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Monday Catch-up: Consumers Prefer Email, Boosting SEO & Understanding DMARC

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Welcome to the work week, marketers! Let’s get right to it with some email-marketing related news.

Survey shows consumers prefer to hear from brands by email

A recent survey indicates that consumers haven’t tired of their relationship with email – on the contrary, they are checking it “constantly” (primarily on smartphones), spending more time on it than last year, and strongly prefer it over direct mail and social media as a way of hearing from brands. The results also surfaced a couple of issues of importance to email marketers.

Talking New Media reported on the survey of more than 1,000 American white-collar workers, which was conducted by Adobe this summer. The survey results indicate that 50 percent of respondents prefer to be contacted by brands via email, followed by direct mail at 22 percent and social media at nine percent; however, the survey also found that respondents find less than one-quarter of email offers interesting enough to open and are “intolerant” of waiting for images to load on a smartphone.

“Marketers must adapt their approach to address email behaviors and avoid adding to the noise of the inbox,” Kristin Naragon, director of Email Solutions, Adobe Campaign, says in the article. “This means fewer emails and ensuring those sent are mobile-optimized, personalized and contextual to offer the best possible digital experience.”

How to use email marketing to boost your SEO

Jayson DeMers, writing at Forbes, sees email marketing as an important method to use for improving SEO and shares several suggestions for email marketers “to directly influence factors that have significant bearing” on search-engine rankings. “Email alone can’t do anything for your SEO campaign; Google doesn’t crawl emails in the context of SEO, nor will your email marketing campaign directly affect your website’s rankings in any way,” DeMers writes. “However, email marketing can affect the behaviors of your users (such as getting them to share your content, engage with it, comment on it, or link to it), which can affect your website’s search rankings.”
DeMers’s suggestions for using email to improve SEO include making generous use of inbound links, promoting content with newsletters and using “valuable offers” to foster engagement. In addition, he advises email marketers to “measure everything” and cautions against purchasing subscribers and spamming customers.

Authentication: How DMARC protects brands

Most email marketers are probably aware that the acronym “DMARC” is associated with email authentication, but you might not know that those letters stand for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance” or how DMARC protects brands from fraud and abuse. With the goal of “bringing a little more clarity into the confusing world of email authentication,” Bettina Specht recently conducted an interview with Steven Jones, Executive Director of DMARC.org, which is published on the Litmus blog.

“Understanding email authentication isn’t easy, and in most cases, it isn’t something email marketers can handle all by themselves,” Specht writes in her introduction to the interview. “Still, as the voice of your brand, every email marketer should have a basic understanding of email authentication and DMARC, and how to use the tools available to help protect your brand from email fraud.” The answers Jones provides to the 13 questions posed by Specht in the interview provide that “basic understanding” she considers so important.

Optimize your messages to support smartphone conversions

“Smartphones are responsible for more than half of email opens compared to desktop; however, it’s important to note that they only account for 20 percent of conversions,” writes Gina Botti, at Business 2 Community. She says the reason mobile isn’t converting more customers is that email marketers aren’t always making it easy for customers to call directly from their messages. “As an email marketer, it’s important you give consumers the option to call from your email campaigns. Callers often have a high purchase intent and seek immediate answers, which makes converting leads to sales much easier for agents.”

Botti shares three suggestions for email marketers to make it as simple as possible for customers to make a purchase by phone: include a clickable phone number in HTML emails; use “call-centric language” when targeting smartphone users (e.g., “We haven’t spoken in a while, give us call today to talk with our local agents about an exclusive new offer.”); and direct email recipients to mobile-optimized web content. She also encourages testing: “You can start simple by using your current email template without a phone number and A/B test it against another version that has a “Call Now” button,” she writes. “Over time, this should help you determine whether or not your audience is more inclined to call and convert.”

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