Email marketing is all about building relationships with your customers and monopolizing on your leads in one of the most low-cost, yet effective ways.
Email is the marketing asset that provides you with a tool to create an interconnected buyer’s journey, from first impression to the checkout. It’s your opportunity to speak to your customers directly and personalize their experience for ROI success.
The question is, could it also be the key to your ranking success? Couples with the right keywords, mobile optimization and sharable content, your email content may be the source of your SEO prosperity.
Why Is Email Marketing Still So Relevant?
So why is email marketing still so important for strategy success? As one of the oldest marketing tools in the book, this form of conversational outreach is vital if you want to see both your sales and SEO rankings rise.
As you can see here, business leaders continue to rank email-based marketing highly within the new digital climate, with 23% suggesting that it generates more leads and a further 19% claiming that it improves their sales and conversions.
Email marketing’s true importance and widely celebrated success however comes from its ability to create a conversational experience like no other. Harboring the power to be customized to adhere to each user’s personal buying journey makes this conversational tactic a great retargeting and retention strategy.
Another reason email is still so important is the fact that after all these years, technological evolution and a handful of generations, people still check their email. In fact, there are a whopping 4 billion daily email users, making it one of the best ways to gain customer engagement.
The Benefits Of Investing In Email Marketing For SEO
Let’s have a closer look at the benefits of email marketing as we delve deeper into why this traditional strategy won’t just boost your conversions, but your rankings too.
It’s A Low Cost, But Effective ROI Strategy
A recent report by Marketing Week deemed email marketing to be one of the best ROI strategies that a business leader could invest in. Generating an estimated £29bn in retail sales yearly, it’s no surprise that post-pandemic e-commerce companies are using this technique to their advantage.
Roughly, the return on investment of email marketing stands at $40 for every $1 spent, making it one of the most low-cost, yet effective routes to take on your next campaign.
Unlike other forms of advertising and consumer engagement strategies, there are no large overhead costs for billboards, television or print-based ads. Smart marketers are able to target their consumers directly for far lower prices.
Ranking above SEO ROI and mobile optimization, email marketing takes advantage of modern-day impulse buying and can send a customer from their inbox to the checkout in one low cost, call-to-action link.
It Aids Retargeting Strategies
Email marketing can also aid your retargeting and retention strategies, which can in turn boost engagement and your site’s SEO success.
With the ability to create an email list segmentation, brands can gain important information from their wide demographic and create targeted responses in return, targeting certain product areas, discount opportunities and tapping into their audience’s values and gratifications for promotion.
Studies have shown that as a result, email-based retargeting strategies boost on-site CTR and engagement, in turn improving the on-site SEO for ranking success.
It’s Easy To Track And Tweak For SEO Success
One of the overlooked benefits of email marketing is the ability to test and track campaigns in order to target your audience more effectively.
Most email-based marketing platforms will allow you to track your open click-through rates and review exactly what is getting traction and, of course, what isn’t.
There are many elements of email marketing you can test, ranging from subject lines to personalization and call-to-action links.
As you can see here, 70% of smart marketers routinely test their subject lines and over half are regularly tracking their call-to-action engagement.
Could It Be The Answer To Improving Your SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, determines how highly you rank on popular search engines such as Google. The better your SEO, the higher up you appear when people type in search terms that relate to your site.
Perfecting both your on-site and off-site SEO can be tricky, but true ranking success comes from a multitude of marketing strategies, rather than just site optimization itself.
While it may look as if there is no correlation between email marketing and your SEO ranking score, your email-based tactics are quietly working in the corner.
CEO of Colorado SEO Pros, Chris Rodgers states that email marketing can gather serious SEO gains by encouraging social shares and backlinks to your site.
“The big connection between SEO and email is the ability to promote targeted SEO content, improve off-page SEO factors, and drive qualified traffic that leads to better engagement signals for Google and other search engines.”
Utilizing your email marketing platforms for off-page SEO boosters such as SEO heavy content creation, sharable email formats and call-to-action links to pages that are in need of qualified traffic will see your rankings rising with minimal effort.
How To Polish Your Email Marketing Skills For SEO Optimization
If you’re looking to personalize your own email content for SEO success, then look no further. We have collated the most effective SEO based improvements to help polish your email marketing skills.
Personalize Your Content
In order to become a master of email marketing, it’s time to get personal. Not only will high-quality content contribute to the success of your email campaign, but personalizing the message will make your consumers more likely to head over to your website and improve your on-site SEO.
As you can see above, experts rate personalized messaging as the most effective email type.
Therefore, it’s time to start segmenting. The trick here is to get to know your audience. Start taking audits of your consumers using analytic platforms such as Finteza, to aid your discovery into what your demographic is engaging with and more importantly what they are not.
Start tracking your site and tap into your social listening skills. Once you have a strong knowledge of your audience’s values and gratifications, you’ll be able to create personalized experiences that will amplify your on-site engagement.
Prioritize Mobile Optimization
Did you know that mobile users are 3 times more likely to check their email daily than desktop consumers?
For an email marketing campaign to have true success, you need to be optimizing your content for smartphone users. Currently, over 1 in 5 email campaigns are not optimized for mobile consumers. Within just three seconds of opening up your email, mobile consumers will bounce if their experience is hindered.
Worst still, unoptimized campaigns may even end up in the junk folder, and no one is going to find you there.
Instead, why not start optimising your content for your smartphone-friendly customers. Start focusing on UX responsiveness, evenly proportioned content and refrain from using a landscaped layout, in order to favor the smartphone design.
Make It Sharable
Email Marketing may not directly correlate to SEO gains, but social media visibility certainly does. Creating an email content template that can be easily shared across social platforms, is a great way to boost brand awareness and drive search traffic.
Including social buttons and sharable links within promotional emails will enhance your search numbers and drive traffic to your site from widely engaged social platforms.
As you can see in the example above, providing sharable links that can increase the reach of your promotion will boost those backlinks across networks and improve your off-page SEO.
In fact, Hootsuite claimed that brand content that was shared across socials organically performed 12% better in search ranking results, proving that cross-platform visibility is a vital component to focus on when creating email campaigns.
Focus On Those Keywords
The foundations of SEO success rely on the keywords you utilize within your content. This is no different for email-based campaigns, and can often be a great off-page SEO asset.
Perfecting your SEO writing for email will aid your content reach when shared and searched for, and may even aid your site SEO audit.
You can gather a great deal of information from email testing. Emails are a great use of keyword testing as you can track their engagement. From this information, smart marketers will optimize keywords based on the cues they receive from highly engaging email content.
By reverse-engineering those keywords, you may discover new terms and phrases that can aid your ranking factor when included in on-site content, simply using this low-cost technique.
