Marketing budgets are limited, and it can be hard to make the case for any new spending. At ividence, we talk a lot about how to do acquisition email right, but if you’re on the fence about whether to try acquisition email (or trying to make the case for it within your organization), these are just a few of the reasons to consider testing it.

ROI – The DMA recently came out with its “The Power of Direct” report. The return on investment for every dollar spent on email averages $40.56. Compare that to $22.24 for search, $19.72 for display, and $10.51 for mobile. Though that average for email is not focused on the acquisition side, it gives an idea of the potential that email has for acquisition.

• How to test: Consider testing acquisition email on a performance cost basis (CPL or CPC rather than CPM). In that way, you can use the same metrics you use for your display and search campaigns to measure the effectiveness of email.

Transfer of Skills – If you already have staff sending email to your list, you have the skills in house that you need to code, write, and analyze email campaigns. In comparison, mobile or social advertising either requires more people or taking people off their core skills to learn something new.

• How to test: Look at your own data to determine which campaigns succeed best at turning subscribers into first time buyers. Use a similar offer targeted to people unfamiliar with your brand to convert them into new customers. (Remember to suppress your current customers from the email so that you don’t disappoint them by sending them an offer they can’t redeem. Your acquisition email publisher must provide you with this feature, and this list should definitely be strongly encrypted.)

Click through rates – An average banner ad CTR is 0.09%. Average Facebook CTRs are even below that at 0.051% (with effectiveness waning after just a few days).

Epsilon’s most recent data puts retention email click rates at 5.5% or more than 100 times as high as Facebook. At ividence, our click rate for acquisition email (email sent to new customers) is roughly 1.5%, which more than 16 times as high as banners and nearly 30 times Facebook. Open rates, which for most web-based email clients require a click as well, are at 23.8% for email.

• How to test: With higher click rates, acquisition email can drive higher traffic to your site. To get the most out of this traffic, make sure that you target your email send to only connect with qualified potential customers. If you use a vendor like ividence, make sure that they are using behavior targeting to get your offers to the right consumers.

Beyond the Click: Rarely do marketers talk about interactive advertising as a branding effort, but email marketing can provide just that.

VP of Customer Marketing at Gilt Groupe Jessica Harley recently spoke about the company’s email analysis at EEC12, the Email Experience Council’s annual conference. When they dug into their data, they found that even when customers didn’t open or click from an email to the Gilt site, sales went up just by sending an email. The subject line effectively worked as a miniature ad that drove people to the site and to buy in other ways.

Email is a tremendously powerful medium, and a lot of trust comes along with being in the inbox. This brings added attention and clout for your brand and your offers.

• How to test: Though you may not be able to track results the way Gilt Groupe does with their emails, you can consider acquisition email a way to break through the clutter of online advertising by making it into the inbox. You can use it to track the effectiveness of different subject lines within your target audience and to track the kind of traffic sent to your site.

If you are looking for an effective medium with a great return on investment, acquisition email is a great one to test. At ividence, we’d be happy to talk with you about what a good test would look like and how to get started. Request information or email us at contact.us@ividence.com.

What new types of advertising are you considering for your 2012 plans? What products or offers would you consider using acquisition email to promote?

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Mary Byrne

Mary Byrne leads ividence’s sales and marketing team in the U.S. as SVP, Americas. She has nearly 15 years of experience in the technology sector, with special emphasis on advertising technology and email deliverability. Previously, Mary led the sales, marketing, and client services efforts at DoubleClick, Microsoft and Level 3 Communications. She can be reached at mb@ividence.com.