5 Data Points That Will Help You Find New Customers, Guaranteed

Learn to identify the right prospects to target and the triggers that make them respond

Customer acquisition is the most expensive goal in marketing. Some studies show acquisition marketing is as much as five times more expensive than retention marketing, and the costs are only going up. Yet, no matter how good your retention is, no company can afford to abandon their efforts to find new customers.

So the real challenge is: How can you find new customers, but make your acquisition marketing more efficient?

Most acquisition marketing is done blindly. We reach out with poorly targeted campaigns, messaging, and branding just hoping that the right people will find them and take the next steps to learn more. This quickly becomes wasteful. Brands spend and spend trying to generate new customers at an immediate loss, hoping the acquisition cost will be offset by lifetime value over many sales.

The way to cut that waste and make acquisition marketing more efficient is to shed light on the people you’re advertising to, and you can do that with data.

Many kinds of customer modeling allow brands to target acquisition marketing more tightly to improve response, cut wasted spend and reduce the overall cost to acquire new customers.

In today’s post, we’ll look at some of the most revealing data points that can help you find new customers who are more likely to respond and present offers they’re more likely to act on.

1. Interests

Perhaps the most important indicator of buying potential is demonstrated interest in the product category or the industry it serves. Fortunately, there are many data points available today that align with customer interest.

Obviously, you can target markets and lists built around interests that are relevant to your target customer, such as subscriber files for related media. But social media provides new opportunities to leverage interest data points. Facebook, for example, allows you to build custom audiences including specific interests that will help you identify new customers.

2. Intent

Searcher intent is now the main factor Google uses to target its search algorithm because intent is one of the most reliable indicators of what a consumer actually wants. You should take the same approach to find new customers by analyzing the behavior of any prospect you’re targeting.

To capture searcher intent data, you need to be able to connect people to website visits. As James Green, CEO of Magnetic, points out, “Search data captured across e-commerce, pricing comparison and product review sites is one of the strongest signals of intent and best sources for new customer acquisition.”

3. Life Triggers

Timing is everything. Once you’ve narrowed your target market by interest and buying signals, life triggers become a powerful way to spur new action.

Life triggers can be tied to events ranging from birthdays and graduations to buying a home, getting a new job, retirement and other once-in-a-lifetime moments. When you can target marketing to a specific time in a prospect’s life when they are most likely to be interested in your offer, you stand a much better chance of making the conversion.

4. Purchasing Behavior

Purchasing behavior can take many forms, but the goal is to understand what type of offer motivates this audience to buy.

For example, if you can identify which individuals only respond to deep discounts, you can hold them out from general mailings and bring them back in when you have deep discounts to talk about.

On the other hand, if you can identify audiences with a propensity to buy around certain price points, say $50, you can build offers around those price points. If that’s above your product price, bundle a strong package deal that will lift response and increase your average order value. If your price is above the target, present it as an installment buy with payments in the target zone.

5. Demographics

I’m not going to talk too much about demographics because we have covered it many times in the past. I would argue, though, that the real power of demographics is in refining your strategy to address these other, more actionable data points.

Demographics aren’t buying signals in their own right, at least not to the same extent as interest, intent, life triggers and purchasing behavior. But demographics can be applied to campaigns around these stronger buying signals to help craft and target the messaging and improve ROI.

Ideally, you’d like to build a target list around the buying signals, then segment it by demographic information and target your creative to those segments. This means optimizing the creative and/or offer by doing things like matching people in the imagery to the demographics of that segment.

Demographics are also essential for building look-a-like audiences, which target new customers based on the customers you already have. Even though demographic data does not directly indicate buying behavior, it can reveal important insights when analyzed as part of the wider customer picture with data modeling tools.

Get Help With the Data Science to Find New Customers

All of these data points are important for optimizing your acquisition marketing, but they’re not necessarily easily accessible. When you’re trying to do advanced customer lift modeling that includes things like buyer intent seen through visits to other websites, it really helps to have data scientists on your side. These experts can isolate those variables and build them into a view of the audience you’re really trying to target, and that’s where Propelo can help

We specialize in building out your existing lists with third-party data we have access to and using the combined data set to build composite response lift models, identify important life triggers, and put those insights into action with omni-channel marketing strategies to find new customers. Together, we will make sure your acquisition marketing is reaching the right people through the right channels to get the results you need.

Contact us to find out how Propelo can help you make it happen.

Contact us for a free one-on-one consultation. Still, we figure you might want to check us out before you do business with us. As a customer-first business, we owe our success on a set of Core Values: 1) Partner, Not Just Vendor, 2) One-stop-shop, 3) Never Shortsighted, and 4) Delight Our Clients.
415.795.8333 • ideas@propelomedia.com