The four acquisition tools
Revive needs 125 new customers every month. Through which tools will they actually arrive, and what will each one cost? There are only four ways to acquire a customer. Most plans lean too hard on the last one because it is the easiest to buy.
Physical presence is often a local business's best engine; better signage is frequently the highest-return money it can spend. Online presence is everything a prospect can find without you paying for the impression. Referrals are the most trusted marketing there is, and they depend on a product worth recommending. Advertising is fast and powerful, but stop paying and it stops working. Most healthy plans combine pull to compound an asset with push to create demand now.
Build the plan to close the gap
With the tools named, the plan is an allocation problem. Here is Revive's.
| Vehicle | Customers | Share | Cost / customer | Start-up cost | New / month | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Location | 750 | 60% | $0 | $0 | 75 | $0 |
| Facebook ads (Lemon Benefits) | 250 | 20% | $44 | $11,000 | 30 | $1,320 |
| Direct mail (Now Open) | 250 | 20% | $70 | $17,750 | 20 | $1,400 |
| Total | 1,250 | 100% | $23 | $28,750 | 125 | $2,720 |
The free, durable tool does 60% of the work. Every paid dollar traces back to a named barrier and audience from the marketing map.
The guardrail: LTV must beat CAC
One number governs whether any of this is sane: lifetime value must be greater than acquisition cost. Many operators aim to keep blended CAC to a quarter of LTV or less. Revive's $23 against $144 is about a sixth.
When acquisition cost creeps above lifetime value, every customer you buy makes you poorer, and more marketing only speeds up the downward spiral.
Build your own acquisition plan and check it against your LTV.
Plan builderRun it as an experiment
A plan on paper is a hypothesis. Spend the minimum to test it honestly, build in a trackable redemption (a code, a landing page, a phone number), give digital campaigns about ninety days, and ask every new customer how they heard about you.
Know the benchmarks
Every cost in that plan rests on a benchmark, an industry average for each step of the journey. You can often beat one, but starting from a benchmark gives honest expectations. Your ad agency is usually the best source. Some common public ranges:
| Action | Cost per action | Converts to | Typical rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website visit from SEO | Negligible | Lead | 0.5% to 3% |
| E-commerce visit from SEO | Negligible | Purchase | 1% to 5% |
| Facebook ad impression | $0.01 to $0.05 | Awareness | 0.1% to 0.5% |
| Facebook ad click | $2 to $5 | Lead | 5% to 15% |
| Direct mail postcard | $0.35 | Purchase | 0.1% to 1% |
| Paid search click (e-commerce) | $2 to $15 | Purchase | 2% to 5% |
| Paid search click (website) | $2 to $15 | Lead | 5% to 15% |
The math, step by step
A postcard costs $0.35 and about 0.5% redeem: $0.35 ÷ 0.005 = $70 per customer. A Facebook click costs $2, 15% become leads ($13 per lead), and 30% of leads buy: $13 ÷ 0.30 = $44 per customer. Not guesses, just benchmarks run through division.
Leave the hard-to-measure awareness benefit out of the math on purpose. Underwrite to the conservative number and let the rest be a bonus, not a crutch. And upload your customer list as an exclusion so you only pay to reach genuinely new prospects.
It's the incrementality
The measurement mistake that wastes more money than any other: taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway. The only number that tells you if marketing worked is incrementality, the results caused by the activity above what would have happened without it.
Don't measure what happened after your campaign. Measure what would not have happened without it.
Make the test trustworthy: comparable groups, a sample big enough to rise above the noise, and one variable at a time. The goal is not certainty, it is a defensible estimate of true lift.
Mind the shop rate
Every business has a rate at which things happen on their own: loyal customers who were coming back anyway, word of mouth already in motion. That inertia is your shop rate, and it is the baseline a control group reveals. Measure every result against it, protect it as an asset, and don't confuse coasting on it with growth.
The three steps that always work
“Does social media work? Does TV work? Does SEO work?” The honest answer is always: sometimes. Even Procter & Gamble does not know in advance. What reliably works is a process for finding what works for your business, right now.
More than one thing drives results
Price, seasonality, distribution, competitors, the economy and your marketing all move results at once. Before explaining any result, list every plausible force. Treat a single, confident explanation as a hypothesis to check, not a fact to act on.
Four ways to justify marketing
Match the justification to the investment. Don't defend a brand program with a short-term payback it was never designed to win, and don't hide a weak performance campaign behind vague “brand value.”