Generating growth is crucial for the long-term success of any business. But many marketing professionals focus too much on short-term results, pursuing growth no matter the cost. While investing in innovative marketing strategies can help you gain new customers, is it worth it if you're spending a fortune to see results?
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is an important figure to keep in mind. It reflects how much your company spends to gain new customers. To calculate the CAC, you must divide the total spent on sales and marketing over a given period by the number of customers you acquire. It might seem like another pointless metric, but understanding your CAC is crucial. Here's why.
Fine-Tuning Your Investments
Ultimately, your CAC will help you make wiser marketing choices. Spending too much to gain new customers can harm your business in the long run.
Look at it this way:
Say you spend $1 million on a compelling new marketing campaign. It earned you considerable brand interest, drawing in thousands of new customers. But collectively, those customers only earned your company $500,000 in profit. Suddenly, that costly marketing strategy becomes a crippling business move.
Generating growth needs to be strategic. You can't throw money into marketing strategies without fully understanding what you have to gain. The goal is more profit; spending carelessly to achieve growth by any means necessary could lead to more losses than gains.
CAC and LTV
When developing new marketing plans, benchmarking your customer acquisition cost to customer lifetime value (LTV) is the ticket to seeing long-term growth. The LTV represents the revenue generated from a customer over a set period. The ideal scenario is that your LTV is higher than your CAC. When that happens, the new customers you acquire contribute more revenue than it costs to gain them.
It's how you generate profitable growth. You can calculate the CAC: LTV ratio by dividing the LTV by the CAC. While the target can vary, a CAC: LTV ratio of 1:3 is a good goal.
Understanding your CAC ensures that you're not overspending on your marketing strategies. As your LTV increases, so can your CAC. But your CAC should never trump the revenue you gain.
Author Resource:-
Emily Clarke writes about customer messaging and engagement solutions including SMS services and mobile notifications tools. You can find her thoughts at customer engagement blog.