Email Marketing Software: 13 Powerful SEO Boosting Ideas

Email Marketing And SEO

Let's face it, your job as an email marketer is never done. You have content schedules and deadlines to contend with and goals, metrics, and quality standards to achieve. And now they want to throw SEO into the mix? You think to yourself, they have got to be kidding. Having spent the past two decades as a marketing and sales director for a national outdoor goods retailer, I can tell you that it is easier than you think. In fact, if done correctly, all of the elements can play together in perfect harmony.

This article will cover the ins and outs of email marketing software. We will take a deep dive and slightly different twist on the subject to help you exceed your objectives in short order. Finally, we will tie it all up in a pretty bow and help you clearly see the connection between email marketing and SEO so that you can hit the ground running.

Email Marketing Software in Digital Marketing

You are probably asking yourself, what is email marketing software? It is the platform you select to help you manage your email subscribers, segment your email lists, and send out your email newsletters and campaigns. Let's face it: you have probably used the same old tools for years. You have an email subscriber list, a bulleted list of topics to cover, and away you go and start writing. With the right tools, you can achieve more than you ever imagined.  When used correctly, the correct setup will help you quickly master the art of email marketing and achieve your organization's desired sales goals.

You can also attain customer engagement that your team will appreciate and acquire more customers. We all spend time or money to drive leads, but what if we could tweak things just a bit and convert more leads into paying customers? Or better yet, loyal fans and brand advocates. Well, as you will soon see, that is where creatively using all your email marketing tools correctly will help you get to.

Benefits of Email Marketing Software.

Your most loyal subscribers love the content you are delivering to their inboxes. This means that you are already halfway there. It starts with producing high-quality content, but you already knew that, didn't you? The software you select will be vital in getting you home and to the finish line by delivering great content to your subscribers' inboxes. Many top solutions even offer a free plan, so there is no reason not to have an email marketing solution in place.

Email Deliverability

Deliverability is where it all begins with your email marketing automation solution. Does your automated email solution provider employ the latest tactics to ensure your emails get delivered? Using the latest email authentication protocols, including SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) can help assure the authenticity of emails and improve your deliverability. But these tactics are just the price of admission in today's competitive landscape. You are fighting for the attention, opens, and ultimately click-throughs and sales or actions your email list subscribers deliver for you.

Relationship Building

With the right solution in place, you can begin nurturing the relationships with your existing customers or new prospects that you have paid so dearly to obtain. It is an increasingly busy digital lifestyle that we all lead.  If you are not engaging with your subscribers or garnering their attention, someone else is. Be sure you deliver a quality newsletter on schedule and when they expect it. Consistency is the name of the game here.

It may be hard to envision, but many subscribers look forward to your newsletter daily or weekly. It is something they should be able to set their watch to. Make sure you stick to your schedule, even if it means writing a few newsletters ahead and scheduling your email sends. This will pay off for you in the long run and help you maintain a good work-life balance as you scale your email campaigns for success. A quick side note: If you want to launch email and SMS campaigns, find a solution that offers both communication methods. Please take a moment to read our Guide To The 7 Best CRM Software With Texting Options.

Branding and Engagement

This is where it starts to get fun and where I can tell you from experience many email marketers fall short. Let's start with branding. Truth be told, larger organizations typically care the most about the branding benefits of SMS and email marketing software solutions. Think of Pepsi-Cola and Mcdonald's, two organizations with much on the line when competing for consumer mindshare. Even If you are part of a smaller organization, branding is still vital and something that you need to place a due amount of emphasis on.

A solid campaign will help your organization, no matter the size, differentiate your organization from your competitors. You can also increase your consumer credibility and the perceived value of your products or services. You will see the benefits in referrals, a general sense of employee pride, and a sense of belonging by being a part of an organization with strong brand values.

Let's explore engagement, as this is where well-thought-out platforms will help you the most. As a small to mid-sized business, engagement is where the best software can help you pull away from the pack. However, to be truthful, if you have inherited an email list from someone who sat in your seat beforehand, you might have some clean-up work to do to get things in order. Remember that you must have a well-segmented list to drill down to get the relevant messages to the customers who will care the most about them.

