Overview of search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is all about optimizing a website for search
engines. SEO is a technique for:

 Designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine results.

 Improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.
 Marketing by understanding how search algorithms work, and what human
visitors might search.

SEO is a subset of search engine marketing. SEO is also referred as SEO copyrighting, because
most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines, deal with text.

If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work.

How Search Engine Works?

Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results.

 Crawling– Process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task
is performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case
of Google).
 Indexing– Process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping
them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the
process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe
the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.
 Processing– When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it
compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the
database.
 Calculating Relevancy– It is likely that more than one page contains the
search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the
pages in its index to the search string.
 Retrieving Results– The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the
best matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them
in the browser.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens of
times per month. When you see changes in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift or
something else outside of your control.
Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences
between their relevancy algorithms lead to major changes in results relevancy.

What is SEO Copywriting?

SEO Copywriting is the technique of writing viewable text on a web page in such a way that it
reads well for the surfer, and also targets specific search terms. Its purpose is to rank highly in
the search engines for the targeted search terms.

Along with viewable text, SEO copywriting usually optimizes other on-page elements for the
targeted search terms. These include the Title, Description, Keywords tags, headings, and
alternative text.

The idea behind SEO copywriting is that search engines want genuine content pages and not
additional pages often called “doorway pages” that are created for the sole purpose of achieving
high rankings.

What is Search Engine Rank?

When you search any keyword using a search engine, it displays thousands of results found in its
database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search
engine results. If a search engine is putting your web page on the first position, then your web
page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed as the page with the highest rank.

SEO is the process of designing and developing a website to attain a high rank in search engine
results.

What is On-Page and Off-page SEO?

Conceptually, there are two ways of optimization:

 On-Page SEO– It includes providing good content, good keywords selection,

putting keywords on correct places, giving appropriate title to every page, etc.
 Off-Page SEO– It includes link building, increasing link popularity by
submitting open directories, search engines, link exchange, etc.

On Page SEO Techniques: Indexing and Key

Word Placement
On-page SEO (sometimes referred to as ‘on-site SEO’), is the process of optimizing the content
of a webpage for search engines. The ultimate goal of on-page SEO is to speak the ‘search
engines’ language’ and help search engine crawlers understand the meaning and context of your
pages.

Proper keyword placement is when keywords are placed strategically throughout the content of
your website so that the search engines can properly index your site for those relevant keywords.
Also, it entices searchers to visit your page and visitors to stay on your page.

When keyword placement is done right, you are able to rank better for your chosen keywords in
the SERPs. Choosing the right keywords and putting them in the right places is a necessary
element of SEO. This brings people with relevant search queries to your site. Remember, though:
it’s the content that makes a visitor stay.

One of the most important places for users is the title tag. This is the hyperlink which appears on
the SERPs. It is what visitors will click on to visit your site. The title tag defines what your page
will be about for both search engines and visitors. You should focus on making your title tag
optimized and compelling.

While this is not a ranking factor per se, it does help the user experience (UX) by helping visitors
understand what the page is about before going in. If the title tag is clear, they are more likely to
stay on your site for a longer period of time; thus reducing the bounce rate. The user experience
is crucial to your website’s SEO performance.

You should add keywords and their synonyms to your heading tags (headers). Headers and sub-
headers are the “titles” which appear in your content. Headers have a different HTML markup
than the rest of the body of your content. You ought to focus on making headers clear, concise,
and easy to read as this will help increase the UX and it will increase the crawlability of your
site.

Your content should always include a main body section that elaborates on what’s in the headers.
You should include your keywords and keyword synonyms naturally throughout the body.
Therefore, you will rank for the keywords you’d like to rank for and similar ones. Remember to
always build your content for people, not search engines. You can always learn more about
making content easy to scan by checking out some helpful HTML tips.

Within the content, you can also enhance UX with videos and photos. These make visitors more
engaged; a study by Quicksprout show that articles with images get 94% more views and
significantly more likes and retweets than those which do not have images. Images bring more
traffic and reduce the bounce rate. To rank for those articles with photos and videos, make sure
that you include the proper descriptions and tags. To increase the ranking probability for that
content, describe photos with ALT attributes, and embedded videos with transcripts.

A good internal linking strategy is also a key point to giving keywords more substance within the
content. Using words that can easily be identified gives search engines and people a better idea
of what the page is about. For example: don’t write “click here to learn more about the coding of
an internal linking” with “here” being the anchor text, because search engines won’t index that
properly. Instead, write “internal linking has its own coding which ought to be followed to be
indexed more properly”, and make “internal linking” the anchor text.

