Email Marketing & CPC key word sponsorship: competitors or complements?
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Consultant at Inside Digital
01 August 2005 15:49pm
Working for an email marketing agency, I'm finding that a number of client both prospective and existing are spending considerable sums on pay per click services such as Google ad sense, overture and espotting. Many of these marketers are switching spend from direct push channels such as email to these pull channels.
My opinion is that the two media must co-exist. Attracting people to your site using targeted and effective key word sponsorship is a very sensible activity and one which is yielding significant results:
- Media Incentives - Media Incentives found 50% more ad revenue with Google AdSense
- DealTime UK - DealTime UK found its revenue increasing between 5 and 20 percent across various product categories
See other case studies at:
http://www.internetworld365.com/Common/StandModules/StandArticleLister.aspx?intStandID=651&intArticleType=4
But what happens when people come to your site and decide not to buy?
If you have a great product that is enjoying high, immediate conversion rates then you have nothing to worry about. If you’re promoting non-impulse products, then the story is different- will enough people convert to cover the cost?
Unless you integrate a data capture vehicle you have no way of communicating with that prospect ever again unless they choose to come to your site again- if this is through your PPC adverts, this is going to cost you more money!
Integrating effective data capture as part of any PPC campaign is essential. How else can you recoup some of your investment than building a database of prospects? Without data capture, you are following a "one chance to sell" strategy which increases risk significantly.
Using email marketing to promote to these people means you only need to capture their email address rather than long mailing addresses. If you use multiple step data capture on site (like www.kogan-page.co.uk ) and further profiling through email surveys, then you can build up your intelligence about your prospects.
Integrating data capture allows you to inform your SEO campaign too by providing the opportunity to capture *who* is coming to your site allowing you to conduct LTV calculations and tweak your keyword strategy appropriately.
To my mind, implementing a keyword sponsorship program without a strategy for both capturing recipients and then communicating relevant messages to them, is a short-sighted, high risk plan.
I'm interested to hear other people's comments and thoughts
Paul
Paul Crabtree
Marketing Director
Adestra Ltd
Paul.Crabtree@adestra.com
Adestra Ltd are a digital marketing agency that specialise in inbound and outbound email marketing broadcasts, fax marketing broadcasts and SMS broadcast solutions
C.O.O. at Couturelab Limited
02 August 2005 18:57pm
PPC and email marketing should virtually always be complimentary.
However the key issue of the ratio of which type of marketing should be dominant in any particular e-commerce model depends not only on the underlying business model (e.g. few purchases, and very little repeat business versus many purchases, dominated by regular repeat customers) but also at what stage of development the individual businesses are within the overall industry sectors online growth curve.
One of the reasons (there are many) why some e-commerce business managers are attracted to PPC expenditure is that it results in measurable new customers flow which is a very easy KPI to give to senior executives.
At one level it is an example of the level of overall initial stage that many e-commerce businesses are going through in many e-commerce sectors.
Managing existing customer relationships and then measuring the resultant LTV calculations (or the value created from generating new customers from original email subscribers) via email marketing creates a much more complex scenario, where there are many more factors which can effect the overall analysis of the effectiveness of the responses to email marketing medium and the overall merchandising strategy being pursued within each e-commerce business.
Therefore a simplistic view is that given that the many businesses are still trying to play “catch up” in terms of their online business strategies, it is predictable that PPC will be focused on heavily as the many senior executives demand large increases in customer numbers, market share, and aggressive customer acquisition strategies.
It is also worth noting that in a number of industry sectors the cost of basic customer acquisition via PPC is very competitive compared to other offline customer acquisition strategies, (combined with high overall market growth rates), and therefore the PPC marketing medium is very attractive based on taking the easiest measurable metric (new customers generated). The issue that the overall KPI numbers could be enhanced dramatically by utilisation of further data acquisition during the initial potential customer visits is something that is not widely recognised by many less sophisticated users of PPC services.
Two factors might start to motivate e-commerce businesses into attempting to extract more value from their basic PPC expenditure.
Firstly as more people adopt PPC strategies the overall price per acquisition will be reduced, which together with potentially a slowing of the overall market growth rate, may pressure PPC users to investigate how they can maximise the ROI which will lead to a more sophisticated approach to the utilisation and segmentation of traffic supplied via PPC.
Secondly once significant numbers of customers are acquired by an online business its management should start to shift partial focus on how to best extract LTV from the internal proprietary customer databases as a way of achieving ongoing enterprise growth with minimum new cost expenditure, in addition to targeting the external growth channels.
Mark Quinn-Newall
mark@threethink.com
Manager at MTSC Ltd
26 December 2005 12:21pm
CEO at Sensorpro.net
27 December 2005 13:36pm
I looked at the site and it appears to be an email extractor product. I would not recommend this approach if your intent is to build an opt-in subscriber list. Instead why not invest your efforts in a marketing campaign that results in subscribers who not only opt-in to your mailing list but also tell you about their preferences and demographic information? To see the latest generation of email marketing at work, take a look at some of our clients case studes on www.sensorpro.net One of our clients is running a promotion at the moment which started with their 10k opted-in subscriber list and thanks to our product it is now over 800k and continues to grow. That is what I call a result.
Chris
Technical Director at DestiNet Limited
27 December 2005 16:15pm
Try NewZapp, www.NewZapp.co.uk, we are a friendly crowd. We are a UK company, the product was developed by us, is hosted by us, is supported by us and I can give you dozens of references of happy small company owners thru to large company Marketing directors.
David Hazzard
On 12:21:38 26 December 2005 LisaGrimmer wrote:
Partner at Keymail Marketing Limited
27 December 2005 17:26pm
Don't do it. Even if you get some email addresses you have no right to send them emails as they haven't opted in to receive them from you. For advice on best practices on issues such as this can I suggest http://email.exacttarget.com/best-practices.asp
Jeff Barnes jbarnes@exacttarget.com