Using Email To Improve Paid Media Performance

Working in paid media, I’m naturally always looking to squeeze out any incremental improvements to performance that I can for my clients.

Despite an initial inclination to spend hours tinkering around in places like Google Ads or Meta to identify new opportunities, I’ve found that making optimizations outside of ad platforms can be more impactful. One area that I’ve been diving into more recently is email marketing, and this channel has been helping clients to improve conversion rate from lead to customer.

In this post I’ll break down some of the benefits that I’ve seen when implementing email campaigns, and how I work to manage another channel among the other tasks within my day-to-day.

Email Can Serve As A Compliment To Paid Media

When working with clients who have products/services with relatively high prices or longer buying cycles, paid media is often focused on lead generation.

While generating leads is great, that’s still only one piece of the puzzle. I firmly believe that marketing can be responsible for more than just lead, or even pipeline volume. Marketing teams can absolutely work with sales to improve the efficiency of their lead to closed deal conversion rate. It’s something that I do in my own client work.

I’ve seen that a lot of potential business can be lost when leads are unresponsive, and don’t show up to sales calls. This is where email can provide a nice boost to marketing programs.

After analyzing data from my own clients, I’ve seen that leads who open and interact with email content prior to their sales calls are much more likely to attend those meetings. More leads attending meetings results in more chances to generate revenue. Without spending an extra penny, a simple email campaign can improve the efficiency of paid media efforts.

Sharing content that builds authority and trust in email campaigns can be a great way to highlight some of the different benefits of a brand’s offer that a lead might not have seen in a singular ad interaction. For example, I’ve seen that by sending leads guides, webinars, testimonials, and other related pieces of content before a meeting, we’ve been able to improve show up rate, and overall revenue.

One of the aspects of email marketing that I appreciate the most, is that despite being a separate channel outside of paid media, it isn’t a huge additional time commitment on top of the work I’m already doing.

Managing Email Campaigns Doesn’t Have To Take Up Your Whole Day

As I mentioned previously, I often find that marketing efforts that exist outside of ad platforms can actually have a greater positive impact on ad performance than in-platform optimizations. Email marketing is no exception.

Naturally, one individual can’t be a jack of all trades, and own every marketing channel or discipline for a business. However, pairing paid media and email together is actually pretty straightforward.

I’m able to work across both of these channels without much incremental effort because of the work I put in at the beginning of client engagements to develop messaging maps for pain points, features, and benefits. Having key messaging points for a brand outlined in one place makes it much easier to write copy, regardless of the format.

This allows me to quickly write copy for ads, landing pages, and follow up emails, all while maintaining a consistent presentation of value props and ideas.

While simple nurture email campaigns don’t require the same level of planning and analysis as an outbound campaign might, these nurture campaigns can still have a similarly strong impact on marketing revenue.

By including email marketing as part of my services, I’m able to provide more value to clients. They can see it clearly when looking at the changes in meeting volume and revenue.

Wrapping Up

Email marketing can be a great way to improve the efficiency of paid media campaigns without spending any additional budget on ads. I’ve seen first-hand how simple email campaigns can improve sales meeting show up rates, and therefore inflate paid media efficiency when reporting on revenue.

Not only can a few simple email campaigns provide a significant amount of value to a marketing program, but these campaigns also don’t have to take up a ton of time. I use a standardized messaging framework to help me quickly write consistent copy across ads, landing pages, and emails. This helps me to stretch my time, and my clients ad budget even further.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.