Last on the list is the meta description. While this is not a ranking factor per se, it will help with
the human element side of SEO. A meta description tells viewers what the page is about before
they even click on the page. This will appear below your meta tag on the SERPs. You can build
your own meta description and place it under your page’s heading. You want the meta
description to be compelling and bring visitors into your site.

All on-page SEO techniques:

 Publish high-quality content

 Optimize page titles and meta descriptions
 Optimize page content
 Headings and content formatting
 SEO Images and other multimedia elements
 URL optimization
 Internal links
 External links
 Page loading speed
 Mobile-friendliness
 Comments and on-page SEO

Content Planning & Optimization

Essentially, content optimization, or SEO (search engine optimization), is the process of

optimizing your content to make sure that it’s more visible through the web. Search engine
robots will rank highly optimized content higher on a search engine page than non-optimized
content. Optimizing a website involves many nuanced details, and search engine robots are
weighing everything from content to HTML to backlinks.

It’s important to note that Google is responsible for the majority of the search engine traffic in
the world. This may vary from one industry to another, but it’s likely that Google is the dominant
player in the search results that your business or website would want to show up in, but the best
practices outlined in this guide will help you to position your site and its content to rank in other
search engines, as well.

Beginner can improve their search engine ranking by referring to the following:

Write Great Content: While content alone isn’t everything, it is a big part of the picture, and
great content can dramatically improve your chances of a great SEO ranking. When writing
content, make sure it’s relatable to the user/reader, is original, and is written for your website and
your purposes. Since you know your business better than anyone, writing content that describes
your product, your services, or your business updates should buy right up your alley.

Keep New Content Coming: Another tip for optimizing your content is to be constantly posting
new content. Search engine robots love new content, and your readers will, too.

Content Planning & Optimization

Essentially, content optimization, or SEO (search engine optimization), is the process of
optimizing your content to make sure that it’s more visible through the web. Search engine
robots will rank highly optimized content higher on a search engine page than non-optimized
content. Optimizing a website involves many nuanced details, and search engine robots are
weighing everything from content to HTML to backlinks.

It’s important to note that Google is responsible for the majority of the search engine traffic in
the world. This may vary from one industry to another, but it’s likely that Google is the dominant
player in the search results that your business or website would want to show up in, but the best
practices outlined in this guide will help you to position your site and its content to rank in other
search engines, as well.

Beginner can improve their search engine ranking by referring to the following:

Write Great Content: While content alone isn’t everything, it is a big part of the picture, and
great content can dramatically improve your chances of a great SEO ranking. When writing
content, make sure it’s relatable to the user/reader, is original, and is written for your website and
your purposes. Since you know your business better than anyone, writing content that describes
your product, your services, or your business updates should buy right up your alley.

Keep New Content Coming: Another tip for optimizing your content is to be constantly posting
new content. Search engine robots love new content, and your readers will, too.

Use Headings: Another thing that search engines love is big text, so make sure you use headings
and subheadings in your writing and make sure you make the text larger or bolded. Another tip:
use keywords within the heading, which will kill two birds with one stone.
Optimize the Text: You can optimize existing text simply by adding a few key content
optimization devices. Title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and URLs are all a great way
to get your content noticed by search engines.

Optimize Images: People love images, and consumers often spend as much time searching for
photos as they do text. As such, make sure you’re up to speed by optimizing all images within
your content. Add alt tags, which serve as alternate text; use image tags, which are the words that
show up when a user scrolls over an image; and make sure the file size of your images has been
adjusted properly to ensure that all images load and view properly.

Optimize Videos: Like images, great headings, and other graphics or bold colors, videos grab
the readers’ attention and help to keep them hooked. If you don’t have your own videos to
upload, you can use websites such as YouTube to find great clips that can be embedded into your
site. As always, use good keywords in your videos’ title, descriptions, and tags; share videos on
social media sites; and use a video as a call to action or another way to drive sales.

Stop Writing for Search Engines: Believe it or not, most search engine robots can tell when
you’re writing content specifically for search engine optimization and not for the user, which
hurts your ranking. Instead of focusing exclusively on keywords, over-linking, or creating
content that’s low quality just for the purpose of publishing, relax, take a breath, and back-off
from over optimizing. Focusing on content that is natural sounding and useful will get you a long
way, and then optimizing after that by doing the things mentioned above is key.

