Back to School, Back to Spending: Get Your Piece of the Pie

By Dennis Malaspina
VP, Sales and Client Development

For many marketers the true beginning of the high-traffic, high-revenue season is back to school. In fact, consumers are on track to spend $18.4 billion this year on apparel, electronics, books, supplies and more. Like Christmas, this makes the back-to-school season a great time to implement email and online lead generation as part of your acquisition marketing mix. These tactics offer reach, frequency and branding. They are also great ways to uncover latent needs (I didn't know I needed that!) and drive higher website traffic (Let me check out this cool stuff!). Here are some ideas for how you can use both email list rental and online lead generation to get those cash registers ringing ...

Categories: Acquisition

Email Recipients Spend More Money, More Often

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

About six months ago I wrote that customers acquired through email have a higher value for most marketers than customers acquired through other methods, particularly search.

Well, there are some new stats floating around that back this theory up.

First, in March Forrester found that consumers who buy products advertised in emails spend 138% more online than peers who don't buy through email...

Categories: Acquisition

It's All About the Offer

By Dennis Malaspina
VP, Sales and Client Development

Practical Ecommerce has a great article on how to improve your email marketing results with co-registration. They cover many of the basics, including payment, finding partners and tracking performance. But they missed one big component that we find is crucial to success for our co-registration clients: The offer.

In our experience with hundreds of clients, throwing up a checkbox and praying for rain rarely gives you the results you are hoping for. Consumers and businesspeople alike are inundated at every turn with offers for email newsletters, so standing out from the crowd is crucial to success.

What makes a great co-reg offer? Generally it's all about the content. What does your email offer subscribers that other emails don't? Some ways to think about it ...

Categories: Acquisition

Direct Mail or Email: It's Not a Choice

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

We found ourselves intrigued by Bill McCloskey's Email Insider column last week about his experience at the Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants. In summary, he found scores of people who weren't doing much of anything with email and weren't really concerned about it. "Direct mail works just fine, thanks." You buy a stamp, you get delivered. No problem...

It's a bit amusing to hear anyone praise the Post Office, especially in light of the fights going on right now over rate hikes. But the bigger point is that we interactive marketing folks have to work harder to convert these latecomers to the email bandwagon. Yes, it can be challenging. But few rewards come without a little sweat and hard work. Return Path works with lots of catalogers and there is no question that they see huge success from the email channel. Have they thrown out their paper catalogs? No way! They still print those suckers - but now they do it smarter and augment the customer experience with relevant, well-timed email. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Don't Exchange Audience Development for Revenue Generation: Get Both

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

Joe Marchese wrote a great piece in Online SPIN yesterday about Web 2.0 business models. Many of the companies he met with at the Web 2.0 Expo have business models that are dependent on advertising revenue. Yet, the prevalent thought amongst these companies is to not introduce advertising until their audience development is complete. The thinking is that advertising is so unwelcome by consumers that it will turn potential traffic away. So rather than risk losing a finicky audience member, Web 2.0 companies prefer to bring in the audience, get them hooked on their offerings, then introduce advertising later. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Email Acquisition Doesn't Have to Drive Poor Delivery Rates

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

There is a persistent myth in the industry that third party email is inherently bad, that third party email drives high complaints and that using email for acquisition will ruin your deliverability.

These are all completely false notions. (And, by the way, equally false is the notion that a well-permissioned house file is inherently free of any problems. It isn't.)

At Return Path we work with many third party mailers. We also sell third party email through our Postmaster Network division. Safe to say we know the true story behind deliverability and email acquisition. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Beat the Postal Rate Increase: Add Email to Your Acquisition Mix

By Dennis Malaspina
VP, Sales and Client Development

Catalogers have a long, successful history using direct mail for new customer acquisition. Specifically by buying postal lists from a variety of sources and sending their catalogs with the hope of sparking a sale. It's an extremely effective strategy, but also an expensive one. And, it's about to get more expensive if the postal rate hike takes effect, as many experts believe it will.

Smart catalogers certainly aren't going to stop using direct mail for acquisition. But, the smartest will certainly be adding email to the mix. Rates for email list rental have held steady over the last few years, making them a bargain by comparison. ...

Categories: Acquisition

7 Techniques for Beating Lead Fraud

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

A few months back I wrote about lead quality and offered a few best practices. This is an issue that is very important to me - so I was honored to be asked to participate in a panel, "Maximizing your Lead Generation: Best Practices" at the IAB Leadership Forum: Performance Marketing on March 14th in Chicago. I will be joined by some of the key thought leaders in lead generation marketing.

None of the issues we are grappling with today are new -- the online lead generation marketplace has been plagued by data quality issues for years. A key driver of poor quality has been the persistent focus on maximizing publisher revenue at any expense. This has led to problematic practices like pre-checked boxes, multiple offers per page, lead reselling and spinning. These practices, in turn, create consumer confusion - they sign up for stuff they don't really want. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Lifetime Value of a Customer Acquired Through Paid Search May Be Lower than You Think

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

Search engine marketing gets a large share of marketing spends because it often results in an immediate transaction and is easily measurable. But is a new customer driven from SEM as valuable as customers driven through other channels? I believe not. When advertisers begin to segment their customers by originating channel, they will find that search engine marketing, like coupons, promotions, and incentives, results in less loyal customers relative to other channels.

Search is a tool to find stuff, and when that stuff happens to be products, search is often used as a tool to find the best deal. Deal seekers are the same no matter the channel, and they tend to be less loyal customers.
Marketers are dependent on customer engagement to increase lifetime value (LTV). In fact, many marketers are willing to lose money on the initial sale knowing they will earn profit on subsequent purchases. But the path to reengaging customers driven from paid search is far from clear. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Relevance is in the eye of the beholder

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

Why do people in our industry persist in bashing email acquisition? It seems to us that no one's interests are served when email acquisition is equated with spamming.

The most recent example of this was last week's Email Insider column where Melinda Krueger equated an email list rental campaign to build awareness for a new business with spam. First, we want to make a point of clarification: email list rental is almost always done with the recipient's permission. Return Path's lists, for example, are all double opt-in. Why would smart, top-tier marketers pay high CPMs to send unsolicited email?

Second, the article advances a line of thought that many industry experts believe: retention email to a house file is good, and acquisition email is recognized by all recipients as bad. This simply is not true. ...

Categories: Acquisition