Electronic mails or e-mails are one of the oldest digital marketing channels to exist, but that in no way undermines its importance or relevance even in the current times. Not only do they help you to connect with your customer base directly, but it can also drive significant traffic to your website. The cost-effective nature of email marketing makes it a perfect tool to integrate with SEO campaign. According to the reports, e-mail has an average ROI of $38 for each $1 spent, i.e. 3800% ROI which is astounding.

What is Email marketing?

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy which uses electronic mail as a medium of sending commercials messages to potential or existing customers. Emails gives a platform to the marketers to reach out to the consumers directly in a personalized and dynamic fashion.

All the digital marketing channels impact each other in some way or the other which might not be apparent immediately, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any connection, as with email and SEO. While SEO helps in bringing traffic to your website, you have no control over the quality of it. On the other hand, emails are sent to people that you have segmented into particular groups based on their preferences and interests. Hence, the traffic you receive on your website via emails is more refined and relevant.

Making use of email marketing has several benefits and here a few reasons why it is one of the most effective marketing channels:

  • Boost sales – Email marketing is a great way to drive sales. According to Marketing Week, email generates around $37B retail sales annually.  People act on impulse when they receive an email telling them about a relevant product that they’re interested in. Featuring similar items to their past purchase or giving out specials discount coupons in emails can entice the reader to go to your website and make a purchase. Email gives you an edge over other marketing platforms. Thus, optimizing your email marketing strategy to boost sales is the most basic way you take advantage of emails.
  • Improve bounce rate – A part of the search engines’ job is to know the duration of time that people linger on your website and what portion of them quickly takes off. This percentage of people who leave immediately is your bounce rate. The bounce rate is an important factor in search ranking.The hatchway to cut down your bounce rate is by creating excellent content. Linking excellent content to your email newsletters can give you a somewhat command over the quality of visitors to your website. Visitors that come to your website via email links are generally more engaged and invested in your content.
  • Get qualified traffic – The most immediate and visible advantage of an email marketing campaign is that it spurs your website traffic. And that is what you should be looking for, just not exactly so. You don’t want a spike in arbitrary traffic. What you should be looking for is qualified traffic, simply put, the visitors who will take some action and give you conversion after they land on your website. A great way to achieve this relevant traffic is through personalization. Personalization is the need of the hour in modern email marketing campaigns. Giving users a personalized experience through content that’s tailored to their interest can send relevant traffic to your website. It also has the potential to spark a certain loyalty in the recipients of the email. The goal of every SEO strategy is to increase conversion and get relevant traffic. If you can drive qualified and targeted traffic to your website through your email campaign, there’s a huge chance for them to convert.
  • Generate a better ROI – The power of email marketing strategy lies in its ability to generate an attractive Return on Investment (ROI) for all sizes of business. A 2016 survey conducted by Direct Marketing Association and Demand Metric (DMA) found that email had a median ROI of 122% which was four times higher than other marketing formats examined, including social media, direct mail, and paid search. Thus, making email marketing a priority and channeling its potential can improve your ROI handsomely.

These are just a few benefits of email marketing. There are several other advantages of email marketing that perhaps needs its separate blog. All in all, its suffice to say that designing an email marketing strategy with SEO in mind can reap benefits for you.

In this post, we will discuss how to do email optimization from an SEO standpoint.

email optimization infographic

  1. Send high quality content – The first thing to keep in mind while strategizing your email marketing campaign is to send high-quality content. Your content has to have relevancy and also match the interest of your target audience. Since your main goal is to combine SEO with your email marketing campaign, you should consider adding inbound links as much as you can. What this will do is redirect your reader from the email to your website.You can do this in two ways:
    • Give references to the posts on your website in your email.
    • Create newsletters with URLs linking to your website.

    Email provides a terrific platform to distribute single/multiple pieces of content and get people to read it. Thus, utilizing its potential to send out quality content can lead to a good surge in relevant traffic.