Use Social Media: If you posted your blog to Facebook or Twitter once and then gave up on it,
you’re not doing your best to optimize your page. Social media is very important when it comes
to content optimization, and simply posting a link isn’t enough. Rather, build relationships with
relevant users and connections through social media sites, share other users’ content too, provide
feedback, and use your social media site for more than just posting.

Keep it Clean: Finally, know that a search engine won’t publish anything that’s hard to find or
illegal to post. As such, make sure you keep your code clean and organized, using HTML and
CSS layouts, which help search engines, find your content efficiently. Additionally, know that
anything illegal (unlawful use of copyrighted content) won’t be published. For best results, use
your own content, and be creative to avoid raising any red flags.

Google’s algorithm is extremely complex, but at a high level:

Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information relevant to the
searcher’s query.

Google’s algorithm determines relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and
evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for,
based on the keywords it contains and other factors (known as “ranking signals”).
Google determines “quality” by a number of means, but a site’s link profile – the number and
quality of other websites that link to a page and site as a whole is among the most important.

Key Factor

Search Volume: The first factor to consider is how many people are actually searching for a
given keyword. The more people there are searching for a keyword, the bigger the potential
audience you stand to reach. Conversely, if no one is searching for a keyword, there is no
audience available to find your content through search.

Relevance: A term may be frequently searched for, but that does not necessarily mean that it is
relevant to your prospects. Keyword relevance, or the connection between content on a site and
the user’s search query, is a crucial ranking signal.

Competition: Keywords with higher search volume can drive significant amounts of traffic, but
competition for premium positioning in the search engine results pages can be intense.

Key element

Title Tags

While Google is working to better understand the actual meaning of a page and de-emphasizing
(and even punishing) aggressive and manipulative use of keywords, including the term (and
related terms) that you want to rank for in your pages is still valuable. And the single most
impactful place you can put your keyword is your page’s title tag.

Meta Descriptions

While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another
meta HTML element that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page)
is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display
in search results, so your meta description may not always show, but if you have a compelling
description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can greatly increase
traffic.

Body Content

The actual content of your page itself is, of course, very important. Different types of pages will
have different “jobs” your cornerstone content asset that you want lots of folks to link to needs to
be very different than your support content that you want to make sure your users find and get an
answer from quickly. That said, Google has been increasingly favoring certain types of content,
and as you build out any of the pages on your site, there are a few things to keep in mind:
  Thick & Unique Content: There is no magic number in terms of word count, and if you
have a few pages of content on your site with a handful to a couple hundred words you
won’t be falling out of Google’s good graces, but in general recent Panda updates in
particular favor longer, unique content. If you have a large number (think thousands) of
extremely short (50-200 words of content) pages or lots of duplicated content where
nothing changes but the page’s title tag and say a line of text, that could get you in
trouble. Look at the entirety of your site: are a large percentage of your pages thin,
duplicated and low value? If so, try to identify a way to “thicken” those pages, or check
your analytics to see how much traffic they’re getting, and simply exclude them (using a
noindex meta tag) from search results to keep from having it appear to Google that you’re
trying to flood their index with lots of low value pages in an attempt to have them rank.
 Engagement”: Google is increasingly weighting engagement and user experience metrics
more heavily. You can impact this by making sure your content answers the questions
searchers are asking so that they’re likely to stay on your page and engage with your
content. Make sure your pages load quickly and don’t have design elements (such as
overly aggressive ads above the content) that would be likely to turn searchers off and
send them away.
 “Sharability”: Not every single piece of content on your site will be linked to and shared
hundreds of times. But in the same way you want to be careful of not rolling out large
quantities of pages that have thin content, you want to consider who would be likely to
share and link to new pages you’re creating on your site before you roll them out. Having
large quantities of pages that aren’t likely to be shared or linked to doesn’t position those
pages to rank well in search results, and doesn’t help to create a good picture of your site
as a whole for search engines, either.

Alt Attributes

How you mark up your images can impact not only the way that search engines perceive your
page, but also how much search traffic from image search your site generates. An alt attribute is
an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if a user can’t
view it. Your images may break over time (files get deleted, users have difficulty connecting to
your site, etc.) so having a useful description of the image can be helpful from an overall
usability perspective. This also gives you another opportunity outside of your content to help
search engines understand what your page is about.

URL Structure

Your site’s URL structure can be important both from a tracking perspective (you can more
easily segment data in reports using a segmented, logical URL structure), and a shareability
standpoint (shorter, descriptive URLs are easier to copy and paste and tend to get mistakenly cut
off less frequently). Again: don’t work to cram in as many keywords as possible; create a short,
descriptive URL.

