Acquisition
Acquisition is a marketing term that pops up everywhere, especially in SaaS and other subscription-based businesses. In plain terms, it’s about gaining new customers or users. Those who sign up, subscribe, or buy what your company offers. But it’s not just a numbers game. Behind every acquisition is a mix of strategy, effort, and understanding customers’ needs.
Imagine you’re working on a marketing team for a SaaS platform that helps HR teams manage employee onboarding. You run a paid LinkedIn campaign targeting HR managers, write a compelling landing page, and offer a free trial. When someone signs up after engaging with your campaign, voilà, that’s a customer acquisition. But what looks like a small win on the surface results from many moving parts: targeting the right audience, crafting the right message, and guiding people through the conversion path.
Acquisition isn’t tied to one channel or campaign. It’s a broader measure of how well your business attracts new users. That could be through organic search, paid ads, content marketing, social media, referral programmes, partnerships, or anything that brings in new prospects and turns them into paying customers (or at least active users).
This is where terms like “customer acquisition cost” (CAC) and “customer acquisition strategy” come into play. CAC helps you understand how much you spend to win each new customer. If you spend €1,000 on a campaign and bring in 10 customers, your CAC is €100. That’s a number every marketer and SaaS executive pays close attention to because if your CAC is rising faster than your revenue, you’re in tricky territory.