Besides email marketing, pay-per-click advertising is one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising out there. Remember the findings of the latest SEMPO survey.
PPC advertising is most commonly used as a standalone marketing method which is a shame in a customer-centric and multi-channel marketing reality.
On top of that, PPC advertising is still too often seen as SEA (Search Engine Advertising). But some social media PPC platforms that are more content-based (such as social bookmarking) show a much better cost per lead (certainly if you are focusing on ‘expensive’ keywords and not engaging in long-tail SEA).
Today, many marketers are looking at PPC advertisements as a method for generating leads and email marketing list opt-ins.
Here are some tips, tactics, and tricks that cover the basics of PPC advertising for email marketers that want to use PPC advertising to have new subscribers to their emailing lists. And remember: don’t think about SEA alone!
Aim for cheap clicks first
Pay-per-click is, to put it lightly, expensive. Most marketers need a relatively high per-click profit (known as the ‘EPC’ value to experienced PPC marketers) in order to generate any real earnings.
Email marketers have an even tougher experience trying to profit. Because you are trying to get new subscribers, the ability to generate long-term profit depends highly on per-click costs.
Aim for cheap clicks and you will generate long-term income, get high-cost traffic and you will end up operating at a loss.
Test multiple traffic sources
Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Myspace all have their own PPC programs, along with thousands of other websites.
If the PPC world is short of one thing, it is certainly not networks. Whenever you are gaining email opt-ins for your long-term marketing campaigns, make sure you are experimenting with multiple traffic sources and advertising networks.
Tip: the most famous ones are often the most expensive ones.
Target on the “value” of the subscriber, not the number of subscribers
Economic fact: proven buyers are worth a lot more than random email opt-ins from an ROI viewpoint.
While cheap clicks might be available in abundance for young Facebook demographics and small MySpace micro-niches, they are unlikely to result in subscribers that will turn out to be customers one day.
So, sometimes cheap clicks can turn out to be expensive. It also depends of course from the PPC platforms you use and the targeting possibilities you have (some social networks have PPC platforms that enable you to target on profile, category, etc.)
It is worth much more to have a small list of qualified prospects than have a long list of recipients that will probably never do business, even if it does come at a higher initial cost.
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