Strategy

How to Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs

CAC falls when more of the people you pay to reach become customers, or when you pay less to reach the right ones. The levers, in the order they usually pay off.

BenchMarketing editorial team Updated October 2, 2026 3 min read

Customer acquisition cost is a chain: cost to reach people, the share who click, the share who convert, and the share of those who become paying customers. Every link is a lever. The cheapest improvements usually come from the end of the chain, not the start.

1. Convert more of the traffic you already pay for

The median landing page converts 2.35% of visitors. Raising your conversion rate lowers CAC on every channel at once, without paying anything more for media. Start with page speed, message match between ad and page, and removing unnecessary form fields. See landing page psychology.

2. Stop paying for the wrong people

Exclude existing customers from acquisition campaigns.
Add negative keywords for searches that never convert.
Exclude placements and audiences that spend without results.

3. Close more of the leads you get

For lead-based businesses, the gap between lead and customer is often the biggest. Faster follow-up, better qualification and clear next steps can lower CAC more than any ad change. Send closed-deal data back to ad platforms so they optimise for customers, not form fills.

4. Spend where your cost per customer is lowest

Compare channels on cost per customer, not cost per click. A Meta click at $1.86 and a LinkedIn click at $5.39 mean nothing until you know how many of each become customers. Shift budget toward the channels with the lowest marginal cost per customer, and watch for diminishing returns as you scale.

5. Lower the cost to reach people

On social platforms, new creative is the main lever: fresh, specific ads earn more engagement, which platforms reward with lower costs. On search, relevance and Quality Score lower cost per click.

6. Grow the channels that compound

Referrals, organic search, email and content take longer but cost less per customer over time. Even a modest share of customers from these channels pulls blended CAC down.

Measure CAC the same way every time

Use fully loaded costs, the same period for spend and new customers, and split by channel and segment. Read benchmarking SaaS CAC for the details, and compare on the CAC benchmark page.

About the figures

Benchmark figures in this article come from the BenchMarketing dataset and update when the benchmark pages do. Each benchmark page lists its sources and period; see our methodology.

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