As a dentist or dental practice, your primary goal is to improve your patients’ smiles. However, getting patients through the doors and growing a practice has become a challenge for many dentists. To increase their patient numbers and revenue, many dental practices have turned to SEO for dentists.

Search engine optimization or SEO makes dental practices more easily discoverable by potential patients. In fact, SEO has the highest ROI for any marketing investment. When your dental site optimizes for search engine visibility, prospective patients to locate nearby dentists via their smartphones or desktops.

What Exactly Is Dental SEO?

Dental SEO is a way to make your practice’s site more visible to more prospective patients on search engines. This means, more people looking for a local dentist will find your practice.

Searching engines such as Google use webcrawlers to visit and sort the billions of pages on the world wide web. As they do so, they gather data to improve their search results. As these webcrawlers visit a page they begin categorizing information and storing it in an indexed format. Google then uses this data in their ranking system to decide the order of display search results.

The data a webcrawler gathers includes:

• What links are contained in a page
• How fast a page and high priority elements load
• Information on the topic of a page’s content (including images) and how in-depth it goes
• When the information on a page was last updated
• How mobile-friendly a site is

All of these factors tell Google about your dental practice and why your site deserves to be displayed higher in search results.

How Does SEO Help Dental Sites in Google Searches?

If your dental website doesn’t appear on the first page of search results, you’re missing out on a large amount of traffic. How much traffic? Only 25% of searchers click beyond the first page of results.

Ranking in the top three results gives you the lion’s share of traffic as shown below.

Making where your website ranks even more important is the fact that local businesses like yours appear in the Google Map Pack. And these top results receive over 50% of the clicks from searchers.

Why Dentists Need Dental SEO

If you’re not using SEO best practices, you’re putting your dental business at a disadvantage. Why? Other dentists are already optimizing their sites to appear higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). So, it’s likely your competitors’ URLs appear above yours in search engine results.

Furthermore, perception is reality when it comes to dental practices–people trust top-search results more than lower results. And when it comes to dentists, trust matters.

How to Implement SEO for Dentists

Google uses a lot of algorithms to collect data points on every website. Each of these individual algorithms is an opportunity to optimize your website. Should be easy, right? 

Well, Google keeps most of their proprietary algorithms secret. However, they do give site owners guidelines as to what they’re looking for, and SEO experts have tracked and analyzed the effects of countless website changes. This guide will prioritize the most impactful SEO changes dentists can implement for best results.

Local SEO: A Dentist’s Best Friend for Gaining Patients

The first thing you need to know is that dentists should optimize for local SEO. This is because your dental practice is a brick-and-mortar business that will appear on both Google searches and Google Maps searches.

While most SEO best practices are the same whether a site is strictly an e-commerce site or a local dental office, there are some tactics the work better for local businesses. We’ll cover everything you need to know.

What You Should Do Before Fully Diving into Dental SEO

The best SEO is built on a strong foundation. So, while it may not seem like a big deal to jump right into keyword research, we recommend taking these steps first. 

As you review these steps for dental SEO strategy, use our SEO glossary to help sort out the industry terminology that can trip users up.

1. Create a Google My Business Profile

A Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business (GMB), is a necessity for any local business, especially dentists. With a GMP profile, you will immediately appear in local searches, and you can begin using your profile to manage your business’s reputation.

To create a Google Business Profile, simply walk through the steps on the Business Profile page.

When you arrive at the categories section, you will want to list dental specialties. Be sure to list the specialties you want to be found for most, first. Google will prioritize these on your GMB listing. So, if you want to be found for teeth whitening, put that first. If you run a family dental practice, dental implants, or specialize in cosmetic dentistry, list these categories at the top.

Find & Fix Duplicate Listings and Locations

There are several issues that can crop up if your business has duplicate listings in Google Maps. 

