Unlock the Potential of Acquisition Email
How to Measure Success in a Tricky Multi-Channel World
Acquisition Email is a powerful marketing channel for expanding your customer base, even with today’s tracking challenges. It allows you to reach cold prospects—individuals who may not have interacted with your brand—and guide them toward conversion. These emails play a vital role in building brand awareness, driving engagement, and establishing the early touch points needed for eventual sales.
Utilize Available Tracking (but also, Manage Expectations)
Tracking Acquisition Email success can be complex, but with the right strategies, you can effectively measure its impact and demonstrate the value of your campaigns. Here’s how you can navigate these challenges and unlock the full potential of your acquisition emails:
Open and Click Rates
Open and click-through rates can be valuable metrics for gauging engagement, even with privacy protections, like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, limiting visibility. These metrics provide clear insights into how prospects interact with your content. Acquisition Email typically sees open rates between 8% and 15% and click to open rates between 15% and 20%. These figures serve as useful benchmarks, especially when reaching out to an audience that is new to your brand. Opens and clicks also help alleviate concerns about emails ending up in the spam folder, which is a common concern. While there is no way to guarantee deliverability, utilizing quality data, reliable deployment partners and evaluating post-deployment data will help inbox delivery and eye share.
2. Holdout Groups
Holdout groups are an excellent way to measure the real impact of your email campaign. By comparing a control group—those who didn’t receive your emails—with your target audience, you can gauge the true lift generated by your emails. This approach is particularly useful because internal CRMs often struggle to track third-party email performance 1:1. Holdout groups bridge this gap by clearly demonstrating how acquisition emails influence conversions compared to organic behavior.
3. Match-Back Analysis
Match-back analysis links Acquisition Email to unique individuals, enabling you to track conversions over time and follow a customer’s journey across multiple touchpoints. This method provides a comprehensive view of email performance, addressing the challenge of tracking across fragmented devices and channels. By closing this loop, match-back analysis reveals how Acquisition Emails contributes to long-term conversions, even when tracking is not seamless.
4. Multi-Touch Attribution
Most people don’t convert after just one email; it usually takes multiple touchpoints across multiple devices and channels before someone takes action. Acquisition Email can be viewed as both a strong targeted awareness channel, as well as a strong conversion tactic. In a perfect world, multi-touch attribution helps track the entire journey from the first marketing touchpoint to the final conversion, giving you a clearer picture of what’s working and what isn’t. However, various channels offer different levels of tracking making it difficult to cleanly measure. Adding to the complexity, not all in-house platforms can support Acquisition Email the same way they can support tactics like digital. Utilizing a combination of tools will allow you to see how emails and other marketing channels contribute to a prospect’s decision to convert, ensuring you’re not just flying blind.
The Bigger Picture
Managing expectations from the start is key. Success needs to be clearly defined up front—not only what metrics you want to hit but how you will agree to evaluate those metrics. Each measurement method provides valuable insights, but none gives the full picture alone. Open and click rates reveal initial engagement, holdout groups show the true impact compared to a control group, match-back analysis tracks conversions over time, and so on. To fully understand your campaign’s success, it’s crucial to use varying methods together, as each complements the others for a more complete view of performance.
At Blue Duck Agency, we can work with you to determine the best measurement techniques to provide confident analysis of your Acquisition Email campaigns. We can help you make data-driven decisions and optimize your marketing strategies. Contact us today.