Schema & Markup

Finally, once you have all of the standard on-page elements taken care of, you can consider
going a step further and better helping Google (and other search engines, which also recognize
schema) to understand your page.

Schema markup does not make your page show up higher in search results (it’s not a ranking
factor, currently). It does give your listing some additional “real estate” in the search results, the
way ad extensions do for your AdWords ads.

Display Advertising
Digital display advertising is graphic advertising on Internet websites, apps or social media
through banners or other advertising formats made of text, images, flash, video, and audio. The
main purpose of display advertising is to deliver general advertisements and brand messages to
site visitors.

According to eMarketer, Facebook and Twitter will take 33 percent of display ad spending
market share by 2017. Google’s display campaigns reach 80 percent of global internet users.
Desktop display advertising eclipsed search ad buying in 2014, with mobile ad spending
overtaking display in 2015.

Digital display advertising is an outbound display advertising format where you target predefined
audiences with images or banners. There’s also native ads and text ads in the mix in there. You
target them on different websites, on social media platforms, and on mobile apps.

Note that outbound advertising is a concept where the advertiser targets the audience and sends
their message out to them as opposed to something like inbound, which would be search where
the audience comes to you. So, there’s a key difference between the type of marketing that
display is. It’s an outbound advertising format.

Awareness and interest

When we visualize a funnel, it’s quite clear to see where display fits in the consumer intent
journey. We begin with awareness and interest. This is where display fits in. We’re sending our
message out there to people, to audiences who may potentially be interested in the product.

Retention

With a retention piece, the remarketing fits back in there too, because if you think about
remarketing, we’re sending ads out to pre-existing customers or people who’ve been in that site
before. So, if we want to retain these people as repeat customers, it makes sense to kind of
remarket out to them with special offers for people who have been on the site before.
Consideration and conversion

As we move down the funnel, as they get more and more aware, as they align it to their needs,
we start moving into the consideration and conversion areas. So, consideration and conversion
can be with around channels like remarketing, and shopping, as well as search as well.

Target

In order to uniquely identify anonymous users, online advertisers today tend to make use of
cookies, which are unique identifiers of specific computers, to decide which ADs to serve to a
particular consumer. Cookies can track whether a user left a page without buying anything, so
the advertiser can later retarget the user with ADs from the site the user visited.

As advertisers collect data across multiple external websites about a user’s online activity, they
can then combine this information to create a picture of the user’s interests to deliver even more
targeted advertising. This aggregation of data is called behavioral targeting. Advertisers can also
target their audience by using contextual and semantic advertising to deliver display ADs related
to the content of the web page where the ADs appear. Retargeting, behavioral targeting, and
contextual advertising all are designed to increase an advertiser’s return on investment, or ROI,
over untargeted ads.

As advertising needs become more sophisticated, display ADs can also be personalized based on
a user’s geography through geotargeting. Basic information such as a user’s IP address can
indicate a user’s rough location with a limited degree of accuracy. This information can be
supplemented further through the use of a phone’s GPS or the location of nearby mobile towers
to have a clearer indication of the user’s current position for a mind boggling array of advertising
possibilities.

Programmatic, Real time bidding (RTB)

Programmatic display advertising, or real time bidding (RTB), transformed the way digital
display advertising is bought and managed in recent years. Rather than placing a booking for
advertising directly with a website, advertisers will manage their activity through a (demand side
platform), and bid to advertise to people in real time, across multiple websites, based on targeting
criteria. This method of advertising quickly gained popular, as it allows for more control for the
advertiser (or agency), including of the individual target audience, rather than just the website. It
has become a threat to website operators and generally the cost paid for advertising in this way is
less than the old method and so the earning potential for them is reduced.

Programmatic is not without its drawbacks, as without the appropriate management adverts can
appear against unsavoury content or inappropriate news topics. This issue became front-page
news in February 2017, when advertisers on YouTube were found displayed on terror group
websites and fake news sites. As a result, a number of major advertisers paused all of their online
advertising until they could put the appropriate measures in place to prevent this occurring again.
it is important to choose the right format because it will help to make the most of the medium. It
is also possible to add:

 Video;
 Rich Media Ads: flash files that may expand when the user interacts on mouseover
(polite), or auto- initiated (non-polite);
 Overlays: ads that appear above content and that are possible to remove by clicking on a
close button;
 Interstitials: Ads that are displayed on web pages before expected content (before the
target page is displayed on the user’s screen);
 Sponsorship: including a logo or adding a brand to the design of a website. This can also
can fall under Native advertising, which is an ad that can seem like Editorial, or “In-
Feed”, but has really been paid for by the advertiser.

