• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Using emails to acquire prospects is a dicey business. You can end up in a spam folder--or worse. But acquisition campaigns can drive conversions. Claritas offers 10 tips for sending acquisition emails. 

Don’t judge your acquisition email campaign by CRM metrics—With a CRM campaign, existing customers familiar with your brand and products are much more likely to open your email. Open rates are thus relatively high. But click-through rates are lower. The exact opposite is true in acquisition campaigns. Prospects may be less likely to open your message, but once they do, they will click through at a higher rate. 

Acquisition campaign engagement varies widely across industries—Sectors like government and nonprofits report high click-through rates based on high intent and clear calls to action. And while B2B emails tend to draw higher click-through rates due to targeted content focused on decisions, B2C campaigns in retail and ecommerce often pull both high opens and click-throughs because of their timely offers. 

Use segmentation to find your best customers faster—Segmented campaigns can lead to a 760% increase in revenue, compared to “spray-and-pray” efforts, according to BusinessDasher. But a brand must work with a partner that offers up-to-date, opt-in data and is compliant with spam and privacy regulations.

Quality data hygiene helps you reach the right inbox—Consumers often change their emails, and this makes targeting a challenge. Brands must use the consumer’s primary address—these are 14s more likely to be read. Also, email marketers must eliminate dead emails and avoid spam traps.

Evaluate and adjust your campaign “in-flight”—Claritas believes in running multiple “test and learn” deployments instead of  relying on one-time blasts to all prospects Whatever the campaign, improvements can always be made. For instance, audiences can be segmented to further boost response.

Use email to strengthen your full-funnel, multichannel strategy—Case in point: a direct mail piece can be followed by a well-timed acquisition email. The resulting increased brand familiarity can boost open rates.

Use multichannel measurement to evaluate measurement to response—Open and click-through rates are fine metrics up to a point. But the real test of success is how many prospects converted and how much revenue was generated. You also have to understand how much your email campaign contributed to conversions in other channels. 

A matchback analysis can reveal your true conversion rate—this means linking IP addresses and mobile IDs to physical household addresses. Claritas itself offers an identity graph for this purpose.