How to Combine SEO & Email Marketing

Taking the time to reach the specific target audiences is often extremely costly. That’s something you may be trying to avoid, especially if you’re marketing on a budget. So what are your options?

SEO (search engine optimization) and email marketing are both useful and cost-effective content marketing strategies that are guaranteed to help your content reach its target audience.

There is one clear goal between these two types of marketing that allow them to be used together effectively: providing your target audience with your products and services.

In this article, we are going to explore what SEO marketing and email marketing are, and give some tips and tricks on how these two marketing strategies can be used together to help you meet your marketing goals.

What is SEO marketing?

Have you ever wondered how search engines decide the order they show websites on results pages? Search engines will take the key phrases that are searched and match them to websites. The more the website matches the key phrases that were searched, the higher it will be on the list of websites that the search engine is showing.

Search engines, like Google, will use bots to search webpages and collect all the information on each individual webpage. The bots will then sort the information that they learned from these webpages into an index.

These indexes can be thought of as a library with an infinite amount of information. When you need information about a certain topic, the librarian (or search engine) will search through the indexes to find the exact information you need.

Search engines are extremely efficient in getting you the information you need. They have specific algorithms that will analyze the page of the index. When the pages are being analyzed, they are taking into account hundreds of factors that will determine which pages will show up. And, of course, this is all dependent on the specific question that is being asked.

Continuing with the library analogy, this process would be equivalent to the librarian reading every single book in the library, then giving you a list of what books would answer your question, in order of how likely they are to answer your specific question.

SEO, or search engine optimization, takes advantage of the way that these search engines run. SEO is the process of changing the wording on your website to improve the visibility when there are searches done on Google, Safari, Bing or any other search engine people may use.

The more visibility that your website pages have in the search results will bring in more attention. In turn, this will attract more prospective and existing customers to interact with your business.

SEO can become very useful, because unlike paid search ads, search engines can’t be paid to get higher rankings on organic searches.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing utilizes both digital marketing and direct marketing. It is a powerful tool that creatively uses email to promote your business’s services or products. By using email marketing, you can help make your customers aware of new offers, or latest items.

Email marketing can also play a crucial role in your marketing strategy. With brand awareness, lead generation, and building – or keeping – relationships with customers that will keep them engaged between purchases.

One of the best marketing tools you can use is email. It is extremely cost-effective, as it does not take much to put together an email that will be sent out to thousands of people. In 2015, there was a study completed by the U.K.-based Direct Marketing Association (DMA) which found that for every dollar spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is thirty-eight dollars.

Not only is email cost effective, but it forces people to take action. Your email will sit in an inbox until it's either read, deleted, or archived. This means, at the very least, the customer is looking at the email briefly, and keeping your brand in mind while they decide what to do with your email.

Taking place in email marketing can help your business maintain a relationship with your audience. While doing this, you direct traffic to your social media, website, blog, or wherever else you’d like people to visit.

With email marketing, you can abandon generalized email blasts. Sending out generalized emails to hundreds of thousands of people usually results in no conversation.

Segmenting your email list is the process of targeting customers by demographics, so you only send people the content that they would like to see. By segmenting your email list you are setting yourself up for success - your clients are more likely to get involved with your brand if the content is catered directly to them.

4 Tips to combine SEO & email marketing

1. Leads with SEO content:
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   SEO content can provide you with a steady flow of leads over time. In fact, email marketing is the largest marketing channel reach for many companies.
   
   To optimize your lead generation, you simply just have to look at your email data, and analyze which topics or offers have the best open and click through rates. After a while of email marketing you will have built up a great history of data for your lead generation efforts. This data can be used to help with prioritizing your SEO efforts. From this data, it will be extremely easy to identify and optimize the top-performing offers and keywords from your email campaigns.
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2. Use email to drive SEO traffic:
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   The clear benefit of using an email campaign is that traffic is going to be driven from your email to your website or social media.
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   Emails that are simple tend to work the best. Adding fancy images, graphics, or a painfully long introduction is not needed. Instead, you should include a quick introduction then link to your content.
   
   There’s a lot of time put into creating valuable content for your website and social media accounts. Take pride in being able to show off your hard work - it will lead to getting views, likes, and shares.
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3. SEO-Driven email marketing:
   
   When you are creating your SEO email template, it is important to keep in mind that the proper wording can help you build website traffic. Ultimately, the goal of email marketing is to get customers to move from their email inbox to take action with your product recommendations.
   
   An email search engine works similarly to online search engines, they take into consideration keywords as well as content. Using longtail keywords, which are keywords - or phrases - that are longer and more precise, may encourage your customers to continue reading. Eventually they may click on one of your webpage links, improving the ranking of your website.
   
   With these circumstances, it becomes crucial to only add in high-quality keywords to your email. Start with SEO research to identify the high-quality words for your audience. This can be done with the help of one of these platforms:
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   -Ahrefs
   -Google Keyword Planner
   -SEMrush
   
   Once you have a list of keywords for your audience, be careful not to use too many at once. Your email should include only a couple of the keywords or phrases, saving the rest for another email.
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4. Co-branded landing pages for SEO and email marketing
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   Your landing pages shouldn’t be hidden. They are key to your marketing success. You should take time to optimize your landing page, as it will result in higher search engine results. Optimizing your landing page can be as simple as a great page title, URL structure, or high-quality keywords.
   
   You may be wondering what co-branded landing pages are, and how they tie into email marketing. Co-branded landing pages ties an affiliate that has referred traffic to your website to your landing page.
   
   There are a couple ways to add affiliates to your landing page such as adding their logo, or a page splash up to welcome the user to your website.
   
   Using affiliates to recommend your product via email can be simple and effective. Audiences tend to trust affiliate’s recommendations, so having a co-branded landing page for referred customers will drive home their recommendation.

Tying it all together

SEO marketing and email marketing are simple and cost effective marketing strategies that your brand are most likely already using. Combining the two strategies could be the ideal change for your brand. Make sure to use our tips and tricks to help your campaign go smoothly.

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