Have you been debating the idea of investing in email marketing? If you have a strong SEO campaign in place, you may think that email marketing is no longer necessary. However, what you may not know is that a combination of email marketing and SEO can boost your overall marketing efforts.
Moreover, a recent study has shown the following results:
- 8 out of 10 marketers consider search engine optimization as excellent or good for ensuring return on investment (ROI).
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- 31% marketers deem it as excellent and 48% as good.
- When it comes to email marketing in light of ROI, 70% of them rate it as excellent or good.
- About 23% consider it excellent and 47% as good.
- Among various other digital promotional channels, the majority of the respondents rated email marketing and SEO as more relevant than the paid campaigns as:
- PPC 56%, affiliate marketing 44%, social media 44%.
From these results, it is evident that email and SEO are the ultimate winners when it comes to digital marketing. These two tools, if woven together well, can help you drive more traffic and ultimately convert the traffic into leads and sales.
Efficient use of Email Marketing and SEO:
If email marketing and SEO are the two avenues for ROI. How can a business use these to attract the audience and attain more results? The more specific question is how can these tools be effectively combined to supercharge your digital marketing strategies?
The simple answer is “use SEO to attract people, and then initiate email marketing to follow-up and convert.”
Now, let’s have a look at a step by step approach to combine these marketing channels effectively.
Step #1: Attract Right Audience Through on-site SEO:
You need to start this by performing proper keyword research. This way, you can find many key phrases related to your niche. Keywords may vary from business to business, place to place, and industry to industry. You may get hundreds of keyword suggestions after a thorough research, and then you have to choose the most relevant ones that fit your business perfectly.
Along with typical commercial keywords like “best family car under 1000″, you may find non-commercial keywords also like ‘tips to buy a used car.” The latter types of keywords suggest that the searcher is uncertain as to how to go about it. Those who usually search with the non-commercial key phrases may be in the very early phase of the purchase.
However, these general and broader category keywords are which you can use to attract more leads on top of the sales funnel. The success is all about being visible to the consumer during the early phase of decision making to create an impression. Once you get a lead, you should nurture it until it gets matured to a conversion or sale.
Step #2: Ensure that you Deliver the Right Content:
Once you attracted the ideal people to your site through on-site SEO, you may want them to sign up for your content. How does it work? How should your sign up page look like?
- Is a blank page with a simple fill-in form enough?
- Should it be strategically designed to offer something exclusive to the users?
Well, you know the obvious answer. You may need to build up your credibility and also make it evident to the users that you are an expert in your niche by providing informative and quality content. Your landing page should have that ‘WOW’ factor to make people take you as the industry leader.
To evoke their curiosity, you have to give some free content. Make it as engaging and informative as possible, and it should be properly tied up with your efforts to navigate a lead through the sales funnel to conversion. The ideal approach to developing landing page content is to keep it 80% relevant and informative mixed with 20% promotional aspects. This effort, if done persistently, can win you many quality leads.
Step #3: Email Marketing:
Now as you have the prospective leads and their emails address, you can start sending emails to them. There are two ways of doing it.
- Start blasting with the one-size-fits-all type of unsolicited mail campaigns to all the leads. It may ultimately result in your emails being marked as junk and get deleted faster without being read.
- On the other hand, you can also plan to have a more targeted and result-oriented long-term approach.
Remember that the consumers you just added to your mailing list are not yet ready to buy from you. You have collected their info through non-commercial search queries. So, instant blasting with sales messages may be a wrong strategy to waste your resources and time on.
Focus on only delivering educational and informative content through email campaigns. Fulfill the receivers expectation for them to consider you as an industry thought-leader and strengthen the relationship.
Do a bit of research to implement it well. You can easily keep track of your performance by seeing which emails got opened and which links they have clicked. If you can identify a pattern where someone is considering a particular product or service, you can prepare more focused emails for them. An example as below
Hi FirstName:
We noticed that you had shown a keen interest in the (product/service). Do you know (brand name) is the leading provider of it and that we have put forth some good deals for you?
Just have a look at what we offer (link)
If they click on the link, assume they are almost ready to buy and pitch in with a sales call at the right time.
Leveraging Email Drip Campaigns for Efficient Email Marketing and SEO Growth:
In order to save time on sending emails, use the tools which were created for this particular purpose. They are called email drip campaigns. You will spend no more than an hour on building an email sequence, adding triggers and delays, and scheduling the campaign. When you click the Start button, the email campaign is launched. After that, every email will reach the recipients’ inboxes only when they perform the action defined in the trigger and according to the schedule. You will only have to follow the statistics kindly provided by the tool.
You should also keep in mind that all these three steps are not a one-time accomplishment, but they need to be done consistently to ensure long-term results. The more you work on this combination, the more fine-tuned it will become. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy in this as every business is different. It may take some time, and trial and error to identify which works the best for your business. If you put in the time and dedicated effort, one can push the limits of the combined power of email marketing and SEO.
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