The three stages of Email Subscriber Acquisition (acquire, optimize, and scale) are hardly unique to DMi. Judging from the scale and performance gains we consistently drive for new clients who come to us with active email acquisition campaigns, though, it’s worth diving into our specific approach to each.

One thing to note before I jump in: given the deliverability complications plaguing today’s email landscape from iOS 15 and iOS 18, any Email Subscriber Acquisition prioritizing scale without regard to quality and deliverability could end up doing more harm (in the form of spam flagging) than good.

With that in mind, let’s get started.

How we Acquire New Subscribers for Client Email Databases

In the Acquire phase, we launch acquisition campaigns, ensure everything is working as expected, and make initial rounds of optimizations.

Early in the process, optimizations primarily include removing any underperforming sources, leaning on our top-performing sources, and testing new sources that have proven effective with comparable clients and targeting.

Generally, this phase lasts about 4-6 weeks, depending on the client’s budget, targeting, and goals. We aim to carve out enough time to make several rounds of optimization and measure the impact; this helps inform a plan for effective campaign scale (more on that in a bit).

No matter how long this initial phase lasts, we communicate updates via weekly meetings, which include pacing updates, insights from and results of our optimizations, and recommendations for how to move forward.

How We Integrate Data, Analysis, and Ongoing Optimization

We aim to continuously improve the performance of our campaigns. The foundation of this improvement is weekly reporting and data that delivers performance insights on the subscribers we’ve acquired for our clients.

Our reporting process is as follows:

1) We work with clients to set up an automated report to drop weekly onto an FTP where our analysts can retrieve it – if we have the client’s ESP and CRM access, we can pull the data ourselves. We request privacy-safe user-level reporting that doesn’t use PII (personally identifiable information); to achieve this, we either tag each subscriber with a unique identifier that we refer to as the ‘LeadID’ or use the unique identifier from any ESP for this level of reporting.

2) We analyze source performance and relay info to our publisher partners. One we receive the data, we match each subscriber to the source they originated from. Based on the client’s goals, we determine how each source is performing and look at any other trends that can be isolated to improve performance.

3) Once we determine which optimizations to make, we kick them off to DMi’s publisher team, who communicates with each publisher partner and ensures each change goes into place as quickly as possible.

4) Rinse and repeat: once the optimizations are live, we let them run for 1-2 weeks to monitor their impact, then make a subsequent round of optimizations, monitor the impact of those for 1-2 weeks, etc.

So when we talk about optimizations, what exactly are we talking about? Levers we can pull to improve performance include:

1) Dayparting: It often works against our clients’ engagement rates to run daily campaigns. We use dayparting to pause on certain days when the data dictates. This strategy is applicable, for instance, for a lot of newsletters that don’t send on weekends.

2) Domain-level suppressions: From the jump, we monitor deliverability and flag early indicators for potential domain-level issues.

3) Source-level optimizations: When the data dictates, we increase investments in top-performing sources and pare back on (or remove) under-performing sources. At times, such as when we’re testing new sources to assess performance potential, we apply specific source caps to control how much volume comes from each source.

4) Demographic-based optimizations: Studying the data at a subscriber level helps us determine which audience, or audience subsets, perform the best by age, gender, location, etc. When we identify the audiences that are performing well, we can refine our targeting further based on those learnings. For example, if the client provided targeting that focuses on subscribers ages 30-55 and we find that engagement from users 40-55 is even stronger, we can lean into that. In some cases, we can set up a separate campaign to specifically focus on scaling that audience.

And speaking of scale…

How We Balance Volume and Deliverability in Scaling Email Subscriber Acquisition

Once the program has been tested and optimized, your DMi account management team will help you evaluate the potential scale of specific channels for your brand. We will consider your brand’s unique deliverability factors and provide perspective from our other client programs as guidance.

As noted above, there is definitely such a thing as too much scale – when that growth comes in the form of low-value, minimally engaged users who may push you beyond Gmail’s aggressive spam thresholds. DMi will never recommend your brand acquire new opt-ins at a higher scale that we feel will maximize email engagement.

The key in finding the sweet spot of scale and deliverability is custom analysis of each brand’s campaign. Once we are about at the halfway point for the pilot program, DMi will determine each source’s scale potential and develop a media plan that supports both the campaign’s overarching goals and the client’s growth goals.

In the “scale” phase, one of the keys to keeping long-term acquisition costs within a client’s efficiency goals is running evergreen campaigns. Typically, evergreen campaigns enable cost savings over longer-term contracts because:

• They reduce the need for rapid end-of-year acquisition intended to hit a growth goal.
• They support week-over-week and month-over-month improvements to email engagement KPIs in a way that ad hoc campaigns do not; email acquisition optimizations are cumulative and compound over time, which means seasonality and campaign gaps can curtail performance gains.
• They mitigate email deliverability issues resulting from acquisition through inconsistent volume delivery.

During this conversation, if there are any cost efficiencies we can pass back we do so at this time. Beyond reaping the efficiency benefits from evergreen campaigns, we assess budget levels periodically to make sure we’re spending to reach a good balance of efficiency and scale.

Stay tuned for…

Acquisition is half of the puzzle, but what you do to engage your contacts once they’re in your system completes the picture. In the third and final installment of DMi’s Email Subscriber Acquisition series, we’ll look at email strategy: send schedules, list segmentations, and automations that maximize the return of your acquisition spend.