Corporate Blogging and Email Marketing: Why They Work Together

Corporate Blogging and
Email Marketing
Why They Work Together By Chris Baggott Co-founder/CEO Compendium BlogwareIntroduction Blogging as a business tool is beginning to gain widespread adoption within organizations of all types and sizes. That's why the time seemed right to publish a whitepaper discussing how blogging and email marketing work together. Few would argue that email is the greatest tool ever invented for building relationships after they've been initiated. In the email marketing world, this is known as permission. It's generally a bad practice to use unsolicited email as an acquisition tool. Unlike other forms of direct marketing, unsolicited email is considered annoying, expensive, and unproductive. Email is a great conversion and retention tool, but what should you do about acquisition? Figure 1: Most Frequent Online Activities According to a study by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, email is tied with search as the number one online activity. For all the noise about SMS or social networking, email and search are still the staples that make up the vast majority of online activity. So if email interaction is an everyday activity that's inappropriate for acquisition, and search activity is equal to email (see Figure 1), how do email marketers leverage search to accomplish their goals? There are two basic ways to use search as an acquisition tool: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Besides the fact that you must pay for one and not the other, there are two other major differences between PPC and SEO. Figure 2: Keywords Targeted by SEO vs. PPC 1. Keyword Volume The average site is considered to be "doing well" if it ranks among the top results for a dozen or so keywords for organic search. On the other hand, marketers using PPC typically target more than 1,000 keyword phrases (according to Marketing Sherpa's Search Marketing Benchmark Study, Figure 2).
2 | H o w t o u s e b l o g g i n g a n d e m a i l Average SEO Average PPC Figure 3: Heat Map Shows Action on SERP 2. Click Volume The same study from Marketing Sherpa found that as much as 99% of the clicks on a SERP (search engine results page) happen in the organic results. Figure 3 demonstrates where the action takes place on a typical Google SERP. You can see that the vast majority of the clicks happen above the fold in the organic results. So do you see what's broken here? For all its effectiveness, PPC can capture only a small percentage of the possible clicks on a given SERP. And traditional website SEO tactics can't come close to fulfilling the volume of keywords that an organization desires to target. What's needed here is an easy to execute strategy for targeting large numbers of keywords and ranking on them in the organic results. This is where organizational blogging comes in. At the end of the day, search engines want to deliver relevant content. And that relevance is determined by the following factors: Page Titles Titles are critical to SEO. A page with a title that exactly matches the search phrase has a much better chance of being served in the SERP. The problem with titles is that they're difficult to utilize within a traditional site. It's practically impossible to have a properly titled page for every single keyword you are targeting (remember, for most of us, this number is around 1,000 in PPC). This isn't a constraint of corporate blogging. Keywords It makes sense that search engines determine relevance based on the ratio of exact keywords used on a webpage compared to the search query. If the searcher is using a specific phrase, the search engines want to deliver as close a match as possible to that phrase. The problem with a typical website is that you have a finite amount of space for text. It's nearly impossible to have a large volume of content that targets all the keywords you bid on in PPC. Blogging, of course, doesn't have this constraint. The nature of blogs keeps the content around forever in reverse chronological order. The more content, the more chances you have to use the keywords you want to be found on. In addition to just keywords, Google has introduced a concept called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) "Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing ... [download for more]