Finding Synergy Between SEO and Email Marketing

Many marketers ask themselves this question. It has been discussed time and again that both of these marketing media have seen their better days.

However, the statistics don’t seem to confirm this:

• A full 80% of retail business owners/ professionals said that the marketing medium with the best results was email marketing
• Welcome emails garner a whopping 320% more revenue than any other type of emails
• Over 90% of all online activities begin with a search of Google, Bing, Yahoo, or some other search engine
• Almost 70,000 searches take place on Google every second

Are these marketing methods dying out?

Hardly.

Staying Power

First of all, they’re both pretty solid methods of marketing. Despite the rumors to the contrary, both of these marketing methods are tried and true — and from the looks of it, here to stay.

Best of all, they work well on their own and even better when you use them in a marketing campaign together. They can complement each other. Research conducted by Omnisend, a marketing automation platform, shows that business owners who use more than one marketing channel see better results overall than those who only use one channel.

The Purpose of Both of These Marketing Methods

Before we delve more deeply into using these two marketing tools in our campaigns, let’s do a bit of a recap. Once we’re immersed in a campaign, it’s easy to forget why we are choosing keywords, doing marketing research, etc. We sometimes concentrate on getting a lot of traffic without really asking ourselves WHY we want traffic. Traffic that doesn’t eventually convert to something – subscribers, sales – is just that: traffic.

Here’s the deal. Both SEM and email marketing can potentially garner you quite a bit of targeted traffic. In turn, these marketing platforms also have the potential for great ROI as we’ve already pointed out.

However, did you know that structurally they can be really similar in many ways, too? They may not seem like it, but certain components of each of these media types function the same way.

The Subject Line is the Headline

Think of it this way. What makes you click on most blog posts or news stories online? It’s usually the headline, correct? Well, the same can be said for an email’s subject line. It functions in much the same way as the blog post’s headline. It grabs your attention.

As with the most attention-grabbing headlines out there, the subject line is the thing that makes readers want to click to find out more.

Fortunately, if you know anything about creating good headlines, then you have a nice head start when it comes to creating the subject lines for your marketing emails.

Aside from this, your knowledge of SEO will serve you well also. Like the headline you’d write for a blog post, your email’s subject line should be composed of the most important keywords/ keyword phrases.

Bringing SEM Into the Mix

There are a couple of reasons for that. First, your recipients are likely to read the most important words of the sentence. Most email programs will cut off the last few words.

Second, you can repurpose the emails you write by making them into blog posts. Once you turn them into blog posts, the search engines can index them. This means that any keywords/ keyword phrases that you have in your blog posts get picked up by the search engines, making your work easier to find.

In short, SEO-rich subject lines make people want to open your emails, which is the point of your marketing efforts.

Using Keywords

Most of us who have had any dealings with search engine optimization know how important keywords are. These important words coincide with the words that people use when they search the Internet. When you think of email as a separate entity to SEO, then it doesn’t make as much sense to use keyword phrases in your email.

However, when you look at your email advertising/marketing campaigns as something you use in tandem with other forms of marketing like search engine marketing, then using keywords makes much more sense.

By adding keywords into your emails, you save yourself some work later if you do decide to use your emails as future blog posts. They’ll be ready for the search engines and there is no need to go back and add keywords. You’ve already done that.

These new blog posts may actually attract new subscribers to your website by making those emails to your current subscribers into blog posts that will attract new subscribers.

Creating Shareability

Finally, it should be noted that good content is content that is meant to be shared. When you turn your emails into blog posts, you’re giving your subscribers something to share on social media. Now they can forward your marketing emails to their friends, family, coworkers, etc.

However, when you provide them with a blog post based on your emails, you’re giving them the opportunity to share your content on other social media sites, like Twitter, Pinterest, and the like. This gives your marketing efforts more juice, which in turn could mean more subscribers and more sales for you down the road.

Final Words

Your most successful marketing campaigns should include both email and search engine optimization. These two marketing powerhouses have been used in countless advertising/marketing campaigns with very good ROI. They perform well on their own and even better together. Best of all, many of the techniques you use for one platform will adapt well to the other platform, saving you time and energy.

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**About the Author: Evaldas Mockus is an SEO specialist working at Omnisend. He specializes in link building and content promotion. You can find him on Linkedin.