Are you facing the challenge in attracting the right prospect? You are not alone; marketers across the world had faced this time and again. In this scenario, one just needs a premium strategy to hit the bull’s eye and pull the best prospects for sales conversions. For this, you need to first understand your customer. B2B customers need proper business communication with a strong CTA. Which is why you need to understand what is schema markup and how to best leverage it to understand your customers.
As a marketer, you know that Schema.org markup is used in the web pages, but are you aware that it can also be used in the email to attract the attention of your recipient?
Yes, the same markup which you use in the search engine results can also be used for sending bulk emails to the recipients. The Schema.org helps in adding the required CTAs, which attracts the attention of the recipient.
Now, for the beginners let’s understand in detail what is Schema.org…
This is the additional code added to the website to provide more information about the pages to the Googlebot crawler. The technology is an advanced one generated with the collaboration of Yahoo, Yandex, Google, and others.
Is Schema markup essential?
From the beginning stage itself, Schema.org has found the balance between several syntaxes versus in making clear recommendations to the webmasters. These syntaxes are RDFa, which is resource description framework in attributes and the JSON-LD, which is the JavaScript Object Notation for the linked data. In order to reduce the complex situation, the schema.org promoted the syntax known as the Microdata developed as a part of HTML5.
Whatever be the syntax, the schema markup helps a specific email to stand out from the rest of the emails.
As mentioned before, schema markup is necessary to stand out from the already crowded inbox. The markup, which is also known as the structured data, enhances the appearance of the email compelling the recipient to take action.
As a marketer, you want your email to have an impact on the recipient; schema markup in emails motivates them to take the required action on emails as early as possible. The call-to-action button is the highlight of the email as it paves the path for starting the right business communication with the user.
Why do you need Schema Markup?
Structured data is the information that helps the machine for better understanding of the content in the emails. They provide useful results to the user. Gmail has a concept called as annotations in the Promo tab, which are the perfect examples of the real-time structured data.
Find some of them here:
- A time period for the discount
- A logo image URL
- URL for the promotional image
- Discount offer description
It helps the search engines in better understanding of who are you and what work you do. Better understanding leads to better findability rate. With search engines trying to deliver only the relevant and high-quality content, it has become necessary as a marketer to develop results which match with the search requirements and needs of the user.
Schema markup helps the website rank better for all the content types. There is a markup for book reviews, software applications, restaurants, events, TV episodes and ratings, local businesses, movies, products, etc.
In the present scenario, the markup which is being used in the Gmail helps all the users to complete specific actions from the Gmail inbox.
Check out some of the examples where markup used in the email appeared in the Google search engine results:
Structured data and its importance in SEO
Structured data is important in SEO, as it helps the search engines in finding and understanding the content of the website. It also helps in the future search process as the Google and other search engines continuously personalize the user experience to answer questions on their search engine results page. Structured data also makes an organization more visible to their potential customers, and increases the CTR rate by up to 30%.
Structuring the data with schema.org provides beneficial results like using the information again and again for enhancing analytics and the onsite search as informing the chatbots and yielding voice benefits.
Benefits of the email markup
Email markup is not only going to help you when the user is executing his search process but also in improvising the conversion rate. It was found that schema markup helped in:
- 20% higher CTR
- 35% more impressions
- 26% more clicks
- Users getting 3.6% more interactive with their content.
Email markup helps in standing out in the organic search. When a schema markup is added to the website code, it becomes qualified for the rich results. These results can be via star, images, ratings, reviews, breadcrumbs, actionable links, etc.
Email markup actions
Actions created by the email markup allows the recipients to interact with the business, service, or product within the Gmail. The four types of actions are:
- One-click actions: These are the actions where the task can be completed with one click in the Gmail. It results when someone signs up for the email list, and they need to confirm their subscription. The one-click actions have two categories which are save actions and confirm actions.
- Review actions: The review actions allow the email recipients to add a star and comment review for the business, services, and products.
- RSVP actions: These actions allow the email recipients to confirm whether they will attend an event or not, by replying to the event from the Google calendar. The email will have the event card where one can see the details of the meeting via which attendee has to confirm his presence.
- Go-to actions: These are the actions which do not come in all the above categories; it is when one has to take the email recipient to the website and complete the action. The CTA can be customized and tailored for specific uses such as reviewing the transactions on the credit cards, updating the payment information, and resetting the password.
How to add the markup in an email?
First, you need to register with Google. This is a multi-step process to ensure that the emails which you are sending are secured and not spammed.
The other steps which as a marketer you have to follow are:
- You will need access to the HTML based emails
- A website which can host your call to action destination
- DKIM/SPF configuration for the outgoing email
- Must meet the bulk email guidelines
- Must send at least 100 emails per day to the Gmail users for few weeks so that Google can check with the low spam rate complaints by the recipients
- Must meet the other guidelines such as same IP address for sending the email, same email address for sending to different recipients, adding subscribers to the list who have opted-in.
- org action guidelines which are used to reference the appropriate action markup whenever required. Go-to action is used whenever the desired action is more complicated and complex.
You can add the markup to an email with micro-data or JSON-LD. It has been seen that Google prefers the Microdata in the header.
Check the above example, which is the HTML tag. The <body> tag and <p> paragraph tag is where one will be adding the Schema.org markup.
First, you have to put a <div> tag identifying the email type for event reservation. It uses the tags such as itemscope and itemtype:itemscope which specifies that email is referring a thing and itemtype identifies what the thing is. With the Microdata item types are given the URLs:
Next is the <meta> tag for specifying the customer’s reservation number for the event.
The customer’s reservation status is being specified by using URL with a <link> tag
The finished code will look like this:
Google’s Gmail email markup tester helps in checking the code for errors or anything which one misses out.
If a person prefers JSON-LD, then they need to have the frame of reference.
Some years back, the Gmail team experimented with the interactive extensions to the email messages with the Gmail Email Markup. The additions to the HTML email allows the developers for adding call-to-action type links to the emails without the need of the recipient to open the email.
These call-to-actions means that the customer can interact with the brand in different ways without leaving Gmail or having to open it. The recipient also does not also need to hop around from one site to the other for interacting with the brand. Many times the brand also makes it easy with just one click.
Highlights
Another use of the Schema.org markup is to display the highlights.
The highlights are designed to display crucial information from specific types of email. At present, it is eligible to appear only for users of Google’s inbox app. The Google inbox supports the following highlight markups, which are flight highlights, order and parcel delivery highlights, event highlights, hotel highlights, restaurant highlights, and others.
Conclusion:
Schema markup is highly beneficial for email marketing. As the competition intensifies and every organization tries to outsmart the other, this tactic is a savior for marketers. You can try different methods for providing a unique appearance to emails. The markup is a great way to make the connection with the recipients so that they can respond to your CTAs.
The outcome, one can see is that there is a huge improvement in the conversion rate.
