Email & Paid Media: The Duo You Never Knew You Needed

By Sam Holmes, Head of Marketing at Force24

 

As a Marketer of a Marketing Automation platform, it’s only inevitable I put our own email strategy under more scrutiny than probably most Marketers do to become a channel that pulls its weight in the mix; of course both from attributional and ROI perspectives, but also new tactics and pushing the boundaries on how Email can be leveraged as a tool  For us, this usually includes thinking outside of the box to combine channels and tactics to make the sum greater than the sum, ‘hacking’ growth, finding competitive advantages and encouraging budget efficiencies.

Where Email and Marketing Automation is unique versus other tools or channels is its ability to collect and interpret first-party data. This valuable data is compounded over time through tracking user behaviours and activity. By using automation tools, you then get a live overview of this data that’s ready to be actioned however you see fit. Its Achilles heel was historically an inability to serve messaging to audience members that we didn’t already know, and in places they spend a lot of their time. Essentially, the tools had a hard time meeting our audience where they’re at such as social media rabbit holes, reading recipes, researching their next city break and so on.

Paid media has entered the chat…

Moving further into the marketing toolbox, we have paid media which is the complete opposite. It has a penchant for scale, reach and big impression, however it cannot deliver with true relevance and timeliness caused by a lack of powerful first-party data. Despite Google and Meta’s guesswork getting increasingly better each year, paid media still falls short. This can make it feel untransparent and discouraging due to the budget needed to make a proper go of it. I think that is especially true for B2B brands and marketers, who have usually seen more failures than successes.

All the reasons I’ve listed motivated us to explore how email and paid media can work together in our own strategy. Not the most natural pairing on paper, but one that we’ve since come to learn can be a powerhouse.

In this article, we’re going to look at the opportunities to be gained from pairing email and paid media. I’ll share the budget benefits we’ve seen to greater opportunities for personalisation and relevancy. By the end, you’ll see more of the pudding as it provides some proof as we’re also going to dig into a recent experiment we’ve done to put this theory to the test.

Email Marketing and Paid Media: competitors to collaborators

Fuelled by evolving first-party data, email and paid media ads dovetail to surface a synchronised message to your audience members. You can deliver more personalised and appropriate ads that drive higher conversions with existing consumers while attracting new consumers through smarter cross-platform knowledge sharing. In essence, you’re only showing ads to those who are engaged, or you feel have a high intent to buy. And you’re basing this on what you have learned about them through their activity and behaviour with your email campaigns.

What we are talking about here is different from ad sequencing, where you line up a series of ads in a group to show to a user. That can be powerful alone for brand awareness, remarketing and a great way of prospecting new audiences, but imagine what your sequences would look like if you knew more about the audience interacting with your ad. Not just who they are, but what type of content and messaging they usually resonate with and how far along the sales cycle they are.

7 benefits you’ll soon discover

1. Spend optimisation

Reduce budgets, or maximise them, by excluding consumers who recently purchased or have low intent to buy from your targeting. Or if you are new to Paid Media, or haven’t found a sustainable way of making it work before, this can be an accessible way to trial ads with modest budgets, where you feel more in control of who you are serving your ads to and confident that impression or click is budget well-spent.

 

2. Divide and conquer by going cross-channel

We already know it’s unrealistic for one channel to do all the work in delivering a new customer, which is why the case for cross-channel campaigns comes into play. Implementing a messaging structure that dovetails across emails and ads allows you tell a story to your audience in a way that is structured, synchronised and repeatable, allowing each channel to do what they do best and build brand recall by speaking to them throughout the day no matter where they are. This also reduces the risk of email overload.

 

3. Healthy pressure to care about the data

You should always want to care about the quality and validity of the contact data sitting in your database, however I do appreciate things get in the way of that. Almost every marketer I speak to, aside from dedicated CRM Managers, say their data is ‘good enough but we know it could be better’. Knowing the success of your ads lives or dies on the quality of your data gives you a real reason to make sure your contact base is relevant, up-to-date and is ready to be reinforced by supporting ad spend.

 

4. Deeper personalisation

The data and insight you gather from your already-ran and ongoing paid ads can feed back into your email strategy, helping you create more relevant emails and content. By measuring the most popular and well-performing ads, you learn what resonates with your audience and can tailor your future messages accordingly.

 

5. Improved Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)

Spend less and get the same by removing budget spillage. Or, maintain spend levels but make it stretch further and convert better, with your budget instead being laser focused on the users you know are more likely to convert. Either will likely improve your ROAS and drive meaningful efficiencies in a stadium where costs are only going up.

 

6. Inform better ‘lookalike’ audiences

The next stage is being able to create lookalike profiling models based off the behaviours of an audience you already know is qualified. Whilst this is more of a guess-work play, it’s much closer to the truth and ensures again that you are targeting the most relevant people and get the lowest CPCs. In this sense, Google and Meta are learning directly from an audience you now just want to uncover more of – just like a well-trained Chat GPT.

