Email is one of the oldest digital marketing channels, but it’s definitely not out of date yet. As the matter of fact, studies prove that an email marketing campaign is still highly productive for businesses:

• More than 60% of consumers say that an email marketing campaign influences them to make a purchase.
• For every $1 you spend on your email marketing efforts, you can expect an average return of $38.

This is obviously still a good option for your sales, but how about search engine optimization (SEO)? Can your email marketing campaign boost website ranking?

If you want the short version, then the answer to this question is: Yes, but not directly.

Emails alone cannot improve your position in Google searches. However, SEO and email marketing do support each other if both are executed properly.

Website visitors who consume quality content on your site will often turn into a new subscriber to your email newsletter as well. On the other hand, an effective email marketing message should inspire users to go to your website.

And usually the more click-throughs you get on your emails, the higher the chances of those individuals navigating to your landing pages and becoming new customers.

It’s a magic circle of elements that you should carefully integrate to produce the greatest outcome.
Of course, keyword planning is crucial for email SEO strategies. You need to utilize email marketing tools such as KWFinder or Google Keyword Planner to make sure you don’t miss a single keyword option relevant to your niche.

As a small business, using email marketing services that work in conjunction with your other digital marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tips we can give you.

So we figured we would give you a few more.

In this blog post, we are going to give you the top tips to use email marketing strategy to boost your SEO.

Use Your Email Marketing Campaign to Boost SEO

But there is much more work to do here besides keyword analysis. In this post, we will show you 6 simple steps to integrate your email marketing campaign with your SEO efforts.

1.     Send High-Quality Content

The first and foremost rule of email marketing is to send high-quality content to your email list. It must have useful information and be relevant to the target audience and match their interests. After all, that is the main reason for subscribing to your newsletter.

Since your goal is to integrate your email marketing campaign with SEO, you should always add inbound links to get your email subscribers to go from your email to your website. You can take two different paths – reference the corresponding posts in email messages or create content digests with URLs leading to specific articles.

If you don’t know how to create high-quality content for your own email and website pages, you should definitely use online tools to help you out or hire an email marketing agency:

• Best Dissertation: The team behind Best Dissertation will make sure that your content is grammatically correct, but it can also suggest ideas for your posts or write on your behalf if you don’t have enough time to do it alone.
• Grammarly: The most popular proofreading service will not only make your text flawless but also give you valuable advice concerning your style of writing.
• Paper Rater: This tool checks your content for mistakes and rates your work after completion. This way, you can track professional progress and know you’re on the right path.
• Slick Write: Slick Write essentially does the same things as the previous two apps, but it is designed particularly for business writing.
• Ginger: The last app on our list has all the standard proofreading features, except that it provides users with a more thorough analysis and sophisticated advice.

2.     Mind the Timing

Although content quality is by far the most important aspect of email marketing strategy, there are many other things to keep an eye on in the process. Timing is one of those features that can strongly affect the success of your email marketing automation and SEO, respectively. Not only does when you send your emails play a factor but also how often you send them.

It’s not the same whether you send a promotional email about your new product early in the morning or late in the evening. Each target group has its own peculiarities and you have to take it into account if you want to improve open rates. For instance, business people usually check and read inbox messages early in the morning and late in the afternoon, so you should act accordingly.

A study revealed that Tuesday is the day with the highest average open rates. At the same time, afternoon hours are good for open rates, while evening hours proved to generate the majority of clicks. Besides that, you need to pay attention to email frequency.

As an email marketer, you don’t want to burden your subscriber list with tons of messages every day. Doing so might cause them to unsubscribe. So on the contrary, it is enough to send up to 5 emails a month. You won’t bother customers this way, but you will keep reminding them of your website and probably inspire some of them to visit it.

However, the general rule of thumb is for you to wait for 24-36 hours after the previous email. And why do you need to wait this long?

• After giving them 24 hours, you can safely assume that they had enough time to see and open your message.
  
• Also, you can go for a 30- 36 hours delay after the previous message has been sent. You can assume that those unconverted subscribers probably didn’t see the message because it was sent at the wrong time. So, try sending it at a different hour. This will also target those who had seen the message but were just too “busy” to purchase at that moment.
  

With this being said, it’s best to conduct a/b testing to see which times or days will give you the best email open rate. Moreover, a/b tests will allow you to explore all the options available and maximize your results.

3.     Write Appealing Subject Lines

An average office worker receives 121 different types of emails a day, so you have every right to guess that your subscribers won’t be thrilled to see just another message in their inbox folders. For this reason, you need to write and personalize subject lines to catch the attention of a typical subscriber.

But aside from personalization, subject lines must be keyword-rich to prove that the email is relevant to the target audience. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a welcome email, a follow up message, a promotional email or a transactional email message- the subject line should always be appealing, catchy and direct. A good subject line should also reveal the actual content of the message. So the best thing you can do is to evoke anticipation and curiosity. Here are just a few examples:

• 10 bizarre money habits making Millennials richer
• Deals That Make Us Proud (Unlike Our Nephew, Steve)
• A Native Ad in 60 Minutes or Less

If you can’t seem to create an appealing subject line, you could try the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. This app will help you understand how titles work and give suggestions how to make a perfect subject line for your emails. Also take the time to look at our favorite email blasts and what we like about them.

4.     Link to Social Media

With more than 3 billion active users, social media such as Facebook or Instagram give you a huge potential to boost website awareness. According to the research, email  subscribers are 3 times more likely to share content on social platforms than leads coming through other channels.

Integrating emails with your website and social accounts is obviously a great way to improve the SEO potential of your website. The process is simple – you only need to add social share buttons to your emails and subscribers will get a chance to share your posts with one click.

5.     Design a Beautiful CTA

Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons represent another element that can strongly influence the SEO potential of your email marketing campaign. CTA has to be well-designed and eye-catching in order to convince more subscribers to visit your site.

The most important feature regarding CTA buttons is contrast. When creating your email design, keep in mind that the color of your CTAs needs to oppose the background to stand out from the rest of the email content. Of course, colors should also fit the overall branding strategy so that subscribers can recognize your website immediately. Take a look at the Amazon email below for inspiration. 

You should always add whitespace around CTA buttons to clearly separate it from other parts of the message. The CTA should be larger than other features, but don’t oversize it – just follow the example of graphic design leaders and you won’t make mistakes. This doesn’t only apply to your email templates but to your opt-in popups as well.

6.     Mobile Friendliness

A vast majority of subscribers check emails on a smartphone. That is why emails not optimized for mobile devices get deleted by 80% of users and why not having a responsive design for your website actually hurts your SEO. After all, great user experience is one of the major keys to retain current visitors and gain new ones. So you should bear this in mind while designing your email marketing campaigns and adapt all features so as to meet the criteria of mobile-friendliness.

We will name several aspects of user-friendly design:

• Single column templates: It looks much better on smaller screens than 2 or 3-column messages.
• Larger fonts: Allows receivers to read text easily.
• Small images: They fit better to the mobile interface and also reduce load times.
• Avoid menu bars: Menu bars force people to click and navigate through the message, which is often difficult for mobile device owners.

CONCLUSION

Email marketing strategy is one of the best marketing tactics to increase sales, but it’s also a good option when it comes to improving search engine optimization efforts. You should use this channel to bring more visitors to your website and improve its ranking in the long run.

In this post, we showed you 6 simple steps to integrate email campaigns with SEO. Do you already use some of these tactics, but you aren’t seeing the results you want? Schedule a time to chat and receive a free consultation from our team of experts.