2025 CPL and CAC Benchmarks [HubSpot Research]

As a marketing consultant, I work on client accounts and ensure their marketing is working (i.e., making money for the business). To gauge marketing success, I particularly like two benchmarks: the cost per lead benchmark (CPL) and the customer acquisition costs benchmark (CAC).

These benchmarks are helpful for everyone in business to know, but especially important for sales and marketing teams.

I work primarily in the B2B space, and the B2B cost per lead benchmark is one of the most valuable metrics. B2B sales cycles can take a long time, and it can be tricky to determine the exact customer acquisition costs, but you must get as close as possible to these numbers.

To help refine your marketing strategy to lower the costs of acquiring leads and customers, here are some helpful CPL and CAC benchmarks, plus insights from a recent HubSpot survey of hundreds of marketers. I wanted to look at what the numbers tell us about CPL and CAC, alongside the behaviors of marketers in 2025.

Table of Contents

• Most Effective Strategies for Lowering CAC
• Marketing Channels With the Highest and Lowest CAC
• Most Effective Strategies for Lowering CPL
• Marketing Channels With the Highest and Lowest Quality of Leads
• Marketing Channels With Lowest and Highest CPL

Most Effective Strategies for Lowering CAC

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is how much a company spends to get a new customer.

HubSpot State of Marketing surveys have previously proven that CAC varies between companies and industries.

What reduces customer acquisition costs will depend greatly on your industry, product or service, customer, and preferred buyer journey. The good news is that you can find data with the cost per lead benchmarks by industry, and this should help you see how your website performs.

I wanted to find some data to see what might reduce CAC. I used HubSpot’s State of Marketing Survey to understand what marketers are doing in 2025 and beyond. Safe to say, any marketing that’s getting the attention of the masses is what’s moving the needle for the business.

Here’s what I found:

• User-generated content (UGC) is voted as the top marketing strategy for 2025.
• If you use UGC in marketing, consider what form of media your audience is most engaged with. For example, marketers report short-form videos as having high ROI.
• Think about your audience. Both B2B and B2C businesses are primarily targeting millennials.
• Authenticity seems to be leading the charge for the majority of marketers. Of marketers surveyed, 92% plan to maintain or invest more in brand awareness. I would argue that branding and authenticity go hand-in-hand with video.

Marketing Channels With the Highest and Lowest CAC

Being mindful of the channels you’re using and how much those channels cost is another way to lower the cost of acquiring customers.

Marketing Channels With the Lowest CAC

According to First Sage Page, organic marketing channels with the lowest CAC include email marketing and public speaking for B2B, as well as social media marketing and webinars for B2C.

Source

For paid channels, the lowest CAC channels are:

• Direct Mail and PPC/SEM for B2B.
• Facebook Ads and PPC/SEM for B2C.

Source

When measuring your CAC, consider your sales cycle and time to close leads.

I used to work in a B2B marketing agency, and every year, we’d run a cheap direct mail campaign. However, the campaign results often didn’t show up for years. The customers we did get were excellent, though! The takeaway is that while low CAC is desirable, you must balance this with efficiency.

Marketing Channels With the Highest CAC

The tables above also show us the highest CAC by channels for B2B and B2C.

I wanted to investigate the marketing people are doing in 2025. It’s safe to assume that these channels are thought to lower the CAC.

Let’s take a look at social media in 2024. Except for LinkedIn, both B2B and B2C businesses prioritize the same social media platforms. The favorite is Facebook, followed by Instagram, Linked (for B2B only), YouTube, and TikTok. B2C brands favored LinkedIn last, which makes sense.

Pro tip: It may be that channels with the highest CAC support channels that have lower CAC. If you’re doing a lot of marketing, consider media mix modeling to identify how channels, such as a higher CAC channel, support others.

An example from the media mix modeling article I wrote perfectly demonstrates what I mean: As pictured above, radio ads have a high CAC for B2B. However, a marketer found that radio ads increased clicks and engagement in social media by 25%. Marketing channels all have different roles to play and should be measured individually and collectively.

Most Effective Strategies for Lowering CPL

Cost per lead (CPL) tells you how much you’ve spent on marketing before you get a lead. A lead might be the customer’s contact information or interest in the business’s product or service.

One effective way to lower CPL is with marketing automation. Using AI tools like HubSpot’s AI, Breeze, increases inbound leads by 99%. If you can increase quality leads with minimal effort — using AI — CPL will decrease.