By segmenting your list, for example, by category of interest, you can deliver the most relevant content to your subscribers. Let me provide an example for you. In our case, we segment our email list by customer interest, for example, customers who signed up for the list from a CRM or Email marketing software page. There is no use sending information on Database management software to someone who has no interest in that topic. Proper segmentation will help you increase your list engagement, opens, and overall consumer loyalty and satisfaction.

Now on to the next topic, let's explore personalization. If your predecessor did not take the time to personalize the list well for your consumers, now is the time to get that job done. We will know that the fewer fields on the sign-up form, the more signups we will garner. With a well-engaged list, you can double back and give customers an easy ability to update their profiles to include additional information that will help you personalize their emails.

Short of that, you can still personalize by country based on the user IP address of your customer, by category of signup, and by enriching your list with third-party data. Connecting with and personalizing your communications to engage with your customers is important. You can include personalization throughout the email body and headings and by personalizing the customer experience when they arrive at your site. 

A final thought or two on engagement, as this is such an important topic for email marketing. You can use automation to help drive engagement in a few ways. As we touched on earlier, sending your emails on a consistent schedule is key. Use your email software to automate the timing of your emails to arrive when your consumers are most likely to engage with your messages. You can also segment your list by the time it opens and then send it to those consumers at the best time for them. Use the A/B testing capabilities of your marketing software to test different elements, including titles, design templates, and copy.

As you have or will learn, each company is unique, and only through trial and error do you find out what works best for your organization. I saved the best for last. Your analytics data and the measurement capabilities from your software are the holey grail of marketing. You need to not only collect the data but also take the time to comb through it for those little nuggets of insight that it will provide to you. Once you have your hands around the data, be sure that you take action. Modify your campaigns and marketing from start to finish to take advantage of the details you learn from your data.

Achieving a high return on investment (ROI)

If your solution produces results, you can easily see it in the numbers. The customer's lifetime value is an important key to identifying your ROI. Are you growing your list organically, or are you spending to drive advertising to your email list sign-ups? All of these factors will play into your calculations here. The good news is that the analytics built into your solution will help you quickly run the numbers to figure out what is working and what is not. That is the beauty of a well-integrated email marketing package.

Another great question to consider when you look at the dollars, and sense of your email marketing is how you monetize your list. This will depend on the type of organization you have and what your goals are. If you nurture leads for your sales organization, you may not have other interests in monetizing your list.

However, suppose you are in the advertising or consulting field. In that case, you may find that brand mentions, sponsorships, or even affiliate marketing work well to help you maximize your ROI and offset your initial subscriber acquisition costs. If your solution includes SMS functionality, you can use this SMS Marketing capability to your advantage. If you want to learn more about choosing the best B2B CRM and how it can help you succeed, read our How To Choose The Best B2B CRM For Sales Team.

The Relationship Between Email Marketing and SEO

Now that we have a solid understanding of some foundational concepts, let's dig into the heart of our conversation. Every organization wants to rank higher in the search results; that goes without saying. It is the content on your website that will help get you there. It is not a quick nor an easy task, but a cold, hard truth that it takes work and lots of marketing efforts to provide exceptional content for your website visitors. Once visitors arrive at your website, you want them to stay engaged and interact with your content.

Relevant web traffic funneled from email can reduce bounce rates, increase social media engagement, and elevate your search rankings. There are no shortcuts to success in life or online. You need to put in the hard work and provide the best content on the internet to achieve high rankings. There is no trickery, special secrets, or shortcuts to achieving long-term success that will be lasting.  Quality, well-researched, and unique articles with actionable content and relevant facts and statistics will generate backlinks and solid rankings over time. 

It is a fact that email marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are two unique but interrelated disciplines. By working towards SEO best practices, you will see the results of your efforts. Again, there is no magic formulae to follow. Both aim to deliver customer visits to your website and are very similar in that way. The medium of words is the same for both disciplines; you can educate, amuse, and even engage your target audience through these words.

In an ideal world, your audience will find you and take action. While some focus on keyword stuffing, guest posting, and link building, these tactics have fallen by the wayside in recent years as search engines have become wise to these tactics. You can achieve your marketing goals by using all of your channels. Email marketing, SEO, Social media marketing, Direct marketing, and other methods focus on the same result: driving qualified leads and sales to your organization.

