How Email Marketing Can Help Small Business Owners Boost Their SEO

Irina Weber

Believe it or not, email marketing is a great addition to your SEO strategy. One of the main goals of any business is to build a loyal audience – rather than getting the audience from paid advertising. The KissMetrics research shows that email has nearly three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined. That’s a whopping 2.9 billion of users.

Every online marketer should use email marketing as a key tactic to share their brand’s content and a permission-based marketing channel for sales. Based on the Content Marketing Institute survey, 80% of marketers that use  email marketing could improve their SEO strategy.

 

Bear in mind that just emails alone can’t do much for your SEO as email marketing doesn’t directly affect your keyword rankings. But it can influence the user’s behavior such as sharing your content, leaving comments on it, linking to it, etc. And after that these actions can affect your website rankings. Monitoring how your website is ranking for different keywords is important. You can use various rank tracking tools like SE Ranking to monitor and improve your SEO efforts.

In this post, I am going to outline some tips and examples you can use to boost  your SEO via email marketing. All these recommendations can be integrated into any sector to reach greater results.

  1. Share your content with a larger subscribers’ base

The majority  of the  online marketers will tell you that a list of 100 dedicated users are way better  than a list of 10 000 customers. Money are not in the quantity of the list, but in the quality. Even if you have a good list of subscribers, you should always work on expanding this list.

The more people see your content and engage with it, the better your SEO results. There are a few approaches on how you can enlarge and enhance your subscribers’ base. For example by trying to make your email readers subscribe to your social networks. The key aspect is to keep them connected to your content, whether you’re promoting it via social media or via email. The more subscribers and followers you have on social media, the more shares, views and opportunities you will get for your online business.

Using your marketing emails to increase user engagement via different channels will give you the chance to boost your SEO results.

Or create subscribe forms on your website or on your blog page as people reading your content might want to get more updates from you. Make sure the text is clear in the input field. SE Ranking does a good job in gathering email subscribers on their blog. At the very top, they clearly explain why customers should join the blog and make this process as easy as possible:

 

Another good way is to make your subscribe form very simple with minimal text and web color palettes. Mattress Inquirer demonstrates it in a good way using the sidebar:

 

Notice that one of the biggest mistakes online marketers do is to send their emails without prior consent or an outline of how often or what type of content you are regularly sending. When you create the email text, you should let people know when they should  expect emails. [Tweet “There is no need to assault people with many emails.”] Give them some time to digest your updates and prepare them to a new piece of information. Many blogs use email subscribe forms and promise people like “free weekly newsletter”, “free email updates”,etc.

 

Once you set the expectation, you should go with quality content and ideas for emails.

  1. Interact with your target audience

For email marketing, it is important to get the right content to your target audience from the start, and not just throw on them any kind of information. Do you know the general rule of all marketing: if they don’t see it, they can’t buy it. This is particularly so with emails. The subject line is the first thing that people see when opening an email. It is evident to make your subject line catching and short.

A compelling subject line induces a sense of curiosity and excitement and is a critical factor to boost open rates.

How to optimize your subject lines?

BuzzFeed provides good examples of punchy subject lines that perfectly fit with the content. I love how the subject line accompanies the preview text. If the subject line has a question, the preview text will provide the answer.

 

Try to avoid the “noreply” type of emails. Likely your subscribers want to respond you. Using this type of email can seem that you don’t value them.  Make sure that the reply address is a surefire way to engage with your audience. Instead of clicking your CTA, customers can directly contact you what poke them up with the further sales funnel.

  1. Use thrilling images

We all love how appropriate the design of your emails goes with your brand. Using nice images for emails is a reliable way that can work for the right audience. Good design and compelling images should be part of your email marketing strategy. They help users better understand your ideas and boost the reader experience.

Don’t try to use unrelated content and stock images as it can distract readers’ attention. Be focused! Make sure that the email header design is also important to catch more attention to your emails. 

