The Best Ways to Combine Email Marketing & SEO Efforts

Send Personalized Content to Your Email List

Personalization is probably the most important feature of 21 ^st -century marketing. According to Salesforce's State of the Connected Customer report, 84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. Every customer feels special and they want to be treated as such.

This means that all businesses using email marketing should approach consumers with carefully tailored content that suits each user individually or at least a highly specific target audience. McKinsey research demonstrates that companies using advanced personalization generate 40% more revenue from these activities than average players. Generic content can only take you so far, but the key question is: How can you personalize email marketing?

It all begins with segmentation because different audiences demand different types of content. HubSpot's segmentation research shows that marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue. You can do it based on users' position within the sales funnel:

• Awareness: It is the initial stage where people simply get acquainted with the problem and the corresponding solutions.
• Consideration: By this point, most users are already showing interest in a specific set of services or products.
• Decision: At this stage of the sales funnel, your content should help customers make a purchasing decision.
• Action: A targeted user is finally ready to take action based on your content and suggestions.
• Retention: Once the purchase is done, you should try and retain a customer with personalized content.

Keep in mind that the sales funnel position is not the only way to segment the audience. According to Forrester's customer segmentation analysis, you can also segment based on demographic features such as age and gender, psychographic characteristics (personal traits and values), behavioral inputs like purchasing habits, and geographic features like ZIP codes or cities.

Of course, personalization goes a long way and you can do more to learn new things about each subscriber individually. For example, you can conduct an email survey to figure out what your subscribers want to watch, hear, or read. Campaign Monitor's personalization research indicates that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. With highly personalized user-related information at your disposal, creating an SEO email becomes a much simpler task.

Include Links in the SEO Emails

When you design an SEO email template, bear in mind it can help you build website traffic and authority with useful links. After all, Mailchimp's email marketing research confirms that the primary purpose of email marketing is to drive subscribers from their inbox folders to take meaningful action based on your recommendations.

Another detail you have to worry about is making your external links trustworthy and meaningful. According to Moz's link building guidelines, relevance and context are crucial factors for link effectiveness. What does it mean?

Well, let's say you are sending a series of emails dedicated to video games. In that case, you are free to include links to the website that lead subscribers to gaming gadgets and the latest game titles. But if you insert links to unrelated products such as shoes or tennis gear, you are about to ruin the credibility of your SEO email campaign.

Another thing you should do here is to use a website ranking checker to inspect Google rankings for the official business website. Google's search documentation emphasizes that understanding your current rankings helps identify the most valuable keywords and phrases you should focus on while designing the content of your emails.

That way, you can concentrate on the most valuable keywords and make sure to add external links that precisely match users' expectations. This will be the result of your link-building strategy, especially when working with SEO management services from an expert agency:

• A quick spike in website traffic
• Relevant content will increase time spent on your pages
• Your search engine ranking will improve over time

Our suggestion is to include links to different types of website content like blog posts, product pages, industry reports, statistical overviews, podcasts, embedding videos into your emails, etc.

Write Relevant and Catchy Subject Lines

Did you know that 80% of readers never make it past the headline? HubSpot's email marketing analysis reveals that 47% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. That's just the way modern marketing works - if you fail to impress users on step one, you will miss the opportunity to present your thoughts and ideas to the wider public.

This is why we urge you to write relevant and catchy email subject lines leveraging the power of copywriting. Campaign Monitor's subject line research demonstrates that personalized subject lines deliver 6x higher transaction rates than generic alternatives.

Subscribers receive dozens of emails on a daily basis, so it's good to learn how to distinguish your subject lines from the crowd of lookalike solutions. According to Mailchimp's optimization research, there are a few basic ideas that work well for most businesses, so let's check them out briefly:

• Keep it concise because you want users to read an entire subject line. Litmus email research shows that some platforms and devices display only 50 or 60 characters, so try and stick to that number.
• Make sure it's to the point. If you don't know how to impress the audience, write a direct subject line that clearly reveals your intentions.
• Ask a question. If you want to engage subscribers, ask them an interesting question and promise to give them a straightforward answer in your message
• Use humor. Write a subject line that makes people laugh. It's an excellent icebreaker and it will encourage subscribers to spend the extra minute or two reading your email.

Align Your Keywords

If you think that the keywords do not apply to email marketing, you are making a serious mistake. HubSpot's keyword research guide confirms that strategic keyword placement in email content significantly impacts overall SEO performance.

An email search engine will take into consideration your keywords and rate the content correspondingly. According to Moz's SEO integration research, if you use long tail keywords and power words that inspire users to keep reading your content, you can expect them to click the link to one of your web pages eventually and hence it will improve the ranking of your website.

