While it’s getting harder to find a marketer that has not adopted some level of search marketing religion, I am still amazed by the number of marketers without a serious initiative built upon an email marketing customer and prospect database.
High quality email marketing software is now available to every marketer on every budget at a low enough price point that you can’t afford not to touch your customers and prospects several times a year at a minimum.
Couple this with the fact that the venerable search marketing keywords are continuing to soar in cost and competitiveness. Gone are the days (1998-2000) where search traffic was quite inexpensive, and the relatively few marketers that jumped in early turned an ROI with little effort.
(Re) enter email marketing.
Email registration has value. Lets go through one simple example. If you are actively converting 2% of your search clicks into leads or sales you attain a theoretical 20 email addresses for each 1000 search clicks you buy from Google. Any decent web analytics package like Google Analytics can help you measure this.
Now lets look at the other 98% of your traffic that does not convert. Adding a strong registration treatment to your landing page (like an AJAX pop up) can arguably net you an additional 5% of that traffic in email addresses. That’s a total of 49 more email addresses.
You are now netting just under 70 fresh email addresses and email prospects per month –and in this example you are likely getting good qualified prospects as they all came to your website on a search term that was relevant enough that spent a significant amount of money on the original search click.
That incremental 49 email addresses each month are opportunities to sell to them again. It is hard to beat multiple impressions, and opportunities to convert the prospect or generate a referral, rather than ignore them!
When we advertise our email marketing software product MarketTraq•Email™, we may spend as much as $20 per click. If 1 person in a 100 converts that’s costing us roughly $2,000 dollars per customer!
If we can get 20 of them to register and through automated follow-up emails (we call them M-Streams) and sell two more of these prospects to ultimately convert, we’ve closed 3 sales at $666 dollars a customer.
This is a dramatic reduction in the cost per sale, which illustrates the value of this approach. One of the objections to engaging in richer email marketing campaigns is that “email is for business to consumer” marketing –that B2B prospects dont convert by or because of email. The example above is a purely B2B focus –and the value of the cost-per-sale reduction is significant.
Go ahead, renew your efforts to increase not only your conversion, but your email acquisition. You will be glad you did.