How to Integrate Email Marketing with SEO

No matter how much people try to convince you; email marketing will never go out of style since it aids marketers in generating revenue while keeping the expenses significantly low. Despite all of its benefits, it can never help your website when it comes to search engine’s indexes. However, all of this is about to change with the simple integration of email marketing with SEO.

On average, billions of professional emails are sent back and forth. Now, if even a small part of this number forms your email readership, imagine what you could achieve once you direct your email traffic to your website.

The benefits of the partnership between email marketing and SEO are tremendous. Because of this, we have compiled a how-to guide that can teach you the skills required for this integration.

this, we have compiled a how-to guide that can teach you the skills required for this integration.

Reuse Newsletter Content

Newsletters provide users with access to gated content. More often than not, marketers use newsletters as a way to promote their latest blogs, products or services. Also, it provides unlimited access to news about exclusive events along with other useful content. The point is, your newsletters should make your users feel special since this is what they were promised while signing up for bonus content.

Sharing of newsletters with a specific group of people creates new content opportunities for your website. Just like that, you can repurpose your email content in the form of research, infographics, blogs or informational articles. Through this way, you can reap benefits from SEO as well.

Usually, newsletters are private and cannot be tracked by search engines. However, when repurposed into any content form, it enables the search engine to not only track it but index it as well. Through this way, your visitors will get new content and at the same time, the search engine will remain happy by feeding on quality content. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

That said, do not make it a habit out of repurposing every piece of the newsletter. Let your visitors know that repurposing is not a daily task and they are still deprived of quality content limited only to your email subscribers. With this, you can compel other people to sign up to your newsletter.

Additional tip: when you are repurposing content ensure that you follow SEO best practices to increase your chances of ranking better in the SERPs.

Create a Digest Email

In its most basic sense, a digest email is a kind of a newsletter which is written in the form of a summary and sent out on a daily or weekly basis. The idea behind digest email is simple which is to freshen up the memories of your readers through information that is presented in digestible bits. Some of the most established companies rely on digest emails because:

1. The summary only focuses on important information. This makes it easy for users to get instant value without wasting time.
2. They are delivered right into the users’ inbox which creates engagement opportunities.
3. They are highly personalized containing business information that is conveyed in a personal manner. This makes the visitors feel appreciated which impacts your website clicks.

Now that you know the importance of digest emails, it is time to reap benefits from an SEO perspective. Since digest emails are delivered to the users’ inbox, use this opportunity to showcase your creative side. You need to create catchy titles with interesting subject lines to compel users to open the digest email.

When creating digest emails, always ensure to include shareable information that has significant value. If you have data-backed research then share them with links. The point is, the more informational content you will share, the more people would be inclined to refer to your data/information in their blogs. This will increase your backlinks and will help you gain authority in a specific niche.

Digest emails can generate positive SEO results only if you are able to send the right kind of content to the right audience. So assess your emailing list and categorize people based on their usefulness. For instance, create a different category for professional bloggers and thought leaders and email them your researches, e-books, or other useful content. This is because they will be more than likely to share your emails’ content with their audience.  

Create High-Quality Content

High-quality content and SEO go hand in hand. To make an impact on your readers, you need to target your subscribers with high-quality email content. However, delivering useful yet great content is not going to take your email marketing and SEO integration anywhere unless you take some additional steps.

Since you want search engine optimization through your email marketing campaigns, you need to incorporate your website’s link into your emails. Design your content in a way that it makes it necessary for the readers to click on the provided links. This is one of the ways through which you can increase your web traffic through inbound links. You can also achieve the same desired results by hyperlinking certain text that leads to relevant blogs on your website.

Combine Emails with Social Media Icons

Subscribers like to share high-quality content and in the absence of appropriate sharing buttons, they cannot perform the action. This is exactly the opposite of what you want!

Social media platforms are a thriving business with billions of users. Among them, Facebook is the most popular which caters to the needs of 66% users daily. Many other social media stats paint a similar picture which creates lucrative opportunities for marketers. So, social media is a huge market and ignoring it would only disrupt your engagement percentage.

On average, email subscribers are 3% more likely to share your content on social media networks than your website visitors. So, trick your subscribers into becoming your business’ unintentional advocates by providing shareable social icons. Doing so will not only bring some SEO appeal to your email marketing but will also drive your engagement levels through the roof!

However, that is not the only benefit you get from this simple integration. When you provide convenient shareable icons, your subscribers will share the content in hopes of benefitting others. This will result in your email content being exposed to like-minded people who have not yet discovered your services. More exposure means higher website traffic and engagement levels.

This is too good of an SEO opportunity to miss; so contact any company that offers digital marketing servicesand plan your email marketing campaign’s integration with social icons wisely.

