 If you’re like many online marketers, search engine marketing (SEM) takes up a sizable chunk of your budget, and email marketing is a regularly implemented program.
But, somehow, you rarely even think of using "SEM" and "email marketing" in the same sentence – let alone combining the two in a coordinated, integrated way. Believe it or not, putting your email opt-in invitation on the landing pages of your SEM campaigns is a simple – and frequently overlooked – way to boost your conversion rates and revenue.
Your SEM landing pages are often “one shot” propositions – the destinations visitors stumble upon only once. Permission-based email marketing extends your reach beyond a single site visit, finding these same visitors weeks, months or even years later – when they may actually be ready to convert or buy.
Skeptical? Consider this: if, on average, less than 3 percent of searchers follow through with the intended call to action on your landing pages, and an equally small percentage convert and become buyers, what’s your paid search return on investment (ROI)?
Now what happens to ROI if you get more of these visitors to convert or buy without throwing additional money at them? It costs nothing to add an email opt-in to your landing pages – and any additional business simply boosts the ROI of your pay-per-click (PPC) spends.
Don’t Do Anything Drastic to Your SEM Landing Pages
The only way to effectively combine SEM and permission-based email marketing – without leading your search visitors down the wrong (navigational) path – is to drive people to take a single, desired action from your landing pages.
If you missed "Effective Landing Pages 101" (usually taught in the marketer’s school of hard knocks), each landing page should be specifically customized relevant to the keywords you purchased. If that keyword is "bagels", your landing page should offer concrete information about who you are and what you offer – in relation to bagels.
In addition, every word, link and image on your landing page should be powerfully optimized to drive your visitors down one specific conversion path – whether that’s buy now, sign up for an offer or request a demo.
That said, you can easily gain permission to stay in contact with your visitors, without distracting them from your primary marketing objective.
The how depends on what your email marketing goal is:
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Do you want to capture a fraction of the 97 percent who might otherwise click away from your site and be lost forever?
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Or do you want to focus on the 3 percent who do actually convert – and turn a higher percentage of them into buyers over time?
Email Opt-in Option #1: Focus on the Ones Who (Almost) Got Away
Targeting your opt-in invitation to the 97 percent who click – but don’t convert – helps your company turn today’s missed opportunities into tomorrow’s loyal customers. For example, at a retail site, people may abandon their shopping carts and click away to competitors – without ever telling you who they are.
To catch these visitors, your email opt-in must be placed separately from your point-of-conversion page.
Take for example, an online bookstore that deploys PPC search campaigns with landing pages that are primarily designed to entice visitors to search for, and then buy, specific titles.
The company also knows that email marketing presents an opportunity to rekindle readers’ interests several times a year – so the company publishes three different email newsletters that appeal to three different reader segments.
One e-newsletter primarily appeals to visitors with a strong interest in rare books, and the appropriate SEM landing pages encourage readers to sign up. Visitors who click through find a newsletter opt-in page that adheres to many permission-based email marketing best practices, including:
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Giving visitors clear expectations of the kinds of communications they may receive by linking to a sample e-newsletter and back issues
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Summarizing the privacy/email policy and linking to a more detailed explanation on their Web site.
The newsletter opt-in captures email addresses in a separate and independent process from the checkout page, which is where those who are ready to buy supply personal information. After opting in, visitors can continue to shop, which is, of course, the primary goal of the SEM landing pages.
As a result, 2 percent of the online bookstore's PPC search visitors sign up for the email newsletter – and about 4 percent of those e-newsletter readers purchase books each month.
Thus, the online bookstore optimizes its investment in paid search by leveraging its inherent ability to drive e-newsletter subscriptions. In turn, every newsletter-inspired sale by a previous PPC visitor boosts the company's overall paid-search ROI.
Email Opt-in Option #2: Convert the Converters into Buyers
Focusing on the 3 percent who take the desired action from your SEM landing page – thereby demonstrating a high degree of interest – can help shorten your company’s sales cycle and reactivate old leads over time. Technology, B2B and other companies with longer sales cycles may be best served by this approach.
To convert the converters, make your email opt-in part of your actual conversion page. 
At Lyris, we direct visitors to a landing page where our call to action is to register for a software demonstration. Our demo registration page features an unobtrusive invitation, just above the "Submit" button, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, Inside Lyris HQ.
You’ll notice that we adhere to an important permission best practice: We never create a pre-checked opt-in box. Forcing each visitor to manually check the opt-in box means fewer names added to your list – but it also means that every new name is someone who really wants to hear from you.
Close to 50 percent of the people who sign up for a Lyris demo also subscribe to our e-newsletter. In other words, nearly half of our “demo leads” give us a second chance to reinforce our value over time, independent of their interactions with our sales team.
Our permission-based approach transforms converters who may not be prepared to buy right away into bona-fide customers later on – and all because we incorporated a permission-based opt-in with our PPC call to action.
SEM + Email = Increased Conversions & ROI
Adding email opt-in invitations to your SEM landing pages is a smart, practical way to maximize the effectiveness of two programs you already rely on: search engine marketing and email marketing. SEM is frequently the biggest line item in online advertising budgets – and regular, targeted email communications to PPC visitors offers a low-cost, low-effort way to extend search-program ROI.
For more tips on how to use email & search marketing together read:
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