E-mails have been through a lot since that beautiful time in 1998 where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan started an online romance via e-mail in the late Nora Ephron’s classic You’ve Got Mail. Various instant messaging and social media platforms have replaced e-mail as our primary way for personal online correspondence while Slack has been slowly but steadily replacing e-mails for our interoffice correspondence. I find this somewhat regrettable because there is at least one field where e-mail can still be particularly effective.

E-mail and SEO aren’t typically mentioned in the same conversation since e-mail can’t exactly help you get better rankings on Google and other search engines, not directly anyway. However, since the ultimate goal of SEO is to simply increase the amount of traffic and/or conversion on your website, then e-mail marketing would certainly be able to help with that. For SEO services and marketers, trying your hands at this somewhat antiquated form of online communication might very well be worth the trouble.

E-mail marketing in the age of emojis

In a way, the practice of e-mail marketing is somewhat similar to the practice of social media marketing. Neither would actually affect your search engine ranking the way high-quality outbound links would but the targeted nature of e-mail marketing could lead to better engagement with your contents, which raises the potential of your contents being shared all over the internet. Just like how your social media contents would primarily be directed at your followers, e-mail marketing contents would be directed at those who have already subscribed to your newsletters.

At a glance, this might seem limiting since your audience would be limited to those already familiar with your business but this would also ensure that your contents would land in the hands of people who are already interested in the first place. Combined with the easily shareable nature of modern online contents, the idea is to get those who have already shared an affinity to your brand to help spread the love in their circles. Other than this primary nature of e-mail marketing, there are also other ways e-mail marketing can indirectly help your company’s SEO efforts.

Newsletter can help you curate your best contents

Most newsletters I have a subscription for are news and events roundups and I’ve grown to prefer this method of receiving updates because there’s just way too much content out there floating around the internet. Using these newsletters as a source for news and what’s going on around the city I’m living in helps save me time as I don’t have to search for those news by myself. By taking advantage of newsletters, you can help push contents that you deem to be more valuable than others to the group of people that could appreciate those values. If Muhammad isn’t coming to the mountain, then you might as well move the mountain to Muhammad.

If you aren’t sure on which contents are more valuable than others or you simply don’t trust your own judgment, you can also use these newsletters to gauge just which contents are a hit with your core audience. You can see which contents are generating more clicks and that information could certainly help you in your future content strategy. Remember, while traffic is always the ultimate goal in online marketing, the data and insights you’ve picked up along the way could also prove to be quite valuable.

You can slip in promotions and CTA buttons in your newsletters

E-mails can be more than just a passive marketing tool these days and I’ve honestly lost count on just how many times I was alerted to an ongoing promotion thanks to promotional newsletters. As they’re delivered straight to my primary inbox, which I made a point to check at least several times a day, the chances of me missing these promotions aren’t much. Additionally, everybody likes a discount, which makes it more likely that your content will be shared across the internet.

You can repurpose your newsletters and e-mails into online contents

If you feel like you’ve put so much effort into your newsletters that you feel they’d be somewhat wasted if seen only by your subscribers, you can actually repurpose them into contents that you could publish on your website. This way, you can actually give non-subscribers a taste of what they could see if they subscribe to your newsletter. However, you have to ensure that you’re not diluting the value of your e-mail marketing efforts by doing this without remorse. Make sure that some contents are kept exclusively for your subscribers and maintain a gap between when the newsletters are send and when they’re repurposed into online contents.

E-mails are one of the last places where text is still king

With the rise of YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and podcasts, it does seem that text is getting shown the door when it comes to online contents. This however couldn’t be further than the truth as longform journalism and other in-depth contents are still garnering quite a sizable audience, even if they’re doing this with the help of other multimedia contents. E-mail newsletter is also another place where texts still get the chance to shine, which would certainly be helpful if your business focuses on text content.