If you have a company with a certain volume of business, you can use Gmail Ads campaigns to send your products and services to users who respond to the customer profile that interests you while they consult their email messages. This way you gain visibility and impact a qualified audience.
One of the main advantages of Gmail Ads is that you can publicize what your business offers to potential consumers that you would not reach otherwise. In addition, your email message will not go unnoticed or end up in the spam folder as can happen with other mass email sending tools .
Another positive point is that this type of campaign offers many combinations in terms of audience segmentation . You can direct your ads to all users who have seen products from your store, to visitors who enter your website from a smartphone or to your customer lists.
And, of course, you can also decide who your ads are shown to based on demographic data such as the sex or age of the users, or based on the products in which they show the greatest interest.
Are you interested in what I am explaining to you? Continue reading to find out more details!
How to create a Gmail Ads campaign
To begin creating your Gmail Ads campaign, log in to your Google Ads account and, as always, select the “Create new campaign” option.
Next, select a goal and the type of campaign you want to run . As you know, Gmail campaigns are a subtype of Display campaigns. In my opinion, it is best not to select objectives at the beginning; When you have more data you will be able to specify your goals.
It’s time to review the campaign settings as well as create your ads . As I’m sure you are familiar with other types of Google Ads campaigns, I won’t need to spend much time on the first section.
In the settings you can choose important aspects such as the country of sale in which you want your Gmail ads to be displayed, as well as language targeting, daily budget or bidding strategy.
The next step, once you have reviewed the additional settings and established parameters such as the ad rotation you want or the devices you want to focus your campaign on, is to create an ad group.
It is best for each ad group to focus exclusively on a specific product or service from your company. Google generally recommends that you include at least three creatives per group .
If you make less than three versions of your ads, it is more difficult for Google Ads to have enough data to evaluate the performance of your advertising messages. Below I’ll give you some basic ad writing tips .
As for setting up the ad groups themselves, there are several things to keep in mind. The first of them is that you must choose the “No automatic segmentation” option, as you see in the image below. This way, you will prevent the system from showing your ads to users who are not within the audiences to which you have targeted your Gmail campaign.
Remember that customer lists are added to your campaigns as another audience. If you leave your list on watch as the Google Ads interface advises, your ads will be shown both to your audience and to other users outside of it, and that is not the goal.
How to make Gmail Ads ads
Broadly speaking, it can be said that there are two ways to make Gmail Ads ads:
- The first method is to create your own creatives, whether it is an image ad or a custom HTML format.
- The second alternative is to make the ads from the Google Ads platform itself.
I highly recommend that you choose to create your ads from Google Ads, this way you will ensure that your advertising through Gmail is displayed correctly on different formats, devices and screen resolutions.
Before writing an ad, I am going to resolve a common question among advertisers: the cost is generated when the user opens the ad . In other words, if someone sees your Gmail ad in their promotions inbox but doesn’t open it, your budget will remain intact.
You must choose the Gmail advertisement option from the drop-down menu and write the fields indicated by the Google Ads interface.
Capturing the attention of people who see your ad is essential. To achieve this, you have several resources at your disposal, such as adding catalog images of your company, a call to action text and even including unenlarged text containing an offer or promotion to attract the interest of your potential client.
Imagine that you have a second-hand mobile phone store. Your Gmail ad could look more or less like this:
- Company name: Second Hand Mobile Phones
- Title: Cheap Used Mobile Phones
- Description: The best second-hand cell phones are in our online store. Buy now!
- Final URL: https://www.movilesdesegundamano.es/iphone
Try not to exceed the character limit for each element, but at the same time, make the most of the available space to convey your message. Adding images or videos representative of your products or services is something that cannot be missed. Audiovisual resources are a powerful tool to connect with the consumer.
An interesting feature of Gmail ads is that you can insert a form in them for users to fill out and contact you in case they want information about your products or your company. This utility is available if you create your ads with custom HTML.
You can check the conditions that you must meet to include forms in the Gmail ad requirements section , within the Google Ads policies.
What is a customer list and what is it for in Gmail Ads
I’ve already mentioned that customer lists were going to help you in your Gmail campaigns, but what is a customer list? It works like a Google Ads audience and is a list in CSV format with your customers’ emails and other data.
Customer lists are available to advertisers who meet certain requirements:
- Your campaigns must have a history of at least 90 days.
- They must comply with Google policies.
- They must have a good payment history.
- You must have made an investment of more than $50,000 in total expenditure.
You may want to review the requirements for using customer match to make sure you meet all Google Ads requirements. You and your team will be in charge of collecting your clients’ data and correctly filling out the fields in the CSV client list before uploading it to Google Ads.
