How to Use PPC Campaigns to Grow Your Email Subscribers

Experts estimate that you can achieve around a 38:1 ROI on email marketing. But to get that kind of return, you have to build a good subscriber list.

And that is where that ROI can dry up fast. But fear not. It may be as simple as running some PPC ads with your eye on the prize of lots of engaged subscribers. And yes, you can do this cost-effectively to capture that ROI. Here is what to know.

1. Why PPC Ads Is a Superior Way to Grow Your Email Subscribers

All email subscriber list growth strategies have their strengths and weaknesses.

You can grow your list with organic social media or SEO. And these audiences do tend to be highly engaged, responsive, and lucrative. But these methods can take a long time to work. All the while, you are investing time and money in email marketing for a relatively small subscriber list. Not cost-effective.

You could also choose to buy an email subscriber list. But if those emails belong to strangers, then that is the equivalent of making cold calls.

Spam filters will quickly catch on that you are sending emails to people who don’t want it. On top of that, if you try to grow a list after having relied on these bought lists, you may find you are already on many top email platforms’ “send to spam” list before you even get started.

PPC ads give you the best of both worlds. You can grow your list fast, but you also end up with a more engaged subscriber list. That is what you actually want, right?

Companies like PPC agency Denver use this kind of strategy to grow engaged subscriber lists from nothing. It works. And you’ll take some plays from the inbound marketing’s playbook to make it happen.

2. Give Something, Get Something

In an inbound marketing strategy, you often request an email address in exchange for something that provides unique value to the visitor. This might be an ebook, a downloadable version of the 10X Pillar page (super-long blog post), a white paper, or industry tools.

If you can build a rapport with the visitor quickly, then you might also ask them to sign up for your newsletter. But in order to do that, you have to show value first, which may not be easy if you are a startup or don’t yet have an online presence.

3. Keep PPC Ad Relevance/Quality Score High High

All PPC ad platforms now have some kind of quality assurance system. It is just good business. If your ad isn’t getting any clicks, they’ll stop showing it and charge you more for each click. Their hope is that PPC will become so cost-prohibitive that you stop advertising there.

For example, on Google Adwords, a low-Quality Score can increase ad cost by 400%. So you must have a strategy to keep your ad performance high.

If the downloadable content has broad appeal, then target narrowly and refine your message to improve ad relevance. Make sure the website your ad takes them to is fast, mobile-friendly, and easily understood.

Geotarget if you are trying to reach local customers. If your company serves the Denver area primarily, then limit your ads to that area. If you want to expand out from there, do so incrementally to avoid sabotaging your local PPC marketing efforts.

Monitor campaign performance constantly. Don’t set up a PPC campaign and let it run for a week without looking at it. Once you destroy your Quality Score, it is hard to bring it back up. But if you monitor and adjust as you go, you can learn from your mistakes and grow your list.

4. Test Email Call to Actions on PPC Ads

PPC ads offer you immediate feedback on your ads. Use this to improve how you interact with your subscribers.

Test email CTAs on PPC first. Run A/B tests against the best ones to continually improve both PPC ads performance and email marketing ROI. You can also use PPC to test audiences, images, and offerings.

5. Use Remarketing to Reduce Unsubscribers

You can’t grow your email list if people are unsubscribing almost as fast as they subscribe. But sometimes, people subscribe to something and then forget about it, so it ends up in spam.

Leverage remarketing PPC ads through social media and Google to remind existing subscribers of why they signed up.

People may not even click the remarketing ad, so you may not have to pay for that click. You’ll see it working when your open rate goes up after you run a remarketing campaign.

Since remarketing tools allow you to remarket to people using their email address, you’ll also know which portion of the list you remarketed, so you can specifically attribute that increased open rate to your remarketing.

With these PPC ads strategies, you can grow your email list and experience the email marketing ROI you want to achieve.