How to improve your email marketing and boost open rates with SEO

Extend your email marketing strategy to include these advanced SEO and networking tactics.

Many of our clients are surprised when we mention that there is huge search engine optimization potential with your email marketing.

And we get it! It’s easy to think that, since our emails are more ‘private’ than a blog post or podcast, they don’t need to be search engine optimized.

Yet we’ve seen time and time again how much potential there is for not only elevated marketing opportunities…

…but also more money in your pocket with all the new leads you’ll be getting!

The truth is, SEO email marketing is still one of the most underutilized mediums in the course membership, online coaching, and spiritual teaching space.

It’s important to avoid falling into the trap of thinking you only have to send emails when there’s something to sign up for, like a program, or new course.

And while promotional emails have their place, we recommend taking a more in-touch approach with your email marketing by asking:

In helping you answer these questions, today we’re sharing some basic and advanced SEO email marketing tricks that you can apply with your own email marketing.

These are the tried and true methods we’ve used to our own marketing advantage, and are the very same we share openly with our audiences (and our clients).

In fact, our conviction about the benefits of SEO implementation for email marketing brings to mind a funny story…

Why SEO Email Marketing is important to your online business:

We have a client who we have been working with for many many years, and we love their work! They’re an awesome person, and they’ve shown incredible success in every step they take.

What we love, though, is helping a really strong client become even stronger, and so we didn’t let up our suggestions about email marketing for the first two years we worked together.

Then, breaking through the resistance that continued to crop up when we discussed the subject, they changed their mind, and started incorporating a more regular email campaign to her audience.

And wouldn’t you know it?

Once they started sending out these extra emails to their list, we were able to deliver the news (thanks to the private analytics we set up for the client) that their emails were now contributing to over 30% of their revenue!

“There’s a lot of money being left on the table when we’re not producing on a consistent email schedule.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

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What this story tells us is this:

When we only send out email blasts when we want to promote something, our audience may become disinterested.

If we instead provide real, tangible value through our emails, we can watch as greater open rates convert into clicks, which convert into leads!

It is these clicks that are important to your overall SEO strategy: it’s those clicks that will end up improving all of the metrics that search engines use to measure the ‘helpfulness’ or ‘popularity’ of your page.

So how can we hit two birds with one stone and add SEO to our email marketing?

Let’s take a look.

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How to get higher open rates for emails with SEO

If you’ve been with us for this entire content marketing and SEO series, then you already know the basics of how you’re going to optimize your email content for search engines.

Here’s a refresher, just in case, but you can review the other parts of the article series for more:

Now that you’ve got the main basics of combining SEO and email marketing, let’s dig into some of the advanced strategies we use behind the scenes at The Digital Navigator:

2 advanced SEO strategies to boost your email marketing

It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing blogs, articles, livestreaming on social media, webinars, or you have a YouTube channel, we all know you’re already providing a ton of incredible value to your audience.

The idea with SEO is, you are trying to make the most of that value through a great conversion strategy that transforms your expertise into email marketing and thus, more leads.

“Whatever you’re already doing, keep asking yourself: how could I convert that into an email?”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

We think the beauty of the strategies we are about to share is how you only have to create the foundational content once. Then, you can harness digital tools like ChatGPT or your virtual assistant to alter that original content into different forms.

It’s almost as if the emails begin to write themselves!

Just remember: don’t overthink it, or over-complicate your email writing.

Say you have a newly released video. All you have to do is include a couple of sentences about what your audience will discover inside the video, and a thumbnail that is linked to the video, and presto, you’re ready to hit send.

That’s less than 10 minutes to create the campaign, send it out, and even add it to any automations you already have going in your email marketing system (we use ActiveCampaign for ours, if you were wondering).

But enough about the basics, let’s get into those advanced strategies we promised to help you extend your SEO practices through incredible email marketing:

1. Use data analytics and keywords to optimize your SEO through email marketing

Simply put, your data analytics and keyword research can help you put the email tools we’ve been talking about in this series to the test. By now you should be a pro at:

I’ll break these down in a moment, but first, I want to talk about an email-specific SEO trick that can do a lot to improve the chances that your network will open your emails: list segmentation.

