Launching a paid acquisition campaign is an essential step to grow email files beyond what is possible through organic subscriber lists alone. It can also be a daunting first-time project, or, for companies who have previously had bad experiences, a task that they are hesitant to undertake again.

The following will look at the signs that indicate it is time to start such a campaign, some of the landmines to watch out for and the difficulty of finding solutions that effectively balance quality, scale and cost.

Knowing When To Start While each situation is unique, there are important indicators that generally serve as clues that the time has come for paid acquisition campaigns. Look for the following cues.

The most common signal that it is time to implement a paid acquisition campaign is that the organic growth rate is showing signs that it has peaked or has started to plateau. This does not mean that the onramp has dwindled down to zero; there may still be healthy, organic newsletter signup rates but it appears to have hit a ceiling and some manufactured momentum is necessary to drive it further.

Often, the impetus for kickstarting a paid campaign is as simple as following a mandate, particularly when the company has set growth goals that exceed their organic growth capacity. Perhaps a CMO expects a database to be at 2 million by the end of the year and it is currently at 1 million with X months left in the year. If the organic base metrics are not active enough to reach that goal than paid acquisition can provide the push needed to hit that subscriber acquisition target.

Another imperative happens when companies are looking to expand their email audience to new segments. Perhaps their list has started to become skewed and – while it may be active and engaged – it is disproportionately tilted towards certain age groups. While the marketing team might be producing great content for millennials or Gen Z, their organic efforts have not caught up with attracting those groups into the file. In this case, a paid acquisition campaign can promote growth in key demographics and provide a more proportionate list.

Avoiding pitfalls What are the impediments to be aware of when you are putting together a paid subscriber acquisition campaign?

Do not expect to equal your organic subscriber performance. Even the best paid acquisition campaign cannot match the performance of a database that is entirely organically subscribed. Although marketers may loathe to admit it, their communication is interrupting someone who was doing something else. Meanwhile, an organic database is filled with people who were actively seeking you out when they signed up. While it is important to be mindful of this dynamic in aggregate performance, quick testing and optimization can be incorporated to clear this hurdle and should not prevent the launch of a productive paid acquisition campaign.

Campaign performance must be monitored closely, and a lack of awareness can result in rapidly diminishing engagement rates. We commonly hear that companies previously abandoned paid initiatives because they started to see their retention, open or click rates go down over time. Being aware of the threat early through careful monitoring and optimization will mitigate long-term drops in engagement rates.

Perhaps the issue most deserving vigilance is deliverability. The most important metric of email marketing is ensuring that the message at least gets the opportunity to be read. We have heard from clients about their previous experiences of disastrous data acquisition campaigns that damaged deliverability, leaving them apprehensive of trying again. It is essential to partner with an agency that truly understands email marketing and the risks associated with deliverability issues, as well as the experience to know how to mitigate and resolve them quickly.

Another challenge is measuring the value of a new subscriber. Content-driven campaigns that look at the real value of an email subscriber over some period (which can vary from 30, 60, 90 days to as long as two years) tend to be measured against ad revenue or long-term open rate benchmarks they can attribute back to each new email subscriber. This can present a challenge to determining the value of a new email subscriber without under/overshooting. Methods need to be put into place early in the campaign to set expectations and optimize over time.

Quality, Scale and Cost For companies that have been challenged by paid acquisition campaigns in the past, their struggles often revolved around an inability to marry three key variables: quality, scale and cost. Before engaging with an adept partner, most have had a difficult time combining any two of these, let alone all three.

For instance, a Facebook lead ads campaign can be great for finding high-quality email subscribers because of its audience targeting capabilities, but the cost per click nature can be prohibitively high for certain use cases.

Sweepstakes are very scalable solutions and can be cost-effective (when contracting a good sweepstakes management company). However, the quality of new subscribers is often low since their intent when they were signing up was not to be opening your emails.

Another example is co-branded partnerships. Marketers in related categories with similar audiences will list share featuring one another as a way of introducing their audiences to relevant content. While it can be an extremely high-quality solution, it is not scalable since there are only so many partnerships to utilize.

So how exactly do you bring it all together? We will be picking up on all the aforementioned topics in follow-up blog entries that highlight successes using disciplined practices of optimization that deliver long-term growth and results; stay tuned!