If you listen to the word on the street, email is dead. Sure, we all get it, email started with the AOL era. The thing about email is that although no one likes to admit that they are on outdated mediums, who among us doesn’t open up our email with coffee to get a start on the day? Email might not be as prominent of a prompt as text or instant messaging, but it is still a useful tool for marketers looking to gently offer or promote something.
The Advantages of Email Marketing
Most of us are slaves to our smartphones. We are almost like Pavlov’s dogs, when our text message chime goes off, we are quickly at it. But the thing about a text is that it is supposed to be reserved for friends, family, and important business at hand. The average person doesn’t like it when their texts are blowing up with offers that they either don’t care about or are clouding their already too much incoming sensory overload. Emails, however, are not in our face. Emails are only opened when we choose to take a look, but we still do, don’t we?
Email Marketing Increases Your SEO
SEO is the practice of using resources and tools to make your website more visible for an organic search. What is an organic search? It is what we all do on a daily basis. When you want to look for a product or service, where do you go? Google. Google’s entire job is to match your inquiry with the most likely website to get the information that you need. They do that by ranking your site according to many criteria. Driving someone to your site is just one way to rank higher on SEO.
How Does Email Marketing Help Your SEO?
The idea behind email marketing is that you softly tell your email list about a production, idea, industry thought, or news through a tagline that gets them intrigued. Then, you add a link to your website. That link will guide them to read what your newsletter hinted about, whether that is a promotional code that you use or a new trend that you explain on your blog page. The act of guiding the viewer to your website itself is what we call “traffic”. The more traffic you get, the higher your SEO ranking goes.
Repeat Visitors are Even Better
Another thing that searches engines like Google use to rank your site is something called “repeat visitors”. That is a fancy way of saying people who go to your site more than once. They calculate how many times an incoming IP address goes to your website. When they go once, you get a point for “traffic” if you can guide them there twice, three times, and so on, then you get bonus points for “repeat visitors”. So, if you continue to provide the viewer with relative and value-added information, then you will get point after point by guiding people to your website.
What is a “Bounce Rate”?
The thing that Google does better than anything is weeding out things that aren’t working to match the right query. They do that by finding tricks that are just that, tricks. So, let’s say that you put something in your newsletter that guides the viewer to your website. When they get there, what you promised isn’t available, or easily accessed. If they land on your site to find what they want, and they don’t, they are going to quickly flip to another site. The time that a visitor lands on your site to the time that they bounce to another is all calculated. If they land and stay longer, great, if they bounce quickly, not so great. The moral of the story? Make sure that if you are going to guide someone to your website, you give them something to make them want to stay there.
How do you Collect Email Marketing Leads?
There are a ton of ways to collect email marketing leads. People usually keep their email, especially business, close to the cuff. No one likes to open up their email every five minutes to find another 300 emails that they can’t go through, nor do they want to. If you are going to collect emails, therefore, you have to give your lead something that adds value. Adding a contact form on your website promising something like information about promotions, coupons, or industry news, is a great way to collect leads to re-market. Also, offering extras like ebooks about how to, information, and insider “specials” all make the consumer feel like they are getting something for nothing.
How Often Should I Use Email Marketing?
The answer to this is specific to what you have to give away, say, or add nuance to. If you are someone who updates your website daily, offering advice, news, and new trends, you can send an email every time you do something different. Again, you want to stay in the stream of consciousness of the consumer, but what you don’t want to do is beat it into them. A 20% off coupon today is the same as the 20% off coupon tomorrow. If you keep making the same offer sound like something new, you are going to fall on deaf eyes, meaning that you are likely to get unsubscribed. Keep your email marketing relative to what you have to say or offer so that when you do email them, they are more likely to pay attention.
What Other Purposes Does Email Marketing Provide?
The most obvious purpose of email marketing is to enhance your brand. If you keep your email marketing fresh and valuable, then you are furthering your brand. If you keep things consistent, only email when you have something to say, and provide high-quality links, imagery, and authority, along with Google’s EAT principle, then it will help in your overall marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Some people say that email is dead, but then again so is Facebook, television, and every other used to technology that we have already incorporated into our everyday lives. Email is a great way to alert the consumer, but not intrusively, and provide them with some valuable information, promotions, or new products in the marketplace. Just as with everything else, however, it is all about how you use it. Email marketing is a very valuable tool if you do it correctly, the key being “correctly”. If you aren’t sure how to get your email marketing set up, leave it to us. We have the tools and expertise to let email marketing, market for you. Contact us today and let’s get your email campaign up and running!