Boosting Organic Traffic with Targeted Content

I am guessing that the reason you came to this article is that you were eager to enhance your knowledge of the topic of email marketing software. Generating well-thought-out content and getting it in front of your ideal consumer will help you to boost the organized traffic to your website naturally. Spend time figuring out what your customers are interested in and then write the content they want to learn about. Research the existing content that is already out there on the subject and use your knowledge and expertise to craft a unique piece of content to fulfill the searcher's intent better than anyone else. This is what will drive your content to the top of the searches.

Let's face it: if everyone is going left, you want to go right where there is less traffic and a quicker route to where you're heading. It is the same with driving customers to your website. Follow the path least traveled and add the most value to the equation. Utilize your organization's resources to craft, outline, edit, and write this content.

User Intent and Keyword Research and Optimization

It is a current topic of debate and interest from SEO and marketing individuals alike regarding the various forms of user intent derived from online searches. It is believed that intent falls into four main categories:

• Informational intent 
• Navigational intent
• Commercial intent
• Transactional intent 

Depending on the goals of your marketing campaign, be sure that you are crafting your content to reach consumers with the correct intent that matches the goals of your campaign. By researching the correct phrases and topics and organizing them into content clusters, you will quickly achieve topical relevance and provide the best experience for your customers. If you are just getting started, be sure you are realistic with your goals and focus on areas where you can add value to the internet and deliver results for your company.

Finding an on-Ramp for Your Customers

A good example will help us best to illustrate the point of an onramp for your customers. Let's say you are a local plumber looking to develop a business for your leak detection services. Your customers may need to find you easily and discover your services. If they have a water leak, they are more interested in locating and correcting it ASAP and less interested in comparing options.

In this case, your goal is to get listed online everywhere that someone could be researching for a leak-detecting plumber in their area. On the other hand, let's say that you are providing a very competitive service, such as braces for kids; you will want to create content that helps your consumers evaluate the options on your site without doing additional searches and then choosing you.

In this case, you may want to research your local competitors' service offerings and costs and then organize them in a chart on your site that compares them to yours. No matter the on-ramp or scenario, you want to make it easy for your ideal customer to find your business and connect or onboard with you. An email marketing list is invaluable as it will allow you to send an email series of information to your prospects. The email series will keep your prospects engaged with your organization so that when they are ready to decide, you are the one they think of.

Leveraging Email Marketing Software for SEO Success

Combining Email Campaigns and Keyword Research

Segment your list by keyword search and use your software to target your customers and segment your list based on the keywords they used for finding your site. This way, you can deliver relevant content based on your consumers' expectations. This will help increase your open rate and the actions your customers take.

The more consumers interact with your site, the longer they stay on each page, and the better your on-page interactions will be. These are all metrics that Google and other search engines measure through analytics and consider when ranking your content. It is the content that consumers interact with and engage with the most that Google wants to push up higher in the rankings. Google and other search engines want to drive traffic to the most relevant results. 

Transforming Email Content for Better SEO Results

Even the best email builder solution is only as good as the person sitting behind the solution typing on the keyboard, and that is you. Take a look at the content on your site. Can it be rewritten and used as the basis for your email content? If so, this will help you develop content for your newsletters quickly and efficiently. If the content already performs well on your site, it should work well in your newsletter.

You can post your email newsletter archive online to help you develop traffic from this content. As long as you write unique content for your newsletter that differs from your site, you will derive great indexing results for this content and improve your SEO. You might publish an RSS feed of your email newsletter or another index that is easily discoverable.

Increase Visibility by Sharing Email Content on Social Media

One of the best uses of your email content is a quick share on social media. Many of the best email software programs will auto-post your email news on publication to your social media.  Doing more with less is a fantastic way to amplify the SEO opportunities the best email marketing systems can deliver. Visibility is where it is at, and that is the name of the game when it comes to generating the most from your solution's features.

Leverage Email Marketing for a Strong SEO Strategy

Be sure that you are optimizing your email content for SEO. You can take action to include relevant keywords in your email. From your email subject lines to the email body text and call-to-action (CTA) buttons you include in your newsletter, it all plays a part. You can send signals to the search engines to help them understand the content of your emails. This will go a long way to help improve the chances of your email feed getting indexed and appearing in relevant search results.

