Average CAC for Startups: 2024 Benchmarks

Last updated: July 16, 2024

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is, along with LTV and ROAS, an essential marketing metric for startups to understand. CAC refers to the amount spent to obtain each new customer, and may be calculated annually, quarterly, or per campaign. The formula for CAC is:

For example, if a company spends $2500 on a PPC campaign that generates 10 sales and pays the salesperson who closes them $500, the CAC for that campaign would be $300.  

Using a combination of proprietary data and third party databases, our research team calculated the average CAC for startups across 29 industries, which we further subdivided into B2B and B2C companies.

Average CAC for Startups

Industry	B2B	B2C
Aerospace & Defense	$722	N/A
Addiction Treatment	$432	$506
Automotive	$692	$234
Aviation	$778	$708
Biotech	$694	N/A
Business Consulting	$656	N/A
Insurance	$595	$94
Construction	$349	$294
Cybersecurity	$429	$73
eCommerce	$84	$68
Engineering	$566	N/A
Entertainment	$329	$106
Environmental Services	$495	$197
Financial Services	$923	$173
Higher Education & College	$1,424	$116
HVAC Services	$380	$177
Industrial IoT	$673	$247
IT & Managed Services	$583	$98
Legal Services	$915	$457
Manufacturing	$784	N/A
Medical Device	$628	$126
Oil & Gas	$857	$176
PCB Design & Manufacturing	$494	N/A
Pharmaceutical	$178	$88
Real Estate	$923	$165
SaaS	$273	$166
Software Development	$761	N/A
Solar Energy	$471	$247
Transportation & Logistics	$584	$147

The sections below outline the average CAC for startups, explaining why the metric matters, how it differs for smaller companies, and methods that startups can use to lower it. 

The Value of CAC for Startups 

Startups gain several benefits by understanding customer acquisition costs, including the ability to: 

• Allocate marketing bugets properly for customer acquisition across multiple channels and audiences
• Make data-driven compensation decisions when hiring sales representatives
• Build a solid case for the firm’s growth when pitching investors

CAC is often paired with Lifetime Customer Value (LTV) to calculate their CAC to LTV Ratio, which measures a company’s overall profitability during a given period. While this metric is ideal for companies with a mature sales cycle and scalable operations, startups often misuse it and calculate their ratio before it paints an accurate picture of the company. 

For example, the ratio for a startup where the founder is active in the sales process will not reflect the performance or margins when the company grows and a sales team takes over. Similarly, a new company utilizing pre-existing relationships to acquire new customers will not reflect the company’s margins when those relationships have been exhausted and the sales team fully leans on the company’s marketing. 

Lowering Startup CACs

When analyzing a company’s sales funnel, we note three distinct stages that lead to a closed sale:

• Lead Generation: Creating awareness of your brand or product in the market

• Lead Nurturing: Growing familiarity and interest in your product
• Sales: Converting leads into customers

These stages, along with the potential online locations of a prospect during each stage, are shown in the image below:

Within these stages, separately known as the marketing and sales funnels, startups have several options to lower their CAC, depending on where their analytics tools indicate inefficiencies. For example, poor keyword targeting on your website’s pages decreases your clickthrough rate. And a website form that doesn’t properly filter low-quality leads wastes your sales team’s time. Plugging those holes will allow a great number of target audience members to land on your website, connect with your sales team, and convert to customers for every dollar spent, thereby lowering your CAC.  

The following sections outline the 3 most effective ways to improve your startup’s CACs.

Assess Your Target Audience 

A company’s target audience significantly influences the cost to close a sale. Enterprises, for example, require a great deal of time and investment to close even a single sale. (However, the proportionally higher LTV justifies the marketing spend.) On the other hand, consumers are much easier to close than enterprises, yet generate far less LTV. 

If the cost to close a sale when targeting a specific audience isn’t warranted by the LTV that audience brings in, your team should reconsider their target market and identify new problems and niches your product can solve. This requires:

• Reexamining your existing customer base to identify previously unknown customer types
• Creating detailed audience personas of those new customer segments, and identifying content types and channels relevant to them
• Reorienting your marketing and sales strategies to include these new markets

Invest in Low CAC Marketing Channels

If a company is spending too much time and money on lead generation, it can consider a lower-cost marketing channel. The table below outlines several options for both lead generation and lead nurturing:

Low-CAC Marketing Channels for Startups

Channel	B2B CAC	B2C CAC	Pros	Cons
SEO	$647	$298	Highest ROI of any digital marketing channel Generates leads as long as content ranks High quality SEO content results in warmer leads	Requires expertise to execute Takes time for campaigns to grow
Email	$510	$287	Ideal lead nurturing channel Easy to track progress	Takes time to build a quality mailing list Limited Use Case: Doesn’t work for lead generation
Social Media	$658	$212	Ideal for reaching younger audiences Encourages audience engagement	Takes time to build traction on social media Requires regular posting of different media types (e.g. video, photo)
Webinars and Podcasts	$603	$251	Allows a company to showcase expertise in real-time Builds intimate relationships with customers and fans	Requires either an existing audience or time to build a listener base Requires a charismatic host

Contrary to conventional wisdom, “lower cost” does not mean “less effective.” While SEO campaigns take time to build, they offer the greatest ROI of any marketing channel, turning company websites into organic lead-generation machines when done properly.

Create High Quality Content 

Startups should periodically reexamine their content for opportunities to optimize its alignment with their target audience. While this approach will not lower CAC directly, it will increase the overall pipeline velocity and make marketing more profitable. Examples of these content improvements include:

• Provide social proof elements: Provide readers with examples of satisfied customers to reinforce your company’s pattern of success. A simple implementation of social proof elements could be achieved by highlighting partner or client logos on the company website. Alternatively, a company could choose to include full client testimonials with corresponding images and contact information to achieve a greater degree of trust.
  
• Create personalized sales content: In addition to creating content targeted at the customer’s search intent, personalized sales content is directly targeted to the individual customer. Building a more intimate relationship with customers makes them more likely to buy. Often, startups can use repurposed content from their marketing campaigns as the starting point for creating personalized sales content, tailoring the highlighted details to the specific lead being sold to.
  
• Include opportunities for soft conversions: While some customers are not prepared for a sale initially, companies can nurture these customers with soft conversions (e.g. white paper downloads, email signups). These soft conversions should include actionable next steps to move the customer through a longer sales cycle even when readers are not yet ready to commit to a purchase.

It should be noted that switching marketing channels can also benefit the lead nurturing stage and directly affect CAC. Email drip campaigns that update leads on the latest company research and findings are especially effective at garnering the attention of otherwise difficult leads, bringing them one step closer to a closed sale. 

Getting Help Lowering Your CACs

Hopefully, this article makes it clear how startups can lower their CACs. But any experienced marketer knows that execution is where the challenge lies, as a combination of experience, judgment, and intuition must be applied. It also takes time to measure results and make adjustments, which the rapid pace of a startup does not often allow for. 

For these reasons, many startups choose to work with an experienced marketing agency to handle the heavy lifting. Our agency specializes in crafting strategy-driven thought leadership SEO content, enabling clients to transform their websites into lead-generation machines. Feel free to contact us to discuss a partnership.