Why You Want to Remove Duplicate Listings

1. The first is that customers wind up at the wrong place. 
2. Second, happy customers may be reviewing the wrong listing. 
3. Third, potential customers may be asking questions on the duplicate listing and not receiving answers.

To find duplicate listings, simply Google your business name. Then repeat with all dentists at your practice.

Remove Incorrect GMB Listing Locations in Google Business Profile

If a location comes up that is not relevant to your business, 

1. Sign in to your Business Profile
2. Go to Manage locations
3. Check any locations that are not your current business
4. Select “Actions” then Remove Location.

You can also remove locations in Google Maps. Here’s how according to Google:

2. Create Your Google Search Console & Google Analytics Accounts

Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA) provide users with the most accurate and up-to-date data. They’re also completely free to use. These tools will be imperative to tracking your website’s organic traffic. In fact, if you decide to sign up for a more detailed analytics tool like Search Atlas, you’ll need to connect your GSC account to the software for the most accurate tracking.

What’s the catch? Neither platform will begin recording your web traffic before you sign up. Learn how to get the most out of Google Seach Console and connect it to your Google Analytics account.

3. Set Your SEO Goals

When you’re first getting started with SEO, it may be difficult to pinpoint exactly what your goals should be. But goals fuel progress, so begin getting used to looking at your GSC metrics.

GSC Metrics and Terms to Know:

• Total Clicks: The number of times your page(s) were clicked on in search results
• Total Impressions: The number of times your page(s) appeared in front of a searcher
• Average CTR: The average number of times all of your pages are clicked on from search results pages divided by the number of impressions
• Average Position: The average ranking position your pages in all search results you appear for
• Queries: The search terms searchers enter into Google for which your pages appear

After about a week of collecting data and exploring your GSC reports, you will have a clearer idea of what your current organic traffic looks like.

SEO Goals for Dentists

Here are some goals you may want to modify for your dental practice:

Appear in Google’s Local 3 Pack: This is by far the most effective way to gain clicks as a dental practice.

Rank for more keywords: Be found for more searches

Increase organic traffic by X: More traffic means more business. A well-rounded SEO strategy will increase your overall ranking and total keywords, which will increase overall organic traffic.

Increase average ranking: As your average ranking increases, more searchers will find your website.

Establishing Your SEO Strategy & Campaign 

Once you’ve set your goals and become familiar with SEO metrics and terminology, it’s time to start implementing SEO best practices for business optimization.

As you work your way through this action plan, consider which tasks you want to complete yourself and which would be better to outsource. If you’re a tech-savvy marketing professional at a dental practice, you can do many of these on your own. You will have to be familiar with your practice’s Content Management System or work closely with your web development team.

1. Check your website’s security protocols

Google wants its users to e protected from malicious online attacks and data breaches. In order to safeguard searchers, Google uses security practices as a quality signal for PageRank. 

One of the important (and easiest) safety practices to protect your patients and boost your site’s security level is an SSL certificate. (Here’s a free SSL service). SSL encrypts your visitor’s data as it transfers from their browser to your site’s server. This makes stealing patients’ credit card numbers, insurance information, and other information nearly impossible.

Without this certificate, your site visitors will be confronted with a warning message. 

With an SSL certificate, your website can actually speed up with the use of HTTP/2, which has a wide array of improved performance features.

2. Improve Your Site Speed for Mobile and Desktop

Google wants to reward websites that provide the best user experience. Part of the user experience is how fast your website loads after a visitor land on it from the SERPs. This is why Google’s algorithm 

To test your page’s page using Google’s PageSpeed Insights or with a Site Auditor tool. All you have to do is enter your URL into the text field.

After identifying what elements are slowing your website down, take the time to fix them. Focusing on Google’s Core Web Vitals is a great start to optimizing your website for speed. 

Since most searches for dental services are performed on mobile devices, be sure to view your mobile speed in addition to desktop speed.

If you notice a pattern, for example in the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) or First Meaningful Paint, you will want to compress your images and videos above your page folds.

