While SEOs help you bring new visitors through search engines, email marketing turns those visitors into your loyal customers. The combination of the two tools creates a great feedback loop: targeted email campaigns bring immediately engaged traffic to your best optimized landing pages, raising your position within search engines.
There is no content marketing method as low-cost and time-efficient as email marketing and SEO. The former makes sure the information will be sent to the targeted customer, and later it will push the content of the website to the top of the search engine for all prospective customers.
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5 ways email marketing and SEO are related to each other
· Turning newsletters into website content
When your prospects are searching for answers using a search engine, they will not be able to see the newsletter contents that are sent to your subscribers through email. However, it is easier to solve by creating a newsletter archive to your website. Now, your prospects can browse your content conveniently and decide whether they need more. You should include some text in the membership explaining that e-mail subscribers will have exclusive access to the latest news. The visitors to your website might be tempted to subscribe in order not to miss out (FOMO) on your content. It also lowered the unsubscribe rate as the visitors were still aware of what you are going to send them.
Otherwise, when you email your blogs, you should also monitor on updating on the site. When you send the email also, ensure the main keywords you are using in your email copy are also reused on the blogs. In this way, subscribers will come across your website when finding those keywords in the search engines. However, as you can see, email marketing and SEO go hand in hand naturally.
· Using the power of social media links and tags
While Google has mentioned that resharing on social media does not affect the ranking, even still, a boosted social visibility can enhance your SEO. Chances of your website ranking at the top drastically increase as more traffic is diverted from the social media shares. Therefore, all the templates in your email campaigns should have social media links. You can also add quick share features for the newsletter to encourage your audience to share it with their social circles.
In addition, it increases your following on your social pages, thus increasing your reach for other forms of marketing. Even if reshares do not boost your SEO rank, you can increase your brand mentions and find more marketing opportunities.
· Drafting personalized email content
A study by Accenture suggests that over 90% of people prefer brands that offer highly relevant recommendations and personalized shopping experiences. Personalized campaigns are no longer a luxury, they have become a necessity. Marketers also prioritize using personalization tactics in their emails over any other marketing channels. Personalized emails hold the potential to drive qualified traffic to your website, thereby, increasing your SEO rank. Moreover, the traffic generated by personalized emails also increases the chances of converting interested subscribers into repeat customers.
Personalized tips, recommendations, tools, and discounts incentivize the customer to spend more time engaging with your emails and website. Improved on-site engagements decrease exit rate. Some seasoned marketers may argue that there is no direct relation between on-site engagement and SEO ranking. However, many have noticed a correlation of high SEO ranking and increased time on site and reduced bounce rate.
· Testing and optimizing content
The A/B tests and the consequent email campaigns provide the marketers with a ton of information. Marketers can use email channels to record the preferences of customers to make better content for them. If not, your subscriber’s social media interactions and online behavior will also give you a clear picture of their preference. This data can also be utilized to optimize your web pages. For example, An example would be if there‘s a positive response to a newsletter heading, you can use this heading on your website to give you more exposure.
Likewise, if a CTA link within an email is always doing well, add it to your website. With Segmentation, you can target the subscriber by many differing verticals and demographics. You are even able to have different website content and email campaigns for different segments of your subscriber list. The smaller the segment, the better the targeting.
· Maintaining a hygienic email list
Use segmentation and micro-segmentation strategies to maintain the hygiene of the email list. Remove the cold and inactive contacts and put the passive prospects in a different segment. By doing this, you are making an email list of highly engaged subscribers. These subscribers are more likely to interact with your emails and visit your website. For the more passive subscriber, you can use highly interactive and responsive email templates to capture their attention. The highly functional Klaviyo email templates will come in handy while you are making interactive emails.
3 way SEO helps email marketing
Got silos in your marketing department? Kill em! When separate functions with separate goals share data, insights, and strategies, the results can be very good.
Let see what robust SEO has to offer for an email marketing policy.
1. Organic traffic and list building
As a “top-of-funnel” marketing strategy, the “natural” traffic that SEO brings to a site is something that email marketers care deeply about: new, potential subscribers.
When people visit new pages on your site a new visitor can easily turn into a new, qualified, email lead. If users arrive at your site from a Google search and they like what they‘ve read, they will want to keep in touch with your brand. Articles and landing pages that draw a lot of natural traffic should include a call-to-action or form so that visitors can sign up to your email. This is how SEO helps you build your email list naturally.
It is also a crucial step in engaging with people at the beginning of a customer journey, and helping move them down the funnel to the next step.
2. Segmentation and lead nurturing
When subscribers from organic search are acquired, then SEO and email marketing can team up to make the communication compelling.
You can also use the pages viewed by the prospect prior to subscription to guide your lead nurturing efforts. E.g., if visitors arrive on an SEO page addressing a particular problem, you may follow up with emails offering to help them with the same issue.
You might also choose to segment the contacts who signed up from your emails by the type of content they visited. For instance, if your brand has B2B and B2C audiences, you could create different signup forms depending on the content they clicked on. So you can make sure you send targeted communications to each group.
3. Subject line ideation
The keyword research that SEO experts perform can actually help email marketers improve their open rates. In fact, finding SEO-optimized headlines can even spark an email subject line strategy.
Occasionally, we get really committed to using the language of the profession, but it doesn‘t connect with our target audience. This is where keyword research can help marketers learn what real people type in search engines to find solutions to their problems and to compare products, and to make buying decisions.
If you include that kind of relatable language in your subject lines and within the body of the email copy, your campaigns will be more likely to resonate with your subscribers.
Title tags are like subject lines in that they are what show up in Google search results, and meta descriptions are the equivalents of preview text, providing, in a sense. SEOs spend time trying to optimize page titles and descriptions for click-through. By looking at which descriptions are getting clicks in the Search Engine Results Page, email marketers can get some inspiration for subject lines.
Conclusion
Marketing is all about increasing the positive aspects of a communication channel while mitigating its weaknesses. Email marketing and SEO cover each other’s weaknesses and help the marketers to come up with an innovative strategy to draw new customers.
Author: Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