 

7. Putting down manual tasks

Automating this through your ESP or Automation platform will not only save time and effort but give you the confidence you are speaking to an audience that is always up to date, removing the need for manual importing and exporting of CSVs.

What you need to get started

Having a Marketing Automation in place that already does this, and is primed to sync your data, will make things easier, more effective and probably a little bit cheaper due to speed and accuracy. That said, it’s not the only way of testing the water to see if this is something that can work for you. Instead, you can upload your targeted email lists straight into AdWords (through Customer Match), as well as Meta, LinkedIn and ‘X’ on, to serve the cohesive ads we’ve discussed and establish bids that will serve specifically for that prospect segment.

Getting a new, or revised, view and understanding of your customer’s journey is the next best step. Consider painting a picture of what the typical journey looks like using the sales cycle of some recently won customers. Based on what you can, hopefully, see about them in your tech stack you will be able to structure an ad framework and messaging hierarchy across both channels. This will serve cohesive and contextually relevant messages.

Who’s running this experiment?

Just to set the scene before we go any further; in case you’re not fully familiar with Force24, we’re a UK-based Marketing Automation platform, used by over 7,000 marketers in a vast array of businesses with varying budgets, goals and challenges. As the Force24 Marketing team, we sit firmly in the B2B SaaS and Technology space, tasked with driving brand awareness, generating demand and passing leads (MQLs) to our hungry sales team

Our team includes five marketers (including creatives), fortunate to have an automation platform at our disposal. However, our paid media budgets are what you’d typically see from a B2B business. As a channel, it’s never really become a mainstay for us. We pick it up and put it down throughout the year, usually in line with quieter seasons where we want to keep up momentum. I wouldn’t normally recommend that approach, however, like many B2B businesses and slow-moving consumer goods, we have lengthier sales cycles and consideration periods that often render paid advertising unfruitful when it comes to attribution time. But over time we have learned it has an important role to play in nurture, retargeting and brand recall – especially when done effectively.

To put this theory to the test, we ran a trial within our own marketing department over an 8-week period. With a modest yet capable budget of £2,000, our mission was to prove the effect of relevancy and cohesive cross-channel messaging on CTRs and conversions.

Here’s how we did it

So, this time around, we combined our existing email campaigns with a new Paid Media strategy that sang from the same hymn sheet. We started by testing and analysing the creative on our emails to find our ad ‘formula’. Not an essential step, but it gave us a head start in knowing what type of creative would land, and email was a cheaper way of doing those A/B tests. (Spoiler: the ads that had lighter coloured always won)

We then took a sample audience (around 10,000 contacts) and split this into three ‘pots’, mirroring the three stages of the classic marketing funnel. We used Force24’s Lead Scoring functionality to do this profiling and segmentation task, placing each contact into one of the three pots based on their given ‘temperature’. That temperature was forecasted on the activities and behaviours we know they have already shown, ultimately allowing us to estimate how far along the buying stage we think they are and dictating the email and ad sets they receive. If a contact showed strong signs of cooling, they would automatically retrieve back up the funnel to be warmed back up. Meanwhile, Google and Meta would find out about this quickly and adjust their bidding too, a quick and simple redirection of efforts through the Force24 integration.

Across the coming months, each audience segment would receive email flows curated for them, whilst also being targeted by cohesive display and social media ads. In the following weeks as we progressed through the trial period, we witnessed contacts flow down the funnel as they engaged more and their lead score grew, meaning the ads they were served escalated to be more commercially driven. After the 8-week trial, we called it a day and collated the findings, shown below.

Isolated numbers and volumes can often end up being irrelevant or misleading, as each business and sector is so different. For that reason, the pattern I’d like to draw attention to here is the CTR column, fourth across. We were really intrigued to see this increase so significantly as we move through the stages, doubling down in conversion rate as the audience progress through stages of the funnel.

What makes this especially encouraging was the stronger CTRs on our ‘Bottom of Funnel’ ads which grew significantly, even despite the messaging in this ad group being more commercial and crafted particularly for contacts we predicted were closer to converting. Usually, we see engagement with this type of messaging perform worse than other groups, as there is often less value in a click for the contact. We quite confidently put this down to the heightened relevancy of our ads, laser-focused budgets and supplementary cross-channel messaging. It was refreshing to know our ads were only being served to contacts we wanted to put in front of, at the times we knew were right for them.

Our plan is to take the learnings from this and roll it out across more and bigger areas of our communications strategies.

So what now?

If you’ve already carved out a paid media strategy that works for you and your business with robust budgets and agency support to execute on big campaigns, then this article might not have been for you.

If that’s not the case, then I did want to encourage you to think about how this could become a new tactic in a wider advertising playbook. Starting to strengthen the ties between your paid media and marketing automation strategies can increase their overall effectiveness and ROI of each, improving the individual and combined performance.

Getting the balance right can result in more precise targeting, growing larger audiences, higher click-through rates and ultimately more conversions. All the while, you’ll likely spend a bit less budget, use the resources that you already have and get to know your audience better in the process.