3. Keyword Research for Dentists

When you’re first starting your SEO strategy, you will want to target keywords that you’re already ranking for, but not as well as you could. Then you want to begin increasing the number of keywords your dental practice website ranks for.

If you’re a new dentist, you will want to skip to the second step and begin building a robust keyword profile with keyword optimization techniques.

How to identify keywords you could increase your ranking for

As we’ve pointed out, dentists want to rank in the top three local search results. So, targeting keywords that are close to  SERP position 3 is a great strategy. Additionally, pushing any pages from the second SERP page to the first should also increase your overall organic traffic.

To, identify these pages, you will want to sort your Top Keywords by Position and SEO Potential in the GSC Insights tool.

How to Optimize Your Existing Pages

To optimize your existing content for improved visibility in the SERPs, you will want to enter the URL into the SEO Content Assistant.

Then, use the SEO Content Assistant’s recommend Focus Terms, length, citations, and readability to improve the content’s topical depth and quality.

How to Perform Keyword Research for New Dentists & New Content

The SearchAtlas SEO software suite makes finding new keywords easy. Within the tool, you can perform competitor research, discover potential keywords, create a content calendar task list, and explore content ideas.

To begin, enter potential keywords into the Keyword Researcher tool. Then modify the search location to reflect your target audience’s location.

After the Keyword Research retrieves the analytics, you can begin creating clusters of keywords that you want to target with the Suggested keyword report or Competitor keyword mosaic.

To determine if the keywords are worth targeting, you will want to aim for Easy keyword difficulty with high search volume. 

You will also want to look at the SERP overview to assess if your website has the potential to rank. If your domain rating (DR) is on par with these pages, there’s a good chance you can rank for the keyword.

4. Begin Tracking Your Organic Traffic

Use Google Search Console or another keyword tracking software to traffic and analyze your SEO efforts. Upward trends are a sign that your efforts are working. 

To make tracking specific SEO efforts easy, create site events in GSC Insight. These will appear along the x-axis of your pages’ historical trends mapping alongside major Google algorithm update events.

5. Meta Tag & Image Tag Optimization

Every web page has HTML tags. The URL, meta title, and meta description appear in your SERP listing and provide searchers with information about the page. This information can encourage more clicks since it appears in Google’s search results. 

There are also image alt tags, which improve your site’s accessibility and heading tags. Each of these “tags” is an opportunity for better site optimization since Google’s algorithms use this information to better understand your site.

So, how do you optimize your dentist website’s meta tags?

Title Tag: Keep your title between 40 and 60 characters & include your Target Keyword. If it makes sense for the page, include your city and state in the title. 

Meta Descriptions: Keep these between 120 and 160 characters and include your Target Keywords towards the beginning of the description. Your services pages need to include your city. Additionally, try to differentiate your listing from your competitors. Always provide an accurate description.

Image Alt Tags: Image alt tags appear if an image doesn’t load. They are also read aloud by screen readers for those with visual impairments. They’re also used by Google’s bots to help determine the subject of your content. To optimize these, give an accurate description and include any Focus Terms related to your Target Keyword. You will also want your image filename to reflect the image.

Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc): Your age should only have one H1 heading that includes your Target Keyword. Other headings should be used in descending order, logically.

6. Use Schema Markup

Schema markup may seem like a foreign language to someone that specializes in dentistry. However, schema is not as complicated as it sounds. It’s one of the easiest ways for Google’s algorithm better understand how to categorize your business.

Using, Schema for Dentists, be sure to include the following schema on your homepage and webpages, including your services page:

• Your address/location on every page
• Phone number on every page
• Breadcrumbs on every page
• Specialties
• Logo
• GeoCooridinates
• An on-page map with ‘hasMap’
• About page
• Photos
• Awards
• Events
• Reviews
• Employees

7. Creating High-Quality Content

After you’ve performed your keyword research (Step 3) for your dental practice website, you will want to compile a list of keywords you want to target. After you have a list of keywords, you will want to categorize them by how they relate to your primary services or a primary topic.