Types

Banner Ads: One of the oldest and traditional forms of advertising, banner ads usually appear at
the top of websites in a “banner” format.

Interstitial Ads: These ads appear as web pages that are served to users before they are directed
to the original page they requested.

Rich Media: These ads include interactive elements, such as video, audio and clickable
elements.

Video Ads: The YouTube advertising platform, as well as social networks like Instagram and
Facebook, have opened a whole new avenue for marketers. Video ads allow you to reach your
audience and connect with them on a personal level, and are well worth investing in.

Advantages

 Diversity: Display ads come in many shapes and sizes. And as you’ve seen above, they
can be presented in a number of formats, too. This means you can choose a style and
advertising format that will help you achieve your goals.
 Reach: Thanks for the Google Display Network (GDN), you can access millions of sites
straight from your Google Ads account.
 Targeting: Because of GDN’s extensive reach, you can also target the right audience by
placing your ads on the right websites. This includes demographic and geo-targeting,
along with specific interests of your target audience.
 Measurable: Clicks, impressions and conversions can all be tracked from Google Ads, as
well as Google Analytics for more granular performance and engagement tracking.

Various SEO Plug-in
AIOSEO

All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market.
Used by over 2+ million users, it is the most comprehensive SEO toolkit that helps you improve
search rankings without learning any complicated SEO jargon.

It comes with the easiest setup wizard that automatically helps you choose the best SEO settings
for your business. AIOSEO shows you TruSEO on-page analysis with an actionable checklist to
optimize your posts and pages.

The on-page SEO checklist includes a smart meta tag generator where you can use dynamic
values (current year, month, day, custom fields, author info, and much more) in your SEO title
and descriptions. This means you don’t need to update a post just to change SEO titles

Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s only second to Google when it
comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs’ Site Audit
feature as it’s the best SEO analysis tool around. The tool highlights what parts of your website
need improvements to rank better in search engines. From a competitor analysis perspective,
you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to use them as a starting point
for your own brand. You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within
your niche, check and fix broken links on your website and get an overview of your best-
performing pages.

Google Search Console

Offered for free to everyone with a website, Google Search Console lets you monitor and report
on your website’s presence in Google SERP. All you need to do is verify your website by adding
a code to your website or going through Google Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for
indexing. Although you don’t need a Search Console account to appear in Google’s search
results, you can control what gets indexed and how your website is represented with this account.
As an SEO checker tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view
your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results. It’s
especially useful for new websites as it lets site owners submit web pages for search indexing.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your WordPress
website for search engines.

It lets you easily add SEO titles and descriptions to all posts and pages on your website. You can
also use it to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to your articles.
Yoast SEO automatically generates an XML sitemap for all your website content which makes it
easier for search engines to crawl your website. It also helps you easily import your SEO data if
you have been using another SEO plugin.

KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool

An SEO keyword tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level
of competition. The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports
on backlinks and SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily
determine your ranking while tracking your improvement based on one key metric. Plus, if that’s
not enough, you’ll get a ton of new keyword ideas to help you rank your website even higher.

Rank Math

Rank Math is a fast-growing user-friendly WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize
your website for search engines and social media. It comes with a setup wizard and allows you to
import data from other SEO plugins during the setup.

You can use it to easily add meta title, description, and Open Graph metadata to your blog posts.
The plugin also allows you to generate an XML sitemap, connect Google Search Console, and
control access to plugin features based on user roles.

Off Page SEO Techniques

Off-page SEO is one of the most important parts of a successful strategy.

If you want to rank your site on Google and increase your brand’s visibility and organic search
traffic in 2020, you need to be looking beyond your own site.

Off-page SEO, in short, covers all SEO tactics that take place outside of your own website.

It is often thought to just be link building, but in reality, there are far more off-page SEO tactics
that you should be using if you want to gain a competitive advantage.

Tactics such as brand building, citation building, content marketing, social media, and more all
play an important part in a comprehensive SEO strategy.

But as a simple explanation of off-page SEO, this covers any tactics that you use that don’t
involve making changes to your own website or publishing content on your own site.

