How to Use a PPC Campaign to Build Your Subscriber List

Customers are omnipresent in today’s digital era, don’t you think?  This sentence simply means that you can find your customers present on various digital platforms, including websites, social media, email, and search options. In fact, a study in 2022 found the average adult user spent nearly 7 hours online per day, although the ongoing pandemic likely impacted these numbers with workers in many countries still working from home. Hence, these 7 hours are fragmented between a PPC campaign (paid search advertising), social media, watching videos, answering and sending emails, online conference calls, and data entry and analysis. Your job, as a marketer is to cut through the clutter created by these competing platforms with value-laden communication to affect consumers’ attitudes, build awareness of the benefits of your brand, and drive purchase intentions. While many communication channels reach your potential customers, email marketing still tops the list.

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As seen from the graph above, 52% of marketers say that emails are their primary tool for communication with each other, but email marketing is also a powerful tool for reaching consumers, featuring ROIs (return on investments) of up to 4200%. However, sending out periodic email messages to subscribers is not enough. You need a solid and continuous program designed to increase your subscriber base with members from your target marketing. By growing your subscriber list in this way, you open new avenues for promotion using targeted email messages that deliver results.

You can grow your email list with Flodesk by using their beautifully designed sign-up forms that build your subscriber list, or you can try a PPC campaign to win more subscribers in less time. If speed is your primary focus, going for a PPC campaign represents a great investment.

Implementing a PPC campaign might look like a cakewalk, but that’s not the case. In order to implement a campaign effectively, you also need the right people on board. To do so, you can test PPC advertising knowledge before hiring a candidate and evaluate his/her ability to create sound decisions in real-time paid marketing scenarios. Also, since platforms change frequently, invest in training to ensure your PPC campaign continues to deliver over time.

Now that you know all about PPC campaigns and how they can be useful let’s look at five ways to use them to grow your email list.

5 Ways to use a PPC campaign to grow your subscriber list

Paid advertising is available through multiple digital platforms, including social media and search, as well as display advertising like the one at the bottom of this post. A PPC campaign or pay-per-click campaign involves paying for advertising based solely on whether someone clicks on the ad. Hence, it’s very cost-effective since you only pay for results. While social platforms may offer PPC options, when we talk about a PPC campaign, we’re commonly referring to paid search, such as Google Ads, because that’s the only option available on search platforms.

Running a PPC campaign is slightly different across various search engines, but testing is an attribute available on all of them. Testing your campaigns is easy and offers an attractive means to optimize returns. But, you can’t test everything, so since you can only test alternatives that vary by 1 aspect, you must prioritize what to test in your PPC campaign. Below, we list 5 options for testing the most impactful elements of your campaign first.

Remember that running a PPC campaign helps achieve your goals, such as increasing your subscriber list, but it’s also a fast and efficient way to test other elements of your campaign, such as elements of your landing page, and for improving the quality of your campaigns.

You can try one or all these suggestions, one at a time, to see what generates the best results for you! 

Test your CTAs and offers with PPC

Your CTA, call to action, is a critical element in conversion. Getting your CTA right makes the difference between success a failure. So, testing your CTA is the first element to consider in any program. You can only test 1 element at a time, so you likely need a number of versions of your ad, each different from the rest by this single element. Here are some elements to consider as part of your testing program:

• Buttons versus hyperlinks, although studies suggest that buttons outperform links. That’s probably because buttons stand out on a page while links do not. Over time, however, links catch up and begin performing better than buttons. Testing is necessary to determine which works best for you. Since PPC campaigns only use links, you can do this testing using your email campaign or by testing it on your landing page.
• Color is a weird aspect when it comes to buttons. Green means go, but red often gets more clicks likely because it draws your eye.
• Which offer works best with your target market is anyone’s guess. Test with different offers to determine how your market responds. Even changing the wording might impact performance even if the offer remains essentially the same. For instance, a percentage discount might perform better than a dollar discount or visa versa.
• You can also test different fonts and sizes to see which performs best.

Test visuals with paid search

Visual elements are a compelling element of any digital promotion, whether it’s a social media ad or an image on your landing page. Adding images goes a long way in display ads, landing pages, and email promotions. Finding the right image to present your product or represent your brand in its best light is the key to success. Choosing the right image out of the box isn’t always so straightforward. By testing different image options using a PPC campaign, you can save time by finding the image resulting in the highest ROI without costing a lot of money.

You can go further by testing images in email promotions to get a fair idea of how images perform with your existing list to make your landing pages even better and help you build better affiliate and display ads. You can even use split testing (A/B testing) and segmentation to understand which image works best for each segment of your subscriber list. After all, the aim is to achieve high CTR for your ads and convert visitors to buyers?

Try PPC remarketing to avoid email overload

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You don’t want to overwhelm your potential customers, do you? Sending frequent email messages might do just that, driving subscribers to leave your missives unopened or even unsubscribing from future messaging. The solution to your need to maintain open communication with your subscribers is to vary your regular mode of communication with your audience through different channels so that they don’t get frustrated. One option is to run PPC remarketing campaigns with your email lists. This allows you to stay top of mind with your list and saves you from being seen as too intrusive.

You also expand your presence to Google through PPC remarketing instead of simply bombarding subscribers with dozens of emails. This increases your conversation rates. After all, the more a viewer sees your ad, the more likely he/she is to click on that CTA.

Hence, relying on remarketing can reduce your need to send frequent and annoying email messages. In fact, viewers are more likely to read those few high-quality emails you send than those incessant emails that eventually find a place in their email trash folder. It is an effective strategy since it allows you to send a smaller number of email messages to your current and potential customers while still generating results.

Use email marketing performance to drive GSP (Gmail Sponsored Promotion)

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GPS is one of the most clever ways to run ads in your prospect customers’ Gmail accounts. You target clients depending on their Gmail account activity. If your customers’ email messages contain the keywords you bid on, your ad is eligible to appear in their Gmail accounts.

Ads for GSPs consist of two components:

• Teaser collapsed ad
• Expanded ad unit

The expanded unit is similar to an image ad, while the teaser line is the same as a closed email. You should focus on email headlines as they generate a lift in CTR.

Upload email list to run identity-based PPC ads

You don’t stalk your prospect customers; you simply follow them more. 

This is what identity-based PPC ads focus on. Identity-based marketing is booming these days. In fact, 95% of consumers are likely to redeem a personalized offer if it is given based on their identity. The reason for this is quite simple. Wouldn’t you like an offer given to you based on who you are?

For instance, if you are a teacher or a military member, and a brand provides you with a special offer based on your profession, you are bound to feel respected. Identity marketing focuses on treating customers as equal partners of their brand. This makes the customers feel special and respected.

You can use an email list to run identity-based PPC ads as it is the perfect convergence of PPC and email promotion. Advertisers can upload email lists to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Ads and serve customized bids for that segment.

If you are already running email marketing campaigns, you might have already segmented your customers into specific groupings.

Pointer:  You can consider reusing these lists for your PPC campaigns and save yourself a lot of time in setting it up!

Wrapping up ways to use PPC campaigns to grow your email list

These are just some of the ways you can use PPC to grow your email list. It is applicable for a small business, or an established one since growing subscribers is crucial to increasing leads. These tips will help you build your email list faster if you are a small business. While if you already are an established business, these tips will help you continuously grow your subscribers list.

So, if you haven’t already thought of merging paid advertising with email marketing, this article is your sign!

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Author Bio: 

Parita Pandya is an Engineer turned Writer. She usually finds herself writing for businesses.  When she is not writing, she is either strumming her guitar or penning her thoughts down on paritapandya.com.