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Marketing vocabulary · Marketing Metrics

Customer acquisition cost

Meaning in marketing, with examples

nounCommon term

In marketing, customer acquisition cost means: The average amount a company spends on marketing and sales to win one new customer, found by dividing total costs by the number of new customers.

In Turkish: müşteri edinme maliyeti, müşteri kazanım maliyeti

How it is used

Usually shortened to CAC. Very common in startups, e-commerce and subscription businesses, where it is compared with customer lifetime value to see whether growth is profitable.

Example sentences

  1. Our customer acquisition cost on social media has almost doubled this year.

  2. If each customer only spends 300 lira with us, a customer acquisition cost of 500 lira doesn't work.

Common collocations

  • reduce customer acquisition cost
  • CAC payback period
  • blended CAC
  • high customer acquisition cost
  • customer lifetime valueAn estimate of the total profit or revenue a company can expect from one customer for the whole time that person keeps buying from it.
  • ROIShort for return on investment: how much profit or value you get back compared with what you spent, usually shown as a percentage.
  • lead generationMarketing activities that attract people who are interested in a product and collect their contact details so that the sales team can follow up.
  • churn rateThe percentage of customers who stop using a product or cancel a subscription during a certain period, such as a month or a year.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Marketing Metrics

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