eMail Marketing and SEO

eMail marketing is not something we generally get involved with in the SEO industry. At SEO junkies we operate a little bit differently to some as we are part of a group of companies involved in all sorts of online marketing, from building kick-ass websites through Search Engine Marketing as well as traditional and digital marketing.

So eMarketing IS something that we get involved in and I have to admit the potential of eMarketing is undeniable. With a good sized database of contacts you can present your company’s offerings on a plate in easy to absorb lumps, building up product knowledge and brand awareness progressively until your targets can take no more and they start using your services... well that’s the dream anyway. I can say, hand on heart that most companies waste their eMarketing efforts by not following through with the benefits good work can provide, benefits not just to your sales ledger but also to the ongoing future of your company and yes, even to your SEO.

eMarketing can help SEO? How?

SEOMoz recently made one of their excellent Whiteboard Friday videos about this very subject - using emails to build links and before you shout that I’m jumping on the bandwagon, let me just say that while I agree with Rand’s point about using email marketing to feed customers with embeddable objects, in order to build backlinks, I think he’s also missing a little bit of the scope of help eMarketing can provide, with very little outlay.

Just to summarise Rand’s video of using email marketing to help SEO, he suggests driving well targeted and optimised email campaigns at people who would appreciate “stuff”, be it some cool embeddable SEO tips, or a free SEO report (if you “like” us on facebook) or a share-able link to pass on to their friends. All this effort to gain back links from the actions of those users. That is a very good use of eMarketing for sure, and backlinks, social shares and reviews are very good and useful for your SEO campaign, but what if you think beyond the short term and see where eMarketing can fit into your SEO strategy for the long term?

eMarketing (and PPC) in SEO Strategy and planning

Just like PPC Marketing, eMail Marketing is only partially about direct sales. No, really, it is; few PPC campaigns ever turn a profit in sales in the first few months, so the initial part of a PPC campaign is all about the data. Just as PPC feeds your site visits that you can then track and assess their impact and the effectiveness of your pages, so too, eMarketing can be engineered to provide traffic that can be tracked, logged and assessed to see if your website is as good as it can be.

Tying PPC, SEO and eMarketing together is an ideal way to proceed because from Analytics and checking your SEO positions you will know what your site is being presented for by Google, eMarketing lets you target these messages and then split test landing pages to see which has a more positive effect on people’s response and letting you refine you message.

If the effect is a positive one then you can replace the existing content that Google has indexed with great confidence that it should increase the performance of your website. Then when the new page is indexed you can compare the metrics to both the old page and to the response from eMarketing.

You do this because the visits from eMarketing are more targeted and the visitors better prepared by the greater detail they receive in the email. As you par down the information given in eMarketing you can make alterations to metadata to prepare your Natural Search visitors to the same level.

This kind of long term research and optimisations lets you put in less effort than two campaigns run separately for an increase in traffic that exceeds what you would expect from campaigns run in isolation. If during this time you are taking Rand’s advice and driving eMarketing traffic to pages with sharable and embeddable content then you are giving yourself a double whammy of assistance in your SEO campaign!