Here’s a simple 4-step technique to grow your opt-in lists,
find new customers, and make the most of your pay-per-click budget.

Pay Per Click – The
Standard Technique

The most common use for pay-per-click advertising (search
advertising) is direct sales. Here’s a vastly simplified picture of a standard PPC
campaign:

1. Figure
   out your target keywords
2. Bid
   on a bunch of terms
3. Send
   traffic to your site
4. Measure
   the results
5. Rinse
   & repeat

This works really well if you get it right, but it has a
fairly large, obvious weakness: The visitors you get from pay-per-click are usually
first-time site visitors & it’s much, much harder to turn a new visitor
into a customer than it is to sell to someone who’s already warmed to your
brand.

As an email marketer you know this. That’s a big part of
your job: Get permission to talk to your prospects regularly and you have a
much greater chance of turning them into customers.

How to Use Email to
Improve Pay-Per-Click Results

Here’s a simple technique you can use to join up PPC &
email and get great results. We’ll take a B2C example to illustrate, but this
will work equally well (if not better) in most B2B scenarios.

Step 1: Target
searchers early in the ‘research’ phase

To do this we’d bid on phrases like “how to buy a tv”, “tv
reviews”, “best tv”, and thousands of other much less expensive variations!

Step 2: Create
something to help these people with their research

We’ll put together an ebook, “Everything You Need To Know
About Buying a TV in 2009”. We’ll put this in PDF format.

Step 3: Turn the
visitor into a subscriber

To convert the visitor into a subscriber we'll create a 2-step landing page on our site.

Page 1 would be a short sales pitch for your free
“Everything You Need To Know…” ebook. The page will also contain an opt-in
form, asking for “name”, “email address” and perhaps another key bit of
information: “Budget”, “Location”, “Type of TV you’re interested In” for
example. All of this along with a checkbox “I am happy to receive emails from
…”. In other words, the visitor is opting in to our emails in exchange for downloading
our free ebook.

Page 2 would be a ‘thank you’ page containing a link to our free
PDF ebook. Maybe we’ll include a list of best selling TVs, or a call to action
back to our homepage to avoid this page being a ‘dead end’, engage the visitor
a little more, and perhaps pick up some sales.

Step 4: Turn the
subscriber into a customer

We know our new subscriber is in the research phase for
buying a TV. Ideally we can then send them an automated series of emails to
grow them from an ‘early researcher’ to a ‘customer’. Alternatively, if we don’t
have the tools to support that, we can simply move them onto our regular email
campaigns.

Either way, the ability to speak to this prospect regularly
gives us a much better chance of gaining them as a customer than we would if we
just pushed them straight from a search for “TV Reviews” to a page of “Top
Selling” TVs on our website.

This is a simple B2C example, but the tactic has unlimited
applications and can work far better in the B2B space, using how-to guides,
whitepapers and reports in exchange for permission to speak to your web visitors through email.