Can Email Marketing Strategies Reduce The Complexity Of Search Engine Optimization?

With the emergence of different digital marketing tools and platforms, it is cumbersome to keep up marketing activities on every tool or platform. But these days, a digital marketer cannot solely depend upon a single aspect of digital marketing. Incorporating every aspect of digital marketing is the key to success for every business or organization.

For example, just focusing on social media marketing and neglecting search engine optimization of your business’s website or not focusing on email marketing as a channel is a formula for significant losses.

Did you know that the average email marketing return is $41 for every $1 spent?

And, as a digital marketer, it becomes a daunting task to select which digital marketing strategies should be focused upon. Hence, it is essential to pull all the marketing levers to achieve your business goals.

But as every business is different, it is suggested to research and gather the best combination which works towards achieving your business goals.

Yet email marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) remain the most cost-effective and highly effective digital marketing strategies of all time—these two work to drive traffic to the website and convert traffic into sales.

Also, SEO and email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Mailchimp alternatives have made it very easy to multiply the ROI effects. And to back this, check out the report by CMI where almost 85% of marketers highlighted that they use one of these tools.

We know you wonder how SEO complexities can be managed by leveraging effective email marketing strategies. Let’s get started:

Bridging The Gap Between Email Marketing And SEO Strategies

Email marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work hand in hand as they focus on delivering relevant content to the targeted user. With the right content and CTAs, emails can help drive high-quality traffic to the website, increasing traffic.

Though search engines do not index the emails sent by a business, email marketing encourages user behavior such as commenting, sharing, liking, and exploring web pages. These strategies help increase website ranking on search engine page results (SERP).

Hence, every marketer should devise a plan to incorporate an email marketing strategy that can influence your SEO rankings and help you to increase visibility and rank higher on SERPs.

In this blog, we will help you discover everything you need to know about the effect of email marketing on SEO so let’s get started:

How To Influence Your SEO Ranking With The Help Of An Effective Email Marketing Strategy:

1. Personalized Email Content

One of the best tools for reaching out to your target audience is email. It is still effective and has high value for businesses. You might be surprised to know that, on average, every user receives 121 emails every day.

With numerous emails being sent out every day, it becomes crucial to have relevant email content to follow the CTA and perform specific intended behavior on the website.

Did you know?

Having a personalized subject line can improve the open rates by 26%.

So why not try to personalize your subject lines and increase the chance of open rates? A simple way to personalize your subject lines is by:

• Add the recipient’s name
• Keep the subject line short, relevant and crisp
• Try mentioning recent content download
• Mix urgency and personalization

Increasing your open rates is only the beginning of the task. As the deep metric of email marketing is engagement with the email content, the user will land on your website only upon clicking the CTA. Otherwise, it’s all a waste.

The SEO rankings will increase through targeted and relevant email marketing, and traffic and engagement on the website will soar. Hence, the email content should be personalized and relevant to catch the attention. Thus giving a push to your SEO efforts.

You can also personalize the email content on a granular level utilizing artificial intelligence with different email marketing platforms. And yes, never forget to try A/B testing for your emails.

2. Segmentation for highly engaged users

According to the Mailchimp survey, segmented email campaigns had a 14.1% higher opening rate and a 100.95% higher click-through rate than non-segmented email campaigns.

Highly engaged users are those users who usually open emails and engage with them. These users are most likely to search for content or engage on the website itself. Hence, it is necessary to personalize the email creative for highly engaging users for SEO purposes.

Various tools and dashboards are available to measure user engagement to determine the list of engaged users. It is essential to understand their preferences which require user data.

Try using surveys and questionnaires to help understand relevant content and other specific user data.

Another way to determine the user preferences is by creating user personas post gathering the user data such as age, gender, income, purchasing habits, etc.  Post-building the list of highly engaged users, you can segment the lists in any category.

3. Place email marketing content on your website

These days, it’s pretty common to send out an email newsletter or blog posts to your audience to keep them updated. But one vital point to note is to keep all those articles and content available on the website. Afterwards, users most likely search about the same using keywords on your website or a search engine rather than in their email inbox.

Since keywords drive the results on the search engine results page, therefore, the keywords become crucial in the email content.

For example, a finance professional receives an email regarding an audit webinar, but they didn’t register immediately after receiving the email. The user will then search for the term ‘X company’s finance audit webinar’ later on the search engine or on your website to find the same.