Basically list segmentation is the process of segmenting your email list based on subscriber interests, behaviors, or demographics. That way, you can curate the content that reaches their inbox, and ensure it’s properly aligned with previous open habits, preferences, and searches.

Different types of businesses (and people) will segment their lists in different ways. You might want to try segmenting for beginner, intermediate, and advanced tips, or decipher clients based on two to five of the main keywords you associate with your business (i.e. mindfulness, nutrition, etc.).

Now, let’s break down the actionable steps we just mentioned are going to create a huge impact on your business.

Improve Subject Lines and Preview Text (Preheaders)

As you implement keywords and keep the subject line short and catchy, you’re going to want to keep to 52 characters or less. Most email platforms will truncate any lines that are longer than that, and you want to be able to get the full message through even before they click.

You also want to make sure you’re careful not to over-capitalize the subject line. We’ve noticed that if you capitalize each word of your subject line, your email is more likely to get flagged as spam. If you’re feeling confident, we also recommend testing different types of subject lines to see what draws the most attention from your audience.

Here are just few examples of the subject lines we’ve found have worked for us in recent years:

Finally, add preview text to give more impact. This is the line that will appear in your client’s inbox following the subject line. If you don’t put anything in this box before sending, the preview text will just be the first words of your email.

Extend the punch of your subject line with the preheader text, and move onto writing the body of your email. Oh! And don’t forget to send yourself a tester email so you can make sure the subject line and preheader come out the way you wanted them to!

Add Multiple Email Links

Most emails you send should have some type of resource, call-to-action, or opportunity to click-through to a page on your website. We recommend including at least two in every email, even if it’s for the same location.

A good rule of thumb for links, is to have one near the introduction for those readers who may drop off before they get to the ‘good stuff’. Then have one or two links in the body of your email, and another in the PS section or footer section of your email.

Think that’s too many links? The reality is that when people are ready to click, they are going to want to have that link right there. It’s not often that someone will scroll back up to get a link if they decide to read a whole email.

Compress Images to 100KB or Less

Do NOT send emails with gigantic images. That’s a huge no-no, and yet I see it so often. It can be really distracting, and someone might click out of your email before they’ve even gotten past the huge image.

What we recommend is to use an online image compression tool to make the data of your image smaller, to put it in non-technical terms.

All you have to do is google image compression, and you’ll find some great free tools to do that quickly. Our founder Pol Cousineau likes to use the free Windows RIOT software to compress images.

Just keep your image to less than 100KB and you should be golden.

Then, download your newly compressed image and make sure to use that in your posts, emails, and webpages to improve load speed and click-through rates.

Monitor Your Email Analytics

When you’re using emails as a part of your marketing funnel, it’s critical that you monitor the analytics of your emails.

You don’t want to keep sending the types of emails that no one opens, so we recommend watching carefully on the back-end to determine what is working, and what doesn’t work.

So what metrics and measures should you be paying attention to when you’re thinking about SEO?

Looking at this information, here’s how you might respond in real time to optimize your next email campaign for SEO.

Let’s say you have a promotion that you run twice a year, where you send ten emails. You have data on the record for that about how many people opened emails, how many people clicked, and how many people unsubscribed and when.

Say you notice that email numbers three and seven didn’t get opened as much as the others. You might then decide to alter those emails to incorporate a new subject line and/or preheader, which will target improvements to your open rate.

(This is where something like A/B testing can come in handy, so you can test twice or even three times as many subject lines in the same amount of time. If you’re at less than 10,000 contacts, it may be too early to accurately A/B test).

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Once you see the open rate improving, then you can move onto optimizing the other metrics. You can improve click-through rates for emails with lower engagement by altering some of the email content, or even by adding more links, thumbnails, or a PS section with important links.

Of course, if you see an email that seems to ‘drop’ your audience numbers or initiate a few unsubscribes, you might want to reach out to those people and ask what it was about the content that made them go.

Finally, begin implementing the success of that subject line and other changes back into the other promotional marketing assets you use for that campaign. This is going to optimize your brand consistency, while also improving your overall promotional campaign thanks to data analytics.

