For many leading consumer brands, email marketing is a cornerstone strategy for sales growth around the holidays. As a result, the same email acquisition scenario seems to happen every year: Brand A wants to significantly grow the email database heading into Q4 in time to capitalize on heightened consumer engagement and revenue from their email marketing. Brand A sounds the alarms to an agency or vendor who can quickly and cheaply (seemingly) generate the subscriber volume they need. The agency or vendor jumps into action and fulfills the order.

Success! Everyone heads home for the holidays satisfied with an exploding email marketing program that is ready for continued success in the New Year.

Yeah, right!

In reality, when Brand A sounded that alarm to grow their email database, the vendor or agency heard a cash register. If Brand A is paying on a cost per new subscriber model, and they need a ton of new subscribers on a deadline, there is a lot of money to be made with little accountability.

Implementing a “Cost Per Open” model could assign the accountability you need, while still allowing you to achieve the volume growth goals by deadline.

The “Cost Per Open” model is exactly what it sounds like. Your brand still gets all of the opt-in subscribers that the paid acquisition campaign generates, but you only pay a CPA when the subscriber actually opens one of your emails. This way, agencies and vendors are strongly incentivized to work hard to find the most engaged consumers to opt-in to your brand’s messages.

For evergreen paid email acquisition campaigns, pay per new subscriber models are still the gold standard. When your brand is not up against a deadline, this model allows you the time to optimize towards the sources that are providing the most engagement and conversion value.

But for large scale email acquisition initiatives that need to be completed in 1-3 months, the “Cost Per Open” model could provide guardrails when you don’t have time to optimize by source - and reap the benefits of DMi’s email acquisition best practices.

If you have an email acquisition initiative heading into Q4, contact DMi to learn about the Cost Per Open campaigns we’ve executed for some of the world’s biggest consumer brands. The model isn’t a perfect fit for everyone, but if your volume demand is high enough – and your current email engagement and deliverability benchmarks are strong – Cost Per Open could be just what you need to have a happy holiday season.