From there, you can create a content calendar that prioritizes the most important keywords in your list or those that have the greatest SEO potential.

How to Create the Dental Search Engine Optimization Content

1. In the SEO Content Assistant text editor, enter your primary keyword into the Target Keyword text field. Add additional keywords from the suggestion list if you want to target multiple keywords.
2. Review content ideas and dentists’ websites that are currently ranking for your target keyword.
3. Begin writing, naturally incorporating Focus Terms into your piece and formatting headings.Consider adding the common citations or reviewing what type of citations top-ranking content and linking to a similar type of content.
4. Add rich media and upload your piece to your Content Management System (CMS).

8. Increase Your Directory Listings

Many prospective patients use directories to find dental professionals. If you’re not listed in these directories, you could be missing out. Listing in these directories also provides you with backlinks and the perfect opportunity to verify your address and phone number elsewhere on the web.

Here are the most common directories practice listings:

• The Real Yellow Pages
• Yelp
• WebMD’s Doctor Locator
• Dentists.com
• The American Dental Association
• The DentistHub.org

9. Think Creatively about Backlink Opportunities

Backlinks help your site build domain authority, which indicates how likely your company website is to rank at the top of Google results. Of course, building backlinks takes time, but it’s well worth the effort. So, as your practice’s site begins to build content, it’s a good strategy to become a trusted leader in your niche and community. This is a natural and effective way to build backlinks.

To build your brand as well as backlink profile:

• Sponsor local events or attend as a vendor
• Write expert guest articles for sites with higher domain authority scores than your own
• Post in niche forums for dentists and orthodontists, such as DentalXP

You can also find backlink opportunities using SearchAtlas’s Backlink Analyzer tool’s Suggested Outreach report.

If you want to build backlinks more quickly or in a more time-efficient manner, consider using an SEO company that specializes in backlinks.

10. Stay Active on Your Google Business Profile

As a local company, your Google Business Profile is key to increasing your organic traffic. Your Google Business Profile is even considered more important than your website’s home page by many strategists. 

What Google Business Profile tasks should be performed weekly?

• Respond to reviews
• Reply to Questions

What other GBP tasks should you keep up with?

• Update photos
• Add new doctors as they come on-board
• Change address location if you relocate
• Add any new services you offer
• Update holiday hours

In addition to keeping your GBP updated, you also want to ask happy patients to review your business. Prospective dental patients put a lot of emphasis on how others’ services went with a business.

11. Consider a Pay-Per-Click Campaign

Pay-per-click (PPC) dental SEO campaigns are a great way to increase traffic to your website when your practice’s site is still getting established. PPC campaigns include Google Ads. These PPC campaigns run your practice’s site at the top of Google results, so searchers see them first.

When to Hire a Dental SEO Expert

SEO takes time. However, the results also stand the test of time in ROI and your brand reputation. If you do not have the time to implement every aspect of SEO for dentists, using an SEO strategist from a dental SEO company can be a cost-effective investment.

Dental SEO services can be tailored to your practice’s site as well as your budget. Your SEO company can help you identify where to spend your budget for the biggest impact. They can also perform more tedious SEO dentist-related tasks such as finding and eliminating duplicate content.

SEO for Dentist: A Reason to Smile

For the best chances of being a snippet on the top of Google’s results, you need to be proactive with your approach to SEO. Begin with signing up for Google Search Console, getting acquainted with your metrics, then moving on to creating a Google Business Profile and beginning your keyword research. 

The next steps will take time but will result in a better experience for your patients from the time they first find you to when they schedule their follow-up appointments. So, get started on the right path with SearchAtlas’s suite of SEO software tools that are easy to use or contact our team for SEO dentists can count on.

The post SEO for Dentists: An Action Plan and Guide appeared first on LinkGraph.

