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Are the media strategies you’ve depended on for 20+ years collapsing beneath you? For most marketers, it sure seems that way.
Imagine your last Google search. Perhaps it was something like:
There’s a good chance (about 1 in 2, according to BCG) that Google served up an AI Overview in response. You quickly got ideas for your MIL (e.g. home decor, gourmet treats), determined that the Sorel Caribou boot is great for heavy snow, or added Disneyland Tokyo to your vacation itinerary—all without a single click.
According to Rob Derow, MD and Partner at BCG, this is all too common in today’s digital landscape. “As zero-click search becomes more common and AI answer engines become the front door to information, brand visibility increasingly hinges on new solutions.”
Close to two-thirds of Google searches no longer result in any clicks, and that’s if the searcher even uses Google. ChatGPT now boasts over 400 million users each week, gobbling up queries that once belonged to search engines. All of these zero-click queries translate to a fundamental change in how enterprises can achieve visibility online.
As reach erodes across search, what’s a brand to do instead? Advertisers need a channel that can still deliver targeted, high-signal interactions at scale.
That channel already exists—it’s the inbox.
Nearly everyone (93% of consumers) uses email every day. Almost half of us (42%) check our email three to five times daily, and over a third (35%) check our email six to nine times per day. That adds up to some significant time in the inbox.
And yet, most enterprises only use the power of email to grow loyalty among existing customers—few consider email a media channel for new customer acquisition. Many marketers don’t even realize email can be used this way and still view it only as a CRM tool.
With a new mindset and a bit of new technology, however, email also works extremely well for acquiring new customers, and it can fill the widening performance gap left by zero-click behavior.
It’s called email as a digital channel, and it allows marketers to speak directly to consumers, one-to-one, through email—without first collecting their email addresses.
How is it possible to reach consumers in the inbox when you don’t have their email addresses? Zeta’s process requires four key steps.
Typical digital ad channels struggle with differentiating between prospects and existing customers. When the goal is to acquire a new customer, it’s vital to suppress existing customers and tailor the message appropriately.
The first step is therefore to suppress the advertiser’s entire customer file, and enterprises need to be comfortable with sharing that customer file with marketing partners.
We match this customer file to our identity graph and suppress this entire audience from our email campaigns.
The next step is to determine what kind of people are most likely to convert to customers. Using the customer file, in conjunction with our identity graph, we examine demographics, behavioral data, transactional data, etc. to build a persona to target with email. This allows us to find and advertise to people who look and act like the brand’s best customers.
It’s particularly helpful to uncover what behaviors prospects display shortly before converting to a customer. For example, our Leading Indicator product ‘looks backwards’ to determine the prospect’s intent prior to conversion. This lets us build targeting parameters to capture people in the process of a purchase decision in real time.
Once we have an ideal customer, we match that profile to Zeta’s permissioned email database of over 1.4 billion hashed emails. With Zeta’s ESP and identity graph working together, we’re able to couple the most desirable audiences with the ability to speak to those audiences via email—a huge advantage for enterprises. The days of data leakage, the dependence on black box, third-party platforms, and off-the-shelf data segments are behind us.
But here’s where the magic happens:
We send the prospects personalized emails that arrive from brand advertisers they already trust.
These emails aren’t going to promotions or spam tabs—Zeta has a 99% primary inbox rate. Based on the recipient’s behavior, the platform then determines the content and frequency for the next email.
Once a prospect converts a customer, we automatically remove them from all ongoing and future inbox advertising campaigns. The brand now has this individual in their CRM and can reach them via traditional email marketing campaigns.
It certainly does, and because this approach is highly measurable via deterministic tracking, we can tell advertisers exactly how well it’s working. Our clients get precise conversion metrics tied directly to ad exposures.
A national retail client specializing in pool and spa care products set a bold goal for 2024: grow their consumer file by 75%, while maintaining a flat year-over-year media budget.
To achieve their aggressive growth goals, the client needed to scale customer acquisition through more efficient, performance-driven digital and social channels while keeping costs flat.
To meet these goals, Zeta launched a targeted email program using a custom look-alike model built from the client’s existing customer data—excluding anyone who had made a purchase in the past three years. The campaign focused on activating a 15-million-household database of individuals who had received residential pool permits.
Zeta provided 1:1 deterministic attribution and incrementality analysis, allowing the client to independently verify performance:
This top-5 credit issuer in the U.S. wanted to acquire net-new cardholders, while maintaining an acceptable application approval rate.
Zeta created a custom invitation-to-apply (ITA) model based on the client’s highest lifetime value (LTV) customers, site traffic, approved applications, and credit proxy floor. Then we used our ESP to activate the modelled ITA prospects at an efficient cost per incremental new cardholder
Results included:
AI overviews, zero-click behavior, and declining search traffic aren’t trends—they’re a structural shift in how consumers discover brands. The channels advertisers have relied on for decades simply can’t guarantee the reach or visibility they once did.
But customer acquisition goals aren’t shrinking. If anything, they’re growing.
That’s why now is the time to rebalance your omnichannel mix. By integrating email into your media plan, you can reclaim the impressions and intent you’re losing elsewhere—through a channel consumers check constantly and trust implicitly.
Email won’t replace search, but it can fill the widening gaps it’s leaving behind.
Add email to your omnichannel strategy now—and reclaim the reach, intent, and conversions that AI search is stealing.
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