Customer Acquisition Guide: Strategy, Funnel & Channels

Full-year 2025 in-force premium is projected at US$1.213 billion to $1.218 billion, with Lemonade targeting positive adjusted EBITDA before end of 2026. Under that facility, General Catalyst financed up to 80% of Lemonade's customer acquisition costs. Follow Holloman for to learn more about the bank stack of the future

Choosing the right customer acquisition channel depends on the target audience, industry, and budget. Email click-through rates increased 25%, and landing page engagement tripled to 3–4 minutes per visit. Sandler turned to HubSpot’s AI assistant, Breeze, embedded within HubSpot Marketing Hub and HubSpot Sales Hub, to modernize and scale its customer acquisition. Their top-performing ads featured polished, brand-consistent video creative, often with influencers, that educated and built emotional connections.

There are two approaches you can take to calculate your customer acquisition costs. Find the best user onboarding practices, metrics, and real examples to create a smoother, more effective onboarding experience. Learn how top product leaders at leading companies scale product operations, drive experimentation, and deliver customer value. Get to know your users to build the right solution for the right audience. Use this template to create a visual representation of the steps a user takes while using your product and interacting with your company. It’s cross-functional by design — because winning users today means solving real problems, fast, and getting the right people aligned behind the effort.

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A churned customer who canceled six months ago needs a different sequence than a power user approaching their plan limit. They paid $20 to both the referrer and referee, with the program helping PayPal grow from 1 million to 5 million users in 6 months. Canva strikes this balance by surfacing premium templates within the free experience and prompting users to upgrade if they try to access them. Gating too aggressively will keep free users from turning into paid customers while not gating enough features will eliminate any incentive to upgrade to a paid plan. A 14-day window with complete access lets users build real workflows before the paywall appears.

HubSpot Marketing Hub automation tools enable systematic lead nurturing that moves prospects through your funnel more efficiently, reducing the time and resources required for conversion while maintaining lead quality. HubSpot CRM reporting enables you to benchmark your performance against industry standards by analyzing your CAC-to-LTV ratio and comparing acquisition costs across different customer segments and channels. Additionally, elevated acquisition costs often signal market saturation or increased competition in your target segments, suggesting the need for differentiated positioning, improved value propositions, or expansion into new market segments where acquisition costs may be more favorable. HubSpot Marketing Hub attribution reporting helps identify these inefficiencies by tracking which campaigns generate the most expensive conversions and where prospects drop off in your funnel.

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Targeting active users rather than your entire base produces higher-quality reviews and better average ratings because you’re reaching customers at the moment they’re most positive about the product. Rather than broadcasting product updates into the void, they nurtured a global network of power users who run local events and create templates. A strong community helps potential customers discover your product through peer conversations, turns existing customers into advocates, and builds brand trust through user participation rather than advertising spend. Offer a reward when users complete onboarding, reach a usage threshold, or invite a teammate so the ask arrives at a relevant moment in their customer journey. Where referral programs incentivize customers to bring in peers, affiliate programs incentivize external partners to drive new users in exchange for a revenue share. These prospects have already signaled buying intent, so a targeted ad at this stage will convert better and cost less than reaching cold audiences.

One customer acquisition strategy example is Tesla’s referral program, which offers $500 in credits to the referrer and a $2,500 discount to the referred customer. One customer acquisition strategy example using sponsored content is Rhode skincare. Sponsored content can include native ads, influencer posts, and co-branded webinars that build credibility for brands while driving traffic.

A high customer acquisition cost typically reveals inefficient marketing targeting and poor conversion funnel performance, indicating that your company may be reaching the wrong audience or losing qualified prospects during the sales process. A customer acquisition strategy is a structured approach to finding, attracting, and converting new users into active customers of your product. In the traditional fintech world, companies spend millions per cohort on digital ads to lure users. Businesses that integrate AI insights into their acquisition strategies can improve targeting, reduce acquisition costs and increase conversion rates. A structured customer acquisition strategy reduces acquisition costs, improves conversion rates and creates predictable revenue streams that support long-term business growth. The campaign led to a significant 397% improvement in ad conversions YoY, a 144% increase in ROAS and a 279% rise in new website users YoY.

• Instead of relying solely on outbound campaigns or gated demos, this strategy puts the product in users’ hands early — then makes it easy (and rewarding) for those users to bring others in.
• This can be an effective way to stay in touch with prospects and customers, promote new products or services, and build traffic to your online store.
• The first step toward customer acquisition is to understand your customer base—both your current and target audiences.
• Systematically reduce customer acquisition cost by implementing data-driven targeting improvements that focus marketing efforts on high-converting audience segments, improving conversion rates through A/B testing of landing pages, email campaigns, and sales processes.
• Get to know your users to build the right solution for the right audience.

Brands that relied heavily on Meta's pixel-based targeting in the pre-ATT era have had to fundamentally rethink their acquisition strategies. 87% of industries saw CPC increases in 2025, with an overall average CPC of $5.26, up 12.88% year-over-year. Meta's Q1 CPM hit an all-time high of $10.88 in 2025, up 19.2% year-over-year, based on benchmarking data from Varos (6,000+ companies, $4B in annual ad spend). Ecommerce brands now lose an average of $29 on every new customer they acquire, after accounting for marketing costs and returns. CAC isn't just high, it's been climbing faster than most brands' margins can absorb.

To execute these strategies effectively, businesses must understand how prospects move through the acquisition journey. Without a defined customer acquisition plan, businesses often overspend on ads, attract low-quality leads or fail to convert traffic into revenue. That means your customer acquisition strategy must align with how modern buyers search, evaluate and make decisions. This system consistently turns prospects into paying customers while keeping acquisition costs under control. Customer acquisition is the structured process of attracting, converting and retaining new customers in a way that supports predictable revenue growth. With agentic AI at its core, Genesys Cloud™ is the AI-Powered Experience Orchestration platform that connects people, systems, data and AI across the enterprise.

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This approach not only reduces the need for constant new customer acquisition but also leads to more referrals and repeat purchases. By using tools for personalization, predictive analytics, and automated testing, businesses can identify high-value prospects and fine-tune their strategies. AI tools are reshaping customer acquisition costs (CAC) in 2025. For instance, SaaS companies often face higher costs due to long sales cycles.

The straightforward value proposition, short sales cycles, and ability to demonstrate ROI quickly allow these companies to acquire customers efficiently through digital channels. Paid search delivers an average cost per acquisition of $802 for B2B SaaS, though this varies significantly by competitive intensity and targeting. The median company now spends $2.00 to acquire $1.00 of new ARR, with bottom-quartile companies spending as much as $2.82 per dollar of ARR.

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Get expert insights straight to your inbox, and become a better customer success manager. Starting small and tracking what sticks — with a system that learns over time — is how sustainable acquisition is built. The brands winning right now — like Hims, Lovable, and Sandler — aren’t just spending more. A customer acquisition strategy succeeds when it combines the right channels, consistent measurement, and a system that improves over time. The three main customer acquisition strategies are organic (SEO, content), paid (ads, sponsorships), and relationship-based (referrals, partnerships).