The latest outreach methods certainly have their pros; however, we often forget one of the oldest yet most effective marketing channels: email. When used correctly, targeted email marketing can be an easy and accessible digital marketing approach for anyone trying to grow their business.

Not sure how to get started with targeted email marketing? Keep reading to learn more about this tried-and-true marketing strategy and the best way to make it work for your brand.

What is Targeted Email Marketing?

Consider this: there are 3.9 billion daily email users worldwide. That’s a lot of accounts and emails ripe for the picking. However, as consumers, we all know the annoyance of waking up to an inbox full of messages that we have no plans to read. As a business owner, how can you ensure your email messaging stands out? How can you craft content that resonates with your consumers, demanding to be read, rather than flagged as spam?

This is where targeted email marketing can help. The idea of targeted email marketing automation is simple. All you have to do is send a specialized email to a group of interested subscribers. This can be done using list segmentation, the act of splitting up your subscribers into different “pools” based on their demographic, interests, location, and website behavior.

Think of it this way––when you send targeted email marketing, you’ll be sending the right message to the right email subscribers at the right time, which increases the likelihood of the customer opening the email, clicking, and making a purchase. When done correctly, your customer will feel catered to, leading to increases in retention and conversions.

Targeted Email Marketing Vs. Traditional Email Campaigns

Think back to the last time you checked your inbox. How many emails did you get throughout the day? Chances are, you’ve put your name on some merchants’ email lists and now receive dozens of emails per week offering sales and general store updates. This type of email comes from a traditional email campaign, one set up by a company to promote brand awareness and grab impulse buyers.

Sure, there are benefits to traditional email campaigns, but these may not be appropriate for your business’s audience and may require you to spend too much time and money for a proper ROI. 

Traditional email campaigns reach a mass audience with more generic content that does not speak to the individual consumer. This choice can be great for larger brands that may not need to reach specific customers; however, even these brands utilize targeted emails. For example, if you subscribe to a clothing store’s email list, they’ll likely only email you about sales and updates for the fashion of your gender.

Targeted email marketing reaches your customers with a more individualized approach. Naturally, there are many approaches to targeted emails; however, the most effective ones share these qualities:

• Urgency: Instead of sending the same content to millions of subscribers, you send a specific newsletter or promotion to a targeted set of consumers that have already expressed interest in your product or service. After all, a vegan will likely have little interest in your new line of leather home furnishings.
• Call to Action: The goal of these targeted emails is for your clients to respond in some way; whether it be making a purchase, completing a survey, signing up for an email newsletter, or calling your store. Be sure that, in addition to information, you’re also providing your readers with a way to convert. 
• Human Touch: In a world where everything is primarily done online, it is more important than ever that your customers feel like they are talking to an actual human behind the screen. It’s always a good idea to write and sign the email from the perspective of an actual team member.

So you’ve drafted your emails, fine-tuned them with a personalized flair, and sent them to the appropriate consumers. With all that said, how will you know if your strategy works? 

What to Know About Targeted Email Campaigns: Open Rates, Clicks, and Conversions

The most important thing to know about targeted email marketing is that you constantly need to experiment, examine your data, and adapt based on your findings. You never know exactly how readers will react to your messaging. Think about it. If a company’s email doesn’t interest you, are you going to take the time to draft them a response explaining why? 

Luckily, there are a few metrics that can help monitor your targeted email marketing campaign. If you read them carefully, you can figure out how to hone your strategy. 

Open Rate

An email’s open rate tracks how many subscribers opened the email you sent. This is the most important metric to check; after all, if no one is opening your email, how will your message get out? 

In a world of digital distractions, there’s a need to make your email’s subject line really pop and get attention. For example, studies show that email subject lines using the subscriber’s first name are 26% more likely to be opened. In a world where the average open rate of an email is about 16%, an increase of a few percentage points can mean hundreds of additional eyes on your brand. 

