When you think about email marketing, you probably don't associate it with search engine optimization. However, when these two things are combined in a powerful way, they can become extremely successful in driving traffic to your site. Here is how email marketing and marketing SEO work together to help your business:
- It increases site traffic – With proper planning and strategizing, email marketing can bring you a lot of targeted traffic interested in what you offer. Emails are sent directly to your customers who are qualified leads interested in your product or service, which can improve sales.
- It can help with off-page SEO – When you send out emails to customers, you share your content. Someone might want to link back to your web page from their site and, thus, you can get backlinks, which are important for SEO.
- It creates a sense of trust – Emails sent by businesses to their customers for promotional purposes appear more genuine than advertisements on other sites. For customers, it feels more personal when you reach out to them via email. This can generate a greater sense of trust between buyers and sellers, leading to more sales in the future.
Email marketing campaigns tied to marketing SEO strategies have a greater chance of being effective because you already know who is interested in your business. This is why it's important to combine the two for efficient online marketing.
How to make email marketing and SEO work together?
Email marketing and SEO go hand in hand. While search engine optimization is the practice of influencing the visibility and ranking of a website in the SERPs, email marketing is all about building relationships with your audience through targeted communication. Both help increase awareness and trust, which ultimately leads to increased traffic to your website.
Email marketers interested in improving their SEO rankings should implement email marketing in this way:
- Include relevant keywords in your email's subject line, from the greeting to the call-to-action button. But don't go overboard repeating them.
- Link to relevant pages on your site through footers or sidebars. Internal links boost SEO and keep visitors on your site for longer periods. Don't forget to include keywords in anchor text when linking, but only link when the content is relevant.
- Make sure that the URL of your emails contains keywords relevant to your content.
- Improve search engine optimization through HTML text within the body of your email. Be sure to include keywords but don't overuse them.
- Use social media to engage customers, but don't neglect the SEO aspect. Include keywords in your profile and make it easy for users to share your content.
Email marketing assets that will help you boost traffic
Organizing and sending out a successful email marketing campaign involves more than just typing up a few messages and hitting "send." Creating an effective email marketing strategy requires careful planning. Let’s outline some of the most important email marketing assets you need to succeed.
More relevant content
Email marketing is all about reaching people with relevant content, but it can be challenging to determine what your audience wants to read. Your email content must be up-to-date and relevant to your audience to be effective. This means offering fresh, new content of interest to your customers and providing value to them.
But how do you know what they want to read? This is where email lists come into play. By creating targeted email lists that contain your most relevant customers, you can find out exactly the kinds of topics that interest them most. And with this information, you can determine what will interest others like them and reach a much larger audience through your email marketing campaigns.
As you begin creating your email list, you should keep in mind that different customers want to receive different kinds of information from your company. It's important to allow those on your lists to choose what they wish to sign up for, whether they're interested in coupons, product specials, or company news. This will help you determine what kinds of topics they're most interested in reading about.
Analysis of traffic from e-mail marketing can also give you more in-depth information about your target audience. In addition to what your readers want from your company, you can also discover what they're doing online. By determining how many of them have been to your website or blog, you can better know whether their interests match the kind of content that appears in your newsletter.
Once you know more about who is on your email lists and what they want, you'll have a much easier time creating relevant and engaging newsletters. And the more relevant your content is to your audience, the more likely it is that they'll open and respond to emails from your company in the future.
Link building & link sharing
Creating digests with the useful and latest content could help with link building. If you include links to your website within the digest, it can increase your site's visibility and authority while providing a helpful resource for your readers.
Creating digests is a great way to round up articles, blog posts, images, or other types of useful content. When creating your digests, be sure to add interesting insights and commentary to keep readers engaged. Adding links back to your website will also help boost your site's SEO ranking. By sharing valuable content in a digestible format, you'll not only attract new readers but also gain the attention of other popular bloggers who might want to share your digest.
Personalized emails
Email personalization is much more than just inserting a subscriber's first name into the "From" field of an email message. You'll need to create different versions of email messages for each type of contact, and you'll also need sophisticated software to track which topics are most relevant to each contact.
Personalized emails can help you get a higher open rate and higher click-through rate than non-personalized messages. In addition, personalized messages have a higher conversion rate.
Here are five tips on how to use personalization to make better connections with consumers:
- Segment your audience into groups based on behaviors, demographics, etc.
- Collect necessary data from your customer's profile to make it as specific as possible.
- Don't be afraid to use consumers' first names in the email subject line, greeting, and signature. It will increase your open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
- Make sure your marketing emails are mobile responsive. Consumers expect to receive personalized messages on any device they use, whether a smartphone or tablet.
- Update your email marketing service provider (EMSP) with the new data you've collected and segmented.
Personalization goes beyond sending one message to your entire list; it's about efficiently targeting specific groups of consumers and sending messages that speak to their interests and needs. Such an approach helps to get highly targeted traffic to your website.
**User engagement **
Email marketing is often seen as a standalone tactic that drives traffic and conversions from outside of a website. However, email can also increase on-site engagement - which is crucial for retaining customers and increasing ROI.
You might be surprised to learn that email can help increase engagement on your site, but only if the email and website content match. When you use the same content across your website and email campaigns, you can increase engagement and conversions by:
- Reminding customers to complete a task on your site.
- Customers see your email as informational content, so they're more likely to click-through from the email if the content matches what they were looking for on your website.
- Providing a relevant next step or call to action.
If you want customers to make a purchase, buying guide email content can directly link to the shopping cart on your website. Alternatively, you could use it to link to product or category pages with more detailed descriptions of items they may be interested in.
Asking for a review
Reviews are important for SEO and increase the prominence of your website and brand. Having positive customer reviews can also help boost brand awareness and is an important part of local SEO. Ask for reviews with your email campaign.
Conclusion
Email marketing by itself doesn't directly influence a website's position on the search engine results page. Still, combining it with SEO can significantly boost traffic to your site and keep your site high in the SERPs.