Illustration of a large magnet attracting diverse people holding shopping bags and carts, symbolizing customer acquisition. Set against a teal background, the red magnet with white ends highlights effective B2C email marketing strategies in drawing consumers.

How to Run a Customer Acquisition Email Campaign

B2C email marketing is one of the most affordable and efficient ways to grow your customer base. But there are a few things you’ll need to run an effective customer acquisition email campaign. This article will cover how to build your list, segment your audience, and develop campaigns that increase revenue.

Email Acquisition

Email acquisition is the most significant obstacle that stands in the way of customer acquisition email campaigns. The success of your efforts will rely mainly on your ability to build your email list so you can scale your email marketing campaigns to reach more customers.

Here are three B2C lead generation tactics that will help you build your email list:

Pop-Up Forms

Pop-up forms get a lot of flak, but everyone keeps using them because they work. If you offer a relevant incentive your visitors will love, they’re less likely to find the form a nuisance. Some incentives, like free shipping, can increase conversion rates substantially.

Lead Magnets

Offering something in exchange for your visitors’ email addresses is a tried-and-true method. Depending on your product or service and your industry, you might offer a digital lead magnet (e.g., an information product like an eBook), a physical lead magnet (e.g., a free sample), or a special promotion (e.g., a discount or free shipping).

Once you discover some effective lead magnets, you can drive paid traffic to them. That way, you can target specific groups of people (through remarketing or third-party data) to convert them into subscribers.

Website Visitor Identification

Website visitor identification makes things even easier. It’s a CAN-SPAM and GDPR compliant way to collect the names, emails, and mailing addresses of up to 40 percent of your website visitors.

Even if your visitors don’t convert, visitor identification software can match a substantial number of them to records in third-party databases. Then they push that data into your CRM, or you can run ad campaigns and send emails from within the visitor identification platform itself.

Each record starts at $0.24 for the first name, last name, email address, and mailing address. You can layer on additional information for an additional fee. That includes information like:

  • automotive data
  • household income range
  • age range
  • education level
  • gender
  • homeowner status
  • length of residence range
  • net worth ranges
  • marital status
  • presence of children

You can get 100 free leads to try it when you sign up for LeadPost today.

Audience Segmentation

One of the biggest pros of email marketing is that it makes audience segmentation very simple, so you can send personalized emails and offers to different groups of your audience. For example, you can make sure you don’t send an email about a back-to-school campaign to people who aren’t parents.

This level of personalization increases customer loyalty, customer engagement, and, ultimately, revenue.

Demographic Segmentation

Demographic segmentation divides your audience based on characteristics like age and gender. If you don’t have any of this data currently, you can enrich your records with website visitor identification.

Geographic Segmentation

Geographic segmentation segments your audience based on their location. This could be at the national, state, or city level. You can also collect this information with website visitor identification software.

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation splits your audience into categories based on relevant behaviors. The easiest method relies on tools like HubSpot and Active Campaign to group your audience based on their website behavior.

For example, if someone has visited a product page for the same pair of boots ten times in the last week, you might want to send them a special offer on those boots to coax them into making a purchase.

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation groups your audience based on psychological characteristics. The best way to get this data is through surveys, but it’s challenging to ensure that the results are valid without working with a professional.

Campaign Development

Once you have an audience to target and you’ve divided them into relevant groups, it’s time to develop your campaigns. For each campaign, you’ll need to know:

  • Objective. Why are you sending the campaign?
  • Audience. Who will receive it?
  • Timing. When will you send it?
  • Call to Action. What do you want them to do?
  • Format. How will you get them to do it?

Objective

What is the goal of the campaign, and how will you measure its success? This is important because you can only send so many emails before your engagement level drops, and spam complaints go up. So, every email needs to have a purpose.

Audience

What audience segment or segments will you be targeting with the campaign? How will it be different for each audience? For example, will different segments receive different offers? Will you promote different products to different segments? Will some segments be excluded from the campaign?

Call to Action

Each campaign should have one call to action. What do you want them to do, and why should they do it? Make the value of the offer and the action they need to take to receive it clear. You might even highlight it multiple times (e.g., in the middle and at the bottom of a longer email).

Format

There are many formats you can use in your campaigns. Newsletters, one-off offers, and abandoned cart recovery campaigns are a few options that perform well. Try different formats for each audience segment to discover which segments respond best to which format.

Now It’s Time to Execute Your Customer Acquisition Email Campaign

Once you’ve taken the steps above, you’re ready to execute your customer acquisition email campaign. So what’s stopping you? If you’re worried that your audience is too small, we can help you grow your audience for less than twenty-five cents per subscriber. Check out LeadPost to see if our platform is right for you.