When we think of powerful marketing combinations, we don’t usually consider Google Ads and email marketing together. Typically, we treat them as separate channels, each working independently to benefit our business. But what if combining them could create a synergy that drives even better results for your ROI and overall marketing success? Read this article to discover how to make it happen and what you can achieve by doing so!
Implementing a marketing mix and omnichannel strategy is crucial for achieving the most effective results. Combining Google Ads and email marketing can not only grow your mailing list but also significantly increase your revenue. And that’s exactly what all marketers and business owners are aiming for.
Building an Email List as a natural goal
If it’s possible to grow your audience, then why not do it? You can use newsletter sign-ups as a conversion goal in Google Ads. It doesn’t even need to be the primary goal; it can be a secondary one. Why is this worth it? Because it provides you with an additional benefit if a user not only takes the primary action, like making a purchase or registering for a product but also gives consent for email marketing communication. Even with just transactional emails, you can achieve great results, but with marketing consent, you can do a lot more, such as upselling or personalizing offers to increase cart value.
With this approach, you can acquire first-party data that will be valuable to you for a much longer time. With Google Ads, it can be straightforward but sometimes costly, as you pay for every click. While the cost might be just a few cents, it can also exceed one hundred dollars per click, depending on the industry and keyword competition. In contrast, with email marketing, you only pay to acquire contacts. Yes, you have to pay an email service provider like us, but this cost is relatively minor in comparison—especially with our Email Marketing Pro plan, where you can send emails for less than $0.01 each. That’s much cheaper than Google Ads, isn’t it? Plus, you can be confident that you have permanent access to your newsletter list - provided you keep your subscribers engaged and avoid prompting them to unsubscribe!
Segmentation and first-party data are crucial for remarketing
Email marketing software allows you to create dynamic and meaningful segments of contacts. These segments can be based on custom contact fields and easily exported as CSV files, making them useful for your Google Ads account.
In Google Ads, you have the option to upload a customer list as first-party data. Simply navigate to the Audience Manager and add a new customer list. You can either upload a file manually or connect automatically with a data source like Google Sheets or MySQL. If you choose to upload the list manually, make sure the data is correctly formatted. Once uploaded, you can use this list to run remarketing campaigns or set different bidding strategies for users included in the list. For example, you might increase bids for users who have already made a purchase, as they are familiar with your brand and may be willing to buy again. You can also combine this list with YouTube ads to create an additional channel of reach, especially if you publish videos frequently and want to increase the number of channel subscribers.
This first-party data allows Google to better optimize campaigns with additional insights about your valuable audience. However, it’s important to obtain consent from your users before importing the list directly into Google Ads. Users should be informed in your privacy policy about how their data will be used and must give clear consent for that use. All data sent to Google is hashed, but you should consult with your legal team before making a final decision.
Increase your chance of converting abandoned carts into completed sales
Google Ads is a well-known channel for converting abandoned carts through remarketing campaigns, but you can also use email marketing to achieve this goal. Running both activities simultaneously will definitely increase your chances of finalizing the purchase process. This way, you not only have the opportunity to display remarketing ads through Google but can also boost your sales by sending discount offers on specific products with a tailored email campaign.
Email marketing tools also allow you to create segments of users who visited specific websites or with specific URL queries. If you used UTM parameters in Google Ads to drive traffic to your website but users didn’t convert, you can create additional segments for users with gclid or utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc in the URL and try to reach them with personalized emails. Additionally, you can target users on your list who clicked on your ad but ultimately didn’t convert. Why not take advantage of this opportunity?
Finding Newsletter Topics with Google Ads: Yes, It’s Possible!
Sometimes, searching for topics for your newsletter can be difficult and exhausting. You may feel that you have already covered every crucial subject with guides on your blog or in previous email campaigns. However, Google Ads can be useful again in identifying common, and often surprising, problems and issues that users face.
If you are running search campaigns using broad or phrase keyword matching, there’s a significant chance you’ll discover search terms related to your business that you hadn’t previously considered. These phrases are crucial for your users and customers, as they represent real queries made on Google. If there’s a trending question related to your services, this could be an excellent opportunity to engage users by providing answers in your newsletter.
By doing this, you can leverage your Google Ads budget to produce extra content for email marketing, as well as to develop new landing pages and blog posts. Your SEO specialists will be grateful for this input!
As you can see, there are several ways to combine Google Ads and email marketing to get the most out of both channels. This is also a way to stand out, as few people integrate these tools in this manner. Most email marketers treat these tools as two separate components, without synchronizing their efforts with PPC specialists. If you apply these tips in practice, you will gain an advantage that will not only allow you to increase your company’s visibility but also improve the ROAS of your campaigns and marketing efforts.
Filip Blajet
Filip is a marketing specialist at Elastic Email, who spends a lot of time with data and ads. Outside of work, he loves football, binge watching tv series and travelling.
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