  2. Link to social media – It wouldn’t be wrong to say that your social media presence is directly related to your search engine ranking. In a 2016 study of 23 million social media shares, it was found that the top five highest-ranking pages on google were also the top five most ranked pages on social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+. An email that provides shareable links to social platforms will encourage the subscribers of your newsletter to promote it on social media channels. Ask your subscribers to share your content by including a CTA. In this way, people who were unaware of your brand will see you on social media through your subscribers. This increased visibility can be a driving factor for organic engagement on your website.You can also make indirect use of social media shares to:
    • Find opportunities to link
    • Build brand awareness
    • Establish valuable connections

    social media links

  3. Make your subject line stand out – Now sure you’ve got the most crafted email linking to your website full of amazingly written content, but how will you get the subscriber to open your email? An average office worker receives 121 emails per day, so what can you do to make your email stand out against all the other emails that they’ll make an effort to open and read it? Well, by writing appealing subject lines. Subject lines are everything, in the sense that they can make or break your game. Subject lines should be catchy while also hinting to the content of the email.Here are some tips to write creative subject lines:
    • Write keyword-rich subject lines to emphasize the relevancy of your content to the target audience.
    • Use a casual and friendly tone.
    • Make use of trendy lingo and style to connect with the audience.

    subject lines

  4. Mind the timing – There is no doubt that content is king when it comes to email marketing, but there are many other factors that you should consider along with the it; and timing is one such factor. It can influence the success of your email as well as SEO campaign. When you send your email and how often you send them also play a role in this scenario. A 2019 study has found that the best day to send emails to get higher opening rates is Tuesday. Adding to that, subscribers tend to read their mails either at 10 a.m. when they’ve arrived at work or after 1 p.m. after their lunch. Open rates are higher during afternoon hours while the majority of clicks are generated in the evening hours. But you don’t want to spam your subscribers with several emails in a day. You also need to keep frequency in mind. Sending 4 or 5 emails in a month is enough to inspire some visits on your website while also not annoying them
  5. Optimize your CTAs – The whole point to optimize email marketing strategy is to get subscribers to click and convert them by sending them to the landing page. This is where the call to action (CTA) buttons come into play. A well-designed and smartly placed CTA in emails can compel the subscribers to visit your site. You want your CTA to be visually distinctive, in the sense that it should captivate the users’ attention. You can optimize the call to action button in the following ways:
    • Keep the color contrast in mind while designing your CTA. The use of opposing colors can make your CTA stand out among the content, thus drawing attention.
    • Twist the language in such a way that it subconsciously pushes the reader to take action, for example, emphasize the urgency (do this now) or give a community feeling (join us now).
    • Give readers more opportunity to click and convert by adding links and buttons that direct them to your landing page.

    optimize cta

  6. Optimize for mobile devices – Mobile emails account for 24 to 77% of email open rate, depending on your target audience, product and email type. This percentage is too big to ignore. Besides, having a mobile-friendly website has hardly ever hurt SEO. You should optimize your emails to give the readers a good mobile user experience. Your email should be responsive and easy to load even on mobile devices. You don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to convert a lead because your emails are not compatible to load on mobile devices. Bear these tips in mind when optimizing email design for mobile users:
    • Use a large font size. Since mobile screens are small you don’t want your reader to turn away because they couldn’t read.
    • Reduce load time by using smaller images.
    • Use large CTA buttons that are tapped easily with thumb.
    • Use single-column formatting to write texts.

Wrap up

An efficient digital marketing strategy involves making the best use of all digital channels to positively impact each other. Integration of email marketing with SEO can result in tremendous results that’ll not only improve your search visibility but also boost your sales. Thus, you should work on email optimization and design your email marketing campaign while being mindful of SEO and what you want to achieve with it. Email is cost-effective, so you can experiment with it. Identifying interesting topics and building your content around it will engage your users, thus increasing subscribers and cementing the position of your brand in their minds. So, channel the power of email and make it the backbone of your SEO campaign’s success.

References:

  1. 5 Email marketing hacks to increase your open rate
  2. 7 valuable Email marketing strategies to increase open rates
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