Ways Email Marketing Can Influence your SEO Ranking
When you are on a tight budget, you cannot afford to waste any resources. In the realm of SEO and digital marketing, one way of leveraging the available resources is by investing in email marketing. Compared to other digital marketing strategies, this form of marketing offers the highest ROI.
Here are some fascinating statistics to help you understand why email marketing is so powerful.
- In 2019, the global use of email was 3.9 billion globally
- By 2023, there will be more than 4.3 billion email users globally
- In 2019, 293.6 billion emails were sent daily
- For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $42
- 9 out of 10 digital marketers use email marketing to connect with their customers
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the process of sending marketing material to potential customers via email. The content is targeted and personalised to resonate with the customers well. If well-executed, it can help businesses create good relationships with customers and generate sales.
SEO, on the other hand, is almost-science of ensuring that your on-site and off-site content is listed as high as possible in search engine results pages when the target audiences do a search using the target keywords.
When creating digital marketing campaigns, and this includes email marketing, getting your website to the highest position in SERPs should be your main priority. It is possible to spur engagement with the target customers and generate qualified leads by using email marketing. This form of content is also used to promote SEO content, thereby helping you get more social shares and even backlinks.
All these SEO gains from email marketing will have significant positive ramifications on your online business and digital marketing campaigns. Let us explore the connection between email marketing and SEO.
1: Ensure Email Content is Personalised
Yes, high-quality content will increase the performance of your email marketing campaign, but the content needs to be personalised to capture the attention of the correct audience. For example, if you specialise in selling gardening materials, a newsletter with valuable links to blogs about garden will resonate with readers who love to garden.
Personalise the content based on the demographics and verticals of the audience you are targeting. The more relevant and targeted your emails will be, the more they will amplify your SEO results. New technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) can give you insights on the kind of content your audience would be interested in reading.
Behaviour segmentation makes it easy to automate email marketing processes.
2: All Email Marketing Content Should be Available on your Website
If you intend to send newsletters packed with blog posts or articles, you should make sure that you post the same on your website instead of keeping it in the email. This is based on the fact that after receiving your email, the recipients are likely going to search for the article in a search engine rather than reading the article in their email.
Customers and readers intend to come to your site, but they rely on keywords to get there. Hence, you need to hammer in the right keywords in the creative email copy to avoid losing them along the way. For example, a marketing professional gets an email newsletter with a link to an SEO webinar but opt not to register right away. Later, they can use specific terms in the newsletter to locate the website and register.
Note that most of the email marketing messages arrive in inboxes at the wrong time, when people are not ready to engage with them, so they search for the information later. Having the right keywords will significantly help you to get the highest engagement possible.
3: Spice it Up with Social Media Links
One of the surest ways of increasing search traffic through social media exposure is by including social buttons in your email blasts. Sharing email content will not only drive searches but also boost the amount of traffic that your website gets.
The social buttons will make it easy for people to share information with other people who may be interested in what your company is offering.
According to Sol Marketing CEO Deb Gabor, “if you have high performing emails with compelling content, highly visual content, really shareable content, and you encourage the recipient to read your email to share that content with their network on other social platforms with links back to your site, that can drive traffic,” she said.
4: Create and Maintain a Highly Engaged Email List
The success of an email marketing campaign is based on the quality of the email list of contacts. Strive to make it as highly engaged as possible to increase open email rate. If they are engaged and interested in the content you are offering, they will actively open the emails, read the content, and click the link to visit your website or landing page.
Even if they do not visit your website immediately, they will remember to do so later if the content resonated with them. Advanced marketing tools such as Salesforce Pardot offers several tools that you can use to gauge audience engagement.
Take the time to study the target audience and learn about their preferences to build a list of engaged users. With this information, you will be able to create SEO content that will pull potential customers to you seamlessly.
Segment the email list according to the interaction you have had with them in the past to boost SEO and response rate. This will involve studying their digital body language. Ideally, you need to send the right message to the right audience and at the right time.
5: Test Different SEO Keywords
A/B and multivariate test different SEO keywords to know which ones you should include in your email content. Note that there is a difference between A/B tests and Multivariate tests. A/B tests refer to when you compare two different versions of an email while multivariate testing investors using several versions of an email.
The test results will help you to know which type of email content best resonates with the target audience and leads them to look for the content later. Tools such as Infusionsoft can carry out both tests and provider a more in-depth analysis.
There is a lot of insights that you can get from emails if you do the tests. For example, you can get cues of specific words that you should be using as keywords in your site content.
When doing email marketing, subject line testing is also essential. Try different keywords in your subject line as well as email bod copy and monitor the results. The results will help you to learn how to optimise keywords based on the emails that the target audience is interacting with.
6: Consider Reverse-Engineering your Keywords
By reverse-engineering keywords, we mean think about which words that the target audience is likely to use online to search for content about your brand when writing the newsletter. For the best results, incorporate phrases that people are more likely to think rather than simply using the best expressions.
As Cassidy notes, “ It matters what the majority of the population thinks of when they think of this topic.”
Final Thoughts
The main goal of email marketing is to deliver the best content possible to potential customer’s inbox. The content needs to resonate with them and motivate them to perform an organic search about your brand or products immediately or in the future.
To achieve the best results, you should discontinue from simply blasting out as many emails as possible. That is a sure way of becoming categorised as a spammer. The right thing to do is picture email marketing as part of the overall digital marketing strategy.
Finally, SEO and email marketing and intertwined and they both depend on each other. Email marketing influences SEO ranking, and vice versa is also accurate. Come up with a way of balancing the two to get the best results from each.
SEO HERO can help you with all your email marketing and SEO needs. We have been doing this for businesses in Hong Kong and abroad for more than five years now. Get in touch with us for more details about our services. Our goal is to help you win and won’t stop until that is achieved.