Email marketing is among the most powerful marketing activities you could leverage to grow your business.
By some accounts, the return on investment (ROI) on email is $36 for every $1 spent. It’s a versatile medium that works equally well for B2B and D2C enterprises. And you can use it for a variety of purposes, including increasing readership, promoting products, retargeting, building a community, and more.
However, the best results always come with an integrated marketing approach. Strategic email marketing and SEO in particular, can be a potent combination to help you increase returns from your outreach expenditure. Here’s how you can effectively deploy this combination.
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How SEO and Email Marketing Complement Each Other
Search engine optimization is a smart investment for most businesses. It helps you grow traffic, increase sales, and establish authority, all in a sustainable way. When done well, it also feeds into a host of other marketing activities, such as improving your content marketing efforts, improving the bid price in your Google Ads campaigns, and boosting returns from your email marketing push.
SEO tells you which queries and topics are relevant to your customers. This is valuable information you can use to craft click-worthy emails. SEO-optimized emails perform measurably better than ordinary ones since they contain information that is genuinely useful to your readers, improving your click-through rates (CTR) and reducing subscriber dropouts.
It’s also a symbiotic relationship in that email contributes to SEO campaigns too.
You can use emails to drive traffic to your website, which, in turn, benefits your search rankings. A newsletter signup is also a good call-to-action (CTA) for prospects who’ve landed on your website and aren’t ready to become customers yet.
Finally, email is perhaps the best customer relationship management tool available to you. Strategic email marketing lets you target existing customers with relevant products and offers, providing them with a service and improving customer lifetime value (CLV) for your brand in the process.
Optimizing Your Emails With SEO Best Practices
Here are some actionable tips to help you create more engaging and convert-worthy emails.
Use Keywords
One of the most effective ways to increase readership for your newsletters is to address topics that are top-of-mind for your audience. If a reader sees your email addressing a pressing query, it can create an instant connection.
Embed your emails with high-volume keywords to increase the chances of catching a reader’s attention. A good email SEO tip is to use long-tail keywords that are easier to include in the copy conversationally and closer to colloquial user language.
There are plenty of tools you can use to find out keyword search volume, including Google’s Keyword Planner and Semrush.
Make sure you embed the keywords in the subject line as well as the email body for maximum impact. If you’re adding links in the body of your email that lead to your website, optimize the anchor text with a keyword as well.
Segment Your Audience
When you’re mailing to large lists, your content can sometimes be insufficiently personalized. Speaking to everybody means you’re speaking to nobody in particular. Segmenting your audience is a good way to improve relevancy and is often the key to strategic email marketing.
Segmented campaigns achieve 101% more clicks and 14.31% higher open rates than non-segmented campaigns.
By segmenting your readers, you can tailor each campaign and email to address specific needs and interests. You can acquire the data you need in a number of ways, including from your CRM system, subscribers’ social media, and third-party email marketing apps.
Get Technical SEO Right
The technical aspect of email SEO is as important as the content. In fact, it can prove to be even more important in certain cases.
For starters, you’ll want to optimize the HTML template, using titles, subject lines, and H1 and H2 tags in the email body. When you’re adding links in the email, make sure you’re linking to the most relevant and important pages on your website. The increased traffic will help those pages rank better on search engines.
Finally, test out any new features or rich media you’re including in the email, such as GIFs and product carousels before you send it. Users have to be able to properly view and access the content in order to engage with your email.
Source: Google
Optimize for Mobile
A BIG part of email SEO is optimizing your campaign for mobile. Mobile devices account for nearly 60% of web traffic. That’s a large chunk of your audience you’re neglecting if your emails aren’t responsive across devices.
Consider presenting your emails as well-formatted, single-column digests. This optimizes the available screen space and makes it easier for your readers to peruse the content. Include a CTA somewhere in the middle of the body so that people aren’t scrolling too long before they encounter one. If you can help it, avoid implementing navigation bars in your email to keep it clean and readable.
You might also want to compress any images and media files you add to the body. Lighter files load quickly and improve user experience for your audience.
Source: Hive.co
Include Videos
Videos are an excellent way to improve engagement on web pages, while also contributing to their SEO. Emails are no different. Adding video content to the body of an email can improve click rates by 300%.
Videos can help you expand on a point you’re making in the email. For instance, you could add product demo videos to promote a product you’ve advertised in the email, or a testimonial video to support your claims. They help drive more traffic to your social channels and are also a good way to break up stacks of text.
Create a Seamless Customer Journey
This tends to be one of the more neglected parts of an email marketing campaign. What happens before and after a user reads an email is as important as the act itself.
Consider if your readers have had a previous experience with your brand and if so, your email should take over from where you left off previously. Your CTA should clearly reflect the next step in the purchase or engagement process. The landing page it links to should continue the conversation and use similar messaging and keywords.
Providing a consistent experience that helps reinforce your brand identity and can lead to improved engagement on your website. Lower bounce rates and increased dwell time, in turn, help your SEO and boost email ROI.
Create an Archive
Search engines can’t crawl and index emails. However, you can compile your emails and post them as a consolidated archive online. This creates a searchable content database that is optimized for keywords and links to various pages on your website.
This approach lets you earn significant SEO benefits from your emails. You could add to the database over time with more emails to indicate to search engines that it’s an updated resource.
It offers newer subscribers a way to catch up on previous newsletters, as well as provides your readers an easier avenue to browse your emails than searching through their inbox.
Analyze, Optimize, and Repeat
No strategic email marketing campaign is complete without tracking and optimizing performance. Analyzing engagement metrics, such as open rate, bounce rate, dwell time, and click-through rate are key parts of email SEO. They help you understand what you are and aren’t doing well.
For instance, if your open rate and dwell time are decent, but CTR is lagging, it could indicate a problem with your email copy. Consider running an A/B test with different messaging to see which one works better.
The average open rate and CTR across industries is 38.49% and 8.29%, respectively, although this can vary quite a bit depending on your niche. Continue optimizing your campaign to see which features perform best and drive maximum revenue and SEO value from your emails.
Rely on Proven Experts for High-Performing Email Campaigns
Strategic email marketing requires a mix of technical and creative skill sets, backed up by solid experience. Coalition Technologies works with some of the world’s top talent to generate 687% more revenue than the average agency. Check out some of our email marketing successes or customer reviews.
Reach out today to implement email SEO and drive more sales for your business. Schedule a personalized consultation and free competitor review for your brand.
