Over 144 billion emails sent each and every day. Despite that overwhelming number, email marketing remains one of the elite channels for business communication. Why does email work, even in the face of SO much competition? One of the most obvious benefits of an email campaign is that it can drive traffic to your site.
So how does the signal separate itself from the noise?
Finding the key to a stand-out message is critical to a successful campaign — whether that means adding to your bottom line, or building engagement and brand awareness.
We’ve got a few steps to follow to make sure you’re reaching your email marketing goals.
Personalize Your Email Marketing
A significant element of email marketing is the relationship. Does a recipient trust you? Does a recipient even know who you are? When an email jumps the gun by forcing familiarity too soon, the personalization comes across as invasive. Relationships are earned in real life, and it’s the same way with email.
Consumers now expect the email newsletters and content they receive to be tailored to their interests. If you’re able to personalize, you will drive more traffic to your site, leading to more sales and opportunities.
How do you personalize email content? If you’re not already sending specific messages to your various customer lists, the best place to start is by segmenting your audience.
No one knows your customer base better than you. When you review and segment your list of accounts, it should be easy to group these accounts based on their product and services needs.
Tips for Clicks & Driving Traffic
It all starts with the subject line. When it comes to deciding how to craft that subject line, there’s only one area to avoid: the subject line of 60 to 70 characters. Marketers refer to this as the “dead zone” of subject length. According to research by Adestra, which tracked over 900 million emails for its report, there is no increase in either open rate or clickthroughs at this 60-to-70 character length of the subject line.
Either way, a helpful email strategy is to squeeze out more words or cut back just a bit to avoid that 60 to 70 character dead zone.
As a general rule of thumb, you can remember:
Do you want to boost clicks (response) or opens (awareness)? Go long for clickthroughs; keep it short for opens.
The advantage of driving qualified traffic to your site is that it enables you to attract readers that are likely to spend time engaging with specific resources and pieces of content.
Encourage Social Shares
By getting your content in front of your targeted audience, you increase the potential opportunities each email has to be shared on social media platforms.
This is especially true if you encourage your subscribers to share your content on their own social channels within your campaigns. To be clear, Google has denied that social media shares aren’t a direct ranking factor. But increased social visibility can still boost your SEO.
Social rewards and contests act as a motivator for people who may be on the fence about posting to social media. Additionally, providing helpful tutorials or other valuable information that can be shared easily can help you get your message out of the inbox, and onto your customer’s personal pages.
Customers like to feel valued. And if they share a post about your brand with their network and you don’t engage back with them, they’ll be less likely to post again. Write them a unique and personalized reply to their post, complementing their post and thanking them for sharing. Not only will this make them likely to post again. But it will strengthen the customer-brand relationship. Making the customer feel special, valued, and improve brand loyalty.
Conclusion
Part of creating an effective digital marketing strategy is finding ways to use each channel’s strengths to positively impact the others.
And while email and SEO may seem to be unrelated on the surface, there are plenty of ways you can use your email campaigns to boost your rankings and search visibility.
Use personalization and segmentation to drive qualified traffic to your site. This will not only help you move closer to your ultimate site goals but can also improve engagement metrics that have a positive correlation with rankings.
As with everything that we call science, it’s all about doing experiments.
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