Using Emails to Build Links - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Kenny Martin

It's not so common to think about email marketing as a potential link building opportunity, but it's actually a wonderful tactic that you can use. Leveraging those finely crafted email lists with an SEO strategy can be highly advantageous.

In this weeks Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows off some useful and creative tips on how to utilize an email marketing strategy that will help you build links.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This is actually Thanksgiving Friday in the United States, so I hope you had a wonderful turkey day with your families. And for those of you in other countries, turkey is not the most delicious of birds, but we enjoy it. It's good. We make a little cranberry sauce. We've got a little yams and some sweet potatoes. It's great. It's lots of fun. And, of course, there's football, which is my favorite part.

All right. So in this edition of Whiteboard Friday, since it is indeed the giving of thanks, we are talking about getting thanks from your users from whom you're getting great email content by getting links from them.

Email marketing, email list building is actually a phenomenal way to get links. It's not something that many people in the SEO world think about. We've got a bunch of different strategies.

The first thing I want to talk about is building an email list itself. There are tons and tons of tips on this out there on the Web, and I don't want to pretend that I'm an expert. But what I will say is that having a subscription to an email list on a website, particularly if you are a content-based site or an ecommerce-based site, is absolutely huge. Even for those of you doing B2B direct marketing or doing affiliate sales of some kind, email list building is a wonderful way to capture consumers and potential customers, bring them into your ecosystem. Those email addresses are incredibly valuable if you can build up a good relationship over time.

A few recommendations. You've often got something on the side of your website that lets people subscribe with email. If you blow it up, it looks something like this. You've got your name, you've got your email, you have a subscribe button, and that's great. What I would really recommend is to ask for very, very little in these boxes. If you have a subscription that pops over, please ask for as little as possible. But do me one favor - ask for the name.

The reason the name is so important is because in email marketing and list building, as email marketers know, getting the open rate up is critical. Getting people to click on that email, open it up and click through. Having their name means that you can do much more with personalization of those emails. Not having their name means it's very frustrating. It's hard to write that first intro sentence or paragraph, whatever, if you don't have their name, and it's often hard to get them to click through as well. I'm sure all of you get email spam like this that says, "Hi, blogger from so- and-so." "Hi, dear Rand@SEOmoz." I'm sort of like, "Yeah, you have no idea who I am and you couldn't care less. You're just trying to get me to take some action." But if it says, "Hey there, Rand" or, "Rand, we've got something you might like," that is much more likely to get an open. It can be customized, etc.

Make sure that you have something of great value that you are delivering over email, and then make sure that you're not just promising it, but you are actually delivering on that promise.

Indicate the frequency that you are going to have. So in here, I might say something like "once per week." So you will get a weekly email, or you'll get a daily email, or you'll get a monthly email. Don't be coy about how often you are going to send it. Try not to be too out-of-cycle with those emails. It's really that kind of thing. I get a weekly email and then suddenly I get two in two days, and I thin