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Email marketing is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website, increase your sales and stay in touch with your customers.
There is no end to statistics that confirm that email marketing – when done right, of course – can be much better than any other kind of marketing. It makes sense, considering that in 2017, the number of email users reached 3.7 billion – and are due to hit 4.3 billion users by 2022.
Here are some more statistics on email marketing:
- Email marketing has an average ROI of 122% – 4x higher than other formats like social media and paid search.
- Email list segmentation and personalized emails were most effective in 2017.
- Marketers saw an increase of 760% in email revenue from segmented campaigns (which get 14.31% more opens and 100.95% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns).
- Transactional/triggered emails are opened 8x more than regular bulk emails and triggered emails have an open rate of 45.70% and a click-through rate of 10.75%.
- Emails with images have a 26.89% higher open rate and 4.36% higher click-through rate than text-only emails.
- For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get $43 in return.
- 26% of marketers say that email is the marketing channel that brings in the most revenue.
- 45% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective digital marketing channel.
- Email is the preferred way of receiving information as it reaches 79% of the intended users.
The common opinion is that email dies the moment it’s sent so all that content you carefully crafted to make it appealing disappear with it, right?
Wrong.
There are many ways to make your content work for you after you’ve hit that ‘send’ button.
One of the best uses of email marketing is in SEO. How does that work? Google can’t crawl emails, after all. But what if you could, in fact, use your emails to improve your SEO? Click To Tweet
This is a strong possibility if you know how to play your cards right. There are many ways to do this – increase traffic on your blog and improve your SEO – but you need to have a deeper understanding of what good email marketing can do for you.
The first thing that comes to your mind when you think about it is probably encouraging sharing and other ways to engage with your blog or canonicalization of your URLs. But there is a lot more to it – little-known ways to boost SEO and market your blog or website at the same time.
Here are eight easy ways to get the most out of your emails.
1) Encourage Sharing, Engagement and Inbound Links
Sharing is one of the best ways to increase the SEO of your emails and bring more people to your website. As many as 83% of marketers say that social media is extremely important to their business.
Once you create your email, chances are it will contain some shareable bits so it makes sense that your readers would probably like to share them.
People tend to be lazy when it comes to sharing (or taking any action!), so you need to make it easy for them. Include social media sharing icons in your email and ‘Click to Tweet’ options, for example. Click To Tweet
Also, make sure that the bits that they are sharing have a link that leads to your website. Sharing is a great way to improve SEO friendliness since the more shares you get the higher your Google search ranking will be.
While many marketers believe that their lead funnel is a one-way path – from blog content consumption to email subscription – it can certainly work both ways. Encourage readers to visit your blog and consume your content. Research says that 41% of B2B marketers use email marketing to drive traffic to their websites.
Inbound links are another great way to increase your SEO. Encourage your email readers to use the links to your website in their own blog posts, comments or anywhere else that might be useful to them. More inbound links means that you’ll get a better ranking in your SEO since the Googlebots will understand that your content was useful and detailed.
Further Reading:
2) Turn Your Emails into Blog Posts and Archive Your Newsletters
Why let all that content die in someone’s inbox when you can reuse it as blog content?
This is a valid question since everything that you put in your emails would make great posts. Keep that in mind when creating your email newsletters – make them SEO friendly in advance so that you can use them later without changing too much or adding extra keywords, titles, etc.
Here is what you need to do:
- Add keywords to your subject line
- Add keywords to the content of your email
- Use subheadings with keywords in them
- Use alt tags with relevant keywords in your images
- Optimize your links and anchor texts for them
Keywords are, as you can see, essential. Your text should be rich with them but not in an obvious manner – let it come naturally. Use Google to find the best keywords for your subject and add any variations to the words/phrases to the text. Using keywords in your headings and subheadings is also a great strategy since those hold stronger value in SEO.
Here are a few simple steps to plan and add keywords:
- Use Google Keyword Planner to choose keywords that best suit your topic. Keep in mind that it doesn’t give you the exact keyword, so change it up and use different forms of the keyword you need.
- Pick one main keyword and a few other long-tail keywords that go along with that.
- Make sure that your keywords are a natural fit in your article instead of just stuffing them randomly.
Include more text and less images in your emails and blog posts. Google loves text – it’s easy to track, crawl and use for SEO ranking improvement.
Archiving your old newsletters on your website is a good idea, too. You can repurpose what you’ve already written, plus it will allow Google to crawl more of your index pages. Include links that lead back to other content on your website in your archived newsletters. All this creates internal linking which attracts more traffic to your website.
You can lead your users to what you want them to see. Make sure that the content you take them to is relevant to what they are looking for.
