The New Email Marketing - Larry Kim

Summary

Larry Kim, founder of WordStream, presents innovative strategies for email marketing in a noisy digital landscape. He highlights the challenges faced by marketers due to email inbox clutter, decreasing engagement, and increasingly complex regulations. Kim introduces 'email-based pay-per-click marketing' using custom audiences, allowing marketers to target specific individuals through platforms like Facebook and Google. By uploading email lists, businesses can engage their audience more effectively, improving engagement rates and conversions. Kim emphasizes the power of targeted advertising through these technologies, offering a cost-effective solution for enhancing email marketing efforts.

Takeaways

• 😀 Email marketing remains the most popular marketing channel, used by 87% of businesses, but its effectiveness is declining due to increased noise and spam filters.
• 😀 The internet has become a noisy place, making it harder for marketers to capture consumers' attention amidst millions of daily posts, tweets, and ads.
• 😀 Traditional email marketing faces challenges such as low engagement rates, regulatory complexity, and inbox filters (e.g., Gmail's Promotions tab).
• 😀 Email-based pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, specifically targeting custom audiences with email lists, is a new and highly effective way to boost engagement and conversion.
• 😀 With custom audiences, businesses can upload email lists directly into platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, allowing for highly targeted ads.
• 😀 Using custom audiences to target specific segments (e.g., past customers, cart abandoners) leads to higher engagement—up to 3x more likely to engage and 2x more likely to convert.
• 😀 People who have already provided their email are more familiar with your brand and are significantly more likely to engage with targeted ads than cold prospects.
• 😀 The effectiveness of targeting ads based on email addresses is much greater than traditional methods, such as targeting based on websites or keywords.
• 😀 One of the advantages of email-based PPC is the elimination of inventory constraints and list burnout, which are common in traditional email marketing campaigns.
• 😀 New ad formats like Facebook’s lead generation cards and Twitter’s lead generation ads offer a cost-effective way to build large, targeted email lists.
• 😀 Targeting ads based on email addresses is now possible across multiple platforms, including Google AdWords, YouTube, and Gmail, allowing businesses to run more personalized and impactful campaigns.

Q & A

What are the main challenges facing traditional email marketing today?

Traditional email marketing faces challenges such as increasing competition for users' attention, with millions of social media posts and emails flooding the internet. Additionally, emails are often filtered into promotional or spam folders, reducing their visibility. Declining open rates and stricter regulations around data privacy further complicate the effectiveness of email marketing.

What is email-based pay-per-click (PPC) marketing?

Email-based PPC marketing involves uploading email lists into social and search platforms like Google, Facebook, or Twitter to create 'custom audiences.' Advertisers can then target these audiences with ads, allowing them to reach individuals who have already interacted with their brand, making the targeting more precise and cost-effective.

How does custom audience targeting improve the effectiveness of email marketing?

Custom audience targeting improves email marketing by allowing businesses to directly target individuals who are already familiar with their brand, such as existing customers or leads. This results in higher engagement, with people being three times more likely to interact with your content and twice as likely to convert into paying customers compared to random strangers.

Why are custom audiences more effective than traditional email marketing?

Custom audiences are more effective because they allow for highly targeted advertising. Unlike traditional email marketing, where the message is sent to a broad list, custom audiences focus on specific individuals who have already expressed interest by providing their email addresses. This leads to better engagement and higher conversion rates.

What is the advantage of people-based PPC marketing over other ad targeting methods?

People-based PPC marketing allows businesses to target specific individuals using their email addresses, offering a level of precision that traditional ad targeting methods like keyword targeting or website-based ads cannot match. This means ads can be shown to the right people at the right time, maximizing the chances of engagement and conversion.

Can you give an example of how email-based PPC marketing can work effectively?

An example is when Larry Kim used email-based PPC marketing to target a curated list of 1,666 influential journalists with promoted posts on Facebook and Twitter. This led to extensive media coverage of his blog post, with over 500 press mentions, all at a cost of just $50. The targeted approach significantly amplified the reach and impact of the content.

How can businesses build email lists efficiently for email-based PPC marketing?

Businesses can build email lists efficiently by using lead generation ad formats on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These formats allow users to opt-in with a single click, automatically filling in their contact information. This is a quick and cost-effective way to build large, high-quality email lists for targeted campaigns.

What is the role of platforms like Google AdWords in email-based PPC marketing?

Google AdWords plays a crucial role in email-based PPC marketing by allowing businesses to target ads based on email lists. Ads can be shown to users who are logged into Google services, such as Gmail, YouTube, and Google Search, ensuring that the targeted individuals see the right ads, whether they are searching for keywords or browsing content.

What makes email-based PPC marketing more cost-effective compared to traditional methods?

Email-based PPC marketing is cost-effective because it targets a highly specific, segmented audience, reducing wasted impressions. Unlike broad targeting strategies that aim for wide reach, email-based PPC focuses on individuals who are already familiar with the brand, leading to higher engagement at a lower cost.

How can businesses overcome issues like email list burnout in traditional email marketing?

Email list burnout can be avoided by using email-based PPC marketing, where businesses can target their email list with paid ads on social platforms and search engines instead of relying solely on email blasts. This allows for continuous engagement with a targeted audience without overloading them with emails, reducing the risk of unsubscribes.