One of my SEO clients found they’re selling more and more products though email marketing-because SEO and SEM, by themselves,  do not generate enough sales.  Think the multi-pronged approach.

Marketingshift has a pretty good post on how to use email marketing to support a SEO/SEM campaign.

First the problem is defined:

Retailers that have been dealing with rising competition over paid-search keywords and are finding they need to rely less on search engine marketing and develop a more comprehensive, multi-channel strategy.

Aaron Kessler, a senior research analyst who follows e-retailers for investment research firm Piper Jaffray & Co. notes, "Three years ago, Internet search was a good value for any retail category, but now it’s not always the value it was," he says. "It’s a great marketing channel when it works, but many retailers have become too reliant on it."

Case in point - Best Buy:

“Our SEM effort has been very profitable because we manage it as part of an overall online advertising portfolio and because of our strong brand, which we build through multi-channel national advertising and in-store service,” says Sam Taylor, vice president of online stores and marketing for Best Buy Co. Inc., adding that Best Buy will aggressively expand its budget for search engine marketing this year, just as it did last year.

My experience with my client suggests the same thing - but I don’t have such big clients.   However, when I work with a client and get to know the business - and know their database capabilities - certain things pop up as opportunities.  That happened to me recently.

Client had 23,000 customers in their database and they emailed out to them weekly; we could tell who ended up buying a product using tracking package for that purpose.  But we did not know who might be interested in buying …. but had not yet done so.

Solution: tell the webmaster to tag each link of each email that goes out to a customer with the customers’ database id.  Within 3 to 5 days after the email, I take a look at my web analytics - see which urls have the most pageviews from the emailing (they will have each customers’ id in the url string).

Then I picked those urls (a.k.a "customers") that had the most pageviews and and looked up who they were.  In many cases the same customers looked at multiple links - so I made a little table that listed each customer number and then what they looked at and how many times.

I then handed that list over to the CIO of the company to have her contact (in a polite way) just those people….people we knew were really interested because of their visitor behavior - visitor intent.

Now, I wager that we’ll get more customers that were thinking about buying….to buy…this way…because of this…because we contacted them and knew something about what they wanted….then all the PPC and SEO that we could do.  

SEO is great, SEM is great, all this stuff is great…but  you have to do a lot of stuff…not just one thing.  Here’s some additional points from Emaillabs.com, (thanks MarketingShift!)

1. Get relevant - dive into personalization and segmentation. (true)
2. Resolve or minimize deliverability and rendering issues.
3. Redesign email messages for the inbox and users who view them in the preview pane and block images. (i don’t know anything about that personally)
4. Optimize the beginning of the email relationship.
5. Get on the permission train.
6. Focus on metrics that matter. (i know a lot about that!)

I think I’ll end here.