3) Create Blog Post Recaps
Updating and reusing your old blog posts can increase organic traffic by more than 111%.
Blog post recaps are a good way to give more life to your blog posts. You can create a schedule of sending your emails on a monthly or weekly basis and then include links to some of the most popular content from that period.
As Robert Lee, a digital marketer at Ukwritings and Studydemic, explained to me:
“You’ll remind people of their favorite blog posts and give those who skipped them a chance to see them, thus driving more traffic to your blog. Select the most interesting articles to display and ask your readers to visit your blog to read them.”
There is room for upgrade from that point: adding personalized links to the blog content that you think your users may like based on information that you have on them. This will be an added value for your readers and it will drive traffic to your website.
4) Engage People with Special Offers
There is no better way to increase your engagement than with special offers. People love getting something for being a loyal consumer and offers like these entice them to do even more for your brand.
A discount can be offered to visitors upon subscribing to your email content – this makes it easier for them to decide whether to join your fanbase or not. You can also offer free e-books, guides, recipes or tips for your new subscribers.
To your current subscribers, you can offer occasional deals and special offers, as well as free exclusive access to valuable knowledge. The thing is, you can’t just give away anything; you have to get to know your users and understand what they would most likely want or need.
Because these tips encourage readers to visit your pages and posts, everything they do will be tracked by Google crawlers – and this increases your SEO rankings.
Further Reading:
5) Write SEO-Friendly Email Content
Writing SEO-friendly content for your emails is, as mentioned before, important if you want to repurpose it later as blog posts. It’s also important to keep it mistake free so that you can continue to represent professionalism. There are plenty of resources available online for you to keep up with the good impression your consumers have about you:
- SEMrush and Google Search Console are both excellent SEO writing and keyword tools that will lead you through writing the perfect email content.
- My Writing Way and Google Keyword Planner help you choose keywords and offer practical examples to display in your email marketing campaign content.
- EliteAssignmentHelp and OxEssays are SEO copywriting tools praised for their execution and quality of service.
- AcademAdvisor and Copyscape are plagiarism tools to assist you in case you are hiring writers and want to check their work for uniqueness.
- Academized and Grammarly are editing tools that assist millions of users to make their content shine with proper spelling and grammar.
6) Ask for Reviews
Local SEO is just as important as regular SEO and asking for reviews is one way to improve it. Ask your satisfied clients to leave you a good review (and direct them where to write it). This will make Google put those reviews right next to your company’s profile name and information. It will aggregate all the positive reviews – and negative, too – no matter where they appear, so it’s a good idea to place an invitation to review your product or services (or your company) at the end of each email.
Good reviews not only boost your SEO and local SEO, but they also give your customers a reassurance that they need to purchase your product, subscribe to your brand or take any other kind of action to engage with your business.
To get the best reviews, make sure that you create an excellent customer experience and treat your customers well.
7) Segment and Target Your Brand Advocates
You are probably aware that a lot of people read your emails passively, without clicking on links or reacting to any of your calls-to-action. But just as those people are passive, there are other people who respond well to everything you do.
These are your brand advocates.
This is a specific group of people that you would benefit immensely from targeting with special content and some sort of exclusivity. Offer content, deals, gifts, etc. that are targeted specifically towards them in return for their performing more of those SEO-improving tasks.
Further Reading:
8) Make Your Emails Mobile Friendly
This ought to be common knowledge by now, but just in case it’s not, keep this in mind: 47% of people use their mobile devices to open emails. This is why you need to make your emails mobile friendly.
If users see that your emails are not mobile friendly, they are a lot less likely to read them. In fact, 57% of people won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile site, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a badly-designed mobile site, and 40% will visit a competitor’s site instead. In addition, emails opened on a mobile device have increased by 180% in the last three years.
This is not an expensive process or an overly complicated one, but it can mean a lot to your readers. Things to keep an eye on to ensure that your emails are mobile friendly:
- Every image should load in a timely manner
- Use a single-column format
- Your email should be under 600 pixels wide
- Use large fonts to make reading easy
- Use large CTA buttons to prevent users from accidentally clicking something else
- Don’t stack links (for the same reason as above)
A good idea is to make your entire blog or website mobile friendly so that your users can easily access your content while on a break, in transport or having any other kind of free time which allows for mobile device usage.
Wrapping Up
Businesses often don’t recognize the importance of emails for their SEO improvement. This is unfortunate since there are so many benefits to be taken from this strategy, which is simple yet very powerful.
SEO-friendly emails are your key to overall better ranking in the Google search results. Make sure that you follow these simple steps – none of them require much time or money, but can certainly do a lot for your SEO improvement.
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