Kyle Denhoff, HubSpot’s Senior Director of Marketing, successfully reduced cost per lead with creator partners. Denhoff says, “Creators have become one of our top growth drivers in less than three years. Some long-term creator partnerships cut our cost per lead by 30-40% compared to ads on Meta and Google. We’ve now got over 100 creator partners, and they’re driving about 50% of our media network reach and demand.”

When it comes to CPL, you want to spend less money per lead. But what does a good CPL look like? Well, that depends on industries and channels, but here’s a look at CPL for different channels according to Visitor Queue.

If you’re wondering what is a good CPL, then you can refer to averages as shown in the table below.

Source

Marketing Channels With the Highest and Lowest Quality of Leads

Not every lead is a good lead — they don’t all have the need or desire to buy a product or service from your company. To ensure you’re reaching your target audience, here is a breakdown of channels marketers use to attract the highest quality leads.

Marketing Channels Resulting in Highest Quality of Leads

According to First Page Sage, marketing channels that result in the highest ROI (and, therefore, assumed the highest quality of leads) include:

• Public speaking.
• Thought leadership and SEO.
• Webinars.
• Email marketing.
• Podcasts.

First Page Sage presents this information in a table with the time to results.

Source

With this new data in mind, I want to nod back to what I said earlier about the direct mail campaign. The highest ROI lead generation channels are:

• Mostly medium to very hard to execute.
• Expensive.
• Take time.

Our direct mail campaign took years to pay off, but we got quality leads. It was at least low-effort and cheap, though.

The truth is that generating high-quality leads for your business isn’t easy, and it will take time.

Pro tip: Make these channels as efficient as possible so you can get the most out of them. For example, AI can help write content, generate blogs from video transcripts, and vice versa. Use the right software (Marketing Hub, for example) with built-in AI to help streamline processes. The more streamlined you’re working, the greater the chances you’ll bring your CPL in line with cost per lead benchmarks.

Josh Ames is a HubSpot and GTM Manager at Phocas Software, and he’s using HubSpot’s AI to do more testing.

Ames says, “HubSpot’s data enrichment feature quickly improved our data quality, leading to more effective campaigns and better alignment. 92% of companies in our CRM had at least one new enrichment property populated by the new feature. AI allows you to go from A/B testing to A to Z testing and quickly find out which ads or posts are the most likely to perform the best with your audience.”

Marketing Channels Resulting in the Lowest Quality of Leads

Marketing that results in low-quality leads is marketing done poorly. Likely, you’re not reaching your audience in a way that resonates, or you’re using marketing channels that your audience doesn’t use.

For example, HubSpot’s Consumer Trends Report found that Millennials’ number one channel for product discovery is social media. Considering that marketers in B2B and B2C businesses are targeting Millennials, a social media presence is a must!

Remember what I said earlier? The top three social media channels used by marketers are:

• B2B: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.
• B2C: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube.

Source

Marketing Channels With Lowest and Highest CPL

What is a good CPL? Similar to CAC, another way to lower the cost of generating leads is to look to channels with the lowest costs.

Marketing Channels With the Lowest CPL

Visitor Queue recorded data CPL by channel. Using the cost average, the lowest CPL channels included:

• SEO ($31).
• Email marketing ($53).
• Webinars ($72).

It’s important that you explore your industry to determine what returns a low CPL for you. The data found by Visitor Queue conflicts with First Page Sage, which listed SEO as the third most expensive channel with medium to high time to get results.

There’s no one-size-fits-all in metrics, and even businesses within the same category (B2B or B2C) need to dig into their niche data accordingly. For example, the B2B SaaS cost per lead benchmark may be different from B2B in general.

Marketing Channels With Highest Cost per Lead

Sticking with Visitor Queue’s data on CPL by channel, they found the channels with the highest cost per lead included:

• Trade shows ($811).
• PPC ($181).
• Content creation ($92).

CPL and CAC Are Essential Parts of the Puzzle

Now that you know which strategies and channels are the most effective for lowering CAC and CPL, you can confidently refine your marketing strategy to attract new customers and leads while also saving money.

While I like to track CPL and CAC, thinking about the bigger picture, how marketing channels influence each other (remember media mix modeling), and the time to close a deal is essential. As I learned by putting this article together: The channels with the lowest CPL that bring the highest quality leads are also the channels that take the longest to see results.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.