In Chapter 17, we explored the Awareness Stage of the AAARRR Growth Funnel in depth.
In this chapter, we will deep dive into the Acquisition Stage.
What is Acquisition?
Acquisition is when the user can be identified specifically as a user – and not just as a number on the “traffic” metrics of your analytics dashboard.
Things are getting real and it’s not just a impression or visit anymore. At this stage, you would usually have some way of identifying the person – and hence reaching out to them again in future (called retargeting).
Going from Awareness to Acquisition is an important step that cuts out the vanity, letting you understand the traffic or reach or clicks or visits that can actually be considered “useful” and hence, “acquired” for future marketing and the next stages of the funnel.
Awareness vs Acquisition
So, with this simple definition, you can see the difference between users in the Awareness and the Acquisition stages is just this:
All people reached who view, visit, click or see anything about the startup will be considered in the Awareness stage, and of those people, all the ones that can be identified and remarketed to in future will be considered as Acquired or in the Acquisition stage of the funnel.
Metrics for Acquisition
Based on this definition, we can now list some of the metrics in the Acquisition stage, and also compare them for the Awareness stage that we learnt in the last chapter (for better understanding and reflection):
AWARENESS:
- Clicks
- Reach
- Impressions
- Visitors
- Traffic
ACQUISITION:
- Enquiries
- Subscribers
- Downloads using Lead Forms
- Email Captures
- Phone Number Captures
- Incoming Calls
- Chat Box Captures
- Pixeled Traffic
You can see that “Traffic” falls into Awareness but “Pixeled Traffic” falls into Acquisition since it can be re-targeted through various marketing channels.
Growth Marketing Experiments for the Acquisition Phase
Just by looking at the metrics above, you’ll know the type of experiments that we can run for the Acquisition stage of the funnel. Here are some examples:
- Setting up online chatbots on the website
- Integrating Facebook Messenger on the website
- Conducting live webinars
- Providing lead magnet downloads
- Promoting free courses for lead generation
- Providing free case study downloads on your website resources
- Giving free trials for your product
- Letting users subscribe to your newsletter
All the above examples help drive the Acquisition Phase of the Growth Funnel. These are just for reference. You should design growth experiments based on the product or service you’re driving growth for.
That’s all for this chapter!
In the next chapter, we will deep dive into the Activation Stage of the AAARRR growth funnel.