Off-page SEO includes those tactics that relate to activities carried out away from your own
website. Link building is often considered to be the main off-page tactic, but this also includes
tactics such as content marketing, social media, appearing on podcasts, landing reviews, building
local citations, and more.

Different off-page Strategies:

 Link Building
 Brand Building
 Content Marketing
 PR
 Local SEO (GMB and Citations)
 Social Media
 Forums
 Influencer Marketing
 Events
 Guest Posting
 Podcasts
 Reviews
 Content Syndication

Email Marketing Introduction and Significance

Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital
marketing, that uses email to promote your business’s products or services. It can help make
your customers aware of your latest items or offers by integrating it into your marketing
automation efforts. It can also play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation,
brand awareness, building relationships or keeping customers engaged between purchases
through different types of marketing emails.

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people,
using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be
considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or
solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of
three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to
sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant’s relationship with current or
previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers
or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
Email Marketing Introduction and Significance
Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital
marketing, that uses email to promote your business’s products or services. It can help make
your customers aware of your latest items or offers by integrating it into your marketing
automation efforts. It can also play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation,
brand awareness, building relationships or keeping customers engaged between purchases
through different types of marketing emails.

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people,
using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be
considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or
solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of
three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to
sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant’s relationship with current or
previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers
or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

Significance:

Email marketing delivers your message.

If marketers have to choose between adding a subscriber to their email list, or gaining a new
Facebook fan, they should go for the email subscriber every time.

There are two key reasons why:

First, 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your
Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. This is because Facebook limits the number of
times your posts appear in the News Feed in an attempt to drive brands towards their paid
advertising options.

Email marketing drives conversions.

Most marketers are laser focused on driving conversions. Regardless of whether they do so in the
form of leads, sales, memberships, or a metric unique to your business strategy, the ultimate goal
for marketers is to turn potential customers into paying customers.

And when it comes to conversions, there isn’t a more powerful channel than email. In fact, the
average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients), whereas the
average click-through rate from a tweet is around 0.5%.
This means you are 6x more likely to get someone to click through to your website via email
than you are from Twitter. As discussed earlier, your email subscribers have told you they want
to hear from you and this isn’t typically the case with social.

Email marketing has larger reach.

With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users and Twitter boasting 255 million, it’s
tempting to believe that social media is the most effective way to reach the masses. These are
impressive numbers, but what isn’t so frequently shared are the statistics on email usage.

Email marketing has a higher ROI.

Given email’s unmatched ability to drive conversions, it makes sense that email is also the most
effective marketing channel to drive ROI for your company. In fact, email marketing yields an
average 3,800% return on investment for businesses and for every $1 spent on email marketing,
the average return on investment is $38.

Advantages

Email marketing is significantly cheaper and faster than traditional mail, mainly because with
email, most of the cost falls on the recipient[citation needed].

Businesses and organizations who send a high volume of emails can use an ESP (email service
provider) to gather information about the behavior of the recipients. The insights provided by
consumer response to email marketing help businesses and organizations understand and make
use of consumer behavior[citation needed].

Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with emails
delivered between 1 am and 5 am local time outperforming those sent at other times in open and
click rates.

Disadvantages

 As of mid-2016 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According

to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 73% in the U.S.; six
percent were filtered as spam, and 22% were missing. This lags behind other countries:
Australia delivers at 90%, Canada at 89%, Britain at 88%, France at 84%, Germany at
80% and Brazil at 79%.
 Additionally, consumers receive on average about 90 emails per day.
 Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their
program does not violate spam laws such as the United States’ Controlling the Assault of
Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), the European Privacy and
 Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider’s
acceptable use policy.

Types

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer’s action with a company. To be
qualified as transactional or relationship messages, these communications’ primary purpose must
be “to facilitate, complete, or confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously
agreed to enter into with the sender” along with a few other narrow definitions of transactional
messaging. Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket messages, password reset
emails, purchase or order confirmation emails, order status emails, reorder emails, and email
receipts.

The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that
triggered it. But, due to their high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters),
transactional emails are an opportunity to introduce or extend the email relationship with
customers or subscribers; to anticipate and answer questions; or to cross-sell or up-sell products
or services.

Many email newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support, which gives
companies the ability to include promotional messages within the body of transactional emails.
There are also software vendors that offer specialized transactional email marketing services,
which include providing targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running
specific marketing campaigns (such as customer referral programs).

Direct emails

Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for
example, a special offer or a product catalog). Companies usually collect a list of customer or
prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages to, or they rent a list of email
addresses from service companies.

