I was once pining after a certain pair of shoes on Zappos, but I opted not to purchase them that day. Imagine my surprise when, as I was browsing another site a few days later, I saw an ad for that exact pair of shoes. This experience was my introduction into the wonderful world of retargeting.
Retargeting is the process of tagging every visitor to your website and then displaying your ads to those visitors on other sites in the display network. If you are new to retargeting, I highly recommend starting with a Google remarketing campaign, because it targets prospective customers who have already expressed intent in your brand. If you get stuck at any point in the implementation process Google has written a how-to guide for setting up remarketing campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under display network, Jessie Kleino, Online Marketing, ppc campaign, remarketing, Retargeting
Enjoy the final piece of our series of posts on drip marketing!
Part 3: Email Marketing – The Third Hurdle
Previously, we discussed how to generate traffic through paid search and then collect user information through user registration. We ended our discussion with suggestions for building a large email list.
The goal, of course, is still converting users into paying customers, but these drip marketing tactics extend the customer relationship well beyond the initial visit from your paid advertisement.
Segmentation and Discounts
With all this free user data you can begin segmenting users based on their behavior. Start off with an educational touch point. For example, why not e-mail the users who do not purchase the product and explain to them why they should upgrade to the Pro version?
Understand that discounts truly motivate indecisive consumers. If the registered free users are still not converting after the educational touch point, send out a promotional touch point in the form of an e-mail that includes a percentage discount of the premium version of your product.
Sender Reputation
A good way to kill your email marketing campaign is to have service providers flagging your emails as spam. Without a double opt-in process or a check for inactive email addresses, users will give fake email addresses. If you keep sending emails to invalid addresses, ISPs will blacklist you.
My first recommendation is to automate email sending. I once dealt with a large email registration lists that was being sent out manually. Due to other activities we were tackling in the marketing department, the e-mails were not sent out on a regular basis. The volume we were e-mailing was also inconsistent.
These two pieces combined sent up red flags for e-mail services providers. We decided to set-up two rounds of automated emails for seven and then twenty days after the free user registers. The 7-day e-mail would use the same educational template we used previously for “Why To Upgrade.” The 20-day e-mail would be the promotional “discount” e-mail we used previously.
This automation allowed our team to eliminate more than twenty hours a month spent on e-mail delivery. After one month of running the automated e-mail follow-up process, the sender reputation score was back to over 95, and we were no longer being black listed by e-mail service providers. The e-mail volume being mailed was consistent and lower volume. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Blacklisting, Drip Marketing, Email Marketing, Frequency Adjustment, Sender Reputation
Welcome to part 2 of our 3-part series on drip marketing campaigns. Where part 1 focused on the four areas of paid search that lead to successful lead generation, part 2 discusses tactics that online vendors can use to funnel new paid search traffic into a paying customer base.
Part 2: Registering Visitors – The Second Hurdle
How can online vendors take advantage of the traffic they generate from paid search campaigns? Whether you’re offering a “Buy Now” button on the landing page of your advertisement or a free download of your product, you are hoping for a good percentage of clickers to convert into paying customers. But what if many people are clicking on your ads and only a few are converting? In general, you should avoid paying for clicks without getting something in return. That is a negative ROI!
One strategy is combining lead generation and sales on one landing page. This practice increases the amount of consumer information you receive through your PPC campaign and also increases the number of consumer touch points for revenue.
Just add a free download link on the PPC landing page for the consumers clicking on paid search ads, and arrange the process so that the consumers must provide you with information like first name, last name and email address in order to obtain the free download of the product. When collecting email addresses, you have to ensure that these are valid addresses, otherwise you will run into problems with ISPs (ED: More on this in part 3!).
I suggest the following best practices once you have collected the consumer information:
- Send the consumer an email requiring them to opt in to an email list for future promotions before you allow them to download the free product. This is a crucial piece in drip marketing, as it allows you follow up with consumers you already know are interested in your product. It has the added benefit of validating the email address the consumer provided on the landing page.
- Include a secondary revenue opportunity in the same email. The secondary revenue opportunity should mention that if the consumer enjoyed the free product, they should upgrade to a premium paid version. These free users will now have a permanent buy link sitting in their email box. If they choose to upgrade or wanted to pass along the email to a friend, they can do so at anytime.
- Add the consumer’s information to a marketing list for future contacts.
By following these practices a vendor can build an enormous email list and create a stream of consistent e-mail revenue. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Drip Marketing, E-commerce Best Practices, Paid Search Traffic, Registering Users
