Boost your email marketing list by creating niche free products to give away
PPC (or Pay-Per-Click) isn’t a huge part of our marketing strategy. We rely heavier on organic forms of marketing that do not require the exchange of money, like organic search engine marketing and social media marketing.
However, PPC can be an added form of promotion when a special event or product is coming up. For instance, we have been promoting for our Content Marketing 2010 Seminars through internal and external promotions. We decided that PPC was worth utilizing for these promotional efforts, as the events are one-time opportunities.
Even more, you can use it to build email circulation. Often times, we rely on creating keyword-rich landing pages and letting Google do it’s work. However, if we’re looking for a boost in email list subscribes, or simply want to test new keywords, we might throw a campaign towards PPC just for the purpose of getting new emails.
The way we do this is by coming up with a free product. In the ad description, we make it obvious that the product is free, with a brief description of what they’re receive. It’s not hard to get an email address for a product that is free, but when you’re convincing strangers through PPC, you might want to make this product the best of your best.
[text_ad]
If you are using PPC to build email circulation, be sure to have the ad point to a data collection page of yours. One of your most popular free downloads could be a landing page you’d use.
One tip I gathered from the Sign-up.to blog is that you should be researching “what’s hot” before creating a campaign. This will heighten the likeliness for success of your campaigns. Some tools they recommend:
- Twitter Advanced Search – A very powerful tool to monitor and discover what people are buzzing about in your marketplace.
- Google Insights For Search – Great for seeing the development of search trends as well as comparing potential traffic by keyword and region.
- Compete.com – There are a couple of similar tools around, such as Alexa, but Compete enables you to see estimated traffic to your potential competitors’ websites.
Even if you are using PPC to drive traffic into a paid product, as we are doing with our Content Marketing Seminar noted above, you should include a pre-selected email newsletter offer on the first page of your order flow. This way, if the user abandons on the credit card ask, you’ve still collected that person’s email address.
