Acquisition Email Tips to Grow Your Customer Base

If you haven’t used acquisition emails as one of your channels, we have no clue what you are waiting for!

Despite the tremendous buzz around social media, email marketing still stands its ground. Many statistics reveal that email marketing is as valuable as other digital marketing strategies, such as organic search, paid search, and social media when it comes to customer acquisition and retention. Incorporating emails into the overall marketing mix can do wonders for your brands’ direct impact and reach that is not affected by algorithm changes. It also allows eCommerce businesses to create better targeted and hyper-personalized customer messages. 

But sending out an email or two is one thing, and building a long-term, revenue-shifting email strategy is another. To achieve this, businesses must build a quality email list to stay in touch with potential customers. Fortunately, acquisition emails are one of the many ways to do this. This article will walk you through five acquisition email strategies to help you grow a thriving email list and expand your customer base.

What Is an Acquisition Email?

Acquisition email marketing is the marketing strategy where businesses build up email lists and send promotional messages to gain new customers. It typically involves identifying the target audience, reaching out to those who have submitted their email, and sharing promotional offers and valuable content via email. A successful customer acquisition email strategy turns leads into subscribers, inactive subscribers into active users, and active users into paying customers. 

Nonetheless, maximizing the impact of an email marketing campaign depends on the email list you build by collecting email addresses from the website visitors. That said, though any business would feel ecstatic to see its email list grow, you also want to focus on acquiring the right kind of subscribers – who are genuinely interested in receiving your content. After all, there is no point in adding random people only to get unsubscribed or ignored as spam after a few days. 

Thus, the key is to focus on expanding the list and filling the top of the funnel with quality subscribers. Since they have opted to sign up for your email campaign, you can send them enticing emails about sales or discount offers, newsletters, exclusive content, and other customized promotional campaigns they will most likely purchase from you. 

With that in mind, let’s now move to sustainable acquisition email tactics that you can use to cultivate loyal email subscribers and have a better chance of converting them into long–term customers.

Top 5 Email Acquisition Tips to Draw in Maximum Customers 

To create an effective email acquisition strategy, it’s imperative that you focus on two aspects:

1. Building up the list of emails.
2. Applying various email marketing campaigns.

While the first allows you to gain the right kind of subscribers, the second enables you to convert them into buying customers and increase sales. Following best practices covers both elements and will help ensure that you get the maximum impact from your email marketing campaigns.

1. Capitalize on Email Capture Landing Page

You may have wondered how you find potential customers to get them to sign up for your email subscription. The answer is simple: creating landing pages. 

A landing page is a conversion-optimized web page with the sole purpose of moving the prospect down the sales funnel. A Hubspot survey found that the companies see a 55% spike in leads on increasing the number of landing pages from 10 to 15. 

You can think of an email capture landing page as a transaction. It displays a specific offer that promises to answer visitors’ concerns (generally for free!) in exchange for a visitor’s email address. Often called lead magnets, these offers might include a subscription, eBook, guide, research report, video, webinar, tools, course, coupons for eCommerce order fulfillment, etc. A recent report from DontPayFull.com reveals an interesting trend: a whopping 79% of shoppers are willing to share their email addresses in return for a coupon code! Your email marketing platform of choice should allow you to easily create a landing page according to your business needs and brand image. 

So, how to create dedicated landing pages that nudge visitors to enter their email addresses?

Here are a few useful tips:

• Write a compelling copy that highlights the benefits of subscribing to it.
• Create a call-to-action (CTA) that is action-oriented and prominent to find.
• Attach social proofs like awards, accolades, testimonials, or reviews.
• Keep the lead capture forms as brief as possible.
• Pose optional questions that are easy to answer.
• Have eye-catching custom graphics.

Here’s an example of a great landing page offering lead magnets:

2. Use Popups to Grab User Attention

When done right, popups can be incredibly effective in acquiring emails without annoying the users. 

