The Dream Team: PPC, SEO and Email Marketing

SEO, PPC and email marketing are three major digital marketing pillars. SEO and PPC are often used in conjunction, but how can each of these three channels benefit the others? By connecting the insight from individual marketing channels, you can unlock another level of customer intelligence to create a holistic strategy that improves your bottom line.

In the world of digital marketing, new tactics and technologies increase twofold. Staying ahead of the game and cutting through the noise is no easy task. We spend countless hours, resource and budget on generating marketing results, so it makes sense to use the insights provided by one channel to inform the other. But how?

How can SEO, PPC and email marketing support each other?

Brands regularly try to connect their marketing channels, usually considering consistency of branding and messaging to run multi-channel campaigns. This is important, but it’s just the start. Taking an integrated approach to your marketing efforts improves your chance of generating a killer ROI. Together with our connected agency, Wired Plus, we’ve considered just how learnings across SEO, PPC and email marketing can be leveraged to push your digital marketing performance to the next level. SEO boosts your organic search engine rankings and this presence is important as users trust what they see in the SERPs. With 75% of users never scrolling beyond page one of Google, it’s important to get your SEO strategy right. Email marketing on the other hand is still regarded as one of the best performing strategies for businesses, reaching users on a one-to-one basis direct to their inbox. But emails will only work if you have a relevant list of prospects to market to. And what about PPC? Ads of this type are brilliant for brand exposure with research from Google showing that pay-per-click ads significantly lift brand awareness.

Here’s how you can use each channel to help generate even more impressive performance.

Use keywords and long tail search terms

Did you know, 47 percent of recipients open an email based on the subject line alone? While 69 percent of recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. The more engaging and relevant your subject line is, the more likely people are to open your email. The higher your open rate, the more likely people are to click through to your website and convert.

Through keyword research, longtail search terms and keywords are identified which can be implemented across your website copy such as blog posts and meta data. But what’s stopping you from applying this SEO insight to your email subject lines and PPC ad copy?

Keywords and search terms demonstrate customer interests and intent to purchase. Turning these search queries into email subject lines could make a huge difference to your email open rate,  highlighting consumer pain points. This same insight can also be applied to your PPC ad campaigns. Long tail phrases are also great for fuelling your content strategy as they identify pain points, questions, barriers and interests within your target market. This insight can be used to create email marketing campaigns and workflows based around a specific search topic that you know your target market is already interested in.

Give your content a new lease of life

Go full circle with your content efforts by recycling and repurposing old blog posts. Email marketing can be used as a promotional channel to share content, or it can be repurposed and shared in various forms such as whitepapers, infographics, e-books, webinars and guides. These content resources can also be used for your PPC campaigns. Why not gate your content as a data capture exercise to build up your email database?

Using SEO insight to generate optimised content can feed into your marketing emails, nurture workflows and PPC campaigns too. Not only does this allow for consistent messaging across all channels, but brand reach is extended by engaging with audiences at multiple touchpoints.

Optimise your CTAs

Use email marketing and PPC to test CTAs, highlighting optimum placement and copy. Email marketing platforms like Wired Plus include click analysis tools that identify which CTAs trigger the greatest engagement. This, this insight can then be fed into your PPC campaigns and landing pages for maximum results.

With most email marketing platforms being contract dependant, it is more cost effective to send a marketing email so why don’t you save your paid media budget and split test your CTAs, ad copy, and offers through your emails. Why not try a subject line to evoke FOMO (fear of missing out) by using words such as “limited time only”, “urgent” or “available for three days only”? The other test could tap into specific pain points such as “Want to get to position one?”. It’s important to remember that in order to run a successful email split test, you need a large enough database sample and give the campaign adequate testing time.  

PPC ads are another great way to test CTA and email subject line performance, but the A/B test will need to run for 3 months to gaincompared to email to get a true representation of performance comparison.

Lead generation and nurturing

Did you know that email subscribers are nearly four times more likely to share your content than other website or social media visitors? More engagement means more positive social signals which help improve organic rankings. Lead nurturing emails are an excellent way of staying connected with your audience, building a trusting relationship. But if your contacts don’t open your emails, how do you get your messages to them? This is where PPC comes in.

As mentioned earlier, PPC can be used effectively to increase the size of your email marketing database, but your existing email database can also be used to inform PPC and remarketing ads. If someone is inactive or unsubscribes from your email marketing, why not use remarketing? The data from your email campaigns can fuel PPC ads and vice versa. As a result, you can successfully grow your email database, optimise messaging and re-engage with a relevant audience, nurturing them back into your sales funnel.

Often, consumers click a paid ad because it’s familiar, and your email subscribers are no different. They are more likely to click an ad if they recognise your brand in their inbox. By re-engaging your inactive email subscribers and unsubscribes through another medium, you increase the chance of prospects engaging with your emails.

Following Google’s E-A-T update, the search engine is becoming more and more advanced at picking out quality content from the crowd and ranking it higher as a reward. SEO encourages the production of top-quality content to satisfy Google’s guidelines, but through email marketing, you can push out your best content out directly to high-quality visitors who already have an interest in your brand. As you get relevant content in front of your target audience, you’ll naturally begin to see an increase in social engagement which supports the improvement of search visibility.

Marketing technology and tactics enable brands to engage prospects through various touchpoints. Part of creating an effective digital marketing strategy is finding ways to leverage the benefits of the different channels to positively support and enhance the performance of the others. While email marketing, PPC and SEO may, on the surface, seem unrelated, there are plenty of ways to combine them to boost rankings, brand awareness and search visibility. What are your thoughts on joining the forces of PPC, SEO and email to bolster marketing performance? For more information on SEO and PPC contact WMG and for email marketing, why not reach out to our connected agency, Wired Plus.