10 Customer Acquisition Examples Worth Copying (2026)

Most advice on winning customers is a list of channels. That is the least useful part of it. The companies below each found one way of reaching people that fitted what they were selling, and then kept at it for years.

Here are ten of them, what each one did, and what you can take from it. After that, how to put a strategy together and which channels are worth your money.

What Makes a Customer Acquisition Strategy Work

Before the examples, the thing they all share. Every one picked a channel that suited the product and stuck with it.

• One channel done properly beats five done badly. Most companies spread themselves thin and never get good at any of it.
• The channel has to suit the price. A £15 product cannot carry a salesperson. A £15,000 one will not sell off an advert alone.
• Know what a customer is worth first. Without that number you cannot tell a good channel from an expensive one.
• Acquisition and retention come out of the same pot. If people leave after one order, no channel will ever look profitable. The customer retention analytics cover the other half.
• Measure by source, not in total. One blended number hides the channel carrying everything and the one wasting money.

Our guide to converting leads into customers covers what happens once they arrive.

10 Customer Acquisition Examples

Ten companies, and the one thing each got right. Between them they cover most of what lead generation looks like in practice.

1. ASOS

ASOS grew on a student discount, which is a sharper move than it looks. Students are cheap to reach, they talk to each other, and they are picking shopping habits that stick for a decade.

Call it a discount if you like. It is closer to a down payment on the years afterwards, made at the point in somebody’s life when switching costs them nothing.

Find the moment your customer is choosing for the first time, and be cheap then rather than cheap always. Our discount strategies cover doing that without training everybody to wait for a sale.

2. Casper

Nobody buys a mattress online without a way out, so Casper led with a hundred-night trial and free returns. That took away the one thing keeping the whole category in showrooms.

The returns cost real money, and still came in under the price of a shop. The trial also became the thing everybody wrote about, so it did the advertising too. Work out what is stopping people buying, then spend your money on removing it rather than shouting past it. The cart abandonment research shows which objections cost the most.

3. Sephora

Beauty Insider looks like a loyalty scheme and works as a way of bringing people in. They join for the samples and the birthday gift, and joining is what hands Sephora the data.

That data drives the recommendations, and the recommendations drive the next order. New customers turn up because the scheme is worth having, not because of the advertising. The same logic runs through increasing subscription sales.

4. Lululemon

Lululemon grew through free classes in its shops and local ambassadors who were yoga teachers rather than models. The customers came out of the room.

It is slow and it does not scale like advertising, which is exactly why nobody could copy it quickly. If there is already a group of people around what you sell, being useful to them costs less than buying attention. That is social proof marketing before anybody called it that.

5. Eloqua

Eloqua, now part of Oracle, buys search traffic on the problem rather than the product. The ads go after people looking for lead nurturing, not people looking for Eloqua.

In B2B the person searching is usually doing homework for a committee, months before anybody signs anything. Paid search reaches them while they are still working out what they want. Bid on the problem you solve, because people searching your name have already found you. Where those clicks land matters as much, which is covered in building a page that converts.

6. Amazon

Amazon wins customers with reviews it does not write. The request email goes out after every order, and what comes back is what convinces the next buyer.

Every review makes the page rank better and sell better, so the asking never stops. Ask every customer, every time, and make it one click. Our online review statistics show what that is worth, and the positive review examples show what a usable one looks like.

7. Pardot

Pardot, which Salesforce now sells as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, grew on free tools and templates that were worth having whether or not you bought anything.

Somebody who has used your calculator has already let you help them once. That is a warmer start than a cold email, and the address arrives without anybody being asked for a meeting. What you send afterwards decides the rest, which is the subject of email marketing optimisation.

8. Harry’s

Harry’s collected around a hundred thousand email addresses in a week before it launched, through a referral page that gave you more product for bringing friends.

The waiting list did two jobs. It proved people wanted the thing before the money went out, and it meant launch day had an audience instead of an advertising budget. Build the list before the product and you get the cheapest launch you will ever run. A real deadline helps, and creating urgency in sales covers where the line sits.

9. Glossier

Glossier started as a blog with readers, then asked those readers what to make. The first products existed because people had described them in the comments.

Customers turned up already invested, because they had been part of it. The photographs were theirs as well, which is why none of it looked like advertising. The user generated content statistics show how far customer photos travel, and collecting photo reviews covers getting them.

10. Zappos

Zappos put its money into free shipping both ways and a call centre where nobody was hurried, then let customers do the talking. There was barely an advertising budget.

Stories about their support spread further than any campaign, and they got shoes over the same hurdle Casper cleared with mattresses. Where people are nervous about buying online, looking after them beats advertising on both price and staying power. The customer experience statistics put numbers on that.

Which Channels Bring in Customers

Every example above leaned on one of these. Which suits you depends on what you sell and what it costs.

• Search, for anything people go looking for. Slow to build, and it keeps working for years after you stop paying.
• Paid search, for expensive or urgent purchases. Instant, and it stops the day the card does.
• Referral, when customers like you enough to say so. The cheapest of the lot, and it only works if the product deserves it.
• Partnerships, when somebody else already has your audience. Quicker than building one yourself.
• Community, for things people have opinions about. Years to build, and nearly impossible to copy.
• Outbound, for a small number of large deals. Falls apart below a few thousand pounds a customer.

Pick the one that fits and learn it properly before adding another. Whichever you choose, the ask at the end matters, and our guide to calls to action covers that. There is more on the follow-up in increasing sales funnel conversions.

Let Other Customers Do the Selling

Three of the ten did the same thing in different ways. Amazon showed the reviews its buyers wrote. Glossier used the photographs its customers took. Zappos let people tell the stories about its call center.

You probably have the same material already. The orders, the ratings and the people who came back are sitting in your systems. What most sites never do is show any of it on the page where somebody is deciding.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

• Recent orders, so a first-time visitor can see the place is busy.
• Ratings next to the price, rather than on a testimonials page nobody opens.
• Customer photographs on the product itself.
• A count that means something, like how many people bought this month.

There are more formats in our roundup of social proof examples. Getting those out of your database and onto the page is closer to plumbing than marketing, and it is what WiserNotify handles. Build it yourself if you would rather.

Either way, a stranger works out whether to trust you by looking for other people, so give them somebody to find.

Wrap Up

None of these companies won by being everywhere. They all narrowed down instead, then gave it long enough to work.

Start with the value of a customer, choose the channel that suits that number, and judge it on its own. The rest is patience.

Also check: How to attract customers to buy your product

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