Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Definition & Calculation

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the cost related to acquiring a new customer. In other words, CAC refers to the resources and costs incurred to acquire an additional customer. Customer acquisition cost is a key business metric that is commonly used alongside the customer lifetime value (LTV)Lifetime Value CalculationLifetime Value Calculation is the process by which a business measures the value of a customer to the business through the customer’s full lifespan metric to measure value generated by a new customer.

Summary

• Customer acquisition cost is an important business metric used to evaluate the cost of acquiring a new customer.
• Calculated as sales and marketing expenses divided by the number of new customers, a thorough understanding of CAC can help improve a company’s marketing return on investment, profitability, and profit margin.

Formula for Customer Acquisition Cost

The formula for customer acquisition cost is as follows:

Where:

• Sales and marketing expenses are the advertising and marketing spend, commissions and bonuses paid, salaries of marketers and sales managers, and overhead costs related to sales and marketing over the measurement period.
• Number of new customers is the total number of acquired customers over the measurement period.

Example of Customer Acquisition Cost

Tim is the marketing manager of ABC Company and is due for a performance review in the coming weeks. Over the last year, he launched several marketing campaigns5 P's of MarketingThe 5 P's of Marketing – Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and People – are key marketing elements used to position a business strategically. The 5 P's of to attract new customers and would like to determine his customer acquisition cost prior to his performance review. Tim’s annual salary is $45,000. Below is information related to ABC Company’s marketing campaigns last year:

The CAC for ABC Company over the last year is calculated as follows:

Importance of Customer Acquisition Cost

CAC is a key business metric that many businesses and investors look at. In fact, many companies end up failing due to not fully understanding their customer acquisition cost.

1. Improving return on investment

Understanding the cost to acquire new customers is crucial to analyzing marketing return on investmentROAS (Return on Ad Spend)ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is an important eCommerce metric. ROAS measures revenue generated per dollar of marketing spent. It is a similar and alternative profitability metric to ROI, or "Return on Investment".  ROAS is commonly used in eCommerce businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.. For example, consider a company that uses several channels to acquire customers:

By using CAC, a company is able to determine the most cost-effective way to acquire customers. In the table above, we can see that Social Media provides the lowest acquisition cost while Social Events cost the most. A company presented with this data may consider using social media marketing more to generate more customers.

2. Improving profitability and profit margin

Understanding its CAC provides a business with the ability to fully analyze the value per customer and improve its profit margins. For example, assume that the value of each customer to a business is $60.

Relating it to the example above, which channel would you choose to use? A business that does not understand CAC would adversely affect profitability by choosing to use Social Events as a channel. The channels Social Media and Posters would improve profitability for the company as the CAC is lower than the value per customer.

More Resources

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