Adding relevant charts and graphs is a great visual teaser and encourage people to read your emails and go to the site in order to get more information on this topic.  It adds much value on its own and users get a positive experience with your brand.

Using images in your emails, don’t forget to provide a plain text and HTML versions. Some users can’t view your messages with images. Make sure your emails user-friendly.

In this context, Uber’s emails are very simple and use bright colors and geometric patterns to increase brand loyalty. And it is one of their main tactics.

 

  1. Take content seriously

Content is a crucial thing that directly reflects your messages. Nice and mobile-friendly emails are great, but you should first think about content. Your content should be informative, interesting and detailed. The Priceonomics blog perfectly illustrates a good example.

They talk about the content on the spot and direct users from the inbox to the website to learn more on the topic. They more explain benefits than features.

 

There is no need to tell the entire story in the email message. Keep it brief. People used to scan for important points in order to decide whether they want to read more and take a specific action. Find the way to sum up what readers should know in a good way and let them click the target web page for getting more info.

  1. Use persuasive CTA

As you know that the goal of email marketing is to get much traffic to your website. No clicks, no clients. All works simply. Give your customers more opportunities to interact. A marketing email without CTA is just a message. Your mission is to tell all benefits and prospects and they probably take a target action.

According to the Hubspot, personalized CTAs can convert visitors by 42% into leads than untargeted CTAs. While Copyblogger stated that CTAs buttons can boost by 45% in clicks.

Make sure that your email includes persuasive and clear call-to-actions. Same deal with subject lines, your CTA should arouse reader’s desire to read more and go to the website. Make it as easy as possible to take the action you want them to take. Just using “click here” or “go here” won’t cut it these days.

 

Keep your CTA short and simple. You need to be pushing, not too verbose. Use a time sensitive offer, for example, a sense of urgency that invokes users to click the order in order to miss out the chance. Here is a good example from Fiverr:

 

Generally, all calls to action must be written as like actions. The more persuasive your CTA works, the more alluring it can seem to your audience.

  1. Make your emails mobile-friendly

The first thing that many people do when wake up in the morning is grab their smartphones and tablets. According to MarketingLand, 66% of all emails were opened on tablets and smartphones. If you don’t optimize your email for other devices, you will miss out a chance to get lots of clicks.

Great tips to create mobile-friendly emails:

Take a look at few examples with good CTA from Evernote and Shutterfly. You will notice how clean and simple their designs and styles are.

 

 

As you know that many email platforms like MailChimp and AWeber display how your emails will look like on mobile devices or you can test it by sending out to yourself and check out how it looks

  1. Provide the chance to unsubscribe

All email marketing campaigns should be friendly. No one wants to purchase anything from aggressive shop assistants. If users don’t want to read your emails anymore, you should make it easy to unsubscribe. Otherwise, they will mark your emails as spam that can evoke issues in the future.

Don’t hide your unsubscribe link in your email. They should always view the opportunity in the footer to stop getting your marketing messages. You can view the example from Shutterfly below that demonstrates the “unsubscribe” and “my preferences” links. Notice that these links are separate from the overall text.

 

Key tips and tricks

In counterpart to the above-mentioned tips, use the following ideas for success in email marketing to increase your SEO:

  1. Avoid spam. You may feel that the more emails you send, the more opportunities you will get for development. Too many emails can make customers unsubscribe. The Database Marketing Institute states that two emails per month can increase the open rate.
  2. Don’t buy subscribers. If you want to build a good subscriber list, never do that. It doesn’t make any sense.
  3. Center around value. Instead of buying readers and making them take a certain action, you should focus on providing quality content and opportunities that they may find valuable.
  4. Evaluate everything. Try to use a right SEO platform to get detailed insights into how your audience interact and behave with your content. You can use SE Ranking, Google Analytics and MailChimp.

 

To become successful with email marketing, it is a long process that combines good planning and data analysis to improve your SEO. One of the most effective ways to reach the goal is to start emailing. Using the tips above can help you get key business results.

 

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