You can use popups to bring in more email leads in the following ways:

• Free resource popups that motivate users to give their email addresses in exchange for free resources. 
• Giveaway popups that offer exclusive deals on sign-up for the email list.
• Newsletter popups that encourage sign-up for your business newsletter.
• Feedback popups that ask users to give feedback after providing their emails.
• Exit-intent popup that displays a special offer when a visitor intends to leave your website.
• Sidebar popups that offer subscriptions by appearing at the sidebar.
• Countdown timer popups that drive urgency and offer discounts for a limited time.

While popups contribute to ROI, there are certain things to remember while creating successful email capture pop-ups.

• The key to showing a popup at the right time is to review the average time on the page and show the popup at around 50% of this time. 
• Too many fields in the form increase friction and decrease sign-ups. But if you can’t remove fields, request further information in the follow-up step.
• Have clear CTA buttons. CTA copy should be persuasive, the right length, and have a bold headline.
• You can also split up a single CTA  into two options or try using a YES/NO CTA copy.

3. Send Effective Welcome Emails 

A welcome email is your first interaction with the new subscribers as soon as they sign and approve receiving emails from you. The main aim of welcome emails is to confirm their registration and welcome them aboard. With a significant open rate of 68.6%, effective welcome emails help introduce your brand while creating a great first impression on prospective customers. It also fuels a lasting relationship with the newcomers.  

Here are different ways you can use to craft welcome emails that make subscribers stick around:

• Kickstart with a catchy subject line that piques the subscriber’s interest.
• Create a compelling email copy that tells the story about your brand and its products. Tell your readers a bit about how your brand started, the people behind it, its mission, and things your brand cares about, etc.
• Keep the tone conversational to connect better. It should read like you are directly talking to the recipient.
• Ensure your welcome email has a prominent CTA that is hard to ignore. 
• It’s possible that your website promised the visitors some kind of incentive, such as discounts on signing up for your emails. In such a case, the welcome email must follow the promise and provide the discount codes. 

4. Write Compelling Content for Email Marketing

While you made that much-needed first impression with welcome emails, you also want to continue the legacy. That’s why one of the most important things you must ensure to solidify your email acquisition strategy is keeping your email content engaging. Every email you send must strive to offer subscribers the most value possible and should make them want to anticipate your emails. 

Let us give you a few tips on how to draft emails that keep readers engaged:

• Add a personal touch to the email content by addressing the receipt by name.
• Avoid stiff formality. Instead, opt for a more casual tone —write how you speak.
• Share your knowledge but sound like a trusted advisor advising a friend. But use simple language to convey your expertise.
• Leave no room for confusion by using common and full terms rather than acronyms and jargon. 
• Keep the content of emails to the point. With some industry-specific expectations, sales emails with approximately 20 lines and three or fewer images have the highest click-through rates from subscribers.  
• Adopt a structure that lets readers quickly skim through while taking in the maximum possible information. To draft skimmable content, Use short paragraphs, bullets, headers, bold CTA buttons, white spaces, etc.
• Infuse content with beautiful designs.

5. Encourage Subscribers to Share Your Emails

Increasing the shareability of your email marketing emails will help you gain access to the recipients’ network and expand your acquisition email base. Do not forget to include a ‘Subscribe” CTA so that the audience receiving the forwarded emails can opt in easily.

You can set up the following share options in your emails:

• Social sharing buttons.
• “Email to a friend” button.
• Campaign URL link.

Conclusion

When it comes to email marketing, acquisition emails strategies should always have a seat at the table. That’s why putting the above tips into practice will help you increase your business’s email base with modest efforts and increase your sales. Started to get cold feet? Worry not; acquisition emails do not have to be intimidating, at least when you have an effective email marketing automation platform like Smaily at your service. With the tools provided, you’ll be on your way to mastering the art of customer acquisition with email marketing.

---

 

About the author

Tim Robinson is Digital Marketing Manager at PACK & SEND, a 25+ years old and respected brand in eCommerce, logistics, and freight delivery solutions. Tim has 20 years of combined experience in sales and marketing. Logistics, D2C, franchising, business planning, and operations management are his core expertise. Connect with Tim on LinkedIn.