With the holidays behind us, it’s time to get back to work, and for most of us, a top priority in the New Year is attracting new customers and winning new business. Acquisition email campaigns can fast track your efforts to find the ideal prospects for your business, offering high ROI and proven results. But the practice of email marketing is evolving quickly. That’s why it’s important to take a fresh look at what goes into creating successful acquisition campaigns in today’s changing business landscape. Here are seven tips to keep in mind as you strive for the best results in 2018:

1.Develop an audience as a strategic business asset: Taking a strategic approach to establishing and developing an audience as a business asset – including identifying it, enriching it, scaling it and optimizing it over time – will empower marketers to deliver significant returns on their investment. At OMI, our business is built around doing just that. We serve as trusted, virtual audience strategists for our clients, helping them expand their market reach, increase qualified leads and drive incremental revenue.

2.Think quality over quantity: When it comes to email data, marketers should focus on data quality; not large vague quantities. Through years of helping our clients grow their businesses, our customers have come to appreciate the crucial role we play in identifying the right audiences to target for successful customer acquisition email campaigns. With our proven segmented approach and high-quality email mail data, we help our clients deliver quality additions to the front (or top) of the sales funnel.

3.Avoid bad data at all costs: Using bad or out-of-date email data can put your business at risk, not to mention lead to lost time and money. IBM estimates that the annual cost of poor data quality is $3.1 trillion (!) in the U.S. alone. Worse, poor data quality can land your company on spam black lists, blocking your business from emailing at all. An interruption like that will not only impact revenue streams, but also keep you from communicating effectively with existing customers. To instill and earn our clients’ trust, OMI pioneered the industry’s first data validity guarantee: we guarantee 95% accuracy of our acquisition email data upon delivery for 30 days.

4.Keep revenue front and center: While it’s important for marketers to track open and click-through rates for email campaign success, they should never lose sight of the most important metric: revenue. Furthermore, marketing executives need to be able to demonstrate and clearly communicate to other non-marketing executives within their companies how their email marketing efforts support and impact the bottom line.

5.Think across your marketing stack: Successful acquisition email campaigns require tight integration with your other marketing and business technology systems. To support this, OMI offers turnkey services for integrating email data with clients’ social and display advertising campaigns. In addition, we can integrate our prospect/acquisition data with leading customer relationship management (CRM) systems such as Salesforce. When systems are integrated and working together, marketing campaigns fire on all cylinders and more powerful results are achieved.

6.Work on building relationships: Successful marketing today involves establishing trust and building relationships with your prospects until (and after) they become customers. This approach can be counter to, say, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, where the prospect can disappear off your sales dashboard after a single click. Acquisition email marketing enables marketers to attract and nurture prospects over the long term; guiding them through the sales funnel until they become paying customers.

7.Create integrated campaigns: B2B email campaigns integrated with display advertising is a powerful combination that is gaining momentum. These two channels offer a successful one-two punch, sparking a prospect’s interest with an email message and then following up with a targeted, relevant display ad. By working together with our clients’ and their advertising agencies, this is a proven combination that OMI is delivering today.

Marketers will again be tasked with helping their companies grow in 2018, and quality customer acquisition data is a proven method to gathering new customers and expanding revenue over the next year.

What other advice or suggestions would you give to marketers leveraging email data? Let us know!