Like all the best marketing, acquisition marketing is most effective when approached in an integrated, multichannel way. Acquisition Email should be a core component of this holistic approach.

While most marketers think of email as a retention tactic, Acquisition Email specifically helps to close gaps in brand awareness and boost lead generation efforts by opening acquisition campaigns to an entirely new segment of customers who might have missed your marketing attempts in other channels. Importantly, it also helps you reach prospects who are most likely to want to hear from you in a given moment. With the right data and partner, Acquisition Email can give your campaign the extra boost it needs to meet your KPIs and goals.

Retention marketing targets customers and prospects with whom a brand has an existing relationship. From an email standpoint, that typically means reaching people who are in your CRM already.

Acquisition marketing, on the other hand, targets prospects with whom your brand does not already have a relationship. From an email standpoint, that means reaching beyond your own CRM to find a compliant data partner that can “introduce” your brand (via email campaigns) to the prospects who are most likely to be looking for offerings like yours.

Again, it depends on the vendor you employ. At Data Axle, we use our own domains to send your Acquisition Emails, which ensures that our mailings have no effect on your customer retention efforts. This is often a concern for brands that do a lot of emailing to their own CRM files and want to ensure those efforts aren’t disrupted by other activities.

The prospect of being sent to spam is daunting but with the right creative and right partner, you can avoid the spam box. Data Axle sends over 1.5 billion acquisition emails every year and we have an average delivery rate of 97%. We follow best practices when it comes to creative design, use only the cleanest lists, follow ISP deliverability guidelines and have active bounce management. We also have an entire deliverability team to ensure your acquisition emails don’t end up in spam folders.

Give it a whirl! Data Axle can even assist as you juggle multiple solution providers in this space. We are masters at suppressing lists and optimizing for performance, and our primary goal is to ensure your success. Data Axle sends more than 1.5 billion Acquisition Emails a year, and we always work to ensure campaigns are tailored to the needs, systems and solutions that our partners bring to the table. You can leverage this experience to enhance your next acquisition program.

It’s up to you! While many marketers come to their Acquisition Email providers with creative completed, we realize that not every brand has in-house resources to take full advantage of the rich creative opportunities inherent within Acquisition Email campaigns. That’s why, at Data Axle, our services include not only a review of creative best practices that can guide clients’ internal teams, but also access to a design team that can support the creation of email HTML and ensure messages are on-brand, memorable, and likely to inspire action.

When it comes to sending Acquisition Emails, you can deploy them directly from your marketing automation platform (MAP) or CRM, or have your partner send on your behalf; it’s up to you. However, if you work with Data Axle for your Acquisition Email efforts, we recommend that you let us send campaigns on your behalf. While we do have the ability to license our emails, leveraging Data Axle for the sending process allows marketers to avoid using their own domains, which are typically also being used for retention email efforts. Using a different domain for acquisition efforts ensures that current retention emailing programs are unaffected by acquisition efforts.

Yes, this is good Acquisition Email practice. There’s no reason to spend your marketing budget to try to “re-acquire” customers you already have in your house file. In addition, it can be annoying to existing customers to receive campaigns that are clearly intended to establish a new relationship when one already exists. When you work with Data Axle for Acquisition Email, we can suppress your existing customers, as well as your unsubscribes, from campaigns.

Some solution providers do have limits on how many they can send in a day, or specified time period, but there really isn’t a limit. We have noticed that sending about 1MM emails per day works well – we would even label it a best practice – but note that we can send out more.

We can’t speak for other solutions providers, but at Data Axle, it takes about 5-7 days.

This is one of the most-frequent questions we get, and the answer is: It depends on your partner.

Here at Data Axle, our Acquisition Email offering is 100 percent compliant with privacy regulations because the contacts used for acquisition campaigns have opted-in to receive third-party solicitations. In addition to being compliant with current regulations and guidelines, Data Axle is also constantly keeping an eye on legislative developments to ensure our solutions adapt alongside new privacy regulations.

This might not necessarily be the case with other Acquisition Email vendors. When talking to potential partners, be sure to ask how they ensure compliance with relevant and ever-changing privacy regulations.

Our emails are sourced through vetted partners of Data Axle. Our partners gather permission-based emails to receive 3rd party solicitations. They are put through an extensive hygiene process prior to being added to our database. Much to the delight of our customers, we offer over 100 demographic and firmographic selections to choose from.

We have a creative team that can help guide your subject lines and preheader to be as compelling as possible to drive open rates. We can also design (and test) creative to entice your specific target audience to click. However, we also encourage you to examine the goal of your acquisition campaign. Acquisition emails are great for driving brand awareness and ‘first touch,’ and when measuring campaign results you should always take that into account. This tool works best as part of an omnichannel or multichannel campaign designed to touch prospects multiple times and tell a cohesive brand story. Let us prove to you that you will get the results you need.

From delivery to click-throughs and other engagements, there are a number of metrics that marketers can capture from their campaigns. But when it comes to Acquisition Email, matchback analysis is perhaps the most powerful form of measurement a brand can employ. With matchback analysis, Data Axle is able to look at a brand’s conversion file and determine whether those who converted, received and engaged with Acquisition Emails somewhere along their journey. 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.

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. Matchback analysis provides this.

You should receive results from your campaign quickly. At Data Axle, initial tracking reports are sent on day 3 and a comprehensive final report is sent on day 10. If you have different needs, talk to your partner and see what they can do to accommodate you.