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Working Together – How Email Marketing Goes Hand-in-Hand with SEM and SEO
by Lauren Hankins on 8.30.2011 in Company News, Interactive Marketing 1
There are so many marketing channels where consumers and information seekers can be reached. Knowing and understanding how all the various marketing channels can work together to optimize your marketing efforts is key to success! Research continues to prove that email marketing can help increase search engine marketing (SEM) efforts. If either email marketing, SEM or both are a part of your marketing strategy, consider incorporating these strategies into your next campaigns.
1. The Nudge Effect
SmartInsight.com describes “the nudge effect” by noting that each email you send is a reminder that your brand exists as well as a reminder of what you sell. Email marketing pushes sales through paid search because of the notice it can provide to subscribers. Email marketing programs are a way of reminding your audience about your product or service and can lead them to search for it online.
2. The Canonical Link
Christopher Penn, vice president of strategy and innovation at Blue Sky Factory, suggests that using rel=”canonical” in HTML-based emails help with search engine optimization. The canonical link can be used in the common “view as webpage” link of an email. When the canonical link is clicked, the email displays as a webpage on the email service provider’s site and any search engine optimization (SEO) benefit is forwarded to the URL specified in the href attribute. The canonical link is an easy addition to your HTML emails.
3. Newsletter Email Archive
Creating a newsletter email archive on your website helps to optimize SEM from all the content and relevant keywords. EmailGarage.com suggests a separate history page to make it easy for search engines to track down your archives. The site notes, “Make sure you follow the basic SEO rules like giving every page a clear title and making a separate history page that links all the newsletters together.”
4. Email Landing Pages
If you’re a B2B company, you know it can be struggle to keep your audience’s attention when you have a lot to say in your newsletter. Provide excerpts in the email instead of full articles and give your audience a “Read More” teaser link to allow them to easily navigate through your email and read on to receive more information on a landing page. Some email service providers make it easy to create landing pages with your emails and even give you options to allow search engines to crawl the pages.
Blue Sky Factory sums it up best:
“SEO & PPC [pay per click] WITHOUT email is like…
Salad with no dressing.
It’s like peanut butter with no jelly.
It’s like Thelma with no Louise.
Well, not really. Really, it’s like an expensive marketing campaign that’s not performing to its full potential. It’s like leaving money on the table. It’s like buying a full-page ad in The Post without including your contact information.”
Adding or incorporating email into your search engine marketing plan is a great online strategy for any company. If you are in need of assistance with SEM, email marketing management, or both, consider working with Brighton Agency’s team of SEM and email marketing experts.
Fabulous ideas, Lauren. I’m especially partial to the e-mail archive idea. Besides helping a site compete for positioning under relevant search terms, an archive of great content would provide plenty of opportunities for internal link building. Thanks for the article!