Envelopes.com’s top priority last year was to draw traffic and generate sales from a new web site feature that allows consumers and small businesses to design and create personalized business cards, envelopes, stationery and invitations. “We are known for the envelope and we wanted to develop a business that helped people create what goes inside the envelope,” Laura Santos, director of marketing, says.
To determine the best way to develop that business, Envelopes.com was willing to spend $15 per keyword—many multiples of how much Envelopes.com and most other online retailers are willing to spend to get ranked high on search marketing pages.
Envelopes.com’s marketing team justifies a high keyword price by reasoning that it would draw enough shoppers interested in such terms as “wedding invitations,” “petal-fold invitations” or “pocket-fold invitations” that it could analyze how they navigate a page and thus improve that page.
“Spending $15 on a keyword such as ‘wedding invitation’ for us is expensive, but how shoppers tracked the site when they clicked through on the term helped us better understand their behavior and develop more specific but less costly keywords such as ‘vintage invitations’ that got us great results,” Santos says.
After they had gathered the data they needed, marketers turned off the $15 keywords.
Developing more expensive and complex paid search marketing campaigns is time consuming—it could take five days to build and execute a targeted paid search campaign, Santos says. But the effort paid off with sales of do-it-yourself printing products expected to top 40% of total print revenuein 2014 at Envelopes.com. “It paid off to specialize,” she says.
Envelopes.com spends 60% of its marketing budget on paid search. The remaining budget is divided among:
- traditional printed direct marketing, 31%;
- e-mail marketing, 3%;
- search engine optimization, 3%;
- social media, 3%
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