In a day and age when our Martech Stacks keep getting chubbier and new digital marketing tactics keep surfacing, it is easy to lose sight of the long-established strategies that have stood the test of time. Email marketing, to be specific, is one of the world’s oldest types of digital marketing and it is still kicking strong. According to Statista, around 300 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2020 and that number is projected to only go upwards not the other way around. This vast user base coupled with a high ROI makes email marketing one of the main marketing channels for most businesses.
However, we are not here to talk about how you can promote your products and services through promotional email messages. Rather, we are going to discuss how marketing companies at the level of King Kong leverage email marketing to boost another important digital marketing channel: search engine optimization. For the average reader, there may be no obvious connection between the two. But here is how email marketing can synergize with SEO to elevate digital marketing.
Email Marketing and Website Bounce Rates
With a proper email marketing strategy, you build an email list of highly loyal customers who look forward to engaging with the pieces of content you send their way. Because of that high level of engagement, these users are more likely to delve deep into your website and far less likely to bounce off. So, by incorporating some sort of call to action in your newsletter, you can drive highly targeted traffic to your site and improve its bounce rate.
Keyword Planning and Searcher Intent
Google (or any other search engine) is on an eternal quest to improve its search algorithm to provide users with the most relevant result for their search. It makes sense because there is nothing more frustrating than irrelevant and low-quality results to your queries which is bad business for a search engine.
So, if you want to rank high on the Google search engine result page to drive traffic to your website, you need to create content that contains information most relevant to the queries. But not just any query, only the ones from users that could be your potential customers. Queries that are relevant to you what you do as a business.
In order to create relevant content, you need to know the reason behind the query and the information your users are looking for. Email marketing can help you achieve that. By designing and emailing a survey that asks for your customers’ pain points, challenges, and desires, you gain invaluable insight into their problems. This information can help you plan your keywords more accurately and create content that directly addresses those issues.
Email Open Rate and Clickthrough Rate
Another way to tap into your email list to boost SEO is using email marketing benchmarks. When it comes to assessing the success of your email campaigns, there are quite a few KPIs you can track, of which two can be very useful for your SEO as well.
The open rate which shows the percentage of recipients who have opened a particular email can be used as a comparative metric to see what subject lines capture the interest of your target audience.
Clickthrough rate which is probably the most important email marketing metric indicates what percentage of the recipients have taken action and clicked on at least one link contained within an email. Similar to open rate, clickthrough rate provides insight into the type of content that your users engage with the most.
By analyzing the high-performing emails in your various email campaigns, you can infer areas of interest that are most helpful and relevant to your customers’ needs. These findings can serve you well in your subsequent SEO campaigns.
Brand Awareness and Social Engagement
Email marketing can be an effective tool to direct your most engaged audience (i.e., those who have subscribed to your newsletter) to your social media channels. While boosting social engagement does not have a direct impact on your SEO, it promotes brand awareness which positively influences it in the long run. People who engage with your content marketing through social media on a daily basis, typically make more queries on the search engines about you and your brand. They also tend to share your content more on their social media profiles which increases your reach.
To encourage such behavior in your users, it is important to make the process as effortless as possible by implementing social sharing buttons and other related call-to-actions.
You can also encourage the recipients to review your products or services online. Since search engines want to help people find the right products, getting positive reviews directly impacts your ranking. Positive reviews also increase clickthrough rates as people are more inclined to click on business profiles or websites that are rated well by others.