If your team has tried acquisition email before but had only so-so results, you’re not alone. A little under a third of marketers we surveyed said that acquisition email wasn’t helping them hit their KPIs as well as they’d hoped. Almost a quarter of marketers weren’t aware they could email prospects who aren’t already in their CRM. Other marketers we surveyed said they didn’t think acquisition email was compliant with security measures.
Marketers are absolutely right to worry about compliance and KPI’s, but if you’re only focusing on the ways things could go wrong, you’ll never allow yourself to actually get it right. So let’s look at four ways acquisition email is a good bet for you and your team’s next campaign.
Have you ever tried to do the wiring for your own home? Unless you have extensive experience with electrical work and a thorough understanding of safety codes and regulations, it’s best to leave it to the experts.
Likewise, you can take on acquisition email on your own, but we recommend using a partner. Doing acquisition email on your own is where a lot of the hesitancy about compliance comes from, and rightly so. Because of the complexity of compliance and privacy laws. It’s best to work with a vendor that has secured the permission to email new prospects on behalf of a third party.
When you work with the right data, acquisition email is not spam.
Acquisition email can be compliant with today’s privacy regulations so long as marketers work with reputable partners who ensure that the contacts used for acquisition campaigns come from permissions-based contact lists. This means your partners need to be providing you with good, clean data. Make sure they are well versed in existing compliance needs, including GDPR, DMA, CCPA, HIPAA, ISP and SISA, and are up to date on the latest regulations, proposed bills and industry guidelines.
Companies like Data Axle can help you do acquisition email right. There are prospects out there who do want to hear from you and have given their permission to hear from you.
Speaking of working with a partner: when you work with an external partner like Data Axle, we can send out emails for you so you can avoid using your own domain. You’re already using your domain for retention efforts, so by using our domain for acquisition, your retention emailing programs will be unaffected by your new acquisition efforts.
National campaigns require national strategies and national technologies. Some providers are limited in the number of emails they can send in a day or specific time period, but Data Axle doesn’t really have a limit. We have a best practice, instead. We find that sending out about 1MM emails a day works well, and that’s generally what we advise for large scale campaigns. We can send out more, of course.
That kind of scale can lead to more effective campaigns. When you combine email with other channels like display or social, we see an average 20% increase in engagement rates. With “match and deploy,” we take your targeted prospect list for direct mail and send emails to those people, thus trimming the rising cost of postage to reach those same people and providing new avenues for your prospects to connect with you. Your acquisition emails can be sent to a variety of target audiences, from your current prospect list, your deanonymized website visitors or to a custom designed, modeled audience.
No matter where your customer is in their journey–awareness, consideration or conversion–it’s important for marketers to reach consumers with relevant messages in the channels where they’re most likely to welcome brand interactions. As research has shown, email is the channel of choice for brand interactions among many consumers. But it shouldn’t operate as an island.
The more times a brand’s message can touch a customer where they are in their journey, the further down the funnel they will progress toward ultimate conversion. When acquisition email is combined with other acquisition channels like direct mail, display, social media and others, campaign performance improves across the board. According to our market research, about 77% of marketers think that an acquisition campaign delivers higher ROI when it includes acquisition email, and 53.3% of marketers say that their acquisition email campaigns are working well.
When you talk to one of our team members about your campaign’s unique needs, we’ll talk about frequency, saturation and market segmentation to help you achieve the best results possible.
For acquisition programs to be most effective—and, importantly, to become more effective over time—it’s absolutely vital for marketers to have a holistic understanding of how their various acquisition channels work together to drive a brand toward its goals and KPIs.
You’re used to using click-throughs and other engagement metrics to determine campaign success. Acquisition email can provide valuable insights via matchback analysis. Since most acquisition email efforts aren’t directed at driving conversion directly from the email itself, this type of analysis is vital to accounting for the true impact of a brand’s spend across all channels.
Acquisition email makes it easy to measure performance, and easy to see how this aspect of your campaign works with everything else.
The time to process your campaign’s results will vary from provider to provider. Here at Data Axle, though, initial tracking reports are sent on day 3 of your campaign and a comprehensive final report is sent on day 10. Getting the actual campaign up and running takes between 5 and 7 days, so within 4 weeks of signing on with us you’ll have a full report on how it went.
Because our reporting comes back fast, you can adapt and shift your campaign quickly. Maybe our initial report shows lower than expected open rates. You can change the subject line or header line of your emails and see what those changes bring. This kind of flexibility means you can act on things that work and cut things that don’t. You can adjust course to meet your prospective customers where they are.
You and your team probably have an idea of what timeline you need. Talk to your partner about how that timeline could work.
Nationally recognized companies have successfully implemented acquisition email campaigns. Success isn’t a winning lottery ticket, it’s a careful series of steps and choices that put your crafted emails in front of the right people at the right time.
Data Axle has been working with companies for over 20 years to help them boost their acquisitions. We’ve worked with over 2000 brand partners and can help your team see results. Ask us how.
As Content Marketing Manager, Natasia is responsible for helping strategize, produce and execute Data Axle's content. With a passion for writing and an enthusiasm for data management and technology, Natasia creates content that is designed to deliver nuggets of wisdom to help brands and individuals elevate their data governance policies. A native New Yorker, when Natasia is not at work she can be found enjoying New York’s food scene, at one of NYC’s many museums, or at one of the city’s many parks with her two teacup yorkies.