It goes without saying that communication is key in any relationship, and the same goes for the communication between departments. Quite frequently, we will see the PPC and email departments working in silo when in fact, they should be working in conjunction with one another.
Oftentimes, collaboration between departments can lead to opportunities that might not have presented itself before. Here at Power Digital, we put an emphasis on working cross-departmentally as we have seen some of our strongest marketing campaigns as a result of working together.
As we all know, the PPC and email marketing channels are the top two highest ROI drivers in digital marketing. By utilizing each channel’s advantages to complement one another, we create funnel strategies that have proven to be very successful for our clients’ bottom line.
In this blog, I’d like to share with you four advanced strategies to help you capitalize on the cross-channel opportunities between PPC and email marketing:
Build And Expand Your Email List With PPC Advertising
Email marketing can drive you great results, but if a company does not have a well thought out email capture strategy in place, then your list will fail to grow. A great way to start expanding that list is by running a PPC campaign to drive visitors to your landing pages. Once people are on your site, there are a few ways to capture a user’s email:
- If you are an e-commerce company, you can capture a user’s email during the purchase transaction as a part of the process to compete an order. Once you have their email, you can upsell, cross-sell, or retarget them in the future. However, if a user does not make a purchase, you can guide these people to a secondary call-to-action on the landing page where they are encouraged to sign up with an email and receive something of value such as a discount offer code or free shipping.
- If you are a lead generation company, you’ll want to include a field in the form fill to capture a user’s email as a part of the required contact information. You can also try testing different types of call-to-actions on the site and see which one drives the most form fills. Sometimes a simple “Sign Up For More Information” will suffice, but other times you might want to test “Free Consultation” or “Free Quote” to get users to bite on the offer and complete the sign up.
Capture Visitors With PPC Ads And Close With Email Marketing
Similar to the strategy above, you can utilize PPC to capture the users who are searching for your products or services. But as we are all aware, not every single visitor will convert once they are on the site.
Related: Why the One Key Email Metric You’re Ignoring is Derailing Your Campaigns
Typically, the intent is there but they could still be in the consideration phase and doing some comparison shopping, or they simply have not made up their mind. In order to close the loop on this lead or sale, you should think about how you can send them deeper down the funnel.
At this point, you’ve already captured their email address, now you just need to give them a nudge by sending an exclusive discount or offer email to incentivize them to return to the site and complete the final step of filling out a form or making a purchase.
Test Messaging With PPC Ads To Apply In Email And Vice Versa
This cross-channel strategy will be extremely helpful in helping you guide your messaging. You can test the keywords, headlines, and landing pages in your PPC text ads along with the graphics and imageries in your GDN ads to determine what drives the most engagement with the highest click-through-rate and ultimately discover which winning element is the conversion driver.
The more A/B tests you set up, the more you will learn about your audience and get insights about what they are most receptive to. Once your data reaches a point of being statistically significant and you are able to identify the winning factors, you can then bring your learnings over to email and make data-driven decisions on your subject lines, topics, offers, and ad creative.
Related: Creating Cross-Channel Strategies Between AdWords and Facebook Ads
Inversely, email data can provide the same value for PPC ads. You’ll want to take a look at the emails with the highest metrics when it comes to open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Identify these high-performing trends and utilize them in your PPC campaigns. Typically, the winning factors in your emails campaigns will be successful in your PPC campaigns as well.
Use PPC Ads To Remarket Your Email List
One of our favorite strategies is to take advantage of the existing customer email list and remarket with PPC campaigns. If you’ve been running email campaigns, you most likely have your list segmented into tiers already based on user behavior and where they are in the consumer buying journey.
If you don’t have your list broken up into tiers, we suggest you do so as it doesn’t make sense to serve the same exact ad to everyone out there. Instead, you’ll want to remarket them with tailored messaging that speaks specifically to that audience.
Related: How to Properly QA Remarketing Audiences in Google AdWords
To set up the remarketing campaign, simply upload the email list in AdWords and build out your PPC campaigns based on the segments. Remarketing list for search ads are great for ensuring your ads show up in the top positions when a previous visitor is searching for your products or services. You can entice these users to return to the site and complete the final purchase by offering some sort of discount or incentive.
Wrapping Up
After reading this blog, it should help you initiate the communication between your PPC and email teams and hopefully open up some opportunities that might not have been very transparent before. Email marketing is a great channel for driving profit and has the potential to bring in more revenue when it’s collaborating with PPC.
These cross-channel strategies have proven to work well for our clients and can bring success to your company as well. I can’t stress enough the importance of working together and bridging the gaps between departments as the opportunities and results you can bring by joining forces will far surpass working separately.
