The Email Wars

We know that an email campaign drives an increase in site traffic during that campaign, BUT does it correlate to an increase in paid search terms and costs? This was an interesting idea that came up in a conversation the other day after a conference that I spoke at. The individual that brought this up to me wanted to know if I had seen this impact as they had seen it over and over again in days trailing the drop of a campaign.

It made me write it down to look at later and see if I could find any correlation between the two. It made sense due to the fact that you were top of mind in the hours, days or week after getting the attention of someone in the inbox. Now they might have not had time to take action on the email but there is sure to be some latent impact to search traffic afterward.

I set out to investigate timing of search traffic against sends in our own and some of our client campaigns that I have site analytics access. So what did I find? Well I did see an increase in each of the accounts for a 3-5 day period after a major campaign deployment. But note that in most of the campaigns that were segmented and targeted drops and not large newsletter pushes there was less of an impact on direct paid search lift, but still enough to warrant some additional thought about it.

Not that I would want to drive any new costs in PPC towards a campaign cost, but if it exists we need to start taking it into consideration when we are planning future campaigns. It was, until now, a hidden cost in my mind that I had not thought of nor noticed a direct tie between. Now knowing this I am thinking a little different not about email marketing, but about the timing of ads and ad spend in search during these times. If you can plan for it you might be able to actually make a larger impact on the overall campaign conversion goals by managing your search terms, keywords and ad copy used.

I leave you with this thought to go explore for yourself and see if there is a way that you can leverage this in your own campaign planning. If you can be using great landing pages tied to the paid search terms that are reflective of the email campaign creative, calls to action or offers you might just close that loop.