Email marketing is an effective way to build a website and drive traffic to your site, and it can increase your search engine rankings even further.

Email marketing can also include building an email newsletter or email list for your customers, building a B2B database or email list, collecting surveys, tracking opt-ins, engaging with your customer base on your social media accounts, implementing checklists, optimizing landing pages and more.

But how much exposure can you get with email marketing when you’re competing against other websites? Ultimately, a more robust website is the only way to really stand out in search results. Fortunately, email marketing can leverage your existing audience, integrate existing content, pull data from your website to build a bigger database, and automatically track conversions for campaigns.

Here are six tips for converting more email visits into website traffic.

1. Collect Marketing Relevant Epsilon Forms

One of the best tools available is Epsilon’s Marketing Relevant Epsilon Forms. Epsilon helps organizations to overcome inefficiencies in lead qualification, because of wasted marketing spend and inaccurate conversion and revenue potential. Epsilon stands out from other data networks as its leads are generated and collected from existing email subscribers, not campaign participants. This greatly simplifies the lead qualification process, enabling a superior level of data optimization and campaign effectiveness. Epsilon’s Forms are deeply embedded into the marketing automation infrastructure and allow for one-time solutions and cross-sell activities to be automated and accurately managed.

2. Refer by Email

You can grab a referral from your email subscribers by sending an email titled “Refer by Email” to a contact list. Here’s how it works: email recipients are explicitly encouraged to refer a friend or family member to your website if they would like to take part in an exclusive promotional offer that could reward them with 10% off an item on your site. The referral form only takes two minutes to complete and can be added to your landing page or targeted to individual contacts.

3. Locate Your Conversion Data

The second element to mention in this method is the conversion data you find while re-referring contacts. Right now, it’s challenging to find this data within the email databases. You must go through the detailed process of digging into subscriber lists and identifying which customers are referring the same person all the time. This could be as simple as the first email being sent to someone’s inbox, or it can be as difficult as identifying a specific content source shared between one subscriber and the other.

To benefit from the power of referral marketing, it is important to carefully track the behavior of referral emails to identify if conversions are occurring. One way to track this is to place a call to action on each email with the same subject line. This can be accomplished by setting up push notifications and/or blacklisting those emails you are uncomfortable with your site becoming a referral resource for.

4. Master SEO Search Locator

Ongoing SEO optimization can bolster your SEO rankings and building a strong search engine as one of the best ways to increase reach to your customer base. When a visitor sees search results from your site, you should make sure they can specifically determine which links are related to your keywords and which don’t have keyword or location data in the title. When possible, make sure these links are classified as a sponsored search. By being a primary sponsor in search engine results, the purchase path being presented to your audience is much cleaner and easier to understand.

5. Build your Active Customer Profiles

One of the most important data sets you can collect is information on your visitors’ existing purchase behaviors. This can be particularly useful when collecting email metrics, such as how long they visit your site, which kinds of purchase types they pursue, the average purchase size, and more. By targeting your own website to mature through emails, you can collect a wealth of customer data on repeat purchases and sources of referral.

6. Adjust Your Go-To-Market Strategy

Improving your site’s long-term success can be equally as important as making a short-term revenue achievement. Even though you can build an email database on your own by collecting data from other third parties, it will be much harder to accurately track the conversion rate of new email subscribers. That means you’ll need to give these subscribers a more personalized experience through email campaigns. As you’re changing the way your site works, adjust your go-to-market strategy as well. As a first step, ask your marketing provider for an initial read of their existing b2b email marketing platform, and ensure you’re reading the business rules and features that can help you successfully build a conversion-friendly website.

Originally published on Smallbiztechnology.com