Email Marketing

Make it Engaging

Perhaps you recently wrote a great article about new strategies for marketing a sales magnet widget on Facebook. Though your blog might get some organic traffic through your regular channels, an email to your list about how they can use these marketing strategies in their own business might increase the number of views (and, therefore, shares, retweets and comments) that your article receives. Here are some other tips to encourage engagement:

1. You have a call-to-action in your blog post, but also include an explicit call-to-action within the email itself.
2. Ask readers to leave a comment after reading your blog about other ideas they have on the same topic.
3. Ask your audience a leading question in an email, linking to a blog post where, of course, they'll be compelled to comment.
4. Write about a service project that your company is involved with, encouraging visitors to share the post.
5. Within your email campaigns, drive people explicitly to your social channels to encourage them to comment on those channels, not just on your blog.
6. Use surveys or past activity and while you are at it, single out those who are good at social sharing on an emotional level.

While engagement can certainly be a positive element within the SEO framework itself, giving subscribers other ways to get them coming back for more on your content is important as well. You don't want to have to rely on using your email list to drive your monthly page view count up.

The perfect world would be for email to not only drive sales but also, over time, encourage more subscribers to connect to your content—and your organization—in other ways. This would also preclude those constant email reminders. Here are three examples:

1. Link to blog posts in your email
2. Provide an opt-in so people can subscribe to weekly or daily updates from your blog
3. If your subscribers like your videos, steer them to YouTube, or Instagram if they like your pictures

Having these "content hooks" help to build your list, engage your audience and helps keep people connected to your fresh, original content regularly, whether you specifically drive your subscribers to that content or not.

Improving Search Rankings

First things first, sending out a slew of emails about terms that are very specific and limiting but you also hope to rank highly is really not a good expectation. However, if you have a campaign of helpful marketing resources, you might attract site visitors by using various marketing-related terms. Emailing might not help you rank in and of itself, but an email that is tailored to good comments and terrific sharing can help propel your business via the elements that search engines want to see in the first place.

Could your search rankings improve if your email subscribers were also following you on social platforms? How much more engagement do you think you would have if you had ten times more people subscribed to your blog via RSS as you have now? At SEO Expert, we can certainly help you find out.

Developing an email campaign takes time. And if you're doing it well, your content provides value to your audience. Best practices for email campaigns includes reusing and repurposing blog content in blog posts and on social channels. For example:

1. If you create long newsletters, turn them into stand-alone blogs by inserting relevant links and placing them live on your blog –allowing you to get the chance of sharing on social media.
2. Bundle the content to other related newsletters, thereby turning short newsletters or three or more emails into one blog post.
3. Allow non-subscribers to learn about your insights and read your messages in other places and not just in inboxes. This also will help with your search engine ranking.