The Hidden Benefits of Email Marketing Towards Your SEO
Did you know that email marketing and SEO, which average returns of USD $40 and $22.2 for every USD $1 spent respectively, are marketing channels with the first and second-highest ROI?
So, if your business is engaged in both, give yourself a pat on the back!
Email is far from dead even despite the popularity of social media: The 3% increase in email users worldwide from 4.03 billion in 2020 to 4.15 billion in 2021 suggests many people still love receiving emails. For marketers, this has translated into an average email open rate of 19.8% and a click-through rate (CTR) of 11.3% across all industries.
Meanwhile, SEO boasts the next-highest ROI, averaging a 30.55% CTR and arguably being the single-largest organic traffic driver for websites.
The average ROI of email campaigns and SEO is USD $40 and USD $22.2 for every USD $1 spent
But did you know: While not often thought about together, there are synergies between email marketing and SEO that you may not be fully leveraging?
Here, we’ll show you how they can work together towards your SEO, as well as some general tips for running successful email marketing campaigns.
3 Benefits of Synergizing Your Email Marketing and SEO
Maximize Your Content Reach
Content marketing is a common tactic in SEO and is attractive because once search engines index your webpages, your content can start reaching your target audience.
However, consistent content creation can be a burden for some companies, hence why so many convert their high-performing SEO webpages into email content. In turn, the email campaigns can drive additional pageviews to content that you spent time creating, with minimal extra effort.
Email marketing helps you get more “bang for your buck” from content marketing.
Drive Qualified Traffic to Your Website
Email traffic is qualified traffic—email marketing has the benefit of attracting highly engaged visitors to your website, namely those who are likely to be interested in converting and have arrived by clicking on links provided in your emails.
This qualified traffic can also indirectly improve your SEO since it comprises visitors who will likely perform highly coveted actions on your site. For example, they may be more likely to leave constructive comments on your articles and help you build your website community.
We’ve recently heard from Google’s John Muller that user comments can add SEO value to webpages by providing additional context. Your engaged users may also be more inclined to share your content with others or on social, leading to an amplification of reach and more backlink opportunities.
Grow Your Email List
Those organic visitors drawn to your site by your SEO efforts have a higher possibility of subscribing to your newsletter if your content provides value to them. This is especially true for visitors in the awareness stage—the first phase of the buyer’s journey—as SEO can be an effective strategy at this stage in the marketing funnel. You can then leverage email marketing to nurture them and keep your brand fresh in their minds.
In doing so, you increase the likelihood that they will come back to you—as opposed to your competitors—when they have high intent to convert.
So, don’t forget to put an email subscription box on your SEO hero pages!
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4 Tips for Email Marketing Success
Here are some key considerations to watch out for when executing email marketing.
Email Marketing Tip #1: Personalize Your Content for Different Segments
Segmenting your audience and sending them relevant content based on their interests is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic and engagement for your brand. But targeting here requires going beyond demographics and tapping into psychographic data to personalize content based on audience characteristics, interests, and desires.
And each brand may have its own unique audience segments. For example, Nike—one of the world’s most notable sports brands with a behemoth market share—sells products to various audience groups ranging from basketball players to marathoners to your typical everyday customer. Thus, its marketers should target email content that would appeal to each segment to increase their chances of clicking and engaging with Nike emails.
Email Marketing Tip #2: Analyze Your Email Marketing Performance
Email engagement metrics like open rates and click rates are provided by your email marketing tool of choice. These metrics are about how well-received your emails are by the recipients and are invaluable in revealing your audience’s preferences towards your content.
On the other hand, web analytics tools track performance once a user clicks through to your website via a link in your email. Metrics like time on page, bounce rates, or on-page events, will help you understand how email users spend their time engaging on your website.
It is important to analyze performance from both tools to better understand your target audience, as well as what content they may like or dislike. It may even help you tailor your content strategy.
Email Marketing Tip #3: Create Strong Email Subject Lines
A great newsletter is worthless if it never sees the light of day. As such, as the first impression on recipients, your subject line is the biggest determinant of what makes them open or discard your emails.
To this end, it’s vital that you construct subject lines with the right “trigger” keywords and phrases to convince your recipients that it’s worthwhile to open and read your email. After all, maintaining your email list is equally as important as expanding it. But that doesn’t mean throwing in overly used keywords like “cheap” or “free” but instead finding the sweet spot between persuasion and value.
If you maintain an SEO keyword list, the subject line would be a great place to ensure you are utilizing your target keywords!
Email Marketing Tip #4: Archive Your Newsletters Online
One of the biggest hurdles in email marketing is figuring out how to attract more target customers to subscribe to your emails. This often requires providing customers with a “sneak peek” at your offering in the initial interaction; in this case, during—or even before—their email opt-in.
To do this, you can consider making an online public archive of your past newsletters. Not only would this give potential customers a better glimpse at what value they will receive before deciding whether to subscribe to your emails, you could also be giving search engines more of your content to index, provided you have set the archive to be indexable.
After all, if you’ve put hard work into your email marketing, why not get the most out of it as well?
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Email marketing is one of those tools in your digital marketing arsenal that—if synergized correctly with your SEO efforts—can help you unlock more benefits for your business.
Because while email marketing doesn’t directly influence SEO, it can certainly help attract target customers to your site, on top of enabling you to build stronger relationships with them. And it is this qualified traffic that can keep you on the right track to maximize your digital marketing performance.