Campaigns using Mail Chimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you share emails, ads, and other
messages with your audience. We call these messages “campaigns.” When you create a
campaign in Mailchimp, we give you lots of flexible settings and design options, as well as
builder tools that walk you through every step of the process.
Things to know

 Before you can create a campaign in Mailchimp, you’ll need an audience.

 If you don’t have any contacts yet, create and share a signup form to build your
audience.
 Connect an online store to sync products and customer data, to tailor your
campaigns to the right people and sell more stuff.
 If you need help creating and designing a certain type of campaign, you can
search this Knowledge Base for additional resources.

Definitions

Campaign

Any distributed content, that’s created and measured in Mailchimp, including regular emails,
automations, landing pages, and ads.

Audience

A place for you to collect and manage your contacts in Mailchimp.

Contact

Someone whose email is stored in your account. A contact’s email marketing status determines
what kind of content you can share with them. Statuses include subscribed, unsubscribed, non-
subscribed, cleaned, and archived.

Choose a campaign type

Email campaigns

 Regular

This is the most common type of campaign. Design and customize your content, and choose
whether to send immediately or schedule your campaign for later.

 Plain-text

The simplest form of mass email you can send. These campaigns contain only text and have no
formatting options.
  A/B testing

Send more than one version of the same campaign and see which one comes out on top. Test
subject lines, From, names, content, and send times. If you’re a Mailchimp Pro user, you’ll have
the option to test up to eight different versions with a Multivariate campaign.

 Automated

Automated emails send when triggered by a specific date, event, or contact’s activity. You can
create a custom automation from scratch, or use one of our many pre-built automation
campaigns.

Email Marketing Strategy and Monitoring

An email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketer identifies and follows to
achieve desired marketing goals with email advertising. This plan of action gives the businesses
a direct channel of communication with prospects and customers for brand promotion.

Strategies

Set email marketing goals

Marketing emails serve to fulfill the following purposes:

 increase customer engagement

 raise loyalty
 maximize ROI
 maintain relationships with your clients

Pick the necessary email marketing tools

Finding the right tools is the first step to setting up an email marketing strategy. A marketer
needs an Email Service Provider (ESP) with an automation tool, among other useful features.

SendPulse allows you to create, organize, and send emails in a breeze. With Automation 360,
marketers can follow up on their customers and send the right emails at the right time. For
instance, you can set up welcome emails for onboarding new customers, abandoned cart emails
to get customers to take action about the items they have left in the cart, and so forth. Register
right now to launch your email marketing strategy with SendPulse.
Determine the target audience

Next, the marketer needs to build their email subscriber list. To do this, you have to identify the
target audience your company serves. Case in point, if a specific business deals with baby
clothes, then its target audience primarily comprises mothers-to-be. Thus, it makes sense to use
conventional means to get the email addresses of this demographic.

Identify the appropriate list building tactics

An excellent way of building mailing lists is through subscriptions. With SendPulse, you can add
subscription forms to your site and collect quality subscribers who are ready to hear from your
brand. You can embed subscription forms on high-traffic sections of your website.

Divide your mailing list into segments

Segmenting is an effective tactic that allows you to send highly targeted email campaigns. With
SendPulse, marketers can segment their mailing lists based on location, gender, occupation, age,
behavior, etc. In turn, you can be sure that you are delivering appropriate and customized
messages that appeal to customers.

Identify the types of emails to send

There’s a great variety of different emails that marketers send. The choice of email style depends
on the aim of each specific campaign. For example, if a user has just joined your mailing list,
send them a welcome email. This is a great chance to explain the benefits of working with you. If
clients have added some items to their shopping cart and didn’t buy them, send them an
abandoned cart email to increase sales. Discover more about email campaign types.

Create a schedule for sending emails

To ensure that subscribers read your promotional emails, find out the best time for sending
emails. It is, therefore, necessary to experiment and determine the time when subscribers are
most engaged. A/B testing proves useful.

Format the email content

For email marketing to be a success, messages in promotional emails should be presented

perfectly. Marketers should choose formats, fonts, and text sizes depending on the type of emails
that they are creating. With SendPulse, you can use a drag-and-drop editor to create beautiful
email templates that are customized to match your brand.
Optimize your emails

A 2017 study by Adestra concluded that 83.8 percent of mobile device owners open emails with
these devices. It, therefore, makes sense to optimize email content for mobile to reach this
audience. Some of the ways for assuring that email content is mobile-friendly include:

 Creating short subject lines.

