How to make the most of SEO and email marketing integration

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Email Marketing is a cost-effective channel for expanding brand awareness and building the better relationship with the customers through creation of compelling, useful, or entertaining content. When you might think that SEO only matters for the website ranking on the results page, it appears to be more complex and diverse.

Email marketing optimization

Email service providers offer IP addresses and activity monitoring. Abiding by the CAN-SPAM law increases site credibility with ISPs. Non-compliance results in lower deliverability rates, or blacklisting. Some readers opt to read their messages in text form, so it is prudent to have a text version for the HTML email. Gradually progressing to promotional messages as compared to starting with them reduces the chances of "opting out."

Content should have a direct link to the landing page, which has the information about a product, services, and promotions, and operates targeted keywords. Personalizing the content to include specific topics of interest increases the chance of viewing and engagement. When dealing with a larger target audience, segmenting using demographics, interests or preferences is important as it reduces bounce rates. SEO drives traffic to sites that have visible sign-up boxes thus help grow the list. Finally, including social media links in messages bodies engages visitors and recipients in any promotions.

Integrating SEO and email marketing

Simple ways to optimize the template design include:

SEO Best Practices such as optimizing headlines, titles, subject lines, body copy, and anchor texts that link back to specific pages on the site. Pictures should not exceed 600 pixels as most readers only preview texts with the pictures turned off. 

Alt text tags on images enable text-only users to understand the subject matter. "View in Browser" functionality should appear in the template design in case readers have trouble reading the email.

Canonical Tags apply when one wishes to use archives for blogs or newsletters to the website that search engines have access to. They tell the search engine to treat the page as the preferred URL, and that all content will flow back to it.

E-Newsletter Archive is a library of all published newsletters with all relevant topics. All titles are optimized for the naming convention using keywords and Individual links to each newsletter.

Mobile Marketing requires templates to fit mobile screens with responsive designs that adjust to the specific mobile browser.

Subject Lines help readers understand email content before even opening it. They should have little to do with SEO and should engage the interest of the recipient.

Video Emails. Embedded videos as a Call to Action help readers learn more and helps with conversion.

Tracking Campaigns using Google Analytics.

Emails do not limit content as long as they abide by the CAN-SPAM requirements and keep them simple and short. Bear in mind to design them according to the target audience with the SEO in mind. With the future enhancements in Google, email capture will be of significance to businesses as users will not need to visit the website to have their activities captured.