How do you allocate your customer-acquisition budget?
The Internet has opened up seemingly endless avenues and choices for digital B2C marketers when it comes to acquiring new customers for their email marketing campaigns. There are so many choices, in fact, that it’s increasingly easy to become confused — and because of that, to commit the cardinal sin of spending budget haphazardly.
Let’s take a step back. How do B2C email marketers currently obtain new customers? There are a few obvious choices: search marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, co-registration, lead nurturing, list services, banner ads — and the list could go on and on.
In fact, it goes on so far that every day it seems there’s a new reason to try one or the other of these and the myriad other acquisition avenues. What’s new and hot? What’s everybody else saying is the holy grail of lead generation? Read the industry publications on a daily basis and the field can get even more complicated.
Add to the plethora of options the reality that testing lead sources is a lengthy and expensive process, and you have marketers scratching their heads in bewilderment. With pressure to spend acquisition budgets wisely, it’s not an easy decision to make and defend. What kind of data do you need? Where does it come from? How can you make intelligent decisions based on the data you’re obtaining?
But imagine for one moment that the process could be changed. The reality is that several marketing companies are finding a solution that provides exactly the data you need and responds automatically to that data.
What those companies do is provide a data analysis platform that tests lead sources and identifies and scales the top-performing sources across multiple channels, thereby enabling marketers to spend acquisition budgets on the right sources.
It’s really that simple: instead of looking at aggregates, look at individual sources, and use data analysis to test and determine the right ones to keep using.
This is the kind of customer-acquisition solution that will allow you to see exactly where and how your budget is being spent, and that’s perhaps the bottom line.
I started this piece by asking how you allocate your customer-acquisition budget. Did you know the answer right away? If you didn’t, why not?
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