With October now in full swing, it’s make or break time when it comes to meeting or exceeding your business objectives for the year. If you’re falling short, don’t forget – email is, once again, the medium that can recharge your marketing, quickly and without breaking the bank.

Reflecting on Campaign Monitor’s new survey profiling the top goals shared by marketers, here are two practical reminders about email strategy that you can implement now to elevate your end-of-year success:

• Delivering new customers and revenue: Increasing customer acquisition was the number one goal for 52% of marketers surveyed. Over a third (35%) rated it their top challenge as well. Acquiring new customers can be essential to fuel growth and generate revenue for early-stage or emerging companies.

How can email make a difference? According to McKinsey, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than social media (e.g. Facebook or Twitter). When it comes to customer acquisition strategies, I recommend clients examine their existing customer base to determine who these businesses are, the common traits and challenges they share, and what drove them to your solution. Then craft campaigns that reflect those insights, with an eye on delivering helpful, insightful content that is of real interest to your prospects. Customer acquisition emails should quickly pique the interest of the recipient via an intriguing subject line and spur action via engaging content, a pleasing design and click-throughs with a valuable call-to-action (CTA).

To broaden the reach of your email campaigns, consider sourcing customer acquisition data from a reputable provider. This will enable you to fast track your ability to reach new prospects that map to your ideal customer profile.

• Improving customer retention: Once you’ve acquired a customer, you’ll want to keep them coming back to your company repeatedly through their positive experience and establishing an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship. Keeping customers longer will lead to reduced sales costs and higher profitability. Improving customer retention was the top goal for 40% of marketers, and was a top challenge by only 18% of those surveyed, which indicates this is less of burden for marketers to achieve.

How can email make a difference? As always, your customers will appreciate targeted content that is tailored to their stage in the customer journey. Q4 is a good time to reward your best customers for their loyalty with special offers, encourage referrals, and reach out to those who may have purchased once who you haven’t heard from in a while to ensure they’re happy and engaged -- or to find out why not.

Additional marketing goals, according to the study, include increasing brand awareness, enriching contact data quality and reducing marketing costs – all of which email can play a key role in supporting or advancing. The bottom line is that email can and should be your “first call” when it comes to meeting – or crushing – your marketing objectives for 2018.

Outward Media’s accurate, targeted email data can help you achieve better email marketing ROI by targeting your best prospects – including millennials and other generations -- and converting more prospects into customers. Take a look at our case studies to find out more.