For most, PPC is an invaluable way to drive low cost leads and/or ecommerce sales. But with its precise targeting capabilities, PPC is also an amazing way to stay in front of these leads and customers to increase closing rates, reduce sales cycle time, and maximize up/cross-sales.
So don’t limit your PPC efforts to the first conversion or sale. Use it help your prospects and customers flow further down the funnel. Here are a 4 ways you can use PPC to get more value from your leads/customers after their initial conversion.
1. Remarket to Your Conversions
If you are like most, you have realized the value of remarketing. You’ve set up a few lists, and do everything you can to stay in front of your site visitors who don’t convert. But that’s where your remarketing stops. And that means you’re only getting about half the value out of this channel.
One way to get more from remarketing is to set up remarketing lists that specifically targets those who have taken a desired action on your site, such as filling out a contact form. Then, start targeting your leads or customers with remarketing campaigns 5-days, 30-days, or even over a year after they convert on your site. This allows you to show your most relevant offers to your prospects. Which in turn can help increase conversion rates and speed up your sales cycle.
Here’s an example:
A visitor converts on your site for a free whitepaper. 10-days later you start showing your prospect display ads that offer a free consultation, 30-days after that you offer 10% off your services if they schedule a call in the next 10 days, after those 10-days are up you offer an additional free whitepaper download, and on and on.
By mixing up your offers you’re encourage that prospect to re-engage with you sooner than they may have if you would have just attempted to keep calling them week after week.
You can also take this strategy with cross-sells and up-sells. If you are an ecommerce site, you can place remarketing codes that track what your visitor’s purchase (how you do this will depend on your shopping cart structure/software.), then you can show them remarketing advertisements for related products.
Here’s a great post on how to create multiple-stage remarketing lists that will allow you to accomplish this:
www.seomoz.org/multiple-stage-remarketing
2. Bidding on Competitors
It’s pretty common for me to start checking out the competition if I see a product I like, or am pitched a service that seems worthwhile. I imagine that your prospects and customers do the same.
Bidding on your competitors branded terms is commonplace in PPC. But understanding that some of those search queries are generated by your leads can shift how you choose to market to them.
Instead of sending these visitors to your typical landing page, you may want to send them to one that compares your against your competitor. Or has a special offer for those who set an appointment with you today. You could even create a free download that gives them an insightful list of questions to ask your competition, and you, when having a sales call.
The point is, to get clever, And to understand that some of this traffic is coming from people who have already converted on your site, and are not shopping around.
3. Target “Do-it-Yourselfers”
Sometimes marketers and sales people do too good of a job explaining the services we offer. And that leads to some of our best prospects telling us, “you’ve been great but I think I’m going to do this myself for a while and see how it goes.”
A way to keep those leads on the line is be where they are headed right after your phone call. Search engines. And what are they going to search, “How to ________.” Or some similar search query they that are likely to perform in order to figure out how to perform your services for themselves. The good news is, with a little proactivity, you can reduce how often this happens.
Create a landing page that talks about the pros and cons of your prospect doing it him/herself. You can’t be blatant, but you can pit the two against each other, and if your services are valuable, it should be obvious that going with help is the best route.
Once you have the landing page, start a new PPC campaign targeting these do-it-yourself keywords. You’ll get some traffic in there that aren’t people who have already converted for you, which is good, but most importantly, you’ll be in front of prospects that have
You’ll also want to be on the Display Network targeting placements on information/how-to sites. That way when your prospect realizes how hard, or time consuming it is going to be to do it on his/her own, you’re only a click away.
4. Coordinate Your Nurturing and PPC Campaigns
A smart practice with email nurturing campaigns (emailing your lists, be it leads or customers, with regular sales and offers) is to coordinate those efforts with a Display Network campaign.
A few days before a marketing piece is set to go out, launch a Display Network campaign to either your remarketing list, an ICM campaign, or a topic campaign that contains the same offer. Then run it for up to 7-days after the email has sent.
You’ll gain two things from this, more conversions from the email marketing piece, and more total conversions overall.
In summary, when it comes to PPC your efforts don’t solely have to be aimed at top of the funnel lead generation or single sales. You can use it to speed up your sales cycle, increase conversion rates, and increase up-sells and cross-sells.
