Even though email marketing has been around for decades, it’s still one of the most effective way to drive traffic and leads. That’s why it’s crucial to your marketing strategy and should be a key component of it. The great thing about email marketing is that it’s low cost and versatile. In addition to helping you engage with customers in a measurable way, email marketing can also help you improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) rankings.
Most people don’t realise this, but there’s a strong correlation between email marketing and achieving better search engine ranking. The best way to maximise this connection is by linking to your website content whenever you send out an email newsletter.
Still not convinced? Read on to find out the main ways through which email marketing affects SEO rankings.
Increases On-Site Engagement
In addition to driving qualified traffic to your website, you must find a way to increase the level of engagement that readers have with your website. The end goal is to ensure that people are engaging with different types of content and resources from within your website. You should try to increase the amount of time visitors spend on each page of your website while reducing overall exit rates.
Why is this important? It’s important because a visitor who spends an extensive amount of time engaging with the content and resources on your website is more likely to convert than one who spends less time. So you want to keep people engaged with your content as that’ll also decrease bounce rates and increase time spent on your website, both of which are essential variables to improving SEO rankings.
Attracts Qualified Traffic
A good email marketing strategy will help you attract qualified traffic to your website. Qualified traffic refers to visitors who’ll prospectively take an action that’s beneficial to your business once they visit your website. Personalisation is one of the best methods to use in achieving this. Once you use it on your email marketing, you’ll significantly increase your chances of converting visitors into buyers once they get to your website.
Personalisation means tailoring content to user needs, especially when you send people email newsletters. Most people will only open an email if they think the topic is specifically relevant to them. So, you have to be very particular with how you create content for your email marketing campaigns and website.
If you can do that, then you’ll increase your chances of getting qualified traffic to your website. You’ll attract visitors that’ll actually take action and purchase what you’re selling, whether it’s a product or service.
Since the whole point of SEO marketing is to increase profits and attract customers, this makes email marketing a lucrative and essential strategy not to be overlooked. The best part is you can easily get started with personalising the emails you send to your audience if you’re not doing so already. It’s pretty easy to get started.
Helps Develop a Targeted Content Strategy
As any experienced email marketer will tell you, it’s vital to analyse some of the key elements of your emails from time to time. It’s helpful to test things like subject lines whenever you’re running a campaign. Other important elements you should analyse from time to time include personalisation elements, calls to actions, messaging and design.
The more you test these elements, the more you’ll be able to build valuable data on them that’ll help you improve over time. This data will prove especially useful when doing on-site optimisation.
Keep in mind that the email list you’ve built over time is a representation of your target audience. Tracking the preferences of your existing email recipients allows you to make informed decisions about the strategies you use on your website and other channels on which you have a presence.
Encourages Social Shares
Another important aspect of email marketing is to encourage your target audience or subscribers to share your content on social media platforms. By adding this call to action, you’re increasing the chances of getting your content in front of many other people and attracting traffic with similar preferences.
While there is no direct correlation between social media shares and increase SEO rankings, there is an indirect connection. The more social visibility you have, chances are, the better your SEO rankings will be.
Turns High-Performing Emails into Website Content
The best approach you can follow when crafting email marketing content is to do so according to your subscribers’ preferences. This means carefully picking topics that they’re interested in and crafting email campaigns that are relevant to their needs.
For example, you can use the strategy employed by the United Capital financial life management firm when they first started email marketing.
United Capital simply hired a content curation service that would source content from other publications and then send it to their target audience. They would send topics related to trending financial industry topics, as well as other themes and topics that the target audience may be interested in based on established preferences.
Later on, United Capital pivoted their strategy to become an effective lead generation tool. They did this by generating their own original email content, based on subscriber preferences while covering topics that weren’t catered for by other publications in their industry.
Conclusion
The hallmark of an effective digital marketing strategy is to create a positive symbiosis between the different channels you use. Part of this involves producing email newsletters and campaigns that you can leverage to boost your SEO rankings and make it easier for people to find you online.
You can start with something as simple as personalisation to attract qualified traffic and boost engagement metrics. This will significantly improve your site’s search visibility and rankings. As you study analytics from each campaign, you’ll be able to craft even more effective emails and better content strategies. In fact, you can even re-use high-performing emails on your website as blog posts etc.
Plus, the more relevant content you generate, the more social shares you’ll get. Taken together, these factors will help to improve your website’s rankings and search visibility.
