Paid Ads vs Email Marketing

Paid Ads vs Email

The age-old question.

Should you be focusing more on paid ads or focusing more on email marketing?

Media buyers will tell you that paid ads are the most important part of your ecom funnel.

Email guys will tell you email is the most important part of your funnel.

My answer may surprise you.

Let’s analyze the situation 🤓

The Case For Paid Ads

Paid ads are the top of your funnel.

Paid ads are the only predictable method for bringing traffic to your site and getting eyes on your products.

Without them, you’re left with organic content and SEO. But these are less predictable.

With organic you’re relying on the algorithm and still having to pay for content creators and your marketing team.

SEO is cool but it can take a long time to really get to work.

With paid ads, you can snap your fingers and scale up your traffic.

And more importantly… predictably bring more eyes to your site.

The problem is that paid ads are expensive.

You have to pay for creatives.

And pay for your spots on Meta, Google, etc.

With prices rising.

And dealing with Meta which has to approve your ads, limit your content, potentially ban you, and can break down whenever (which it’s known to do) is a pain.

The Case For Email Marketing

Email is the bottom of your funnel.

It’s how you can nurture non-buyers and get them to trust you enough to make a purchase.

Without any form of nurture in the backend, you’re relying on continually showing your customers paid ads (more money) or hoping that they view your organic content (unpredictable) to cross the trust barrier.

With email, you can set up a predictable system of education that sets up your non-buyers to make a purchase.

On top of that, you get retention.

With a customer’s email, you are always able to market to them and stay in their face.

And the best part, it’s cheap.

Email costs a fraction of what paid ads are.

Email has an average ROI of 4000% while paid ads only have an ROI of 200%.

All because of price and the ability to continue to market to customers for cheap.

And with email you have complete autonomy over what you post and when. You have the ability to send, use whatever copy, and use whatever graphics you want.

Without the potential of getting banned.

Let’s look at these two side by side:

It seems obvious - email is more important, right?

Email does have more advantages over paid ads.

It’s way cheaper and you have complete autonomy.

But the problem with email, is that it relies on attention acquisition.

If no one is being brought to your site, how will they sign up for email?

You need to gather consent from a user to email them.

And that isn’t possible without something like paid ads to bring people to the site to see your email sign-ups or pop-ups.

Okay so paid ads are more important, right?

Well, not completely.

The problem with paid ads is it relies on email as well.

Somebody needs to see your brand an average of 7 times to trust you enough to make a purchase (rule of seven).

Without something like email in the backend, you’re forced to show someone an ad seven times which is very expensive.

You may just break even on your CaC and your first purchase AOV.

Then how do you get people to return? More paid ads. Expensive.

Whereas if you have an email pop-up and proper systems in the backend you won’t need to rely on more paid ads to get conversions.

You pay for an ad 1-2 times and someone can join the email list where you can send the remaining content for cheap to convert them.

That’s the perfect setup.

The Verdict

There’s no world where a brand can profitably grow without both paid ads and email operations.

The real solution is to dial in your backend systems through email and THEN scale up your paid ads.

This way you only pay up on ads to get attention.

Then you can convert the attention for cheap with email.

And retain your attention with repeat purchases through email.

Dial in cheap conversion and retention systems —> Scale up acquisition.

This is the way.

Email Inspiration Of The Day

Brand: Magic Mind

Email Design:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MrJXTCWV6S69wB62ZgKx8x3VNYKA5Bue/view?usp=sharing

Notes:
Great concept by the Magic Mind team.

Their product is supposed to enhance brain power and function, so they include a puzzle to test yourself on your skills.

These types of emails are a great way to earn the trust of your list by proving you’re not always trying to sell to them.

And what I’ve found is these types of emails actually can have great returns.

People will still click on any email you send. By forcing them to stay on the email for 60 seconds to solve the puzzle they are more likely to go a step further and check out the site.

Try these types of games out with your list!

A/B Test Result Of The Day

This client test was vs a large top graphic and button for a flash sale.

The bottom version was a quick header and a button very high up in the email.

The results tell us that for sales it may be helpful to be brief with your graphic and get straight to the button rather than spend time trying to put a cool graphic.

This audience is much more straightforward and prefer to get straight to business, so be sure to test with your own accounts.

Helpful Links Of The Day

• Davie Fogarty’s advice on scaling an ecommerce brand

• Funny thread on exposing celebrities and their potential info-products

• Mamba Mentality Mindset

PS - Happy Pi Day!

Here are the first 50 numbers of pi:

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510

Reply to this email if you have any questions or further content you want covered.

Cheers,

Max