 Limiting emails to a width of 600px.
 Using single-column templates.
 Displaying small images.
 Writing distinct CTAs.
 Testing on multiple mobile devices.
 Avoiding menu bars.
 Using a large font size (ideally 13-14 pixels).

Conduct split-testing

With A/B testing, marketers can determine what copy of their email works best by swapping out
different aspects of their email, such as subject lines (the most popular option), images, CTAs,
headlines, offers, and so forth.

Monitor email performance reports

Adjusting your email strategy based on reports and feedback that you have gathered is the last
step for developing an email marketing strategy. SendPulse provides users with a set of analytics
that aids in gauging the effectiveness of email campaigns. Track email open rate, unsubscribe
rate, click-through rates, email deliveries, email bounces, spam complaints, and more.

Monitoring

Overall ROI

Overall ROI is an email metric every marketer should track. It tells you the overall return on
investment for your campaigns.

You can calculate this by taking the money you made in sales from the campaign minus the
money you spent to execute the campaign, divide that by the money invested in the campaign,
and then multiply that by 100.
Email sharing rate

The email sharing rate indicates how many times a recipient shared your email through their
social media, but has nothing to do with sharing the email through email.

This metric is calculated through the “share this” button on your email. To find this rate, divide
the amount of “share this” clicks by the number of total emails delivered, then multiply by 100.

Engagement over time

Tracking engagement over time will give you information on the best times of day to send
messages.

You can utilize automation in your email service provider to send emails based on customer
behavior or trigger, but tracking engagement over time will tell you when you get the highest
open rates and click rates for emails that are not automated.

Forwarding rate/email sharing

Forwarding rate/email sharing measures the percentage of recipients who either shared your post
via social media or forwarded it to a friend.

Forwarding rate or sharing is a helpful metric to track because it gives you an idea of how many
brand advocates you have. It tells you what percentage of subscribers are recommending your
emails to others.

Spam complaints

It can be very discouraging for your emails to get marked as spam. You may prefer to ignore
these instances but it’s important to pay attention to spam complaints.

Email service providers want to ensure quality and track spam complaints. If this rate gets too
high, it’s possible your email service provider will take action against you and block your
account.

List growth rate

List growth rate is the metric to track the rate at which your list is growing.

You can calculate this by taking the number of new subscribers minus the number of
unsubscribes, then divide that by the total number of email addresses on your list, and then
multiply it by 100.
Number of unsubscribes

Measuring unsubscribes is very simple. Any email provider will tell you how many people
unsubscribed upon receiving an email from you. This email metric can usually be found in your
main dashboard or your metrics dashboard.

A high number of unsubscribes can be discouraging. However, email marketers prioritize this
email marketing metric and often view unsubscribes as a good thing because they indicate that
you are fine-tuning your subscriber list.

Bounce rate

When sending an email campaign, you also want to track the bounce rate. Bounce rate measures
how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email. Soft bounces track temporary
problems with email addresses and hard bounces track permanent problems with email
addresses.

Measuring bounce rates against open rates will give you a more solid idea of the quality of your
subscriber lists. If you have a high percentage of hard bounces, your list may be full of fake
email addresses, old email addresses, or addresses with mistakes in them.

Conversion rate

Your click-through rate measures how many people clicked your link, while your conversion rate
will assess how many people clicked on the link and then completed a specific action. For
example, if you included a link in your email for your subscribers to participate in a Black Friday
sale, the conversion rate would tell you what percentage of the people who clicked the link made
a purchase.

Conversion rates give you unique insight into your return on investment. When you know how
much you have spent and how many subscribers are converting, it’s easier to determine whether
or not the money you are putting into your campaign is paying off.

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR is another common metric that can help you determine how well your campaigns are
performing. CTR measures how many people clicked on the links in your email. For example, if
you included a link to redeem an offer, the CTR would measure what percentage of subscribers
clicked on your links.

When crafting an email, there are a few ways to increase click-through rates. For instance,
include links throughout the email in appropriate places and add an eye-catching and
conspicuous call-to-action button that subscribers can click on to redeem your offer.
Open rate

Open rate is the simplest email marketing KPI and is vital to understanding how well your
subscribers are receiving your messages. The open rate tracks how many subscribers opened the
email you sent.

Open rates can give you insight into the success of your subject line copy. For example, studies
show subject lines that use subscribers’ first names are 26% more likely to be opened. Other
strategies, like using emoticons in subject lines or keeping subject lines direct and short, can
increase open rates as well.