In a down economy, finding new B2B customers is more important than ever. And finding them with email is truly a stroke of marketing genius.

Email gets high marks as a business development strategy: a recent study revealed that 53% of respondents are successfully using email to find new customers, and 77% of those surveyed believe acquisition campaigns deliver higher ROI when they include email.

But here’s the catch. A lot of B2B marketers today still aren’t using email for customer acquisition. From my perspective, saying no to email acquisition is the equivalent of saying no to business growth.

Drawing upon our deep expertise in email marketing, our team put together a roadmap that makes email acquisition easy. Here are four ways to simplify and scale your campaigns:

1. Use the right data. Your first-party CRM data might be good but it won’t help you find new customers. And while you may have a steady stream of incoming leads, when you need to generate significant impact, third-party email acquisition data is the answer.

Modern B2B marketers know that acquisition email is no longer about sending out a high volume of emails to random prospects. Today’s acquisition campaigns can and should be highly targeted. Working with your data vendor, you’ll want to customize your B2B audience by selecting from a wide range of firmographic, behavioral and contextual targeting options to identify the ideal prospects for your offers.

Above all, be sure to choose your B2B data provider wisely. The significant employment shifts we’ve seen in recent years have caused many data vendors to falter – they can’t keep up with the changes as decision-makers move to new roles and new companies. It’s a waste of time and resources to market to irrelevant or even non-existent contacts, and your brand integrity will suffer if your acquisition email campaigns don’t reach the right audiences. To reduce risk, look for a vendor with a reputation for quality. Even better, look for one with a data quality guarantee.

2. Choose the best platform. Sending acquisition campaigns through a CRM is not only potentially against the platform’s policy, but it can also create deliverability issues and result in lower open rates. Fortunately, there are other options: acquisition email platforms are purpose-built for reaching out to “cold” contacts – people you haven’t engaged with before. They have different standards for white-listing, reputation management, and IP address cleanliness, making them ideal for third-party data campaigns.

OMI offers acquisition campaign management as a service to our clients. After working with you to build your custom B2B audience, we’ll send the first “cold” email through our email acquisition transmission platform. From there, we can transfer any contacts that open or click the initial email to your CRM platform for ongoing outreach via sequenced nurture emails and automated follow-ups.

3. Implement privacy at scale. In the study mentioned above, 58% of respondents said they would utilize email for acquisition outreach if their data vendor could prove the emails are privacy-compliant. Companies like Snowflake have responded, with marketplaces that offer anonymized data options that ensure privacy, allowing brands and agencies to connect third-party data from multiple sources to their preferred martech platforms to power digital campaigns.

OMI is part of the anonymized data movement – since June 2022 we have been offering access to our B2B contacts and audience segments on the Snowflake Media Data Cloud. These contacts are matched to digital IDs to drive digital campaigns with powerful reach and accuracy.

4. Try new strategies. Email marketing continues to reinvent itself, and now you can power your campaigns with data that reaches prospects who are not only interested in what you have to offer, but ready to buy. Digital intent monitoring offers this capability, enabling you to connect to an audience that is in market for your solutions now. It may sound too good to be true, but if you understand the process you’ll see it’s an idea worth considering. Go here to find out how it works.

OMI has been offering intent data in combination with our business contact data for several years now. Clients who engage with us have access to more than 14 billion fresh intent signals each week to fuel email acquisition campaigns. Contact my team for more information.

Today, to add customers and grow sales you’ve got to use every tool in your toolbox. By modernizing your approach and embracing best practices, you stand a better chance of success. I hope these ideas have inspired you!

OMI’s high-quality B2B business contact data is used by Fortune 1000 firms and start-ups alike to drive modern digital marketing initiatives—from intent monitoring and ABM to email marketing and omnichannel campaigns utilizing display, social media, and more. Reach out to our team today for more information.