This helps curb the scenarios wherein the user is not ready for an engagement at a point in time but might search for it later.

This also reduces the chances of users missing out on the latest updates on the website and driving traffic.

Pro-Tip for finding the right keywords to incorporate in your email creatives:

1. a) Use long-tail keywords in your email:

• Users tend to remember long-tail keywords instead of short-tail keywords
• Generally, long-tail keywords are more relevant to users

1. b) Reverse-engineering the keywords

Reverse engineering the keywords means thinking about how the audience would search for specific topics later. Instead of searching for blog articles or email content, you start with the keywords or phrases users think about relating to a subject matter.

Remember, there is no best keyword on a topic. Instead, choose the phrase that most of your audience can relate to. The next step is to craft the newsletter, article, or blog content utilizing the exact keywords.

4. Test Different SEO Keywords

As soon as you have compiled a list of relevant keywords, it is necessary to test different keywords to determine which ones work the best with your targeted audience. One of the best ways to do that is to incorporate such keywords in your email creative and test them.

You can try A/B testing or multivariate testing to determine which keywords lead to better engagement on the emails. A/B testing helps you compare two versions of the emails, while multi-variate testing enables you to test several versions together.

Once test results are out, you can find clues about specific words you wish to incorporate in your website for better SEO ranking.

It is recommended to test out keywords in the email body and the subject line. The keywords which improve open rates can be used as headlines or titles in the blog articles leading to improved engagement and relevance.

5. Mention Social Links in the email

The main question arises here: Should you drive your users to your social handles?

The answer is yes. Adding social media links helps increase the virality of your content as it helps distribute content across platforms. The broader distribution provides a better chance of reaching new users and following a link.

It is necessary to build an active presence on social media platforms so that the audience can engage with the content on your social media handles.

Social links in the email also help automate the sharing, which helps in increasing visibility and brand awareness. If you have high-engaging and visual content, the users can share your emails on their social networks and link back to your websites, which can help drive traffic.

6. Automating Email Journeys To Generate Traffic

Automating email journeys is one of the most powerful tools to generate traffic without manual effort. It boosts customer retention. As per Campaign Monitor, ‘just a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 75% increase in profitability.’

Whenever a new subscriber joins, they will follow an automated list of the best posts. The increase in engaged traffic on your website helps in improved SEO ranking. Check out how marketing automation can help you multiply website traffic:

• Optimize Your Customer Lifecycle

Without spending much manual time, automation techniques can help you send automated emails to the right set of audiences. And this results in strategic interaction with your customers.

To do this, first, you need to map your customers to the right conversion stage. For instance, you can bifurcate them based on stages like acquire, convert, experience, retain, and win back.

You can use the same set to plan your content strategies and tactfully reap SEO benefits.

• Utilize Behavioural Triggers To Target Subscribers

As a result of pre-defined triggers, you can target audiences via email marketing automation. Initially, it will require hard work, but you can leave the burden to automation tools once done rightly.

7. Create The Top Of Mind Content For Both Seo & Email

Top-of-the-mind brand awareness provides a lot of leverage over other brands in converting the audience who are already aware of the brand instead of converting the new users.

Top-of-the-mind brand awareness is not created by simply blasting emails frequently; instead, it becomes a way to be classified as a spammer. It requires thinking holistically to determine the content you wish to send to the users that resonates with them when they search on search engines.

Email is just a touchpoint that helps the audience become aware of your brand and build its image. It’s essential to have an effective content marketing strategy that incorporates different types of content such as articles, videos, and social media.

Even though it’s difficult to quantify whether these investments finally give any return on investments (ROI) in the future, it’s possible to reach top-of-mind status with consistent efforts. But it’s the combination of multi-channel activities and heavy creative lifting by the marketing team.

Wrap Up

There is no direct connection between email marketing and search engine optimization. But it indeed has an indirect relation which digital marketers can leverage. Try to leverage email marketing to boost rankings with various methods illustrated above since both strategies aim to deliver relevant products or services to the right audience.

Make the best marketing tools to combine SEO and email marketing to gain a highly engaged audience. The most important way is to abandon generalized email blasts and leverage the power of personalized email. With high-quality traffic, the search engine will rank your website higher. Nothing beats a power couple.