Maintain Consistent Branding

On the topic of maintaining consistent branding, one of the simplest ways you can improve your SEO reach in the long term is to reuse similar image styles, colors, and layouts in your marketing material.

Use similar terminology and keywords that will act as ‘anchors’ for your content. The reason for this is because users will feel as if they are in a curated, organized space. This can improve trust and authority from an audience perspective, which is a huge win for online business owners.

“I still see some businesses from time to time send emails with so many different templates it’s hard to know what’s going on. That’s not the right way to use it. If you want to use a template in a pre-published library, I recommend picking just one or two, adapting it to your branding, and then delete all other templates to ensure you’re SUPER consistent with your branding.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

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2. Practice good email hygiene to maximize SEO marketing campaigns

In this section we are going to share with you the processes we implement with ourselves and our clients to make sure our email list stays in good health.

You don’t want to end up with a bunch of ‘dead-end’ inboxes in your contacts list, nor do you want any of your contacts to ‘fall through the cracks’ and not receive any emails at all.

That’s why we practice a little bit of good email hygiene in our email marketing, which involves:

In following these simple tips, you will find yourself with more active email subscribers who are actually engaging with your content, and not letting it sit in their inboxes unopened.

These are the kinds of audience you want if you want to hit that 30% revenue increase we saw with the long-time client we mentioned earlier–they read your emails, they know who you are, and they know what you do.

So let’s break these tips down a little and see exactly what steps you need to take to cleanse your email list and upkeep good email health:

Initiate an onboarding welcome sequence

Sometimes called an indoctrination sequence, your onboarding welcome sequence is a set of emails that introduce what you do, who you help, and provide links to some of your best resources.

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What kinds of links? Well, if you have a Facebook Group, or if you have a really popular video, handouts, articles…whatever, you’ll want to put those in as a part of the onboarding sequence as well.

We also recommend telling your audience what to expect from you. If you send emails every Tuesday, tell them that. This will set up an expectation, and if you come through on it, your audience will trust you more.

Simple as that!

Create an off-boarding sequence for unsubscribers

If you find that a contact is no-longer engaging with your emails, but have not unsubscribed, we recommend creating a system to offboard your email subscribers and literally unsubscribe them.

Yet you don’t want to be too hasty about it. What you can do is make a trigger that says, if after six months someone hasn’t opened or clicked on any of your emails, that the off-boarding sequence begins.

For a regular off-boarding sequence, we suggest doing four emails over a week and a half. You want to pack a punch with the value you’re offering in these emails, so make sure you’re sharing your absolute best value with webinars, handouts, freebies, and discounts.

You might also create subject lines that match the theme of their off-boarding.

Then, if there’s no clicks or opens at the end of the week and a half, you can create a trigger that unsubscribes them. And while that might seem rude, it’s actually going to leave a good taste in the mouth of your user.

“You should also spell it out in the email that if they find value they can access the resources, but if not, then you will remove them. That way, they know to “click” in a specific way if they do want to continue getting emails from you.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Likely, they saw your emails but didn’t click, and now you’re associated with being an attentive business in a niche they may want to enter again later down the line.

Plus, if you keep emailing someone, and they don’t engage with you, this is actually going to hurt your metrics. You could even end up in someone’s spam box, and email platforms take note of that.

Purge your list to refocus audience and business interests

Using the off-boarding sequence should help purge you of inactive users, but what happens when you decide to take a new direction in your business, or design a new way of delivering your courses, products, or services?

Let’s say you used to do a lot of nutrition and mindfulness content, but now you’re gearing towards a more mindfulness focus, and don’t work in nutrition anymore.

Here, you could for instance send out a few emails to those who you have tagged as being interested in nutrition and tell them that you’re going to focus exclusively on mindfulness.

Let them know that if they are still interested in learning about mindfulness that they can click to subscribe to your other segmented list, and if not, you will remove them from the list since you’re no longer focusing on nutrition.

Of course, you don’t have to let them know you’ll remove them, but it can incentivize that signup in some audiences. The most important part is to have them click on something that shows they are interested in mindfulness.

