Synergies Between Email And Search Marketing

David, regional head of search of Neo@Ogilvy asked an interesting question in LinkedIn,

What synergies exist between email marketing and search marketing. Can you provide an example of how the sum is greater than the parts?

Search recent years is gaining more and more popularity among marketers. According to a recent MarketingSherpa’s annual survey of ad:tech:

Email marketing from house lists, a top tactic of 47% of marketers in 2006, was cited by 42% in 2007.

SEO is gaining in popularity among marketers: 57% of those surveyed in 2007 said it outperforms other tactics (”great ROI – outperforms other tactics”), compared with 45% in 2006.

Paid search remains a strong money maker for 34% of those surveyed, but that’s down from 49% in 2006, likely due to increased competition that raised keyword prices and lowered ROI.

Email marketing is overall the best marketing tactic though I personally favor search marketing over email (too tedious to me). So, is it true that “email + search > email | search”?

My experience tells that email marketing is much more cost effective and I definitely would do that. But, is the combined effort better than individual input from each channel? I can’t tell that as I haven’t really done or found any research on that. However, I personally believe so.

Web analytics can help find out. This is how:

1. Plan your campaign (for one product) to integrate your email marketing with search. This is another topic, I won’t cover it here; but, the least you can do is:
   • Keep your marketing message consistent.
   • Use the same images for things like logo, products
   • Use the same color theme
   • Make sure the landing page continues from where you entice your customer to click.
2. Select a web analytics software, which allows you to:
   • track the conversions from each traffic source, which most web analytics tools can do. And,
   • track the direct and the other “contributors”. If someone clicks on a link in the email and converts, email is the direct contributor. However, that may not be the whole picture. He/she maybe have clicked on a PPC listing 2 days ago, which contributes to the conversion.
3. Spend $1000 on PPC, with tracking implemented, allowing at least 30 days for cookies to expire (so that if a guy comes back later from other channels can be tracked).
4. Spend $1000 on email, with the similar tracking implemented.
5. When the campaign ends (within the cookie expire days), find out conversions from
   • email only, E
   • PPC only, P
   • conversions from both, C
6. Compare the “E + P” with C

This is not a scientific experiment. But, it definitely gives you some insight.