In such circumstances, adding only high-quality keywords to your email content becomes vital. It all starts with thorough SEO research as you need to check website ranking of your competitors and identify the finest words and phrases for your audience. Ahrefs' keyword research methodology emphasizes that understanding competitor keyword strategies is essential for effective SEO implementation.

Brainstorming is not the way to approach this task, so we recommend taking advantage of numerous keyword research tools as it is the quickest and most accurate way to analyze your options. According to Backlinko's tool comparison analysis, you can use the following platforms:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Answer the Public

These tools should be more than enough for you to pick the right keywords, but be careful not to add too many target words and phrases to the text. Google's spam policy documentation clearly states that this strategy is known as keyword stuffing, and search engines penalize it immediately.

Another piece of advice is to utilize Google Trends because it will show you the latest topics that your subscribers are interested in. Google Trends documentation explains that you can conduct an analysis based on a specific topic, keyword, territory, and many other parameters in order to filter out irrelevant suggestions.

Encourage Your Readers to Share Your Content on Social Media

Social media networks have become a major marketing tool and we don't even need to explain why. According to DataReportal's 2024 digital report, social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram attract nearly 5 billion users globally, representing a massive opportunity for content amplification.

The number is mind-blowing and it reveals the potential social networks have in terms of SEO and website ranking. Moz's social signals research indicates that you should encourage your readers to share your content on social media because it can give you a whole lot of extra influence and visibility online.

Although there is no clear correlation between social media and search engine ranking, Search Engine Land's comprehensive analysis confirms that more shares, likes, and comments give your content additional credibility and professional authority. In other words, social media does impact your SEO efforts.

You can use email as the generator of social activities simply by adding social sharing buttons to your messages. HubSpot's social sharing research shows there are a few basic options here:

• Add sharing buttons above the fold
• Place them laterally
• Put them at the end of the text

In each case, the goal is to convince recipients to take action by publishing your content on their social media account(s). Sprout Social's platform research suggests trying to focus on platforms that mean a lot to your business because you don't want to confuse subscribers with too many options. For instance, you can only add social sharing buttons for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter if that's what works with your target audience.

Social sharing buttons simplify the sharing process and guarantee to give your business that much-needed awareness on major social media networks.

SEO and Email Marketing Combined: Honorable Mentions

As you might have guessed already, the five tips we mentioned above are not the only ways to combine SEO and email marketing. Content Marketing Institute's integration research confirms that other hacks deserve to be mentioned here, particularly if you want to prepare and implement a powerful SEO marketing campaign. Here are a few more things you should bear in mind:

• Turn emails into blog posts: Who says your email content is not supposed to be suitable for a website? HubSpot's content repurposing guide demonstrates that you can easily turn emails into blog posts and publish them on your website along with many internal links.
• Ask for reviews: Email subscribers are engaged participants who want to take action whenever they notice a good opportunity. In a recent survey, 71% of customers said they would be likely or highly likely to provide a positive review if the company made it easy for them to do so. BrightLocal's review research shows that one such opportunity is to ask subscribers to give you an online review on notable business directories and review platforms. That way, the reputation of your business is going to improve and it will gradually influence your SEO efforts.
• Repurpose old content: Content repurposing is a must-have strategy for companies publishing lots of posts on a regular basis. HubSpot's repurposing methodology suggests that your goal should be to repurpose older articles and give them a better form, packed with new and useful data, stats, quotes, and so on. You can insert older posts into new email newsletters, thus creating excellent content that your audience is likely to appreciate.
• Send content wrap-ups via email: Finally, Mailchimp's content curation research indicates that you are free to send weekly or monthly content wrap-ups in order to inform subscribers about your latest posts, videos, and other content formats. Evergreen posts guarantee to make people interested in your content, so the only job left for you is to refurbish articles and make them slightly different than they used to be in the first place.

The Bottom Line

Email newsletters and SEO represent amazing marketing strategies, but Salesforce's digital marketing research confirms they actually perform best when combined. You can use a variety of tricks to add a little SEO spice to the email marketing equation and make the most of both worlds. We focused on five superior ways to combine email marketing and SEO efforts:

• Send Personalized Content to Your Email List
• Include Links in the SEO Emails
• Write Relevant and Catchy Subject Lines
• Align your keywords
• Encourage Your Readers to Share Your Content on Social Media

We also added some other tricks and hacks your business may find to be useful in an attempt to merge SEO and email marketing. HubSpot's integrated marketing analysis shows that businesses using combined email and SEO strategies see 25% higher engagement rates than those using isolated approaches. We hope you've got everything right, but don't hesitate to write a question in the comments.

FAQs