4 Reasons to Make the Move to Acquisition Email

By Dennis Malaspina
VP, Sales and Client Development

Many smart marketers are still skittish about acquisition email, instead relying on other methods - especially direct mail - to get new customers. In the spirit of giving this holiday season - and in the spirit of increasing your holiday revenue! - I'd like to give you four really good reasons to consider testing email to meet your customer acquisition goals.

Categories: Acquisition

Lead Generation Do's and Don'ts

By Stephanie Miller, VP of Strategic Services
and Craig Swerdloff, VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

One of the best ways to grow your email file is to invite prospects when they are in process with another registration. The idea of a "co-reg" checkbox has been around for a while, but a newer opportunity is lead generation -- also typically offered on a cost per lead basis. Publishers provide advertisers with full page ad forms that entice prospects to engage with offers of interest. A single offer on the page gives advertisers lots of room to tell their story and makes the process more clear to prospects. Lead generation programs tend to yield much higher quality leads than co-registration because the subscribers are less likely to be confused by a sea of checkboxes.

If you are considering trying lead generation and want to make sure you succeed, consider the following Do's and Don'ts to help you craft a winning strategy. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Optimizing Email Acquisition for Non-Profits: The Same Best Practices Apply

By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services

We often write about the challenges that B2B and B2C marketers face when it comes to using the email channel for retention and acquisition. After all, battling inbox clutter to stand out and be relevant, keeping subscribers engaged and growing files are top concerns for almost all email marketers.

Which might lead you to wonder about non-profits and charitable organizations. Do they face similar challenges? Are they focused on optimizing email for their business goals? Do the same best practices apply? Our non-profit clients have shown us that the answers are a resounding yes, yes and yes!

One might assume that non-profits have an easier time of leveraging email from both a relationship-building and revenue-generating standpoint. Surely it would be hard to find a more engaged house file than one with subscribers who are committed to a charitable organization; a file filled with dedicated folks who donate their money, volunteer their time and make their voices heard by spreading the word about new research or upcoming fundraisers. ...

Categories: Acquisition

The Future of Online Lead Generation

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

As I've written before (here and here), online lead generation is a great channel for acquisition but can be fraught with problems that smart marketers need to be on the look out for. My goal here at Return Path is to create an online lead generation network that marketers (and publishers) can use with confidence.

This is why I'm very excited about one of Return Path's newest hires, Evan Adlman as Director of WebLeads, our online lead generation product.

He has a great background for this position, having come to us from the agency Trafficbuyer Digital where he managed lead generation campaigns for companies like Get Smart, Lending Tree, ING and eDiets. In addition to advising clients on every aspect of their program, including offer, creative and media, Evan was focused on tracking the performance of every data source - both on the front end and the back end. He would then make recommendations on adjustments to their buying and steer clients away from problematic data sources. So, in short, Evan "gets it."

So what does this mean for Return Path, and, more importantly, for Return Path clients? ...

Categories: Acquisition

Questions and Answers from Return Path's List Growth Webinar

By Dennis Malaspina
VP, Sales and Client Development

Yesterday my colleague Margaret Farmakis and I presented a webinar called "List Growth NOW: Using Online Acquisition Tools to Improve Email Marketing Results." It was a fun and interesting session. If you missed out on attending, you can still listen in. Download the recording now.

Meanwhile, we got some great questions from the audience. Here's a few of them, with our answers and some additional resources to help you:

What's the difference between creative used in retention campaigns and that used in acquisition campaigns? Retention campaigns are aimed at people who already know you and your brand. They're on your house file because they're your existing (or past) customers or your prospects. Even if they are a prospect, they signed up for your email and have some understanding of what your products and services are about. Acquisition campaigns are aimed at people who don't know you very well. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Unleashing the True Power of Email

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

A recent Behavioral Insider column had a truly tantalizing quote from iPost's Steve Webster:

"There is the presumption that when someone receives an email message they then click on the email go to the Web site and either make a purchase or not and then they are done interacting with your email. This turned out to be wrong. We discovered very quickly that the power of an email impression lasts for weeks after the customer has actually received the message. The particular interaction they will have with you later really depends more on their personal preferences than on your putting a new email in front of them."

The highlighted portion is a point we've been making here at Return Path for years now. Emails are not perceived by recipients as distinct, one-off promotions. But many marketers continue to view them that way and make both strategic and tactical errors because of that. Here are a five things you need to start doing - right now - if you want to capitalize on the true power of email ...

Categories: Acquisition

The Letter After "CP" Matters Less than the Quality of the List

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

Late last week Diedre Cook wrote a timely "hot vs. not" column in Email Insider. We agreed with about 99% of her list - especially her points about reputation and relevance, but disagreed with her assertion that CPM list rental is "out" and CPA list rental is "in." Specifically her assertion that with CPA you have "nothing to lose."

While this sounds sensible - pay for performance seems low-risk - it actually isn't. The problem is that you get what you pay for; and many of the lists that are available for CPA advertising are often the worst ones. Quality, permission lists are expensive to build and maintain. Quality publishers do not spend a lot of time and money doing so, only to hock their lists to the first buyer. So the lists you often get lack real permission, are over mailed with irrelevant offers, have high complaint rates, and therefore can destroy an advertisers reputation. So while your media buyers are happy, the marketing team is left to contend with angry customers, and poor ISP deliverability on their most precious internal mailings. It may be that your marketing budget is only paying for the emails that generate a response, but your brand reputation is paying for the rest.

Of course, CPA can work. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Email Marketing Spending Predicted to Eclipse Postal

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

Email marketing for acquisition has often been treated like Rodney Dangerfield - it just gets no respect. Well, for those of us who know how great email is at establishing and building relationships with customers and prospects, it is time to celebrate: new data from the DMA shows that email acquisition is about to explode. And for those of you coming late to the party, welcome!

We are talking, of course, about the DMA 2007 Postal and Email List Report which found that marketers are increasingly turning to email, both in addition to and instead of, postal lists, for prospecting. (See the full story in DMNews).

The DMA found that ...

Categories: Acquisition

Multiple Impressions Impress Consumers

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

eMarketer recently ran a report that found that multiple impressions across online media work best in driving sales and acquiring new customers. In fact, the quoted study found that ads seen on multiple websites were twice as likely to convert as those seen on a single website. Moreover, 86.1% of ads which led to a responsive action had multiple placements.

While the article didn't specifically mention email, our experience is that clients who use email acquisition consistently, and as part of an integrated online marketing strategy - creating multiple impressions with the same audience - have a much higher ROI than those who use email haphazardly.

In fact, it is sometimes possible to ...

Categories: Acquisition

How to Achieve High Inbox Placement Rates with Third-Party Email

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Let's face it: third-party email doesn't get a lot of respect in the email marketing world. And many people assume two things: 1. third-party marketers must have bad deliverability, 2. all third-party email is the same.

At Return Path we've never believed either of those two things to be true. In fact, we were so sure that you could do third-party email and have a good sending reputation, that in 2004 we acquired Postmaster Direct, the original email list rental company going back to the mid-90s. Well, we now have some great data that proves that email list rental can have good deliverability and that all email advertising is not equal ...

Categories: Acquisition