How Combining PPC With Email Marketing Can Help You Maximize Your Leads

For many firms, get­ting as many good leads as pos­si­ble is the pri­ma­ry goal of their mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. But turn­ing these into cus­tomers requires a very smart strat­e­gy using mul­ti­ple tools.

Every firm has dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties when it comes to mar­ket­ing. For some, the key is to build up aware­ness grad­u­al­ly, so that a wide poten­tial base of cus­tomers can be built up over time.

By con­trast, oth­er firms will con­sid­er it imper­a­tive to gen­er­ate as many leads as pos­si­ble as fast as they can. This means tak­ing steps that will enable them to bring in new leads swift­ly and poten­tial­ly have pay­ing cus­tomers with­in a short time of set­ting up shop.

What tools are available?

Because aims will dif­fer, so will the best dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tools to use. The key is to select the cor­rect ones from a wide range. Among them are:

• Con­tent mar­ket­ing and SEO
• Pay-per-click (PPC) and advertising
• Email mar­ket­ing
• Social media management
• Remar­ket­ing
• E‑commerce influ­encers

Of course, mar­ket­ing deci­sions may be deter­mined by a range of fac­tors, from busi­ness strat­e­gy and the lev­el of finan­cial back-up avail­able through to the nature of the busi­ness itself.

How­ev­er, if yours is a firm that falls into the cat­e­go­ry of seek­ing to bring in leads quick­ly, it is clear that the mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy should, in order to be suc­cess­ful, employ the most effec­tive meth­ods pos­si­ble to achieve this.

Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing pro­vides sev­er­al of these and the best strat­e­gy will nev­er rely just on one of them, but a com­bi­na­tion designed to help the cus­tomer through the whole of the buy­er jour­ney. PPC and Email mar­ket­ing can offer a par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive mul­ti-lev­el mar­ket­ing strategy.

What does the buyer journey involve?

Any mar­ket­ing mix you choose should seek to cov­er dif­fer­ent parts of the buy­er jour­ney, which has sev­er­al stages. The first three are the com­mon­ly acknowl­edged parts:

• Aware­ness – the point where some­one becomes aware of your firm and what it can offer
• Con­sid­er­a­tion – the peri­od of time in which they are con­sid­er­ing whether or not to make a purchase
• Deci­sion – the point at which they are going to make their minds up, either to go ahead or walk away.

A fourth stage may be added, which is ‘delight’. This is a post-pur­chase stage in which you can help turn a one-off cus­tomer into a loy­al and reg­u­lar cus­tomer by pro­vid­ing excel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice and incen­tives to reward their loyalty.

By under­stand­ing these dif­fer­ent stages, you can appre­ci­ate the effec­tive­ness of a com­bi­na­tion of PPC and email marketing.

How does PPC get the ball rolling?

PPC is a pop­u­lar tool when a firm is not yet well estab­lished online. Since organ­ic con­tent mar­ket­ing is focused main­ly on aware­ness and even the best SEO takes sev­er­al months to get con­tent to the first page of search engine rank­ings, it is not ide­al if you want to get the cus­tomers vis­it­ing your web­site very soon.

By con­trast, PPC, by bid­ding for adver­tis­ing space on the search engine rank­ings pages (or on social media pages) can get you there faster. Your ad still needs to be opti­mized, espe­cial­ly with the rel­e­vant search terms, but it offers not only a swift route to the atten­tion of those using search but also a means of gain­ing leads when­ev­er some­one clicks on your ad.

Of course, it comes with a cost for each click, but you can set a bud­get to ensure you don’t end up spend­ing too much. In the mean­time, each of those clicks has the poten­tial to be a future customer.

Before you get start­ed, it is worth not­ing there are sev­er­al options for the best PPC avenue:

• You can choose from search engine rank­ings pages and/or social media
• Sev­er­al dif­fer­ent search engines offer PPC (Google, Bing, and others)
• There are also var­i­ous social media plat­forms you can pick from, which can be ide­al when tar­get­ing the right audi­ence for your prod­ucts and services

How does Email marketing take your leads forward?

PPC can help get peo­ple to the aware­ness stage and into the con­sid­er­a­tion stage, but on its own many will not take mat­ters fur­ther. This is where Email mar­ket­ing can syn­er­gize with PPC to help turn warm leads into hot ones, and hot ones into cus­tomers.

The key is in the design of your PPC ads; by encour­ag­ing peo­ple to pro­vide email details by sign­ing up for more infor­ma­tion about your prod­ucts or some­thing else of inter­est like a free newslet­ter, you can cap­ture their email details and, poten­tial­ly, some more details as well.

All this opens up the oppor­tu­ni­ty for you to send a range of tai­lored emails to your leads. Each of these can be designed accord­ing to what the lead is inter­est­ed in and where they are in the buy­er journey:

• The email can focus on the prod­ucts or ser­vices they have expressed an inter­est in
• You can have emails designed for the con­sid­er­a­tion stage to seek to push them towards a decision
• Fur­ther emails can be aimed at those who are at the deci­sion stage to nudge them over the line
• When some­one has become a cus­tomer, fur­ther emails can pro­vide them with oppor­tu­ni­ties for inter­ac­tion and spe­cial offers to make repeat purchases

Anoth­er rea­son all these emails can help back up your PPC efforts is the ‘rule of sev­en’. This is com­mon­ly known to mar­keters and is an under­stand­ing that the typ­i­cal cus­tomer needs to encounter a mar­ket­ing mes­sage sev­en times before mak­ing a buy­ing deci­sion. This is why a mar­ket­ing cam­paign using mul­ti­ple tools that offers sev­er­al oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­tact peo­ple is more like­ly to bear fruit.

What tools can help an email marketing campaign?

At first, it can seem daunt­ing to be faced with a pletho­ra of leads, with large num­bers of dif­fer­ent peo­ple inter­est­ed in var­i­ous things and at var­i­ous stages of the buy­er jour­ney. Hav­ing designed sev­er­al dif­fer­ent emails, how can you be sure you are send­ing them to the right people.

The good news is that there are sev­er­al email mar­ket­ing sys­tems that let you split up peo­ple into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories (known as groups or seg­ments). These include Mailchimp, GetRe­sponse and Optin Monster.

SOURCE: Busi­ness Matters