Your marketing should be viewed as planting another seed for future search engine results. Another great idea is repurposing your newsletter content to create blog posts or articles on your website. Taking these steps consistently will allow you to expand your reach, attract organic traffic, and improve your website's SEO.

What is the best email marketing software?

Even the best, most popular email marketing platform or service only works if you have subscribers. One of the best ways to draw targeted subscribers to your list is to create a lead magnet. This free offer should be a highly desired item, such as a template or white paper, that is both relevant and timely for the user you want to draw to your list. Ensure your lead magnet is delivered instantly on sign-up in your welcome email, providing a huge amount of value to the consumer. It should be something that is immediately valuable to your user.

Our Picks for the Top 16 Email Marketing Software Solutions

Below is our short list of the top email marketing solutions for small to mid-sized businesses. Many solutions offer a free trial perfect for a small business to get started with a new email marketing platform. Most of these solutions include email templates and drag-and-drop email editor functionality to help you get up and running quickly. As you launch your first email marketing campaign, you will quickly discover how all email marketing features work together.

• GetResponse
• ActiveCampaign
• ConvertKit
• AWeber
• Omnisend
• MailerLite
• SendX
• Benchmark Email
• EmailOctopus
• Moosend
• ClickFunnels
• Podia
• Pabbly
• Stripo
• Sitetrail
• Beehiiv

Email Marketing Software Statistics

Let's take a look at email software by the numbers from some unique statistics. The numbers can vary widely regarding email marketing success for small to mid-sized businesses across various vertical markets.

In the SEMrush State of Content Marketing 2020 Global Report, marketers who combine SEO and content marketing see improved results. According to the report, 75% of marketers say SEO is their most efficient content marketing tactic. In fact, according to ActiveCampaign, 75% of marketers rate the ROI of their email marketing strategy as excellent or good.

The statistics suggest that email marketing has a high ROI, with an average return of $42 for every $1 spent, according to GetResponse. It is interesting to note the impact of email marketing on website traffic click-throughs are different by industry. According to a GetResponse 2023 email benchmark study, Communications, Publishing, and Financial Services all observed higher-than-average click-through rates (4.42%-5.77%) compared to 2.89% across all industries.

Email Marketing Software Case Studies

Many businesses have achieved SEO success through email marketing. I will wrap up with a few exciting case study stories to illustrate the point.

Using the Benchmark Email solution, The Little Market, a nonprofit organization, increased their email open rates and engagement. They were able to achieve a 50% increase in email open rates and a 40% increase in click-through rates, leading to increased donations and support for their cause.

The Goodness Project, a vegan snack subscription service, used the EmailOctopus solution to increase email open rates and revenue. They achieved a 40% increase in email open rates and a 30% increase in revenue, leading to increased customer loyalty and retention.

The Greek Designers, a luxury fashion brand, used the Moosend solution to increase their email engagement and sales. They were able to achieve a 25% increase in email open rates and a 20% increase in sales, leading to increased brand awareness and customer loyalty.

According to the company's blog post, Stripo's email builder helps the Chelsea Football Club create varied and memorable email designs easily without coding. The software's pre-designed templates, drag-and-drop editor, and reusable modules enable the club to quickly customize emails for different campaigns and audiences.
Stripo's tools help Chelsea FC and other clients build mobile-friendly, professional emails that drive user engagement.

No matter what solution you choose, one point is clear, you need to leverage marketing software to improve your SEO results.

What is the best free email marketing software option?

As you are just getting started, you may have a limited budget. This should not deter you from getting your email list started right away. Several popular email marketing solutions offer a free option to get you started. These email marketing software providers understand that if they give you a hand as you are getting started, as your list grows, you will likely stick with them. Free software for email marketing can help you get a start. While you will be limited in list size for the free option, for example, ConvertKit will only allow a contact list of 1,000 subscribers; this is more than enough to get started.

The ConvertKit solution we went with provides a great email marketing solution that is both easy to use and comprehensive in its offerings. One of the best features of this solution is the option to join the creator community to work collaboratively with other creators to grow your email subscriber contact list quickly.

Our short list of free email marketing software

• ConvertKit
• AWeber
• Omnisend
• MailerLite