Importance of Coordinating Search and Targeted Email

I read a great blog post yesterday on why aligning your SEO and targeted email strategy is important to reducing your cost of new customer acquisition. Julie Batten’s Using Search and E-mail to Acquire Customers post at Clickz has some great info in it. I pulled out the following quotes that I thought were particularly interesting:

If you plan your search and e-mail activities appropriately, you should pay only once for a new customer. Your search marketing will get the user into your site and registered in your database (acquisition), and your e-mail marketing will help you avoid spending additional media to achieve repeat purchase and customer loyalty (retention).

And specifically, in regards to customer acquisition:

Regularly reaching out to your audience via e-mail to communicate relevant information, updates, or offers will help your audience think of you first when they need a solution that your company offers. Instead of that person starting from scratch with another search query, you want her to come back to your Web site of her own volition. That way, you can avoid paying twice for an acquisition.

How true. We’ve definitely been preaching the same philosophy for a long time (see my Retention Importance Increases as the Economy Lags post from way back in May). Unfortunately, when talking with potential companies, many are less concerned with retention than with finding new customers in this economy. Obviously, both are important, but I’m inclined to think that holding on to your existing best customers is becoming more of a priority, especially given the fact that the purchasing behavior of many consumers will change soon if the current recession continues into next year.

Tags: Consumer Behavior, Customer Retention, Email Marketing, SEO, Targeted Email

Add Personalized Product Recommendations to Your eCommerce Site

Istobe is a powerful recommendation engine that makes it easy to add recommendations to your eCommerce site. How powerful? Shoppers who click on Istobe recommendations spend 20-50% more than the average visitor.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 11:59 am and is filed under Email Marketing, Personalized Email, Targeted Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.