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) measures how many consumers clicked links in your email. So if your email included a link to your website’s homepage, it measures the number of people directed there via your message. At just above 7%, the average CTR for a targeted email marketing campaign may seem low, but when you translate that percentage into number of views, the figure can be impressive.

There are some easy ways to increase your email’s click-through rate;

• Putting a link within the first sentence of the email’s copy.
• Add links to specific product pages under pictures of the product itself.
• Including an eye-catching and unique call to action (CTA) at the end of the email with a prominent link to your optimized website. 

Remember, you’ll want to be strategic with your links. More than a few will likely either confuse or overwhelm your reader. We’d recommend placing one key link near the beginning and another towards the end, likely where you’ll bring up your call to action.

Conversions

A conversion measures when a potential customer becomes a consumer. While your CTR measures how many people clicked on a link, the conversion rate measures how many consumers actually completed something. What you consider a conversion can vary depending on your business goals. A conversion can be making a phone call, signing up for a workshop, or participating in a certain sale by entering a promo code.

At the end of the day, no matter what your specific conversion is, this metric will give you a unique insight into your ROI. When you figure out how many people are buying from you, compared to how much you are spending to acquire them, you will be in a better place to see whether or not your targeted email campaign is successful.

Collect Customer Data to Create Targeted Email Lists

If collecting all of this data sounds like a daunting task, then fear not! Assuming your company has existing customers, you likely already have a ton of unused consumer data at your fingertips. But before you can do anything with it, you need to proceed strategically to help you measure your success and get the best results. You will want to:

• Set Specific Goals: Similar to the conversion metric, your goal can be anything you want it to be, from having a customer make a phone call and completing a purchase to promoting a new product, free plan, or collecting email signup forms.
• Choose Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Depending on the goal you come up with, your key performance metrics could be batch, open rate, downloads, signups, and/or sales. Be sure that the KPIs you privilege correspond with an increased conversion.
• Analyze Your Data: Testing your data is exceptionally important, so make sure to frequently check your results to understand if they align with your original goals. The easiest way to do this is by using customer relationship management software (CRM) and email services, which can track everything for you.

Not all data is created equally when it comes to email marketing campaigns. Now that you have a process to manage the success of your targeted email marketing campaign, you’ll want to start segmenting your data.

How to Segment Audiences for Email Campaigns

Here is the type of data you should segment when tracking the success of your data-driven email campaign.

Demographics

You’ll want to start off with some basic demographic information like age, sex, and geographic location. This information is easily collected during a sign-up or time of purchase. Use it to your advantage when you want to send personalized emails to your target audiences such as millennials, parents, or those who live on the East Coast, for example.

Customer Type

Different customers have different sensibilities, and you’ll likely have a wide array of customers that visit your site through its tenure. You will have returning customers who are loyal to your brand, new consumers who are considering products or services like yours, or those that just need something on the fly without requiring brand loyalty.

Understanding these customer types and their user behavior can help you determine how to accurately target them; whether it is via a retargeting campaign to get already converted consumers to buy, offering a new customer discount, or even sending a thank you note.

Website Behavior

It is incredibly important to track behavioral data because it tells you what about your website piques user interest. It will show you not only product trends but also how many customers are filling up a cart and then leaving the site mid-purchase.

This “bouncing” is incredibly common, and understanding the data behind it can give you insight into your next steps. For example, if a specific group of consumers is leaving the site right before they put in their credit card, you can consider adding a one-step payment system like PayPal to your site. Or, if you are noticing that your consumers rarely press “check out,” you can email them a coupon code or some other special offers enticing them to return to your site and hopefully convert.

Best CRM &  Email Marketing Softwares for Targeted Email Campaigns

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software simplifies life for business owners, as it tracks dozens of data metrics and presents them in one dashboard. Plus, these CRMs seamlessly integrate email marketing platforms to help you manage, store, and track your data.

