Email has been a popular way to market a business, especially local small businesses with limited resources. Your favorite diner or lunch spot may have a sign-up sheet to receive daily specials for example.
But this form of email marketing generally isn’t too effective as subscribers often feel a bit overwhelmed and don’t appreciate just getting marketing emails that offer no real value.
Integrating SEO practices into your email marketing can prove to be quite beneficial to drawing in new clientele however. And delivering informative content to those subscribers can build trust in your products and services and ultimately bring more qualified prospects.
1. Attract the right audience
First thing is to attract the right people to your email signup page. People ripe for email marketing are generally in the exploratory phase, researching products and services to see which would best suit their needs. Being able to read a blog or article is what they need to see.
This is why your initial pages should be optimized with more non-commercial keywords so you can draw in those people searching for information and offer them an exclusive look at that, useful information.
2. Initial page(s) need to contain compelling data, not marketing
The initial email or landing page a visitor sees should educate the prospect, not market to them. This builds trust and credibility with the prospect that you are an industry authority. People in the discovery phase will be disappointed and leave your site if the first thing they see about you is simply a sales pitch.
3. Offer something compelling for free
Another way to draw people into subscribing to your email listserv is to offer them something special for free if they signup – perhaps a white paper or free trial of some sort. Maybe a weekly newsletter as well that expands on information presented in your initial landing pages.
Whatever it is, it needs to build on the theme of informing them.
4. Send non-commercial messages, especially in the beginning
You’re still trying to build trust now that you have their email address. This fulfills their expectations that your firm is an industry thought leader and you can be trusted. Simply blasting them with marketing emails ruins what you have done so well up to this point, build trust. When you begin marketing to them, do it in a more subtle way by outlining a problem then saying you have a product to deal with it and how.
5. Iterate – Continuously build on your success
Keep inching the bar forward with each of your emails and landing pages. You may be discouraged in the beginning and feel a 1% return isn’t worth your time. But make each one better than the last and strive to build your rate of return. A lot of this has to do with building your search engine rankings with keyword-rich content so in the beginning, you will not have much response by default.
Here’s a great video from SEOMoz that explains how melding SEO and your email marketing can drive much more qualified leads to your site or storefront.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Email Marketing and SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.