That way you can recuperate a whole segment of your audience without losing their attention, or having them feel ‘you’ve changed’ in a way they don’t resonate with. This kind of transparency and opportunity for consent goes a long way, particularly where email marketing is concerned.

If you kept sending those emails, your metrics would definitely be affected as well.

Resend emails to people who haven’t opened them

It might seem counterintuitive to resend emails to those who haven’t opened them, but we have found doing so accomplishes two goals. First, we increase our open rates of that initial email by anywhere from 7 to 12%.

Second, we get an extra chance to optimize our subject line by resending similar content with a bit of a different spin, and see which line is more successful.

So how do you do that? Your email automation platform should give you the option to trigger a resend to unopened emails. All you have to do is change the internal content slightly, enhance the subject line and preheader, and leave it to the automation to do the rest.

Obviously, if you keep doing that over and over again and the person never opens any emails, they will end up in your off-boarding sequence anyhow, and you can rest easy knowing your email hygiene practices are keeping your email clean.

Only send promotional emails when your audience opts in

When you have a specific marketing campaign you’re doing for a course, product, or membership enrollment, you likely have a lot of emails in those promotional campaigns…anywhere from 10 to 20 emails likely!

And while these are a combination of sales and value messaging, we don’t recommend sending the whole campaign to your entire list of contacts. It’s just too much.

What you want to do instead is give people a way to ‘raise their hand’ and opt in to the messaging they’re interested in. Then, you can go ahead and open the gates and send your entire campaign their way.

What does this look like in practice?

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Let’s say you have a dog training course. This is your paid offer that you want to be promoting. The content you’ll likely create to do so may include a free webinar with dog training tips, a PDF handout, or a cheat sheet with dog training tips.

So you’ll send the webinar to your list, and include a link to download the handout.

Then, anyone who requests the handout or signs up for the webinar is likely more interested in a dog training course than the average user, and will be more interested in the dog-training-specific value you’re offering in the promotional email sequence you created.

The idea is to avoid flooding your audience with emails they don’t want or need, which again will greatly decrease your click and open rates, and skew your analytics along the way.

As for the rest of your list? We recommend sending about three or four emails from the promotional sequence that still explain the benefits of enrolling, but then stop. You can give them another chance to opt in next year, or on your usual promotional cycle. However, if they DO click on a link (let’s say, to go to a sales page), then you can move them into a sequence to get the rest of the promotional campaign for that link or page.

Just make sure you’re promoting valuable, tangible benefits in your content and promotional emails, and you’re sure to find an uptick in clicks and opens, which will ultimately improve your organic reach…

…all thanks to SEO and email marketing!

Maximizing course sales with SEO and Email Marketing

By strategically aligning your email marketing efforts with your SEO goals, you can maximize the impact of both strategies and create a more integrated and holistic online marketing approach.

As a result, you’re likely going to get a ton more signups, enrollments, and memberships to your online training, coaching, or spiritual teaching business!

That’s because, and we’ve been saying this all along, your email marketing efforts are the leading way to increase engagement.

They are honestly still the best way to generate leads that actually want to engage with your content, which means you may also benefit from our free masterclasses on improving lead generation and optimizing your indoctrination emails.

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And that’s that! Now we’ve shared with you the top ways to boost your content marketing with SEO and email marketing, you should be in a really excellent position to start drawing in tons of organic traffic.

Over the long-term this is going to have a huge impact on your marketing budget, and you’ll find yourself able to do much less work, and gain much more profit from what you do input.

You’ll also discover – as you repurpose content with SEO to extend your reach – that your content can be utilized again and again to help boost search engine rankings and results.

That means you can focus on creating really excellent foundational content, and then use that content to have the rest of your marketing materials write themselves.

In fact, this is the approach we use ourselves at The Digital Navigator, and is one you can continue to follow and implement through your marketing funnel approach.

We even have a free Marketing Funnel Template for Digital Products and Coaching Businesses to kick you off on the right foot!

Can’t wait to see what you come up with–and if you ever want to chat about what to do next with your SEO and marketing, don’t hesitate to schedule a free content marketing consultation with one of our digital marketing specialists to ask about our Marketing Funnel and AI Content Marketing service plans.

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