Archive Your Emails

Archiving emails is done in a bid to store or preserve the newsletter content for easy retrieval. Although archiving emails is done on a professional level for knowledge management and litigation support, you can benefit from this process by storing your previous newsletter issues and allowing easy access to your website visitors.

With the help of archiving, your attrition rate will decrease, you will gain new email subscribers, and you will provide the search engines with a way of crawling and indexing your email content. As a result of this, you can achieve a desirable rank in the SERPs. Additionally, you will be providing your website visitors with a glimpse of what they are missing by not subscribing to your newsletter.

However, there is a slight problem with this. When you archive and repurpose similar content, you are essentially confusing search engines. Because of this, you need to add canonical tags, leading to your original blog, in the newsletter archive. This will prevent the search engine’s algorithms from getting confused with the duplicate content as the canonical tags will guide the search engine crawlers.

The subject of canonical tags can be a little tricky. However, do not worry as we have got the perfect informational guide to help you understand it in details!

Opt for Mobile Optimization

Lately, everyone has been jumping on the bandwagon of “mobile-friendliness everything.” It is a growing trend and we cannot blame marketers for prioritizing mobile optimization since the majority of the internet traffic comes from hand-held devices.

The same goes for email newsletters. According to Litmus, 51% of the readers access emails from their smartphones. These numbers are huge and ignoring the mobile-friendliness market could take a toll on your readership as well as your SEO efforts.

Not having a mobile-friendly email template means that the majority of your emails will be deleted by users without taking any action. In this case, it does not even matter how many social icons you have or how many inbound links you have integrated into your newsletters because users will be deleting your emails even before viewing it. This results in a missed opportunity of driving web traffic and engaging subscribers to impact your SEO.

Still, you can turn this around by following a mobile-friendly template that provides users with a great experience. Additionally, you can opt for single column templates, larger fonts, and smaller images to fit the mobile dimensions.

Make User Engagement Your Goal

The main purpose of an email marketing campaign is to make sure that people follow the provided links to visit your website. Sometimes, inbound links and other shareable icons fail to generate the desired effect. Considering this, you need to amplify your engagement efforts that compel users to take any action. For this purpose, you can focus on the following elements:

• Offers and other incentives: No matter what, people will always appreciate free stuff. Take advantage of the users’ psychology by creating email content that revolves around free benefits, perks or incentives. You can take it a level further by offering time-sensitive deals. Additionally, sharing any exciting piece of content will also encourage engagement.
• Eye-catching CTAs: A well-designed CTA is all you need to pump up your email marketing’s SEO potential. That said, contrast plays a massive role in determining the success of your CTAs. So, utilize particular colors for actionable buttons that are in stark contrast with the overall layout. Also, add a suitable amount of whitespace and keep the CTA’s font bigger than the overall content to draw attention.
• Backlinking opportunities: Some of your subscribers may have their own blogs. By sharing useful pieces of information, you will be creating backlinking opportunities for your website through your emails. So, focus not only on designing vibrant email template but also on sharing high-quality content.

While attempting to increase user engagement, you need to realize that email content alone will not help in reserving a desirable spot in the SERPs ranks. Rather, it is the actionable content that can generate users’ activity. So, create email marketing newsletters that tick off all the ranking factors which search engines use to rank a website.

Use UTM Parameters

Working with email marketing campaigns without any tracking measures in place can result in loss of important data. Obviously, every marketer needs to track link clicks and gain information about the effectiveness of their email campaigns to pinpoint the areas that need improvements. For the purpose of calculated tracking, you can set the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) in place.

With the help of UTM, you can track your online marketing campaigns while at the same time send all the information about link clicks to Google Analytics. At the end of the day, you will be able to track your online traffic, get all the necessary information about the email link clicks, and track improvement.

All of this information will be provided in detailed reports by Google Analytics. You can use these reports to know which email marketing campaigns work for you and which do not.

For more information regarding the implementation of the UTMs, read this helpful article.

The Bottom Line

Running a successful email marketing campaign means an increase in sales, readership, and overall revenue. If you do everything by the book, you may even improve your website’s SEO efforts. Through this way, you will not only enjoy an increase in the coverage but your website may also secure the desired position in Google’s SERP.

Because of its immense benefits, we have enlisted 8 strategies that could help you achieve your engagement goals. You can also take help from affordable SEO services to put your email and SEO’s integration attempts on steroids.

Now that you have the recipe for success and are better equipped to sail through Google’s difficult ranking algorithms, what are you waiting for?! So, get down to business, experiment with all the above-mentioned strategies and try to figure out the best route for a successful integration!

About the Author

Shawn Mike has been in the field of blogging for the last five years. He provides ghostwriting, SMM and copywriting services. He occasionally writes articles for Dynamologic Solutions, a web design and development company.