There are plenty of CRMs available depending on your needs and goals. Here are some of our favorites. Each of them simplifies the work of targeted email campaigns.

HubSpot CRM

The HubSpot CRM is great for a beginner as it has everything you may need in a CRM, email marketing service, and email service provider––all in one place. With HubSpot, you can draft emails from a series of templates or make your own from scratch. You can even send emails and track analytics through this platform. They’ll provide you with information such as open rate, click-through rate, and they’ll even tell you which links were clicked.

Salesforce Essentials

Salesforce is a great CRM for small business owners. For beginners, it’s a simple way to approach targeted email marketing due to its intuitive interface. Salesforce also offers advanced reporting of website visitors  and lead assignment routing, as well as the ability to track new and inactive subscribers

Keap

If you have an e-commerce business, Keap is the way to go. It is an all-in-one software tool that generates leads, develops, and sends out automated email campaigns throughout the United States. It also allows you to sell your goods in an online store.

Successful Email Marketing Campaigns and the Power of Personalization

In order to conceptualize how targeted email marketing works when done correctly, it’s important to look at some successful national email marketing campaigns with brands you may know.

Chatbooks

Chatbooks is a photo book service that offers custom prints and binding at the click of a button. They go the extra mile in their email marketing by sending emails that evoke powerful emotions such as love or nostalgia. For example, they have been able to target new mothers, suggesting that they commemorate this sentimental time with a photo book chronicling their new baby’s first year. Ultimately, this strategy proved highly successful for them.

David’s Tea

To retain customers, this tea company sends thank you letters following every purchase. By sending these emails with a personalized message about the consumer’s purchasing history (i.e how many cups of tea the consumer bought from them), the user starts to feel important and remembered, ultimately leading to further purchases down the line.

Loft

Loft is an apparel brand that approaches their email marketing with transparency. They promote the fact that users can manage their email preferences in order to receive content that truly resonates with them. This self-selecting strategy boosts their click-through rate, as their emails only go to the consumers who have chosen to get them.

As you can see from these three brands, the power of personalization can really go far when it comes to connecting with your customers and encouraging them to convert.

Best Practices for Email Marketing Campaigns

While no two businesses are the same, there are some best practices anyone can implement to get the ROI when it comes to their email marketing strategy. Here are the best tips to try out before pressing “send.”

• Optimize the email’s preview text. You’ll want to put the most important information in this sentence to really capture the user’s attention. Marketing emails are a dime a dozen, so make it a goal to create snappy, effective emails for your active subscribers.
• Experiment with what time you send your emails. Try different times during the day so you can be sure to capture your audience when they are engaged on their mobile devices and computers.
• Personalize the email greeting with a first name. For consumers, this is an important part of grabbing their attention. It also lends a human touch to each piece of correspondence.
• Add incentives in the subject line and the copy’s headline to increase click-through rates and potential conversions.
• Be personal with your email copy. Include your company’s logo, your contact information, and even a personalized email signature.
• Send an auto-responding follow-up email to those consumers who choose to sign up or subscribe to a newsletter, if applicable. A relevant email as a followup is better than no email at all.
• Be consistent. Once you figure out the best time to send out an email, stick to this schedule. This way, your customers will become accustomed to your schedule. That being said, only choose to send one or two emails per week, as constant contact can be a bad thing. Consumers are more likely to unsubscribe from your emails if you’re constantly filling up their inbox.

Targeted email marketing can be an incredibly powerful tool for your large or small business, as long as you stay dedicated to your end goal. Just as boosting your page ranking takes time, so does building an email campaign that continually delivers.  

Remember, your digital marketing effort is something that should be folded into your overall outreach strategy. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was any successful targeted email marketing campaign. However, with careful planning, implementation, and data tracking, you can develop a targeted email campaign that will convert consumers and take your business to the next level.

The post Targeted Email Marketing 101: A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on LinkGraph.