowest customer acquisition costs. 55.8% said the same about email marketing, 41.4% listed experiential marketing, and 40.8% said websites and blogs.

Marketing Channels with the Highest CAC

When asked what are the marketing channels with the highest CAC, 47.4% of marketers mentioned paid social, which is the practice of showing sponsored advertising content on third-party social media platforms. 46.2% said physical events and trade shows are the most expensive, 42.1% said physical ads, and 42.9% said print advertising.

Most Effective Strategies for Lowering CPL

Cost-per-lead (CPL) is how much money it takes to generate a new lead. Unlike with CAC, the majority of marketers we surveyed (56.2%) reported CPL has stayed about the same in the past year — only 37.7% said CPL has increased.

However, almost 70% of marketers still said their company is working to reduce CPL.

60% of marketers told us optimizing their website to convert leads into customers is among the most effective strategies for lowering CPL — that generally means taking strides like adapting websites for mobile devices or reducing page load times

Other effective strategies listed by marketers are:

• Analyzing advertisement campaign performance data (55.9%)
• A/B testing (52%)

…read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

      



Author: Aaron