You can use the customer information that you have stored through your website, your mobile application and even your physical store. There are many contexts in which customers voluntarily provide you with their data, and Gmail campaigns are a way to make this research work about your consumer profitable.
The most common fields that you must complete when creating your client list are:
- Email addresses
- Names and surnames
- Telephone numbers
- Country of residence
To upload your CSV file with information about the consumers who visit your business you have to enter the audience manager. Then, within the remarketing lists section, you can create your customer list.
If you look at the image below you will see that you can upload different types of data such as emails, telephone numbers or postal addresses. Additionally, there is a template available for download that will make the process easier for you.
As with any other Google Ads audience, you can use your customer list to target your campaign exclusively to the users within it. Imagine that you are the owner of an online supermarket and you detect that a certain customer profile is more inclined to buy beer and chips, for example.
With this knowledge in hand, you could create a Gmail campaign to promote beer and chips to users who show more interest in these items using customer list segmentation.
Another thing you can do with a customer list is add it as an audience to your remarketing or shopping campaigns . Don’t forget that Google Ads allows you to adjust your campaign bids by audience so that you can invest your budget in the customer niches that are most profitable for you.
In short, customer lists tell you what your customers are like, what actions they are most likely to take on your website, and what their interests are. Demographic factors such as sex or age, for example, come into play here.
Additionally, as you see in the image below, you can check the audience statistics . This way you will know which audiences with purchasing intent and which affinity audiences the users on your customer list belong to.
You can take advantage of all this information to profile your company’s target. A very visual way to do this is to create a series of buyer personas . Putting a face and name to a series of typical customers will help you better understand what motivates your consumers, as well as the possible concerns that slow down the completion of the purchasing process.
On the other hand, by checking the audiences in the market you can get an idea of the products or services of your company that certain users are most likely to buy, for example.
This can help you target your Gmail ads to those most popular products or to get ideas for new products to promote that you already know in advance can have a good return on investment.
Let’s say you own an electronics store and you see a 7x rating on video cameras, for example. That tells you that users on that customer list are seven times more likely to purchase video cameras than the general population. Useful information to plan new campaigns that are likely to be successful.
Related audiences are somewhat less representative because we no longer talk about purchase intention, they are made up of users who show great interest in a topic. However, the information recorded by the system is key to improving your digital marketing campaigns.
As a conclusion to this section, I can tell you that it is not necessary to target Gmail ads to customer lists, but this segmentation is the one that generally offers the best results. Knowing the gender, location and even the devices from which your company’s customers connect is an invaluable tool. Seize it!
What is a Gmail Ads campaign for?
This question is of capital importance: by opting for Gmail ads you can launch a personalized campaign to users who have generated leads to encourage them to make another type of conversion.
I’ll give you an example: consider that you are the owner of an insurance company and it turns out that there are a large number of users who have requested information about specific home insurance, but in the end they have not contracted it.
Using the customer lists you can contact these people who have shown interest in your home insurance to find out if they really want to take it out. And you can even talk to them about other insurance policies of your company to cross-sell.
On the other hand, you can also create lists of users similar to clients. This way you will reach a broader audience with a quality profile, since these users behave in a similar way to people who have carried out actions relevant to your company such as purchases, for example.
I return with the hypothetical case of the insurance company: you could create a Gmail campaign about a specific home insurance that has been well accepted by your consumers.
This hypothetical campaign would be aimed at a list of users similar to customers. If the people who make up your main customer list have responded well to your advertising campaign, it is likely that others with similar concerns will too.
Segmentation is key in this matter . It’s important that you exclude your customer lists from campaigns targeting similar users. If a loyal consumer of your company has already made their purchases, it is not necessary to overwhelm them with advertisements for products that they already have or know about.
The possibilities are multiple. You could design a campaign aimed at users who have already completed the purchasing process, offering them a discount voucher to build loyalty, another to encourage those who have abandoned the cart to purchase the products they have in the basket and even improve your brand image.
Advantages of Gmail Ads campaigns from the point of view of inbound marketing
Inbound marketing techniques are the order of the day in the business world. That being the case, you are probably wondering what benefit Gmail campaigns offer compared to sending emails to customer lists through tools like Mautic or HubSpot.
One aspect that you should consider is that your promotional emails will have greater reach with a Gmail Ads campaign. In addition, you can launch campaigns designed specifically for specific user segments.
Don’t forget that your email ads will appear in Gmail. This ensures reception is guaranteed and, therefore, more users see your advertising. Other shipping methods will not have the same impact.
In short, Gmail Ads campaigns increase the visibility of your brand on the internet and allow you to reach a qualified audience with personalized messages according to their interests and concerns. Have you already tried this type of campaign? Take the step and check the results!
