Answer: Your search engine marketing (also known as SEM, pay-per-click or PPC) campaigns can have a significant impact on your online reputation and email deliverability. For better or worse, everything that is associated with your company and domain is trackable in the online world. Because search engines rely heavily on relevance in order to serve up organic and paid ads, your online reputation expands every minute of every day.

Shore up your SEM so that it improves your company’s online reputation and supports the likelihood that your email marketing messages will be delivered properly:

Make relevance the priority. If your listing or paid ad features your company’s new skin care product, make sure that the landing page concentrates on that skin care product. If your content is not in alignment with your PPC ad, a customer will consider future ads irrelevant and avoid clicking on them. Search engine algorithms will then label your company’s ads as irrelevant, suppressing SEM/PPC conversions. If a prospect has determined through your PPC ads that you are misrepresenting your offering (an ad for skin care but a landing page that sells Cialis), trust in your company is tarnished and this prospect is likely to ignore or mark as spam any incoming email from your company.

Ensure continuity. Continuity is related to, but distinct from relevance. Continuity is the flow of information from one source (your PPC ad) into all your related sources (landing page, confirmation page, links and Web site). If your ad promises information on skin care products, don’t serve up pages that sell candy. Your abandonment rates will soar. Your conversion rates will be low. And your online reputation will suffer because ISPs gather detailed information about recipient behavior (such as when an email is printed, or which links are clicked within an email).

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About the Author

David Fowler is the director of email strategy, deliverability and privacy compliance for Lyris. He consults with email marketers to help them get better results from their email programs.

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