PPC and Email Marketing : How Marketers can leverage cross-channel opportunities

[#1]

Often in Marketing Departments across organizations, there are different people or teams looking at each aspect of Digital Marketing; be it SEO, PPC, Email or Social. It is often observed that these teams work in silos, without cross-collaborating to achieve the larger goal. What is required in today’s date is a cross-functional digital marketing team, with people having expertise in varied domains and are working towards achieving a common goal. Email and PPC, though very different marketing channels fundamentally, are complementary to each other if integrated with the right approach.

Here are some ways your paid search and email marketing programs can work together:

Building E-mail lists with PPC:

E-mail marketing works well till the time you have a good number of interested recipients in your database. Targeting the same database time and again eventually leads to people opting out or losing interest in your communication.

PPC campaigns attract clicks from searchers who are actively looking for products or services you could offer. Consequently, the page that searchers land on after clicking a PPC ad must include a way for you to stay in contact with these prospects, even if they don’t make a purchase. This way you could nurture these prospects by sending an exclusive discount or offer email to incentivize them to return to the site and complete the final step of making a purchase.

Run PPC Ads with Email Lists:

Advertisers can upload targeted email lists in Adwords and serve ads that are customized for a target segment. Customer Match gives advertisers the ability to create multiple user lists by uploading prospects’ email addresses and phone numbers.

Also, similar audience targeting based on Customer Match audiences, helps marketers target audiences who share characteristics to the users in their database. So, a Similar Audience taken from a Customer Match list could be an extremely relevant pool of new users who can be targeted to become potential customers.

Test Call-To-Actions with Paid Search:

Even e-mails with good open rates often lag in conversion numbers, due to not having compelling CTAs. Thus, it is extremely important for marketers to test out their CTAs through A/B testing. But A/B testing on a database of prospective customers often has the risk of high opt-outs.

An easy, quicker and cheaper way for marketers to test out their CTAs, is to use the same CTA in PPC ads as well. For example, you have two great ideas for an email CTA or subject line. Instead of creating an email campaign A/B test, you can create two different PPC ads using the copywriting you want to test. You can run this campaign for a few days and check metrics like clicks and conversion rate and accordingly replicate these copies in e-mails as well.

Increase mindshare with a Re-marketing strategy:

Your website visitors may sign up for your newsletter, but may not read them very carefully or remember your offerings. Also, sending e-mails to your list very frequently can increase the chances of opt-outs. The best approach here would be to adopt a combination of emails and re-marketing campaigns(PPC). While e-mails could be used for important announcements or special offers which could land people to your website, the re-marketing ads can gently remind prospects that your site has what they need.

PPC and E-mail Marketing are both extremely developed channels, with each having its own nuances to understand. But both these channels can be leveraged to their true potential when the people working on them collaborate and share their ideas.